JUNE \ MAY 2011   JUNE 30, 2011     SHIFTING THE CURVE “Epic floods, massive wildfires, drought, and the deadliest tornado season in 60 years are ravaging the United States, with scientists warning that climate change will bring even more extreme weather.”  That’s according to a story yesterday by Mira Oberman of the AFP news service. One of the quotes came from Penn State’s Michael Mann, who heads the university’s earth systems science center.  He warned that “the intensity of future droughts, heat waves, storms and floods is expected to rise drastically if greenhouse gas emissions don't stabilize soon.” “Even a couple-degree warming can make a 100-year event a three-year event,” Mann said.  “It has to do with the tail of the bell curve.  When you move the bell curve, that area changes dramatically.” The tail of what curve, now?  What area?  What’s he talking about? Allow me to illustrate, using weather data for Penn State’s location.  How often does the town of State College experience a “hot July”?  That’s what I’ll call a July in which the maximum temperatures for the 31 days of the month average out to more than 87.5° (the green line on the graphs below).  According to a legend I’ve just made up, the Nittany lion becomes very uncomfortable if the average high reaches 88°. During more than a century from 1895 through 2009, there were 19 years when July highs averaged 81°.  There were 17 years at 82° and 20 years at 83°.  These temperatures are represented by the peak of the graph. There were cooler years and warmer ones, but those extremes were fewer in number, represented by the lower “tails” of the line to the left and the right.  This is what statisticians would expect:  a bell-shaped pattern, low on the sides and high in the middle.  It’s called a “bell curve.” Fortunately for the lion, July highs have crossed the green line only twice, averaging 88° in 1955 and again in 1988.  He survived these rare hot months, represented by the yellow shading. But now suppose that in the future, global warming increases all temperatures by merely two degrees.  Graphically, this would move the bell curve two degrees to the right. Now the lion’s in trouble.  During a 115-year period, July highs would average 90° twice, 89° three times and 88° five times — a total of ten years that would be too hot for him.  That’s a fivefold increase! Note the much larger “area under the tail of the curve,” shaded in yellow.  This is a simplified demonstration of one way that a small increase in temperature can greatly magnify the likelihood of extreme weather conditions.   JUNE 27, 2011     NOT FOR ME TO SAY NO At the age of 39, my mother didn't want to move away from the hills of sunny southeastern Ohio, where she had lived all her life.  However, my father had a great new job opportunity more than a hundred miles to the northwest, and she couldn't ask him to turn it down. In her new hometown there was more wind and more shade.  She could make new friends, of course, but what of her beloved flowers?  That's the subject of this month's "100 Moons" article.   JUNE 23, 2011     1/2 So who came up with this half-game nonsense, anyway? As of this morning, here are the Major League Baseball standings for the Central Division of the National League. .TEAM GAMES PLAYED WINS - LOSSES WIN PCT DIFFER- ENTIAL. .Brewers 76 41 - 35 .539 +6. .Cardinals 75 40 - 35 .533 +5. .Reds 76 39 - 37 .513 +2. .Pirates 74 37 - 37 .500 0. .Cubs 74 30 - 44 .405 -14. .Astros 76 28 - 48 .368 -20. We can rank the teams according to their wins.  But there other, slightly better methods. Not all teams have played the same number of games, so it’s more accurate to rank them according to winning percentage:  wins divided by games played.  Here in Pittsburgh, Pirates fans keep a close eye on that number, because the team hasn’t finished a season with a winning record (over .500) since 1992. Percentage points being hard to visualize, most of us actually rank the teams based on their win-loss differential (wins minus losses).  The Brewers have won six more than they’re lost, so we say that they’re “six games over .500.”  The Cardinals are five games over .500, the Cubs are 14 games under .500, and so on. That should mean that the .500 Pirates are six GAMES BEHIND the division-leading +6 Brewers.  We could also point out, as we do, that the Pirates trail the Brewers by four games in the win column but only two games in the loss column. All the arithmetic adds up.  If the Brewers were to play no games while the Pirates won six straight to raise their W-L to 43-37, the Pirates would match the Brewers’ +6 differential and claim a share of the lead.  (But having played 80 games, their winning percentage would be only .538, so they’d still be “a percentage point behind” the Brewers.) So here's how I would add a GAMES BEHIND column to the standings. .TEAM GAMES PLAYED WINS - LOSSES WIN PCT DIFFER- ENTIAL. GAMES. BEHIND. .Brewers 76 41 - 35 .539 +6. 0. .Cardinals 75 40 - 35 .533 +5. 1. .Reds 76 39 - 37 .513 +2. 4. .Pirates 74 37 - 37 .500 0. 6. .Cubs 74 30 - 44 .405 -14. 20. .Astros 76 28 - 48 .368 -20. 26. Suppose the Pirates were to win their next game to go to 38-37 while the Reds lose theirs to go to 39-38.  As a result of those two games, the Pirates and the Reds would be in a virtual tie, both with a differential of +1.  Note that this situation depends on the outcome of two games, a win by one team and a loss by the other.  Thus, it would be logical to say that the Pirates are two GAMES BEHIND the Reds. But no.  Somewhere in the murky past, someone arbitrarily began dividing all the numbers in the GAMES BEHIND column by two! Wait, what?  I suppose it makes the competition seem closer if we claim that the Pirates are only one game behind the Reds and only three games behind the Brewers.  The Astros have 13 fewer wins than the Brewers and also 13 more losses, so they're only 13 “games” behind the leader — not the more embarrassing 26. .TEAM GAMES PLAYED WINS - LOSSES WIN PCT DIFFER- ENTIAL. “GAMES” BEHIND. .Brewers 76 41 - 35 .539 +6. ---. .Cardinals 75 40 - 35 .533 +5. ½. .Reds 76 39 - 37 .513 +2. 2. .Pirates 74 37 - 37 .500 0. 3. .Cubs 74 30 - 44 .405 -14. 10. .Astros 76 28 - 48 .368 -20. 13. Baseball fans have come to accept this tradition.  But it only applies to the GB column, not to record-compared-to-.500 or anything else.  Where’s the logic?  How can a team play half a game? While we’re on the subject of the Pirates, I’ve made a graph of some inning-by-inning stats originally posted by a local blogger called JAL (that’s his avatar). Pittsburgh has scored 49 runs in the first inning, more than any other inning.  That's not particularly surprising; a batting order is designed so that your best hitters always come to the plate in the first.  But that 49 is the second most in the majors!  Only the Yankees have scored more runs in the opening inning, with 57. Then it falls off.  The Pirates are 11th in second-inning runs but dead last in third-inning runs.  Lately, however, they have engineered some late comebacks against opposing relief pitchers, raising their eighth-inning run total to 11th most in the majors.   JUNE 20, 2011     LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!  STOP ACTION! When I was a college freshman, a movie was filmed nearby.  This website now includes my article about that motion picture, which was called The Fortune Cookie. Because the screenplay begins with a football telecast, one “character” is CBS Stop Action.  This was an early instant replay technique, and I describe it in some detail. Another character is “Whiplash Willie” Gingrich — no relation to Newt, I trust. And you get to see Keith Jackson wearing my costume.   JUNE 15, 2011     EIGHTH GRADE CHORUS, REVISITED It was more than 50 years ago in Richwood, Ohio, and I don’t have any documentary evidence.  But if memory serves, I was a member of the junior high school boys’ and girls’ chorus. Our conductor was the high school music director, Robert Shoemaker.  For some reason, maybe to please our parents and grandparents, he chose some “oldies” for us.  Real oldies.  I’ll give you links to professional performances. From around the time that we were born, we sang “The Old Lamplighter” (a 1946 ballad romanticizing the era before electric street lights) and “Goodnight Irene” (not the raw Leadbelly lyrics but the cleaned-up Weavers version). There was also a cowboy song written by Cole Porter, performed here by Cincinnati’s Leonard Slye atop his dancing horse.  Another western tune was originally sung by Cleveland’s Bob Hope in the move Paleface, but it was performed here by Dinah Shore on her Chevrolet-sponsored NBC-TV show. From before World War I, there were “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” and Irving Berlin’s “Simple Melody.”  We used only the refrains of these rags, then a half-century old.  (If you enlarge the image of the label, you can see that the original 78 rpm singles were priced at a steep 75 cents each; that would be about $16.99 today.) And there was another song, dating to 1902 but popularized more recently, which was addressed to a luminous insect.  (Incidentally, around 1977 my parents and I saw the Mills Brothers on the revolving stage of the Celebrity Theater in Phoenix.) Does this music bring back memories?  Anyone?   JUNE 9, 2011     LOCAL FAUNA I hadn’t noticed it before, but this week, outside a medical office only a block from my apartment, I discovered a 10-foot-long Stegosaurus. Painted on its left side is an image that is itself a dinosaur:  a view looking up at Pittsburgh’s Fort Duquesne Bridge, from the era before Three Rivers Stadium became extinct. What’s the deal with this strange statue?  Although the plaque has gone missing from its signpost, I recognized the beast as one of the fanciful fiberglass dinosaurs that invaded the environs of Pittsburgh several years ago.  So I went in search of more information to the greatest library the world has ever known — the Internet.  In a matter of minutes, Google led me to the details. This is one of a herd of 100 such dinosaurs that were commissioned for DinoMite Days in 2003.  This particular one, Bridgeosaurus, created by artist Michael Hogle, was displayed at The Waterfront in Homestead.  It’s nearly 5½ feet tall and weighs 200 pounds. The design was described as follows:  “Pittsburgh's many bridges are arguably the city's most evocative images, to both the visitor and the long-time resident.  The structures of the Fort Duquesne and the Fort Pitt Bridges find a perfect echo in the curved back of Stegosaurus.  Transposing the images of these iconic spans from Pittsburgh's Point creates a resonance between natural past and engineering present.” After four months, the statues were auctioned off to raise money for the renovation of Dinosaur Hall at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.  Bridgeosaurus sold for $5,700. The Internet couldn’t tell me where this dino has been hanging out for the past eight years. Nevertheless, Bridgeosaurus is now my neighbor. UPDATE:  Four years later, it became Stegoskeletus.   JUNE 6, 2011     THOMASES DON'T TWEET I’m not sure what to think about recent trends in interpersonal communications. When a startling piece of news comes to my attention, I feel an obligation to inform the other people in the room.  But that’s usually as far as I go, because that’s how I grew up.  As a college student, if I wanted to call someone I had to walk downstairs to the public telephone and ring up the operator.  Therefore, even today, I don’t phone all my absent friends to tell them the news.  I assume they’ll hear it from the radio or TV, the same way I did. However, in the 21st century young folks carry cell phones with them, and they feel an obligation to text or tweet their widely-scattered friends with their OMG! reactions to everything that happens. A study by Frank N. Magid Associates’ Magid Generational Studies unit, described in an article in Broadcasting & Cable last week, describes how the news about the death of Osama bin Laden was spread differently by the different generations. I’ve rounded off the numbers to produce these pie charts.  I’m a Baby Boomer.  The next youngest generation is called Gen X, and younger still are the Millennials. BOOMERS MILLENNIALS How did you learn about Osama’s death?   In the next hour, did you tell someone else? Magid’s Sharalyn Hartwell comments, “A communications lifestyle isn’t something Millennials take lightly.  It is important to them not only to be available to their personal network, but to share with their personal network.  It was instinctive for Millennials to directly share such big and important news.” But I remain a Boomer, and I’ll probably never change. I do look favorably, however, on another recent development. When I was a young man, we discussed sports stats in ordinary language.  “He’s been on a hot streak.  But I bet he’ll cool off eventually.” Nowadays, technical terms from statistics have entered the discussion.  If a player has been hot lately, someone cautions us about the “small sample size.”  When he eventually returns to mediocrity, someone cites “regression to the mean.”  Such considerations ought to discourage analysts from ascribing too much significance to short-term trends. With my background in science, I welcome this more precise language of mathematics.  (See my earlier comments, now augmented by a borrowed cartoon.)   JUNE 1, 2011     WRAPPED IN A SHEET Hiding out in a cave? Reported to have died? Hurriedly buried? That describes the narrator of Entombed.  It's the seventh in my series of old stories that I’ve retold from an alternative point of view.   MAY 30, 2011     LULL ME TO SLEEP I’ve added a short new article about Bedtime Story Lullabies.  Actually, it’s about baseball — with 30-year-old audio, plus digressions on “nothing across,” trapped balls, and day games.   MAY 28, 2011     IT'S STILL ILLEGAL On this Memorial Day weekend, more than a hundred moons have passed since I wrote the article linked here.  I continue to gripe quietly about the vast majority of my neighbors who blithely ignore the law.   MAY 24, 2011     GUARDIANS Parents have many issues to worry about, from vaccinations to potty training to nightmares to sibling rivalry to homework and much else besides. But what issue always concerns parents on television situation comedies?  Guardianship.  “In the highly unlikely event that we both die in a plane crash, who gets the children?”  It seems to me that this problem comes up in one episode of every family sitcom. In real life, it’s usually no problem.  Just appoint the grandparents, or the closest uncle and aunt. But on TV, agonizing over this decision affords opportunities for adult characters to offend each other.  These characters, often unrelated, get to disparage each other’s parenting abilities.  That leads to much better comedy than making everyday decisions, such as whether Susie can stay up past nine o’clock. When Paul Reiser’s new NBC series was canceled this spring after only two weeks, the obligatory story line was already in the works.  “A later episode,” TV Guide reported, “finds Paul reevaluating his choice of his children’s legal guardian should something happen to him and his wife.  ...The laughs, he says, come from the consequences of rescinding one offer only to learn ‘no one else wants your kids.’” UPDATE:  Sitcom writers are still at it.   MAY 19, 2011     HAPPY 65TH BIRTHDAY Last year, I happened to find for sale on eBay a newspaper insert from 1973.  It was the August 26 through September 1 edition of Chicago Tribune TV Week. The cover story featured my favorite cute television actress from that year, Deirdre Lenihan.  So I bought the booklet for $9.99. The article on page 3 is by TV Week editor Bill Manago. This threesome are the stars of Needles and Pins, a new comedy series to premiere this fall in the 8-8:30 p.m. slot Fridays on NBC (channel 5). Easily recognizable is Norman Fell, far right, who will play the role of Nathan Davidson (“Mr. D”), the hyper hopped-up head of a dress factory in New York’s garment district.  Ditto for Louis Nye, cast in the role of Harry Karp, Mr. D’s troublesome and incompetent brother-in-law and alas, by marriage, his bumbling partner in the dressmaking business. But the face to watch is the pretty one in the middle.  She’s Deirdre Lenihan, and she’ll be Wendy Wilson, a young dress designer hired by Mr. D because she’s the daughter of an old friend and because he thinks “she has a future.” Young Miss Lenihan’s future as an actress is also looking bright at this point, and it all came about, bless her stars (she was born May 19), when she began studying dress designing.  After graduating from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., the petite (5-4), blue-eyed, redheaded native of Atlanta returned to New York, where she had attended P.S. 41 and Brooklyn Friends High School, and enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology.  That became her back-door entry into acting, leading her first to a job in the costume department of New York’s Shakespeare Festival, then to the Neighborhood Playhouse, and, after auditioning for “anything and everything,” a movie role in Glass Houses. One of her many auditions was for last season’s Bridget Loves Bernie.  She failed to get the Bridget role but made enough of an impression to be called back to play Wendy in the pilot of Needles and Pins.  If the show is a hit, she’ll be sewing a lot of stitches again, but all of them, this time, on camera. Then a few months ago I heard from a man in Savannah, Georgia, who had run across my mentions of Deirdre on this website.  He wrote: I had the pleasure of spending a few summers as a young teen with Miss Lenihan.  Her cousin was my best friend.  She would travel from her home in New York to the small town of Jonesboro (just outside Atlanta) to spend the summer.  She was a couple of years older than I was and had her driver’s license, so she would drive us to the Rock Hill lake beach. I replied: I seem to recall reading that Deirdre's mother was living in the South in those days.  Ah, yes, here it is in my files:  “Her mother lives on a yacht off Florida,” from an article in TV Guide, November 3, 1973.  Later on in the article: “‘My life,’ she sighs, ‘is like a small Gothic romance.’  Her father, Liam Lenihan, was, she says, a hard-drinking, old-time Irish radical and newspaperman, who was forever running off to join the IRA in Ireland.  Her mother, Ida Louise Huie, was what used to be known as a Bohemian, a rebellious daughter of the antebellum South, replete with crinoline, corn muffins and cracking wallpaper.  The two met when Ida Louise, some 20 years his junior, was a copy girl on the Washington Post. ‘“They began to battle almost immediately,’ Deirdre recalls of their married life.  ‘When that happened, I was sent down to the ancestral home in Jonesboro, Georgia, presided over by my four spinster great-aunts.  They were complete matriarchs.  God was the only man they ever invited into their home. “‘I remember once some impatient driver made the mistake of honking at my Aunt Caroline in traffic.  She simply stopped the car, folded her arms and refused to budge.  When a cop tried to do something about it, she told him imperiously, “But we're the Blalock sisters of Jonesboro!”  I never had any trouble being accepted.  As far as they were concerned, if you were a Blalock, that was enough.’” And my correspondent replied: My friend was Patrick Huie, whose father was Arthur Huie (Ida's brother).  Patrick and I spent many happy hours at his spinster aunts, and his mother Lucy was our Cub Scout den mother.  Ironically, the Lenihans and Huies were kind of like the Hatfields and McCoys in the sense that the Lenihans were Catholic and the Huies were Protestants (Presbyterian).  So I suppose if both were back in Ireland back then, they would have been enemies. There were actually some family feuds even in the quiet town of Jonesboro.  Edgar Blalock, the brother of the spinster aunts, had an ongoing feud with Arthur Huie which fortunately was settled before their respective demises.  So much for life in a small southern town. Oh, yes!  I almost forgot.  From that TV Week, here’s the cover photo of Miss Lenihan. I’ve also mentioned her in this article. And this one.     MAY 18, 2011     BUSES ARE A-COMING Many Oberlin College students who enrolled in 1962, 1963, and 1964 were involved in the civil rights movement.  As I learned at the 2008 reunion and elsewhere, they generally had become politically active as high school students.  Several said that the Freedom Riders of 1961 were their first inspiration. In 1961 I was still in junior high and didn’t take much notice of what was happening in the South.  When I enrolled at Oberlin in 1965, I was not politically active. Thus when PBS aired an American Experience documentary about the Freedom Riders earlier this week, it was a real eye-opener for me.  I had no idea of the bravery that was required 50 years ago to take a bus trip from Atlanta to New Orleans — if you were determined to ignore the “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs at the bus stations and restaurants along the way.  I had no idea of the beatings and bus-burnings and imprisonment that these pioneers endured during their non-violent protest.  It makes me appreciate even more my pastor’s trip to Mississippi 2½ years later.   MAY 17, 2011     GONE FISHIN’ I have a number of reservations about Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, but one incident in particular has always bothered me. Let’s turn the clock back to 1998.  Gingrich had represented the Sixth Congressional District of Georgia for 20 years.  For the last four years, he had also been the leader of the majority party in the House of Representatives — the Speaker of the House. On November 3, the people of the Sixth District re-elected him for an 11th term as their Congressman.  In that same election, however, the Republicans suffered a net loss of five seats in the House.  Many in his party blamed Gingrich’s leadership, including his failed attempt to remove President Bill Clinton from office.  Therefore, three days after the election, Gingrich did the right thing and announced his resignation from his leadership position as the Speaker of the House. But he also announced that he was resigning from Congress altogether.  The people of his District had just re-elected him to another two-year term, but he thumbed his nose at them and declined to take his seat. Others in similar situations, like Bob Dole in 1976 and John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008, didn’t react to losing a national election by walking away from their responsibilities to their local constituents.  They continued to serve in the United States Senate. In a phone call on November 8, 1998, Gingrich gave his reasons for abandoning Washington.  “We have to get the bitterness out,” he said.  “It is clear that as long as I'm around, that won't happen.  ...My only fear would be that if I tried to stay, it would just overshadow whoever my successor is.” Fellow Congressman Joe L. Barton (R-Texas) fretted, “We could end up losing that seat.” “Trust me, that district will elect a Republican,” Gingrich replied.  “I think Marianne and I will probably take six months off and go collect dinosaurs or something.” Georgia voters had elected Gingrich to serve them for two more years as their Representative.  Later, Alaska voters would elect Sarah Palin to serve them for four years as their Governor.  But when these politicians were denied a higher office, they became dissatisfied with the office they had.  They decided to turn their back on the voters and quit the game entirely.   If they couldn’t call the plays, they were going to take the ball and go home.   MAY 13, 2011     MISHEARD LYRICS Every day, a loan company in the Pittsburgh suburb of Cranberry airs a radio spot that ends with a jingle.  It sounds to me as though they’re singing Golden Oak land ain’t sure, mount do! Well, I’m sold.  However, I ran across a post by “60sixx” on a LetsGoPens.com thread about annoying commercials.  He’s apparently been able to understand the words, which he quotes as Golden Oak Lending cured my blues! I’m glad I’ve learned the true meaning, because these radio commercials can stay around for decades.  Another local company, the waterproofing firm Mariani & Richards (catchphrase “Ah, dry up!”), still occasionally runs a jingle in the style of the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine” from 1966. Also, the announcer for Golden Oak ends the commercial by muttering “Animal list 114937.”  After some research I decided he’s actually giving us his firm’s Nationwide Multistate Licensing System identification, “NMLS 114937.”   MAY 7, 2011     MOTHER'S DAY 1956 That’s me with my parents in Cambridge, Ohio, 55 years ago.  My mother is wearing a fox fur; she always hinted to my father that she wanted a mink coat, but this was as close as she got. The occasion was Mother’s Day in Cambridge, Ohio.  My grandmother Emma Buckingham had been widowed ten months earlier, and on this weekend her three children had come to visit her. In the second photo, I’m standing between my uncles Ralph and Jim.  The lady with the flower on her hat is my aunt Virginia (Jim’s wife), and the older lady next to her is of course my grandmother.         MAY 4, 2011     OHIO Forty-one years ago today at Kent State University, during a protest against the war in Viet Nam, four students were killed in a confrontation with National Guard troops. I’ve referenced that event in a few places here on my website, such as here.  I mentioned Howard Emmer, a Kent student who had spoken at a protest the previous year at my college, Oberlin. That led to an e-mail I received last month from a man named Jim.  “I was actually a classmate of Emmer’s,” he writes, “though our acquaintance was nodding.” And that led me to add to this website the audio file of Emmer’s 1969 talk.  You can listen to it by going to this page. In May 1970, Jim had just begun what was to be a 12-year association with the Cleveland Press as a reporter.  Now retired, he writes that he has “been thinking more and more about the events of that time.  ...What fascinates me is why Kent?  I know all the theories, but none of them ring true to me.  I mean, we had Oberlin, Denison, Kenyon, Antioch and others seemingly more suited and more receptive to anti-war protests.” I replied: Students at public universities like Kent differed from students at private colleges like Oberlin and the others you mention.  Both groups included many who were passionately opposed to the war, but at Oberlin, at least, this opposition was limited to intellectual debate and nonviolent protest — a tradition that went back more than a century, to the abolitionists’ opposition to slavery. The Oberlin student leaders of the 1960s were committed to pacifism.  When they marched on the president’s office in the incident I documented in Carr Confronted at Cox, they insisted their intent was not to seize or occupy the building.  When representatives of the armed forces visited the campus, protest tactics consisted of shouting, waving signs, and holding hands in a circle to isolate the soldiers and keep them from contaminating our peaceful community.  Afterwards there were “teach-ins” to talk about it. Because the military had no permanent presence in Oberlin, antiwar students had no physical symbol on which to focus their anger.  At Kent, however, there was an inviting target in the ROTC building.  And maybe to some young people, the ethos at Kent condoned destruction of property as a legitimate form of protest.  That violence led to more violence. But what do I know?  As I noted on my website, I observed all this from a distance.

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