The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I've always been a crappy runner. I get all winded and it's no fun at all. But I was convinced to run in the 92nd annual Bay to Breakers last Sunday and it was great. The event itself was really interesting, what with the crowds, the tortilla toss, the costumes, the nudity... I felt like a salmon, somehow compelled to continue upstream no matter what.

And the running! What a boost to my confidence. I jogged most of the 12km, a personal record for me, and the last two miles I ran without stopping, another personal first. At the end of it I felt like I could keep going, and would have signed up for another 5k on the spot had there been one to join. I think this was the runner's high people talk about and I must say I like it very much...

I got written on today as part of my Very First Triathlon! (I'm either Racer #29 and 119 years old, or vice versa.)

It was a sprint distance triathlon, with a 500 yard swim, 11 mile bike ride, and 3 mile run. I'm still learning how to do the running thing successfully so I walked parts of the run segment, but I finished! And I didn't just limp across the finish, I had a solid (if not blazingly fast) time. So now I know I can do this and I have a time benchmarked which I can try to improve during subsequent triathlons. I definitely want to do more - I can see how this can be very addicting (isn't self-confidence wonderful?). Maybe if I manage to get myself into better shape I'll be able to do an olympic distance one as well.

Even though I'm a Yankee fan, I think I'd like to see a Red Sox-Cubs World Series. Not only would it improve the mood of my professors, but it could keep the Red Sox fans from whining for the next 90 years. And it would probably help abate the global warning problem when Hell inevitably freezes over after one of them wins.

When I was in the law library copy room the other day a Staples delivery guy started giving me crap about my Yankees hat. We started trash talking, and I said that yeah, maybe if the Sox win they'll stop whining for 90 years. He said, "Nah, we'll keep whining. We've had lots of practice." So I said, "I know. While you guys have been practicing whining we've been practicing winning."

Then the librarian came and shushed us...

Tomorrow (or today already here) my classmates and professors will be sad (and cranky from staying up late just to lose). But what a series. What a sport. And what fun it's been to enjoy such an intense series in such an incredibly committed baseball town.

But tonight I realized that while it might be fun to spend some time in Boston during my law school years, I can't settle down here. I think maybe it's getting to be time to go home, back where I'm from, where I'm not the only Yankee fan around.

When this year's Tour de France began I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. Not only was Lance going to go for his historic 6th consecutive win, but American Bobby Julich had escaped relegation to history to compete again as a serious Tour contender; American Levi Leipheimer was back from a devastating injury that took him out of the Tour and the season last year to try to best his earlier 8th place finish; and Tyler Hamilton, who had stunned the world by placing a fantastic 4th and winning a stage last year, all with a broken collarbone, was looking in great form to shoot for a podium finish this year and maybe even put some pressure on Lance. I think I was most excited about the prospects of that last bit. Tyler won my heart and my support last year with his amazing performance.

But right away things went horribly wrong. The Tour route packed the first week with long, fast, narrow stages full of jittery riders. Crashes were inevitable and devastating, although their full impact wasn't necessarily realized right away.

And then poor Tyler - his dog Tugboat died. Tugboat was the Golden Retreiver who faithfully rode around in the car on his training rides, was there for him at the end of stages, and who shared Tyler's glossy magazine spreads in biking magazines. He'd been sick right before the Tour, but he seemed to have gotten better. It was after the Tour started that it turned out he'd had to be put down. Hearing the news I felt so sad. And I don't even like dogs. But Tyler did what he needed to do and kept going.

Until a few days later when the extent of his injury ended his race. He'd been caught up in one of the terrible crashes and had landed on his back. He'd kept going, finishing that stage and doing a few others, but landing on one's back at high speeds is not a healthy thing to do. The damage it caused affected his ability to ride competitively and so a few days later he had to withdraw.

I was so crushed, I couldn't even watch the Tour for days or read anything about it. In the list of interesting things going on in this year's Tour I suddenly realized I was most excited to watch Tyler. Without him in the race, I didn't seem to care.

But worse, if I was so crushed, I couldn't imagine how he must have felt. He came into the Tour with such high hopes and expectations. And then to lose his dog and his race... Tyler keeps an online journal that I'd been reading but I had to avoid all mention of it. I felt sure when I saw his next post I'd see someone wallowing in disappointment and self-pity, and reasonable as they'd both be, that's hard to read.

But this is why I feel motivated to post, because when I did finally get the courage to see what he wrote, instead I found a post full of maturity, dignity, classiness, and optimism. No shrinking violet, he explained he withdrew because serious damage had been done to his back. Not only did it affect his ability to ride fast, but it required immediate healing in order that he could ride future races, like the Olympics. Instead of being devastated, he was making future plans.

Including to be up in Paris to greet the rest of his team when they arrived. That was maybe the best thing to read, because it gave me the permission I felt I needed to be able to keep watching the rest of the Tour.

Edit: Date changed. Was posted on 7/21.
Edit 7/23/04: And yet another reason. I dare you to read this without tearing up...

I posted the following on another Internet site. The World Series came to town, for better or for worse. I've been to the World Series once, in 1996 when I went to Atlanta to watch the Yankees beat the Braves. A World Series game is like no other, with a certain electric buzz that no other game has. I decided to pay it a visit, and described it like this:

It's bad enough that my Yankees got knocked out of the postseason, by the loathed Red Sox no less, but for me it's even worse. For while ... most other Yankee fans can commiserate with their own, I. Live. In. Boston. Oh, the horror.

In fact, not only do I live in Boston, but I live less than a mile away from Fenway. I live so close that this evening when the F-18s did the flyover during the pregame I could hear them out my window.

But I decided to make the best of it because, really, how often does one have the World Series down the street. So in the top of the first I left the house, and risking life, limb, and expulsion from school (I'm not kidding about that!!)* I walked over to Fenway.

The atmosphere was fall-like and festive. Half a mile away I could see the glow of the lights and even hear the roar of the crowd. As I got closer I saw the Prudential Building, with the office lights left on in such away they read, "Go Sox." I saw hundreds if not thousands of people walking around outside the Park, most of them holding up signs looking for tickets. (My favorite: "Semi-healthy liver 4 tickets.") Some just bought sausages from vendors on the street outside, others queued outside the bars on Landsdown, and still others sat hopefully on the curb below the Green Monster, hoping to catch a wayward homerun ball. I was able to walk right up to the building, touching its brick walls and green girders. I walked halfway around it, to Yawkey Way. Along the way I stood on my toes at one of the entrances, catching a sliver of a glimpse of the green, glowing field.

At first it was exciting, and I liked being there even though it was the wrong team. Baseball is baseball. It's the World Series. It's exciting. But soon I felt ready to leave. The police presence was unnerving, although a little more low key than I'd expected. But whereas during the playoffs on Monday there were all sorts of tvs and such on outside that people could mill around and watch, tonight they turned them away. It just sort of felt like the city was turning on its own, and I feel the fans deserve better than that.

And it was the wrong team. The empathetic excitement for my neighbors wore off pretty quickly. They're all being really annoying, and I dread how insufferable they'll be if they somehow manage to pull this out. So go Cards. Please!

* This was a reference to the tragedy that took place during the celebration after beating the Yankees to clinch the ALCS. Police treated revelers like rioters and killed a woman. Certain public officials make this out to be a crowd-behaving-badly problem. I think it's a civil liberties problem, because the mechanisms used for "crowd control," mechanisms no more appropriate for the protestors expected for the Democratic National Convention this summer, were inappropriate. The part about expulsion came from an email the BU dean of students sent out, threatening it if we got in trouble but also implying that simply going to the Fenway Area - on public thoroughfares - might earn us such a consequence. I resented that insinuation and so further resolved to go myself.

Posted on 10/28/04

I woke up yesterday morning in a cold sweat. The Red Sox looked poised to win the World Series. For a Yankee fan like me, this was a cruel twist of fate indeed, not only to not have the Yankees there but to have the reviled enemy being poised to take the title.

I actually was palpably miserable, but probably not because the Red Sox were going to win. It was more that the occasion left me feeling so isolated. While my neighbors were all cheering I had to ask myself why should I be a Yankee fan? I haven't lived in the New York area in a dozen years. My family doesn't like them, and few friends do either. I have some friends who are A's and Red Sox fans and I trashtalk with them all the time, but that's really the only thing that keeps me engaged. And last week my rhetorical skills seem to have gotten out of hand I may have alienated one of them with my trashtalking, so here I am further out in the wilderness.

But the problem isn't just that I'm a Yankee fan incongruously. The problem is that when I reflect on it, as I couldn't help but do during this year's postseason, it conjures up all this doubt about my life and rather foggy future. Last year at this time it wasn't so much a problem, partly because the Yankees went to the World Series, but also because I thought I could hold out a little longer, being a Yankee fan in Boston, because soon I could get a job in New York, move back to the area, and get to be a Yankee fan in context once again. But such a future is hardly clear right now. No future is clear right now. I don't know what I'll be doing, much less where. And so far it's looking less likely that it will be New York, since most of my energies have been spent looking at opportunities in the Bay Area. Part of me is enthused by that prospect, and part of me is terrified because I don't think I want to settle there forever...

Anyway, the postseason brought up all these negative feelings and I was not a happy person earlier this week.

But, at least baseball-wise, I decided to make the best of it. With the Red Sox needing to win just one more game it seemed likely that they'd be able to do so. Either I could cower under the bed, or I could enjoy the history that was getting made and be excited that I got to be in the middle of it. BU, in its attempts to keep its students out of trouble, decided to show the game on the large scoreboard screen at Nickerson Field. This was an intriguing offer based on what the school included in the invitation:

We believe Nickerson Field may be the best place for Red Sox fans to break the alleged curse that has accounted for one of the most discussed championship droughts in professional baseball. You may know that, according to legend, Babe Ruth signed the so-called "fateful contract" that sent him from the Red Sox to the New York Yankees in an office adjoining Nickerson Field - formerly the Boston Braves Field.

So this is what I did. In the 6th inning my friend and I went over and watched the end of the game, when history changed and the Red Sox ended their epic World Series championship drought. With the city on a euphoric high, people poured down the streets headed towards Kenmore Square. We decided to follow, although there wasn't much to see once we got there except very happy Bostonians. I was happy for my neighbors, and rationalized the Red Sox success as being due to the eclipse. They always said the planets would need to align for the Sox to win, so I guess they were entitled to when the planets finally did.

I've written before about Tyler Hamilton here. He's my favorite professional cyclist, an underrated rider whose accomplishments are sweeter than had anyone else attained them.

But he's in trouble, as this recent article in the NY Times explains. Cyclists are routinely tested for drug use, and his blood samples allegedly showed signs of blood doping (transfusions of extra blood to increase the red blood cell count and with it oxygen capacity). This finding would break a lot of hearts if it were true. And there are so many cyclists who do impermissible performance-enhancing things that at this point it's generally easy to believe such wrongful behavior plausible. But I still don't believe it is true of him.

A huge reason for my reluctance to rush to judge him is the shoddiness of the evidence at the root of the allegations. As I wrote to a friend:

I'm mostly concerned from an evidentiary standpoint. These samples are handled poorly, their results are little more then inferences yet they are regarded as absolute truths, and (and this is what really sets me off) they allow no opportunity for independent validation. Thinking about it from an American jurisprudential standpoint, I think there are huge due process problems with this testing regime, and these tests in particular. Even if they did just happen to be correctly conclusive of wrongful behavior on his part, I still couldn't believe him guilty based on what has been presented. It reeks of unfairness, and that horrible Kafka-esque nightmare that too often too easily innocent people can find themselves trapped in.

He's innocent until proven guilty, which these results in no way do.

The other reason for my doubt of their truthfulness is a greater confidence in his character. He's my favorite cyclist because of his maturity, sportsmanship, work ethic, and devotion to those close to him. While some cyclists have remained anonymous to me, perhaps seeming more mercenary, he always struck me as a guy I wouldn't mind having as my best friend. That hasn't changed.

In the final analysis I don't think his winning had anything to do with the blood coursing in his veins but rather the heart he rides with.

Backdated to 11/14, even though it wasn't posted until 11/17 and technically I didn't send that part to my friend until today. Although I meant to earlier.

I would be a bad Cal fan if I didn't comment about the post-season tumult our football team has just faced.

We had a couple of issues as we headed into the waning days of the season. One, that our coach, Jeff Tedford, is awesome, and being so awesome was highly coveted by other teams. Like the University of Washington, who openly lobbied for him to come join them when the Cal Bears went up there to play their currently hapless Huskies. The other, that Cal was more successful this year than it had been for years and years previous, even decades and decades previous, and as such had its eyes cast on playing in the Rose Bowl, where it hadn't been since the 1950s. The Rose Bowl has traditionally been the game that the Pac-10 champion played against the Big 10 champion. This year we weren't the Pac-10 champion because we lost (barely) to USC, the reigning #1 team in the country. But because of the BCS system – a complex system for ranking teams and assigning them to the more prestigious bowls – the Rose Bowl was still a possibility for us. We went into the remaining week of the season the #4 team in the country, with a legitimate claim to being ranked that high and going to a commensurately desirable bowl. All we needed to do was win our last game. Right?

We did, and by 10 points. Near the end of the game when we'd built up steam and the other team had fizzled we could have tried to score more, but it was hardly necessary to do so to win and it might have been unsportsmanlike. Meanwhile, the rival in the rankings, Texas, was already done with its season and didn't play that day. Yet somehow, in the final analysis, when the final rankings were released Texas had crept ahead of us, taking our place at #4, knocking Cal lower and out of contention for a Rose Bowl appearance.

On the other hand, we did have a long-standing opportunity to go to the Holiday Bowl, which is not insignificant. In most of the years that I've been a Cal fan we could hardly dream of any Bowl game. In fact, four years ago we could hardly dream of even winning a regular game. In 2001 we were 1-10. In 2004 we were 10-1. In one sense the Holiday Bowl was good enough. In several others it wasn't.

For one, the Rose Bowl has sentimental meaning to many Old Blues, loyal alums from many years back who have rooted for Cal through thick and thin, increasingly few of whom can even remember the last time we went. Every year we hope and hope it will get to be our turn again. And every year something happens to ruin that dream. The same way the Red Sox fans hoped and hoped for an impossible World Series victory that was always snatched away, we hoped to go back to the Rose Bowl. It was that important to us. And our fate was surprisingly similar. (Until this year.)

Even if we'd managed to go to the Orange Bowl this year, ostensibly the game between the #1 and #2 teams for the alleged "national championship" it might not have meant as much to us, even though it would have been more prestigious than either the Rose Bowl or the Holiday Bowl we were relegated to. But at least it, like the Rose Bowl, would have had an upside that the Holiday Bowl doesn't have: revenue. The main BCS bowls pay the (I'm not sure if it’s the schools directly or the conferences they belong to) $15-17 million. The smaller Bowls, like the Holiday Bowl, pay up to $2 million.

So when the final rankings came out, and Cal was mysteriously and inequitably relegated to the lesser bowl, it was a $15 million snub. That's millions of dollars that can't be put back into our program, to develop our other sports, and to lessen the tension between academics and athletics as the latter manages to be more self-sufficient.

Worse, it's not that Cal has itself to blame for this strange turn of fortune (like it so often does). Cal did everything it needed to win 10 games this year. I think we should have and could have beaten USC, but that's the only mistake from the season. Our performance still should have justified the #4 ranking, and finally gotten us our Rose Bowl berth.

But the computerized rankings as part of the system objected to us not beating the teams we beat by more points than we did. A simple "W" was not good enough it seems: apparently we needed to make the opponents cry. And the human polls evidenced a ridiculous pro-Texas (or anti-Cal) bias. Texas was our nearest competitor in the rankings with a similar record, and though almost as similarly worthy as we were for the #4 slot, it wasn't quite. And in a week when they didn't play but we won, there was nothing that would justify boosting them over us. And yet that's what certain (currently anonymous) pollsters did.

People everywhere are in an uproar over the BCS system. Cal wasn't the only school reamed – Auburn also got proportionately jilted in its ranking. Some in response to the mess are calling for a playoff system instead of the BCS but I don't tend to think it's the answer for college football, given the short season and league complexity (among other things). Instead, if there is going to be a system, BCS or otherwise, it needs to be transparent and equitable. Right now it's not. The computer polls that are part of the equation are immune to bias but fail to measure most of the intangibles (like whether it would have been appropriate to go for an extra touchdown near the end of the game, before penalizing a team for a smaller point differential in its victory). The human polls can better account for the intangibles, better considering the overall quality of the performance that may not be revealed in the final score itself (for instance, Cal started to dominate a tough, tenacious opponent near the end of the last game, which is testament to our excellent conditioning and a better measure of our quality than a point spread), but are subject to manipulation by the voters (as was the case here). The previous BCS system was actually recently changed to this half-human, half-computer formula in order to improve it, hoping that by combining both types of polls it could mitigate the flaws in each. But perhaps it's time to eliminate the downsides of each outright. There's just too much at stake.

That may actually be the larger problem, that there is so much at stake in college football. Football becomes an end to itself, tenuously attached to academic institutions but bearing little connection to the academic learning they are supposed to foster. Vast amounts of money are involved, vaster than that available for academics. Incredible pressures are placed on the players, not just to play well for the joy of it and the pleasure of their peers at school, but because other people's fortunes ride on their performances, now and in the future.

When Tedford was being so openly recruited in Seattle it brought to the fore the hazards of superstardom, that underlying quest for fame and fortune and winning at all costs that seems to fuel the sports engine. Massive amounts of money were being offered trying to lure him away, amounts that we now needed to match in order that he stay. Because even though there were many intangibles we could offer instead, and even though we were already paying him quite a bit, how can you ask or expect a coach, in an industry where employment can be so fleeting (see Tyrone Willingham fired from Notre Dame after a winning season where apparently there wasn't quite enough winning...), to walk away from more money than most of us can ever dream about having.

It turns out we met the price, though not entirely. And Tedford will stay. And we're happy. And maybe that's ok.

Because college sports can still be about college. College is a community that we students, alums, athletes, faculty and staff get to be part of. It's a family that nurtures us for several years in our lives before setting us out in the world. And like a family, it's a place to go home to and a culture that connects us to each other no matter where we are in the world. I'm constantly bumping into Cal people hither and yon, and though we've never met before, because of this connection we are not strangers either. If the athletics can help strengthen this connection, through the games themselves and their supporting pageantry, then it provides an important service that should not be undervalued.

The trick is to make sure the athletics complement the fundamental mission of the university without compromising it. Sports can't be the end itself, where if we throw a little more money at it, where if we manage to win a little more, we will be proportionately enriched in response. It's not a case of "little must be good a lot must be better." Such a notion is a fallacy. The question is where to draw the line so that the investment is returned not only in the context of the football team but in a net positive way for the university as a whole.

Posted 12/8, written 12/7.

Edit 12/10: The combination of the high financial stakes and the potential for vote maniupulation and abuse has prompted at least one newspaper to withdraw from the AP polling system. See this article for some of the unseemly behavior that caused Cal to drop in its ranking inexplicably.

After all the BCS fracas, Cal didn't manage to win its Bowl Game this evening. Disappointing, but I'm inclined to think everyone just ran out of emotional steam.

I might be more upset, but also tonight 88 people died in a night club fire in Buenos Aires, 31 people died in a burning bus in Pakistan, and the tsunami death toll is currently at least 119,000. And this isn't even counting what's going on in Iraq.

So it's a little hard to get worked up by a football game.

Here's hoping 2005 is a better year than this one has turned out to be.

Edit 1/3/05: (For posterity, all those numbers have unfortunately turned out to be low.)

When it looked like Cal would finally make the Rose Bowl for the first time in decades I purchased tickets when I had the opportunity, fearing if I waited there would be none left. It seemed like a safe investment: as long as Cal won its last game they would go. And if they lost, surely the team that got to go instead would be so thrilled that its fans would snap up the tickets, right?

Mack Brown is the Texas Longhorn's coach, whose abject lobbying affected the rankings and kept Cal from going to the Bowl.

You owe me $200.

Were it not for your shenanigans I would have been able to use the tickets I had to the Rose Bowl. But thanks to your wheeling and dealing, Cal got knocked from its rightful place in favor of your measly little team, so measly that no one could be bothered to show up for the game. That's right, the Rose Bowl, which otherwise is a sellout whenever the Pac10 is represented, had tons of tickets left over. Thereby destroying the resale value of mine. Tickets that, once Cal won at USM, should have been worth every penny. Instead, not only did legions of disappointed Cal fans like myself not get to see our team play, because legions of Texans stayed home I was left holding worthless tickets. Given your incredible conniving to force your team into the game, it speaks volumes that your fans were so uninterested in attending. Congratulations on winning a game no one cared about.

Get in touch and I'll tell you where to send the check.

-Cathy

A commercial that helps sum up why I love Cal.

Edit: OK, I'll be a bit more loquacious... What I wrote elsewhere:

I saw it as valuable in helping resolve the cognitive dissonance that results from equating UC Berkeley, the great academic institution, with Cal, the possible football powerhouse. Because these ends so often seem (and so often are) mutually exclusive, I appreciated the commercial for putting both thoughts into the same conceptual bite and showing that at this school they can co-exist.
...
I think it was good to remind people that even though we're excited about our team, we haven't forgotten what we're here for.

Someone ought to be paying me a lot of money: ever since I moved to Boston the championship prospects of the local teams have greatly improved...

Earlier this evening I went out to BU's new Agganis Arena where the school had invited the student body to watch the game (instead of rioting at Kenmore). The arrangement was a little surreal: a brand new arena, with arena food concessions (except the school provided free diet pepsi and bottled water, and ONLY free diet pepsi and bottled water...), the game on the brand new video screens hanging over the arena floor with the sound blasting out of the brand new PA system, and people ice skating on the rink in the middle. (It's BU - they take their skating seriously.)

I had just stopped in to take a peek and went home shortly after kickoff. I could tell how the game was going by the yelling and screaming coming from all the apartments in the neighborhood as I walked past. There was a lot of yelling at the end of the game too...

Today at work an almost-five year old came to visit (given that this was at my law job and not the swimming job, it was a bit unexpected).

"When do you turn five?" my colleague asked him.

"On my birthday."

He and I also had a lengthy discussion about various sports. I asked if he liked playing football, and he said he liked flag football.

"Yeah, with tackle football people get smushed!" I said.

"And they have bad breath! Pee-yew!" he complained.

Which led me to wonder if some NFL coach might plan his strategy around oral hygiene:

"Team, gather round. We've got a tough game coming up, so no one brush their teeth for a week. If our breath really reeks, the other team won't come anywhere near us!"

I suppose it's entirely possible some team somewhere has used this strategy. Although I wonder how effective it was. I can't imagine football players are ever pleasantly aromatic when on the field, so perhaps it's hard for anyone to notice when one team happens to be particularly rancid.

I teach swimming lessons in the most beautiful location. It's up in the hills behind the Berkeley campus, with sweeping views of the glistening Bay, shimmering San Francisco, and the ocean beyond the Golden Gate. Every time I catch the view as I walk home it takes my breath away, even though I've seen it so many times all the other years when I lived and worked up there.

Unfortunately, gorgeous though Strawberry Canyon is, it's a place where there is no summer. Thus swimming lessons often become a somewhat painful ordeal.

(Even under the best of circumstances, Berkeley is never as hot as the inland valleys. And lately everything's been less hot than normal. But some days, like today, when the fog stubbornly refuses to burn off it's not even sunny enough to compensate.)

Even though teaching is physically arduous, somehow I end up feeling invigorated from it. Maybe it's the exercise and fresh air, and maybe it's because I have a job where I get paid to play. I have three classes: two with little kids (3-5 years old) and one where the kids probably range from 6-10. The last one has four boys and one girl. They can be a handful, but they're also kind of (inadvertantly) funny. Yesterday I insisted they swim for a bit without their goggles (actually, I would prefer they not use goggles at all during swim lessons, but I decided against having that battle). They all whined about how they could only swim with goggles. I said, "You're going to need to learn to swim without them. What if one day you fell off a boat?" That quieted them down and they did the drill without them. Unfortunately, three of the boys have identical goggles and it was a bit of a comedy of errors as they tried to figure out whose was whose when they put them back on.

With the little kids the dynamic is different. All I really want is for them to acclimate to locomotion in water. Once they are ready-to-learn they can focus on form and strokes. But that doesn't usually happen until after kindergarten, when they've now gotten the hang of "in class we learn things." Also, they need their bodies to start becoming more linear. Cherubic little kids can't really do a proper crawl stroke, no matter how much they try. To do it you need for your hands to be able to touch up above your head. However, chubby little arms often don't.

But if I can get them to put their heads in the water regularly and comfortably, and if I can get them to float on their own on their fronts and backs, it's a great bonus. Towards that end, every day I hold nearly the same lesson. We begin by entering our "bathtub" and washing off our knees, elbows, belly buttons, chins, noses, shoulders, foreheads, etc. Then we say "hello" to the fish, blowing lots of bubbles and then putting our ears to the water to hear them say "hello" back. Then we do rocketship rides - with pointy arms and legs in prone position - and backfloat rides. Then depending on the time we sometimes play ring-around-the-rosy, often with surprise endings ("We all fall UP!") and my favorite game, zoo. Zoo was a game I started using years ago when one of my kids wasn't paying attention, and instead was wandering off and imagining on his own he was various animals. I decided to have the rest of the class join him, and now "zoo" is a regular staple of my classes, where we pretend to be different animals as we walk back and forth across the pool steps.

Today was a little different, though. It was safety day, and as part of it we practiced wearing lifejackets. Unfortunately, it was foggy and cold, so no kids (nor teachers) were really having a good time. One of my students was already having a bad day, having been near tears when she arrived. She didn't enjoy the lifejacket practice at all, and at the end of it, with half the class left, she started crying and got out of the pool. But she stayed close by as her mom dried her off and encouraged her to watch the rest of the class. I did the rocketship rides and backfloats with the other kids, and then it was time to get out.

"Time to say good-bye to the fish," I announced, as I always do to signal the end of class. All of a sudden she's there on the steps in the pool, bending over to blow her bubbles.

"I forgot to say good-bye to the fish," she said between sniffles. So she did.

Tonight while we were playing zoo one of my students informed me that some octopi actually have nine legs. This was the first I'd ever heard of that, but it's possible things have changed since I was in kindergarten. (It has been a while.)

I have new classes now, as of yesterday, and so far things are mostly good. I'm a little worried about the second class because the two girls are really not cool at all with putting their faces in the water. In fact one of them doesn't seem to know how to blow bubbles. That happens from time to time, where it's something that actually has to be taught, but I've rarely encountered it because for most kids it's instinctive. So this class might be a little challenging to teach because they're more "junior" than I'm used to, but I think if I reset my expectations I can make it ok. After all, the goal is just to get them generally accustomed to being in the water -- not to win the Olympics.

But my FIRST class! Excuse me while I kvell... Two of the girls I had last session and they've made SO MUCH progress! They both put their WHOLE FACES faces in the water now! One of them even puts her whole head in and is well on her way to self-buoyant prone floats. The other meanwhile has nearly gotten the hang of backfloating. And the third kid, who's new, is keeping up pretty well with the other two, which I gather is a big leap from where he was in his other class last session. Anyway, it's great. The challenge in teaching this class then will be to adjust my routine for their new talents.

I have one other class as well, similar to the one I taught last session. This time, though, it's three girls and one boy. We spent all day today working on the crawl stroke. I expect we'll do the same tomorrow, adding also the back crawl. Then we'll move onto learning new strokes. This level has way too many things to learn in 8 sessions than is feasable to teach, but I think I'll be better organized about it now than last session when I had to figure it out on the fly. The challenge, however, will be nomenclature: I have two students with the same name. It makes giving instructions tough... ("No! Not you! The OTHER one...")

But the kids are nice and fun to be with. It's also nice to be with people who are willing to do what you tell them! There aren't nearly enough environments where that happens...

I was going to boycott the Tour de France this year. I'm so disgusted about the injustice that has befallen Tyler Hamilton I was ready to wash my hands of the sport. Cycling is better served with having a peloton full of dopers than even one miscarriage of justice this severe.

But Lance Armstrong's success has done more to raise cycling's profile in the United States than almost a century worth of Tour de Frances did on their own, and as a result everyone and their brother is now talking about this year's race just underway.

It would be nice if they actually knew what they are talking about, however, so I thought I'd explain.

(However, when I typed it out last night, it ended up 6 pages. So I've posted it elsewhere and linked to it here.)

Today I was discussing safety rules with one of my classes of little kids. "Should we swim in the deep water?" I asked.

"No..." said the kids.

"That's right. Not until we're bigger and are super swimmers—"

"Like when we're 13!"

"And 14!"

"And 15!"

"And 12!"

"And 4!"

"4?"

"Yeah. I'm almost 4."

This from the class with the girl who, after I told them that the fish can hear us talk to them better if we put our whole faces in the water, exclaimed that, when she put her ear to the water to hear them say hello in return, the fish were "scWEAMing!"

(Then she gets annoyed when it's time to get out because we haven't done enough yet. "We only did thwee things today," she complained.)

But that's just the first class. My second class, which I was worried about because both kids were so tentative, had a banner day. They both got their faces mostly wet, "Superman'd" mostly on their own, AND jumped into the pool pretty much by themselves. This is why I love teaching the little kids: they just have such an incredible potential to amaze and astound with all the new things they discover they can do.

I got up before dawn this morning to head over to Marin County for a triathlon. It was my third ever, and the first in two years. It was also the first open water one I've done. The first leg was a half-mile swim in the Bay, and I'd wanted to try out Bay swimming.

It turned out to be harder than I thought it was going to be. All the racers gathered at the end of the marina, and then started the race in waves. It was a water start, meaning that we all took off from a line about 20 feet out from the dock. I jumped into the water to acclimate about three minutes before my wave left, which was a good idea, because when I first got in my arms went numb. Unfortunately they remained that way when it was time to start swimming, which made it hard to do a decent crawl stroke (what with not being able to raise my arms out of the water). I eventually managed a breaststroke, and near the end was finally able to muster a crawl stroke and pick up some speed.

I also had made things difficult for myself by forgetting to bring my goggles. I can swim with my eyes open, but I was a little afraid to because I thought they might hurt from the drying salt during the later stages of the race. Had I had the goggles it might have encouraged me to keep my face in the water, thus making me more streamlined and my swimming more efficient. But I guess it wasn't too bad – I still did the leg in about 20 minutes, I think.

The next stage was a nine-mile bike ride, which was more tedious than challenging. My issue was just that it was the first time I'd ridden a bike in about two years. I was having problems remembering how to change gears... But it was nice to get at least one ride in this summer. At least I didn't shlep my bike all the way out here for nothing...

(I'd had grand plans to ride every weekend after my soccer games. But then reality set in, and I've been lucky to make to the games at all, let alone squeeze in a bike ride afterwards.)

Then there was a two-mile run. This is the part I'm most disappointed in. I've never been a good runner, but I've been known to manage it somewhat competently from time to time. But I just couldn't keep myself from walking the run today. My legs quickly started to hurt (which was somewhat surprising to me given that I did manage to play some soccer this summer, even as recently as last week), and I suddenly became very worried about being really sore afterwards and having it mess up my week.

But I felt very chagrined that my legs hurt because it was evidence of my lousy conditioning. Of course, this run wasn't going to help fix that because I was walking it. So the run ended up being a vicious cycle of demoralization, where I didn't push myself because I felt bad about being out of shape, and then felt worse for not pushing myself.

On retrospect, however, I think the race would have gone better if there had been mileage markers. Part of the reason I didn't push myself was because I didn't know how to budget my energies. I was very afraid of coming up short. But had I known how far I was progressing and how much was left, I think I would have been able to do better.

Even so, it was still nice to be reminded that I can do these kinds of races. The distance is nothing I can't handle one way or another, and now I have some idea of what open water swimming is like. There's another open water tri I have my eye on for later this summer, and if I can work out the logistics I think I'll sign up. Emotional melodrama aside, these things are a lot of fun to do.

Edited, because blogging while dehydrated does not lead to pretty results.

Edit 8/10/05: I just saw the official results. Man, I suck. I finished in 323rd place, out of 342 with a total time of 1:32:59. I was in 290th place for the swimming, having done it in 18:18 (I guess I did break 20 minutes...); 304th place for the biking with what I think was an 11 mph rate (which is terrible for me - I should be able to do at least 12 mph or even 14 since there were no traffic lights); and 332nd place on the run, doing two miles in 25:31.7 at a rate of 12:46 (oddly, I would have thought that a good pace for me, but it seems clear that I could have gone faster had I not walked it.)

So this is kind of depressing, mostly with respect to the bike. But on the upside, what with not having any idea what it was like to swim in the Bay, I'm ok with that swimming time.

We¹ interrupt this discussion on law and justice to ask this important question about base running.

(Cross-posted at the Huey Lewis and the News board, which is always a good place to talk baseball...)²

Since we're talking baseball [...] I have a base running question. There have been a couple of situations like the one tonight [at Tuesday's A's game], when on a long fly ball the runner wasn't able to advance.

Tonight's scenario: first base empty, runner on second, one out. There's a long fly ball hit deep. It's either going to clear the fence, be caught on the warning track, or drop in on the warning track. But as the ball carried, the runner came pretty far off the bag. Meaning that by the time the ball was fielded (in this case, caught on the fly) there wasn't enough time to come back, tag up, and then go to third. But the ball was hit deep enough that had the runner been standing on the bag, there probably would have been time to advance - even if the ball had dropped in for a hit.

My question: is it bad base running to have wandered so far off the bag? The upside to doing that seems to be that if the ball did drop in, the runner might have been able to get all the way home. But the A's were way behind at this point, and just getting to third would have been helpful. It seemed that in trying to get the extra bases, they gave up a good chance to get one.

Anyway, a few weeks ago there was a similar situation with the runner on first, where on a deep hit he couldn't advance because of the tagging problem. I forget the exact details of that play - which obviously was a little different because of the force situation - but I remember thinking even then that given the deepness of the ball, there was no reason to lead off so far. Even if the ball were to drop in for a hit and the runner needed to make it to second, there would have been time to get there.

So it seems like this is the way the A's like to run the bases this season. But I wonder, is it wise?

Anyway, over at the board no one's answered me. They're all busy talking about music videos and upcoming concerts. Troglodytes³ ;-)

But I thought I'd share my take on it over here, and see what other opinions might be.⁴

1. And by "we," I mean "me," but "we" sounded better.
2. Does this surprise you? They did name an album "Sports."
3. I'm kidding. Mostly.
4. Apologies to the Unreasonable Man for borrowing his footnoted blogging style.

I was too rushed in August to do a very good job packing, but I did manage to pack my soccer gear. I knew I wanted to play when I got here, and just needed to find an opportunity to.

The first came about a week ago when I played indoor with the men. I was welcome to play, but at first the German men tended to back off and give me a lot of space to handle the ball. It was only when the American men who were also playing started attacking me that then the German ones followed suit. I don't think it was a referendum on how the German men thought I actually played – I think it was just that they didn't know what to expect from a woman player and they just wanted to be polite (non-aggressive). The American men seemed more used to women players, however, and so were more comfortable putting the requisite pressure on me. And then, especially after I started attacking them, the German men started attacking me and all was well.

The game I played on Friday was nominally coed: it was technically a scrimmage between the women's team and alumni men, but only one other woman showed up. Again, the men watched to see how I was going to play and then reacted accordingly. Particularly in that instance, I think they would have tolerated poor playing because I don't think they necessarily expected more. Fortunately they didn't really need to. Until I was slowed by the blisters I got from the indoor game I played solidly, scoring and saving goals. (I had to buy sneakers with non-marking soles to play in the gym, and they require some breaking in, apparently.)

But at Malente... Malente was something else, a tremendous validation after many years of frustration. Of all the people there, probably 200 or so, I was the only woman who played in the soccer game there. I don't really understand why that was, although I have some theories. I would have expected, in a country where soccer is so popular, that everyone would play, men and women. But it seems to be very much a man's sport, and perhaps not as accessible for women as it is for men. In the US, I think it is particularly accessible for women, maybe even more so than for men, in part because the men get sucked up by football and baseball. Whereas in the fall, if a girl does a team sport, it's likely to be soccer. As a result, in the US there are now a lot of adult women who play, and I've even played in adult leagues with some of them.

But before I sing the praises of US girls' youth sports opportunities, it should be pointed out how often they (and indeed all youth sports) so often squander talent and enthusiasm of so many kids. Because here's the thing: when I was a kid, I loved to play always went out for the teams. But in games, I sat on the bench a disproportionate amount of time. Now, I will admit that I'm not the fastest, strongest, or most coordinated of athletes. But I love to play. And I know how to use the talents I do have to contribute to the success of team play. So why didn't they let me play?

(Perhaps it should also be mentioned that I was not the most popular kid either, and some coaches were more likely to play their daughters and their daughters' friends than the other girls they were stuck with having on the team. Granted, this was more often my experience with softball than soccer. But this kind of favoritism happened with soccer too, and was particularly appalling on my freshman high school soccer team.)

So let's look at what happened after we all grew up: some kids who played then surely still play now, and just as surely some kids that got to play then got bored and stopped. And some kids who were really gifted were pressured to play too much, blew out their knees, and now they can't play at all.

Meanwhile, *I,* the kid who wasn't good enough to get playing time, is apparently good enough as an adult to join a game fielded entirely by men, men of a country where soccer is massively popular, and not only not play badly but play well enough that people made a point to come up afterwards and tell me how well I played. Not only were they completely impressed that a woman wanted to play and could play, but they were objectively impressed with how I played. Which is not to say that I'm the greatest soccer player ever. But I ran hard, I played aggressively, I got open, I passed well, and I even scored. I knew how to use the talents I had to the betterment of my team. The World Cup we weren't ready for, but we could be competitive enough that the whole experience was thoroughly enjoyable for all. And, really, with sports that's all that really matters.

The thing that really makes me seethe, however, is that were it not for my sheer obstinate refusal to let go of sports despite coach after coach, team after team, trying to rip all the joy of playing from me, I would not have been able to do what I just did yesterday: play well and have fun. Only because I insisted on having this be part of my life is it still today. And that's a shame, particularly for all the other kids – the perpetual benchwarmers – who are deprived of having sports in their adulthoods because it was denied to them when they were young. More than a shame, it's a tragic waste.

I do find it interesting, also, that I play better today than I did back then. And I think it has something to do with the ridiculous pressure placed on me when I played on youth teams. Because I was always a perennial benchwarmer, every shred of playing time that I managed to get was laden with an unbearable weight of needing to prove myself in THAT particular moment for fear of being yanked out of the game and not getting another chance. I never felt like a good player, and I was essentially told as much during every game when I only got a fraction of the playing time my teammates did. Whereas when I started playing as an adult, I never introduced myself as a bad player. And because no one expected me to be, I wasn't. I was able to perform not only tolerably, but at a higher level than I ever had as a kid.

So I will enjoy my time in Germany, and play as much soccer as my schedule will allow. I've been learning the words and phrases you are supposed to shout out to your teammates, like "hintermann!" (sp?) when there's a player coming up to attack the ball, or "ecke" when it's a corner kick. But that's not really the important thing. There is nothing else quite like the thrill of competition, of getting out there on the grass (or the gym) on a fall day to run around and challenge yourself to play as well as you can. It is one of the things I want to have in my life, so I will.

Written 10/2, posted 10/3.

Evan Schaeffer is bothered by the Lawsuit Reduction Act for a number of reasons. But the question one of his post raised, is why the sanctions only kicked in after the third offense. He wondered if this was the baseball metaphor of "three strikes, you're out" getting out of hand.

I thought otherwise:

It *might* be the baseball analogy run amok, but the baseball example itself manifests a certain perception that three chances may be fair. Which is certainly tenable:

The first strike might have been an accident. A bad pitch call [perhaps], etc. So it wouldn't be fair to punish someone for that.

The second strike is more serious. It is likely that at least one of these two actions (bad swings [etc]...) was truly bad. But, it's not fair to punish without a warning, so consider this second strike designation a warning.

By the third strike you've certainly had adequate warning. So NOW you get punished.

...

Of course, this raises the question of why there are four balls allowed. But I think it can be distinguished by the fact that a walk is vastly less punitive than a strike out. A team is only entitled to 27 at-bats to try to beat the other team. Whereas a pitcher can face as many batters as he'd like... Granted, it's hard to win a game if he faces a lot, and it's definitely hard if his inaccuracy puts a lot of them on base, but a walk is not such a critical event – not such a dramatic loss of opportunity – as a strike-out necessarily is.

The joke from the movie "Airplane!": a stewardess is handing out magazines to the passengers. "Would you like something to read?" One passenger responds, "Do you have something light?" To which the stewardess answers, "Well, how about this leaflet? 'Famous Jewish Sports Legends.'"

Cal managed to avoid a quarterback controversy this weekend due to the prescient coaching by Jeff Tedford and a spectacular performance by the third string quarterback Steve Levy. After Aaron Rogers quit school last year to enter the draft, Cal had players compete for the quarterback role. But the starter quickly went out for the season with an injury, and Joe Ayoob took his place. Levy was the back-up behind him. But Ayoob's had some struggles, and Cal's not played well in its last several games. So Tedford announced last week that he'd start Levy instead. He could always pull him if he had problems and put in the more experienced Ayoob, but why not see what Levy could do?

Granted the first half Cal led only 6-3 (botched extra point), but the touchdown was due to a terrific long throw by Levy, who was throwing well after getting over the early game conservativeness. And in the second half Cal exploded, following his lead. He was confident and poised in the huddle, fairly accurate with his throws, and flexible (and fast) enough to rush for his own first downs. He reminded me a lot of Steve Young, actually. But he really played well in all regards, and especially under given his neophyte circumstances. I felt very comfortable watching him, with the quiet confidence that he wasn't going to throw the game away (which, one way or another, many Cal quarterbacks eventually find a way to do).

But then today I read an article in the Chronicle about him and the game. Apparently he was benched a lot when he came to Cal, down in the ranks behind Rogers who was quite good. In order to get playing time, he went in as a linebacker, which is where he got his running instincts from.

Apparently his father's birthday was Saturday, and weeks ago when he asked his dad what he wanted for his birthday, his dad said, "For you to start Big Game." Which is quite the story, when that's exactly what Levy got to do. And he didn't just get to start or play in the game – he won the game. He won Cal the Axe. If there's one game we want our team to win, it's that one.

So all this is a nice story (as someone else wrote, it has a "Rudy" quality to it). But even more: the article also indicated that Levy is (half-)Jewish, and from New Jersey! No wonder I like him!

I got back late last night from the annual SBA ski trip. It was at Sugarloaf in Maine. I'd never skied in Maine before, but other than being annoyingly far away and suffering from typical East Coast terrain conditions (read: icy) it was pretty nice. Much nicer than Killington in Vermont, for instance, where the SBA used to go. When I was growing up in New Jersey it was THE THING to do, to go ski in Vermont, and lots of my classmates from well-heeled families went all the time. My family normally contented ourselves with the Catskills instead (about a two-hour drive away), except once in high school my mom decided to take us all the way to Vermont. But only my sister ended up going because I had to stay home for a swim team obligation. So it wasn't until just two years ago when I finally got to go and discovered it to be vastly overrated. And incredibly snobby with an indifferent staff who seemed to comport themselves with an air of "we-don't-need-to-be-nice-because-we're-this-famous-ski-resort-
you-all-want-to-come-to-no-matter-how-rude-we-are." Whereas in Maine there was a more genuinely friendly New England hospitality. (Unfortunately, however, the prices in the cafeteria were more like Vermont…) Maine was also distinctive from any other place I'd skied (which, according to the lift tickets on my jacket includes California and Oregon) in that a lot of people telemarked. In other places I'd see maybe one or two telemark skiers on the whole slope, but here there were dozens and they even ran clinics for it.

One of the other nice features of the Maine trip was that our package prices included one free lesson a day. So the first day I did an intermediate class to work on my skiing, and then yesterday I did a beginning snowboard class. I liked snowboarding much more than I thought I would, and I was able to do it much better than I expected. Though I like sports, I'm not the most physically coordinated person. And I can also be extremely timid. But somehow I got past that and within a two-hour lesson was able to figure out how to get myself down the hill.

I'm not THAT great at it, of course. I'm much better heel-side than toe-side, and my cowardice has prevented me from really learning how to turn. But I did figure out how to get on and off the lift without crashing (most of the time), and I only sprained one hand in the process…

I'm a bit torn about whom I should root for in today's Super Bowl. I think it's kind of nice that two smallish market teams should have made it to the big game, but since they're both smallish teams and since both are from places I have no personal attachment to, the rooting preference is not obvious.

In the Seahawks favor I do have friends in Seattle. Friends with kids, in fact.

On the other hand, Pittsburgh is more overlooked as a city, I think, and thus has more of that underdog quality to it. Plus the AFC is often the underdog conference.

Or at least it was till the Patriots came along. I keep forgetting that the 1980s NFC steamroller isn't really steamrolling these days. The AFC can do just fine on its own.

In fact, because it has done just fine in recent years, maybe it's time to give the NFC a turn at domination again.

Still, does Mike Holmgren really need another trophy? Maybe the Steelers guy should get a shot at one for a change.

It's too bad that there's no designated hitter in the NFL so that I could make the decision on that basis...

Edit, 5 minutes to kickoff: I've decided to root for Pittsburgh, because I've always wanted Bill Cowher to win. Since no team I care about more is in the game, this could be a convenient time to scratch that itch.

I'm also concerned that if Seattle wins, there may subsequently be an airstrike on Iran...

It's an ad for Sony, which is evil, but it features a really interesting representation of The Play.

For those of you living under a rock not familiar with The Play, it has sometimes been called the most exciting end to a college football game ever. The Play was an amazing series of lateral passes that gave Cal a surprise, last minute victory over Stanford in the 1982 Big Game. It was further notable because the Stanford Band, which had incorrectly assumed that victory was theirs, had started celebrating in the end zone of the field and Cal had to run through them to score. A trombone was famously crushed in the process (although don't be fooled by the video which shows it to be a French horn).

But apart from the liberty taken by representing the wrong horn, this ad captures all the important parts of the event, like Cal knocking Stanford all over the field, Oski looking on approvingly, and Joe Starkey's breathlessly excited, near-screaming play-by-play... Good times.

Edit: You know, I think the ad completely defeats Sony's point. It's trying to sell HD-TV by saying, "Oh, you wouldn't want to watch something as 'lo-tech' as this." And yet I think the ad's inherent coolness is entirely based on its low tech representation of such an awesome event. It doesn't make me want to go buy HD-TV at all...

Last night was our last broomball game. What is broomball, you ask? (You are asking, aren't you?) It's basically hockey, but without the skates. You run around the ice in sneakers, whacking a ball with a stick. I suppose originally it was a broom, but now it's a stick about lacrosse-stick length, with a small plastic head on the end. Teams are of 5 people plus a goalie, and the court is a hockey rink (which BU, being BU, has about 3 of...).

Anyway, running around on the ice is no easier than you'd think it would be. Well, I take that back. Running is pretty easy; it's stopping that's hard. As is gaining sufficient leverage to whack the ball with significant force. It's a tough game to play if you don't like getting up close and personal with the ice.

I've tended to be just such a person, and as a result I've tended to play very tentatively. But at our last game something clicked and I started playing like I knew what I was doing, taking off and running down the ice full-tilt, going after the ball aggressively... It made it a lot more fun. And somehow my balance had improved, and I hardly hit the ice at all.

The team I was playing on was an intramural team made up of law students - hence the team name, "Slip and Fall." I did find it interesting to read on Wikipedia that in ancient times the Icelanders used to play epic matches of a similar game that would usually lead to the death of several players. But because this was just an intramural game we were able to keep the torts to a minimum.

There's an article today about colleges giving up their swimming requirements to graduate. Although there seems to be a whole bunch of reasons why the requirement is impractical, I'm not sure that giving it up entirely is a good thing.

I never had to take a swim test to graduate from college, but my grandfather did. Which meant that he had to learn to swim. As an immigrant child of immigrant parents growing up in New York City he'd never before had the occasion. But in working his way through college, now he did. It may have been one of the most practical lessons from his entire education, and one that stayed with him the rest of his life. Some of my favorite memories of my grandfather, in fact, are of swimming with him. Memories that wouldn't exist if he'd never had the requirement or opportunity to learn.

Today as the United States welcomes more immigrant children there are new generations who will have lacked the opportunity to learn to swim. But it's not just immigrant children: children who grow up in areas without pools, or the parental availability to take them to lessons, also go without. And it isn't just poor or poorly-educated children who are affected: I remember how one of the smartest and most accomplished people in my high school, someone with an upper middle class upbringing who later went off to Harvard after graduation and completed it in record time, couldn't swim at all. It was a huge blindspot in her education - at least if Harvard didn't make her learn.

I obviously think everyone should learn to swim. Water exists everywhere - learning how to deal with it in a safe way is therefore incredibly important and adds to the enjoyment of life. Of course, I'd rather that every six year old get the opportunity to learn. It's a much better time to teach people to swim. But if for whatever reason they are unable to get lessons then, there should be other opportunities in the course of their education for them to learn this important skill. So it's not that I think the requirement is so important per se, but if that's what it takes to make sure they have the opportunity and inclination to avail themselves of this education, then I think it's a good thing.

I didn't get to see the game yesterday where Barry Bonds hit the record-tying 714th homerun, but I did go to the game he and the Giants were playing against the A's the day before. It was a great game, at least in terms of suspense and drama. Obviously a lot of people came expecting the longball, but it turned out to be a pitching duel that the A's won 1-0. It was also fun for me to watch because it was a "Battle of the Bay" game, and since I didn't really have a horse in the race (although nominally I support the A's since they were my neighborhood team for so long) it was amusing to watch the crowd interact. (Case in point: a fan dropped a foul ball. A's fans next to me: "That's such a Giants move.")

It was a "sell out" crowd of about 35,000, although they still were able to sell me a ticket despite this condition. I'm not entirely sure I approve of what the A's have done with the place: they've closed off (tarped-over) the upper deck of the Coliseum. Now, for a normal game that only draws between 10-20,000 fans, that's g