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 great because it makes the stadium more intimate. But for a game like this that could easily sell out the entire park, I think it's a mistake. I've been to the Coliseum when it was a 45,000-person sell out, and I think they should take advantage of that extra capacity for high-demand games like these. It doesn't seem right to me to needlessly shut people out from the game when the stadium can handle them. (Nor does it seem right for the cost to attend to so dramatically increase because of the lessened capacity. The A's have a lot of loyal blue-collar families in its fan base, and they shouldn't be priced out of the opportunity to have a nice family outing at the park. Especially given how affordable the A's games have been, it would quite the sudden and unwelcome change if the A's suddenly became much less financially accessible. True, there are still some cheap seats on Mt. Davis (the outfield) and they may still do $2 Wednesdays, but even high-demand games should be available for loyal fans to go to without needing a mortgage.)

Anyway, play-wise I still have criticisms of how the A's run the bases (except for Kotsay, who tagged up excellently), and the A's batters are looking incredibly undisciplined (striking out swinging), but the fielding was great and so was the pitching, and this is why the A's won over the Giants.

The A's got their one run somewhat early, and then the rest of the game was a matter of holding the lead. Which can be a little suspenseful under normal circumstances, and these weren't normal circumstances: Barry Bonds was on the prowl for a home run. He had no luck in the earlier innings (the starting A's pitcher held the Giants to only a handful of hits through the 8th innings), and even though everyone was expecting him to hit it out of the park, by the time the 9th inning rolled around he still hadn't.

Now, granted with the A's lead being so small, had he hit a home run it would have been a big deal. The problem is, though, that swinging for the fences tends to also result in a lot of strikeouts. Which, with two outs in the top of the 9th, is not what the Giants needed. What they needed was to stay alive.

But quickly there were two strikes on Bonds, who was now up at the plate. He backed away from the batter's box to take in the signs. I turned to the guy next to me, "You know, he should bunt. It would be so unexpected he'd probably get a hit out of it." But he didn't take my advice, he swung for the fences, and so he went down on strikes. Game over, the end.

In yesterday's game he finally did connect for his home run, and the Giants won 2-1. So in that case the home run obviously helped the Giants win the game (as did the A's lackluster hitting), and to be sure it would have helped in the earlier game. But sometimes going for the home run really is the bridge too far. Sometimes it's only a hit that's really needed to help the team along. But because so much for the Giants is about Bonds and his home runs, the team ends up depending on them more than they should. He can't obviously hit home runs all the time (he hadn't his one before yesterday since around May 8) yet the team still needs to win every day. If the other 8 people can get involved, the team just might, but in putting all the eggs in one slugger's home run basket their victory is much less likely.

Now that I have my handy little MP3 player, I'm trying to take up running. So far so good: I've done it twice this week so far. The problem: I'm an unbelievably bad runner. Always have been. In first grade I remember being the second slowest runner doing laps, and the kid who was the slowest only was because he'd just had his appendix removed.

But I've decided that since I have one of the world's prettiest running spots available to me, now that the weather's gotten nice, I have no business not taking advantage of it. So I've taken to running around the Charles. From the law school I go up a block to the BU Bridge, which I cross, and then I run along Memorial Drive until the Harvard Bridge. It's about .9 miles between the bridges on that side, so if I include the BU Bridge part I can do about 1.1 miles on my run. And I can do it. I don't feel so hot while I'm doing it, but I can get through it and then later in the day my body will falsely remember having enjoyed it...

Once at the other bridge I walk back across to Boston (.4 miles) and then walk back to the school (1.5 miles). The whole loop takes me about an hour and passes me by an awful lot of waterfowl and fish (the Canadian geese are a bit boring but the squadron of large white geese (or are they ducks?) that live underneath the BU Bridge on the Cambridge side are pretty interesting). Hopefully once I get used to it I'll be able to up the mileage by perhaps adding on the Harvard Bridge leg. (And it would of course be a thrill, and completely unprecedented, if I could do the whole thing...) Of course, the real challenge will be to keep the routine up. So far so good, but exercise regimens are tricky things to stick with, especially when life keeps trying to pull you in all sorts of other directions. But the fact of the matter is that I was way too sedentary last semester, and it shows. So I want to nip those behaviors in the bud while it's still not too hard to do, and thus regular exercise is now one of my top priorities for the summer. We'll see how this goes.

There is also the possibility of joining the gym. My access to the nice new BU facility runs out tomorrow, so I'd have to pay to use it. But I'm not sure it's worth the money. I will get to swim a bit anyway because I just signed up to teach a few swimming lessons (yay!), but I'm not sure it's worth the money for the access to weights and such. Maybe if I had more time, but I'm afraid to make a huge commitment until I can get a grip on how much bar review will suck from me. I think it would be better to do a little each day than take on too much, get overwhelmed, get behind, feel guilty, and then stay home. Even a little exercise is much better than sitting on my ass, so I think I'll take what I can get and be happy with it.

I will, however, try to find some exercises to do at home (even if just sit-ups and push-ups), eventually try to add in some biking, and try to keep up the running. If I can manage to do it regularly it will be such an accomplishment. Plus running around the Charles makes me feel like Banacek...

Edit 5/31: Oooo.... wicked cool Google hack! (To use the local lingo...) Paul Degnan made a pedometer tool using Google maps so now you can figure out how far you've run/walked/unicycled much more painlessly than entering different intersections into Yahoo maps, which is what I had to do yesterday in order to calculate the mileage. Seems I was pretty accurate though...

(I read about this tool in the June 2006 issue of New England Sports magazine. In an article about blogging about jogging, actually...)

Since I was in the neighborhood, I did something I rarely have ever gotten to do (and haven't done at all in at least 20 years): go to a game at Yankee Stadium.

It's actually a bit of a sore point. I love my parents dearly, but my interest in baseball and the Yankees in particular wasn't well encouraged. Every year it would be, "What do you want for your birthday?" "I wanna go to a Yankee game!" "What else do you want for your birthday?" They'd only take me when they got free tickets from work, which worked out to about 3 or 4 times in the course of my childhood.

Since then I have gotten to see baseball, the Yankees included, but with the exception of the 1996 World Series in Atlanta, it was almost always at Oakland Coliseum. So I guess it figures that the team I got to see the Yankees play against the other night was the Oakland A's...

It was a little odd: because of the amount of time I lived out there, I seem to know the A's better than I know the Yankees (although some of that may be because the Yankees are currently comprised of a bunch of minor leaguers that nobody knows...). And, admittedly, I sometimes root for the A's. But never against the Yankees.

Unfortunately, Randy Johnson is not the pitcher he was hired to be, and some of the Yankee bats were not as disciplined as they should have been. But they did make a game out of it, including with a 4-run inning after an hour long rain delay. Which was itself kind of interesting, given how suddenly the skies opened up and just dumped an ocean of water on the stadium. Or at least it was ok for me, since I'd let a scalper talk me into buying a $30 covered loge box seat instead of a $20 uncovered upper deck seat...

The only real problem with this whole endeavor (apart from the final result...) is that it's nearly impossible to catch a Yankee nightgame when you are dependent on mass transit to get home to New Jersey. After the final out at nearly midnight I immediately sprinted out of my seat, raced to the subway, then ran as fast as my little legs would carry me up three or four levels and down a long hall of the Port Authority to catch the last bus of the night - with about 20 seconds to spare...

Everyone's getting all worked up about the World Cup. Even Americans. John Steele on the Legal Ethics blog, for instance, complained about "flopping," when a player would fake some sort of devastating injury following some minor contact with someone on the other team in the hope that the ref would assume that the other player had done something very, very wrong and blow the whistle on him.

For many years in high school and college I was a soccer ref and I used to see this kind of thing all the time (well, more so in college when I refereed adults - in high school I mostly refereed youth games). I'd inwardly laugh at the overwrought melodrama of it all, but I wouldn't call it. You can't ref by inference. Either you saw the infracting contact, or you didn't. You couldn't presume it had been there just by the aftereffect, and it was better to not call something legitimate you might have missed than call something that had not happened. "Play on" was therefore a constant referee refrain, and usually the floppers would knock it off when they realized they wouldn't get anything for their acting efforts (plus it would be bad playing, since while they writhed on the ground the other team would go off with the ball...)

I liked ref'ing. It was one of my "professions" during those years, along with swim teaching, and meant that I'd never had to work in retail or food service... In high school I used to ref kids' games on the weekends in the fall, and then in college I refereed intramurals. I did it for 7 of the 8 semesters I was in school there, and after a while you'd get to know the "regulars" who were there every season. Teams like "The Young Hegelians" and "Area I" (named after the city parking area everyone on the team lived within), which I encountered often enough that their names became etched somewhere in my memory.

Anyway, cut to last fall when I was in Germany, more than 10 years after I'd refereed my last game. The school hosted several "Transatlantic Lectures" during the course of the semester, and at the end of them the head of the school would take the speaker and related affiliates out to dinner. On a few occasions I was invited to join them. (I consider this one of the highlights of my time there and was honored to have been so included.) Anyway, one of these affiliates is a German with a Ph.D. in history, and as we were chatting at the table we realized we'd both spent time studying at Cal. More than that, our time there had overlapped. So I jokingly asked him if he'd ever played intramural soccer, and to my surprise, he said YES!

"Oh really, what team?"

"The Young Hegelians."

It was great fun to realize that we'd probably been on the field at the same time. It seemed so random to suddenly run into each other in a completely different context over a decade later. But even though it was probably true that we'd "met" before, I couldn't specifically say that I remembered him. At least not right away...

He went on to explain that the team was made up of a bunch of German graduate students who thought that "Young Hegelians" might be a good name for them. He then recounted, "Being German, I tended to play a very physical game. I kept getting in trouble with the refs..."

"A ha! I thought I remembered you!"

It was even more fun to imagine that the man I was now dining so civilly with in a nice little restaurant half a world away I'd once given a yellow card to...

So let this be a lesson to you all: never antagonize your ref. You never know when or where you'll see her again...

Remember when I talked about my running loop, and how I wondered if someday I'd be able to run across the second bridge? Well, today I did! I ran a whole mile and a half! In fact, had I not run out of road I probably could have kept going. Even more in fact, I was pretty annoyed that I'd run out of road because I actually wanted to have kept going... It seems the runner's high had kicked in at some point and I was in a nice groove. It makes me realize a big reason why I've always hated running: because I do so little of it, I'm always doing the first part, which is the worst part. You have to be going for a while before it starts to become tolerable.

On the other hand, I'm sure my recent bike ride helped my stamina. Although I didn't do anything yesterday except sit on my ass recover, today my legs were noticeably stronger. I'm now looking forward to Friday, when I'll hopefully get to run again, and thinking about how I might modify my route so that I can keep going if I want to (the problem is that my current loop requires crossing an intersection somewhere, and I'm not so strong a runner that I can easily deal with the starting and stopping crossing it requires, so I'll have to figure out which intersection to cross at to get the smallest disruption.)

In any case, I think this may have been the farthest I've ever run on my own.

Well, the moment finally came that I'd been dreading - the two Huey Lewis and the News concerts scheduled for this past weekend. Were they going to be the social train wreck the last ones were? Was I going to end up in tears again?

Actually, it was fine. Well, at Friday's show I melted down a little bit when I got there because I was overwhelmed with anxiety from not knowing how it would be, but as the evening went on I felt better. It was a good show, I had great seats, and I generally felt comfortable there.

But just in case it was going to be a self-esteem crushing vortex again, I had come up with some insurance for the Saturday show: I decided I would bike there. Then, no matter what happened or how people treated me, I would still have something to say for myself - a tangible accomplishment I could hold onto.

So let's take a moment to talk about all the things that could go wrong with this plan:

• It was far. Farther than I'd ever biked before, and almost more miles than I've biked the last three years combined.
• It was on roads I'd never been on before with hills I'd never seen, much less climbed.
• I had stayed out too late the night before, and hadn't eaten well either.
• My bike needs a cleaning and tuning, and I can barely change a flat.

But this was my plan, dammit, and I was sticking to it. To be fair, I wasn't entirely unprepared. I had plenty of maps, plenty of Gatorade and water, lots of peanut butter sandwiches and carrots and other snacks. I also had planned my route and come up with a workable plan for getting home after the show. So off I went.

And almost immediately encountered enormous hills, the labyrinth and cryptic under-labeled streets of San Francisco, more hills, still more hills, and then an irritating downhill that lost lots of the altitude that I'd worked so hard to attain. And that was only in the first 20 miles...

There were some nice spots though, like the trails along the reservoirs in the San Andreas fault. Shimmering waters, deer munching leaves by the trailside... As I rode past I thought to myself, "I earned this." Of course, I still had 30 more miles to earn...

Eventually (eventually...) the trails gave way to the traffic of Cupertino, which wasn't really such a great trade. And then I was on the final climb, which I kind of bonked on. I've made it up before, but not after 62 miles. In fact, I've never ridden anywhere close to 62 miles before. So I walked about .2 of a mile of the 62.8 total. But then there I was, at the top, with only the private drive up to the venue ahead of me. Which cyclists are prohibited from. So I did something I've never done before: I hitchhiked. Normally, of course, that's not something I'd do. But this was a one lane road that only had one destination - it hardly seemed likely that some passing lunatic who just happened to be going to a Huey Lewis concert would pick me up.

I didn't bother sticking my thumb out when the sedans drove past, but it was interesting that none of the gigantic SUV drivers were interested in having a stranger invade their automotive bubble. The pick-up drivers, on the other hand, seemed to delight in the fact that they could be helpful, and so I got a ride up with one of them. Which was very nice, albeit a little awkward when a sheriff's officer directing traffic at the top demanded to know how long I'd been riding in the back like that...

But all in all, my plan was a success. I made it all the way, had enough energy left to dance with (which helped keep me from getting stiff), and generally had a nice time. Plus I saved the $10 parking fee...

Actually, I never read Moneyball. But most people outside the Bay Area talk about it whenever they talk about the A's, since it's all about the A's back office strategy of building a solid team with no money. The A's have been frequent contenders over the years they've been constructed with this Moneyball strategy, but until yesterday when they completed a sweep of the Twins, they had never (er, or at least not in a very long time) progressed beyond the League Division Series.

Ilya Somin was discussing their fortunes on the Volokh conspiracy. I commented:

As a native Yankee fan who's inadvertently become an Oakland aficionado due to 11+ years of living next to Oakland, I've watched them surprisingly intently the last couple of years.

This year's team doesn't surprise me because I saw the makings of it last summer, when the young team (I forget the average age, but apparently it was relatively low) was full of scrappy players for whom their Little League heroics were still fresh in their minds and who, instead of being relegated to pinch hitting and utility work, got to step up and drive the team. The run they had in June/July/August was a lot of fun as they discovered what their potential was and figured out how to meet it.

This year they are mostly the same players, but with the benefit of experience, and the introduction of Frank Thomas (a man whose bunts would still fly 400 feet...) They are solid and deep, play as an effective ensemble, and have progressed to the point where their success will come down to how well the pitching holds up. And perhaps the managing/coaching. Macha seems decent, but he's no Torre in terms of post-season experience. I also have issues with the A's base running...

So what does this mean for Moneyball? Probably that it can work, but that the payoff might not be right away. Build the team while the bricks are cheap, and then let time settle them into something solid.

(Of course, I would also argue that a lot of the Yankees recent success has also been due to similar factors, namely the coaching and the ability to play as a team. No matter how high the payroll, the Yankees could not achieve anything (remember the 80s?) until Torre came along to hold this team together.)

For what it's worth, I went to yesterday's A's game, the one where they clinched. It was fun, and I'm very happy for them. Of course, what I'd wanted to have happen was for them to progress, the Yankees to progress, and then for me to get to see the Yankees play in the post-season out here. Unfortunately the Yankees are trying to stymie that plan... But I guess if they fail to make it out here I'll just root in full force for the A's. Because if they can get to the World Series, maybe I can get to go...

My room on the houseboat came with the use of a kayak. So yesterday I bought a lifejacket (since no self-respecting water-safety-instructor-cum-lawyer-to-be can be without one), and today I went kayaking. Unfortunately it's a river kayak and therefore even less stable than kayaks normally are, but, hey - it floats! So I tooled around in the houseboat marina before braving (somewhat) open waters.

While I was out there I saw what at first appeared to be a rock, but then I realized was a smiling sea lion head. I was too far away to see it in more detail (which was good, because it's illegal to mess with sea lions), and soon he dove under water and disappeared.

I have to say, though, that the whole thing was extraordinarily cool. In fact, the entire kayaking experience, out on the sunny Bay waters, was extremely cool. I really would like to do more of this, but unfortunately to get really into it will take money (lessons, wetsuit, better kayak, etc.). And I am still not working. Which leaves lots of time for kayaking, but no money to make the investment. But it's on the list of things to invest in once I get the means again to do it. (The means I have now seem earmarked for BarBri, which I don't think will be nearly as much fun as kayaking...)

In the meantime, now I get to learn about tide charts.

There's been a lot of news lately about all the new stadiums proposed for the Bay Area. The Oakland A's want one in Fremont, the San Francisco 49ers want one in Santa Clara, and Cal football coach Jeff Tedford managed to get the promise of a new one added to his contract.

Of all these teams, Cal has the greatest need, and not just because Tedford demanded it. The Cal Bears play in the wonderful 1920's-era Memorial Stadium, nicely nestled at the base of Strawberry Canyon, with breathtaking views of the Bay Area from the west side and a nice, gentle bowl with perfect oval symmetry to give good views of the field to every seat within it. (Click here for a picture.)

Unfortunately it's also built right on top of the Hayward Fault, a fault that creeps about a centimeter a year and has been on an 80 year quest to rip the stadium apart. Meanwhile the western half is built upon unreinforced fill, and in case of earthquake bad things are almost certain to happen to the stadium.

So a seismic retrofit is desperately needed. And it wouldn't hurt to update it a little too: concessions are fairly sparse, and restrooms even sparser. But otherwise it's a lovely stadium, inside and out, and should be left alone.

Of course, once the people in charge of stadium projects get to start thinking about stadium projects, they tend to think big and radical. I haven't seen the plans they've unfolded for it - I'm not sure anyone in the public really has - but already concerns are being voiced by affected constituencies. The City of Berkeley, for one, but perhaps more importantly, Cal fans themselves. There's a significant concern, for instance, that the new improvements will obliterate Tightwad Hill.

As I described, Memorial Stadium is built against a hillside at the mouth of what's known as Strawberry Canyon, a small valley that runs for a mile or so back into the hills. On each side of the canyon are some taller hillsides, and one of these hillsides offers a decent vantage of the playing field. Thus the name "Tightwad Hill," in commemoration of all the people who perch on it to watch the games without coughing up the money for a ticket.

How many other schools have a tightwad hill? How many even could? It's something that sets Cal apart. It's part of Cal culture, Cal tradition. And that's what's really important. More important than a modern stadium. Even more important than a won-loss record. It's what keeps Cal, Cal. It's what unites its fans and brings them together, year after year, no matter how Cal manages to perform. It's what inspires us to cheer her, it's what inspires us to love her. It is not something to be trifled with.

Last night Cal managed to avoid the same season outcome it's managed to avoid since 1959, a trip to the Rose Bowl, despite all predictions to the contrary. Yes, this is a great Cal team, perhaps the best in years, but the national pundits who tried to pick it for national championships prematurely and set other bizarrely lofty aspirations for a team that until recently could get through a season with barely one win, missed the point about what Cal is about. Cal isn't about being an athletic powerhouse. It's not supposed to be a USC. It's a scrappy team that comes to play and wins victories that are sweeter than any SEC team could possibly experience simply because Cal isn't expected to be that kind of team. Instead what should be expected, given years and years of past history, is that when Cal plays Arizona, no matter how each team has been doing, all bets are off. There may be no mathematical reason for why those games break that way. When you match up every season statistic there may be no reason to expect it at all. But it can't be discounted, because that's what happens, nearly every year. It's part of the mystique of Cal football.

Just as every other ritual or song or tradition is part of the mystique. It's that mystique which keeps us coming back, year after year, even when those statistics tell us we shouldn't bother. Of course, it's not as though an Old Blue Cal fan doesn't want with all their heart to win, or doesn't believe just as fervently that we can. It's just that if the winning doesn't happen - or even if it does - that there is something else left of value. Something that no national ranking or fancy stadium or other hype can possibly supplant, and that none should ever try.

A statue on the Cal campus dedicated to Big Game, properly adorned for the occasion.

Despite tempting the weather gods by scheduling football for December, a gorgeous day ensued for the annual Cal-$tanfurd football match-up. I, of course, attended, as did about 70,000+ Cal fans and a dozen $tanfurd fans. It's kind of unsporting of them, actually, to be absent in such droves. What fun is a rivalry if one side stops caring? Cal fans always attend no matter how dreadful Cal is playing. Obviously $tanfurd fans are much more fairweather, which is yet another way $tanfurd is inferior to Cal.

(Me musing to friend after game: "It's a good thing we didn't lose the Axe [the trophy that the Big Game winner gets to keep until the next year and we've now kept for five straight years]. If we'd lost it, there would have been no one to give it to.")

Guess they just were too thin-skinned to watch their team lose. Which is exactly what they would have seen, had they attended. As it should be.

I saw in the news last week that legislation is getting passed to change the management structure of the Red Cross. I actually have nothing to say about any of that. I know there's been lots of criticism of the Red Cross, and maybe some of it is deserved, but generally speaking I tend to think the American Red Cross is a perfectly fine organization.

Except when it comes to the health and safety aspect, the swimming program in particular. In that respect I have a lot to complain about, and now that I'm going to have to fill out report cards for my students next week my frustrations are bubbling to the fore.

When I was a kid of swim lesson age (say between 1980-91) the Red Cross swimming lessons were structured as "Beginner," "Advanced Beginner," "Intermediate," "Swimmer," and "Advanced Swimmer." These were serviceable levels, except at the lower end when there would be a big bottleneck because the requirements to pass Beginner were a little too steep. For example, I remember having to swim 10 yards or so with the crawl stroke, without stopping, to pass, which took me at least three different 3-week classes to manage. These steep requirements meant that in a Beginner class you would have kids who could get their heads wet, prone float, and do a rudimentary crawl stroke mixed in with kids who might not even be willing to put their faces in the water. That's an enormous range of abilities. But apart from this problem with the Beginner requirements the rest of the curriculum generally made sense, as new skills were added later on (e.g., elementary backstroke in Advanced Beginner and sidestroke in Intermediate) but not before previous ones were reasonably mastered.

In the early 90s the Red Cross redid the entire curriculum, doing away with those class tiers and replacing them with Levels I through VI (give or take, as I think the numbers may have shifted over the years). What was good about this change was that now Level I was truly a beginner class for all the basic water acclimation skills kids needed to have before they could even begin to learn proper strokes. So by Level II in theory you'd have kids who were now really ready to learn to swim. Except that's not the way it's actually worked out. Given the almost negligible passing requirements of Level I, in Level II you still get kids that aren't necessarily ready to swim, but it turns out they aren't really expected to anyway because the requirements for passing Level II are also very low. Which means the bottleneck has simply moved to Level III, which requires decent mastery of the crawl stroke - a very difficult stroke to master - as well as the beginnings of all sorts of other strokes, including the butterfly(!)

All of this is completely unrealistic. For one, even if you were to decide that the crawl stroke should not be put together until Level III, which is awfully late, neither of the preceding two levels effectively require mastery of any of the basic skills that go into it. Meanwhile, Level III just has way too much to cover. As it is you could fill an entire 8-10 session course with instruction in the crawl stroke alone. First you have to ensure that the students can do a good prone float that keeps them on top of the water (some kids end up submerged, which will prevent the arm strokes from being successful). Then you have to make sure that they can kick with straight enough legs to not affect their buoyancy. Then you have to make sure that when they do their arm strokes they are able to generate enough momentum (as well as perform out-of-the-water recovery). With all that, then you can add the side breathing, for which you will need to have done drills on breath control so that they'll have any hope of being able to coordinate the timing. Which itself is hard to master, as is proper positioning of the head and proper form of the arms and legs. But because none of the earlier levels even require more than exposure to these elemental skills, they're forced to work on them all, plus the skill on the whole, in Level III. Where they also must now learn all sorts of new strokes (e.g., back crawl, elementary backstroke, butterfly). Unfortunately there simply isn't time to cover all of it. (There's barely enough time to teach all these things, let alone give the kids time to practice them). Now, if you're at a facility where you'll see a kid over the course of the summer, you might be able to cover everything eventually. But kids come and go and change instructors, classmates, and facilities. The courses have to be standard enough so that the levels will all be taught the same wherever they go. And I don't think they can be, at least not if the teaching is going to be effective.

Furthermore, there was another significant change in the 1990s that was also ill-advised, and that is the shift away from water survival skills to competitive swimming skills. For instance, back crawl is taught before elementary backstroke. And while the flutter kick that goes with the back crawl is potentially easier to do than the whip kick, the arm strokes for the back crawl are pretty difficult for little people to do well. Plus, like any stroke involving out-of-the-water arm recovery, it burns up much more energy than one (like elementary backstroke) where the arms can stay under the surface. But instead of these more efficient strokes, kids are now sooner taught the skills they need to be on a swim team. But wouldn't the swim team itself be in a better position to teach them? Not every kid goes on to swim competitively, and those that don't will need survival strokes more than they'll need competitive strokes. Unfortunately their aquatic education is now co-opted by these other students, even though by virtue of being on the swim team they will have an opportunity then to learn what they'll need to know for it.

Which is not to say that I think it's a good thing no one taught me the butterfly under the original Red Cross curriculum. On retrospect I would have gladly done away with some of the former Swimmer and Advanced Swimmer strokes like the trudgeon, and even perhaps the inverted breaststroke, and instead have learned the butterfly. But there's no reason the butterfly should be taught anywhere before Level IV, preferably Level V, and certainly not before the basic crawl stroke, breaststroke, sidestroke, elementary backstroke and even regular back crawl have been learned to the point that only more practice is needed for any remaining issues of form to be corrected. Students may not be able to go blazingly fast with all of them, but they should be able to go pretty far.

Perhaps the thinking is that because kids don't always progress through the entire Red Cross curriculum, it's better to frontload lots of skills while they're still around so at least if next summer they don't come back they'll have learned lots of basics. But I think the way the curriculum is set up it undermines that goal because it causes too much time to be wasted. For instance Level II, as it's currently constructed, is a waste of time. And Level III has too much in it, so advanced students have to waste their time waiting for their classmates to catch up. It puts instructors in a terrible position, because we may have kids ready for the new strokes, but we can't get there because other kids in the class are still trying to get the basic pieces of the front crawl down.

What's at least good about the Red Cross is that it does reassess the curriculum from time to time and make changes to it. My point is that it needs to do so in response to these issues, and below the fold I articulate specifically how the current level requirements need to be changed. What with 15+ years or so of experience teaching actual kids, and having had a valid Water Safety Instructor certificate since 1991, I think I know what I'm talking about.

I last ran Bay to Breakers four years ago. I remember specifically, because it was the race before the upcoming Democratic presidential primary, and I got hit in the head with a "Dean for President" tortilla during the traditional tortilla toss at the start. I was really curious which candidate was going to hit me in the head this time... But it turned out that most of the tortillas thrown were generic. However, points do go to the Barack Obama camp for being the candidate with a sizeable grassroots presence at the event generally.

But enough about presidential races; this post is about the road race. I walked the first half of it with some friends, which is an experience itself. Walking you can really notice the party around you, with all the costumes, music, naked people, etc. But once at the top of the Hayes Street Hill, I had the need for speed, or at least an interest in actually running, so I took off.

My goal was to run at least 5k, or 3 miles and change, without stopping. I've never done that much before. Even the last time I think I only did two miles, and I was with people. This time I did all 3 miles, and I did them on my own. And I did them fast. Well, not blazingly fast, but I did them in 37.5 minutes, which means I was doing at least 11 minute miles. While no land speed record, I didn't know I could go faster than 13 minute miles. And I did all this after having already walked four miles. So I'm pleased. And somewhat surprised. Over the winter I'd been working on my running and have gotten up to doing about a mile and a half comfortably, but this was a yet-unattained stretch for me. Plus I hadn't really gotten any significant exercise within the last month or so. But it's good to know I can do it, because 5k is usually what you need to run in a sprint triathlon, and I've been always walking the distance when I do them, which makes my overall time terrible and gets me to the finish line too late to get a t-shirt in my size... So now I'll have to go sign up for a few and finally see what I can do.

It's not just the standard epitaph; it's a demonstrable fact.

I bought Big Game tickets yesterday, which means my streak of attendance at the annual Cal-Stanford football match-up can continue unbroken this November. But I was very, very lucky to be able to, and many, many loyal Cal fans were not as fortunate.

Ever since the two schools decided decades and decades ago to let the football game be the outlet for inter-school antipathy, they have taken turns hosting it in their heretofore extremely large (75,000+ seat) stadiums. By contract each school got to sell about half the seats at either stadium to its own fans, and at a typical game you'd usually end up seeing two-thirds to one-half of the crowd decked out in the home team's colors, and the rest in the visitor's. At least that's how it's all tended to work so far.

But a few things have coincided this year to change all that: One, that Cal in recent years is actually playing good football - of a quality that hasn't been seen in several decades - and thus is attracting more people who actually want to watch it play. Two, the contract between Cal and Stanford agreeing to give the visiting school an allotment of half the tickets apparently expired last year. And three, Stanford knocked down its old 85,000-seat stadium and replaced it with a 50,000-seat one.

Shrinking the stadium obviously was going to reduce the number of tickets available. Split in half, each school was now going to have 15,000 seats less than they would have otherwise. And that's only if they each got half. Because the contract had expired, this year Stanford decided to only give Cal 15,000 seats total, keeping 35,000 for itself and giving Cal only a fraction of what it used to have.

Some rivalry... Particularly when you consider that while Cal's play has had it competing for elite end-of-season bowl games, Stanford was something like 1-10 last year. And when Stanford's not playing well, its fans don't care. Last year in Berkeley the stadium was almost entirely blue and gold. Only a tiny fraction of the crowd was wearing Stanford's red and white, and that included their rather large band. As we could see, when the going got tough, Stanford fans didn't even bother to show up. Some rivalry, indeed.

Obviously anything could happen this year, and the fortunes of either team could easily be reversed. But there's reason for everyone to think that Cal will have a similar season this year as it did last, and the same goes for Stanford. Which makes Stanford's ticketing decision look all the more petty. Because it knows that so many people will potentially be interested in seeing Cal's last regular season game, it looks like it's keeping all those seats to itself to profit off of.

Of course, Cal itself is also not immune to criticism. The athletic department, suddenly faced with a reliably competent football team and the increased local popularity such athleticism engenders, is starting to exploit it in ways that are particularly alienating to those long-suffering fans who have been filling the seats even in all those dark years when the same could not be said. Suddenly being a Cal fan has become a very expensive and very inequitable thing. Which is worth a diatribe itself, but for now the important point is that after 5000 seats were set aside for students, the remaining 10,000 were only available for Cal fans who were major donors or season ticket holders, and of the latter only a small fraction were able to get them. So what's everyone else to do?

So far the best possibility seems to be to buy Stanford season tickets. Which to a Cal fan seems at first like complete sacrilege. But on further inspection, it's a plan with a certain machiavellian brilliance. First of all, it's not economically unrealistic. The Big Game ticket the package includes would have cost about $70 alone, so subtract that price from the package deal to see the true cost of this plan. Then you can also subtract the Stanford-Notre Dame game ticket, which can probably be sold to a Notre Dame fan, possibly even at a premium. The same may also be true for the Stanford-UCLA game. Which means that there's only a few more games' tickets that a poor Cal fan would need to eat.

But here's the thing: wouldn't it be great if Stanford Stadium turned into a ghost town for all those games because of all the non-Stanford fans who bought the tickets and couldn't be bothered to show up? Or, even better, what if all the Cal fans who had to buy the season ticket package turned up themselves at these games proudly wearing their blue and gold and rooting for the other team? As it is I've heard of some Cal fans who'd bought a block of 30 season tickets - that would be a pretty impressive show of blue and gold already.

Is such a plan very sportsmanlike? Well, possibly not. But a healthy rivalry always involves some sort of efforts to subvert the other team or its fans. I mean, Stanford's recurrent attempts to paint the Big C red or the unspeakable things they annually do to innocent little teddy bear effigies aren't exactly sportsmanlike either, but they're part of the rivalry and moral equivalents of this sort of plan. But there's no comparison between these essentially harmless pranks and one school openly screwing the other on tickets. It's not clever one-upsmanship; it's just exploitation. And not by passionate fans loyal to their schools and communities, as has underpinned the 100+ year history of the Cal-Stanford rivalry, but by the academic institution itself.

Incidentally, Stanford isn't the only school behaving this way. The more money there is at stake in these events (and Cal's recent success has greatly raised the financial stakes), the more all the schools are getting sucked into an inappropriate tit-for-tat with regard visitors' tickets. USC last year, for instance, instead of giving Cal its usual 10,000 seat allotment (of the 90,000-seat stadium) to sell to its away-game fans, only gave Cal 5,000, thereby either shutting out thousands of Cal fans who wanted to see this very important game or leaving them to be exploited on the secondary ticket market. So this year, since the Cal-USC game will be played in Berkeley, Cal is getting even by only giving USC a small amount of tickets to sell to its traveling fans.

The Pac-10 really needs to step in and broker some sort of equitable convention among its teams regarding how these ticketing matters should be dealt with. It's bad for fans, bad for the schools, and bad for college sports in general when the schools get so blinded by dollar signs as to shut out their competitors' supporters. It's this behavior that's truly unsportsmanlike and runs completely counter to any notion that college sports can be healthy athletic and cultural activities that complement scholarship. Or even just fun.

Yesterday there was a blimp outside my office window. Well, not right outside. But down the street. Hovering over PacBell AT&T Park.

It's always exciting to be at the epicenter of baseball, so I took a long lunch and walked down to the park to watch the Parade of All-Stars as they came to the stadium. It was an incredibly slooooowwww parade, but I did get to see Tony LaRussa drive by, and he's a lawyer. (Er, a JD at any rate.)

A friend and I had thought about kayaking in McCovey Cove during the festivities, but bar prep sucked up the cycles needed to plan it. Plus the hubris of the San Francisco Giants really dampened our enthusiasm. They required you to register in advance with them if you wanted access to the cove.* Registration involved giving your full name, date of birth, and driver's license number.

Even though it seems that it was quite the scene, kayaking at the game just didn't seem to be enough fun to justify the privacy invasion and exposure to identity fraud. But the situation left me wondering: since when do the Giants have jurisdiction over America's waterways?

* The registration web page currently kind of intimates that the US Coast Guard was complicit with the registration requirement. Earlier versions of this page were not so forthcoming in this regard, assuming it's even true. But if so, on what basis can the Coast Guard delegate its authority to a private ball club?

Another old post, that I wrote in September.

It is one of my greatest regrets that I never marched in the University of California Marching Band. So much so that I'm incredibly tempted to do a one-year master's or something (LLM, perhaps?) at Cal just so I could have a chance to make up for lost time... (You think I'm kidding?) Anyway, I have a lot of friends who did march in the band, so I routinely now crash their party on alumni band day, the football game where they all get together and march again. Which this year was yesterday.

Yesterday was also the second home game of the season. It's a good season so far, as Cal is doing well, as expected. I like when Cal does well. Winning is generally more fun than losing. But winning isn't everything, as the powers-that-be are amply demonstrating.

It's a minor complaint itself, but I fear representative of a larger defect, that the stadium now blasts generic anthemic rock songs over the loudspeaker I suppose in the attempt to rouse the crowd. This is unnecessary and unwelcome. After all, we already have an amazing band to play all the music necessary to rouse the crowd. As they've been doing successfully for, oh, a century or so. (Did you know Earl Warren played clarinet in the Cal band?) A canned stadium soundtrack, the kind you find in any stadium in the US, is not going to add anything, and instead takes away from the experience by cheapening it. The pomp and circumstance surrounding the game has historically been unique to our school; since when do we want Cal to be so banal?

The answer, I fear, is since Cal started playing well and the powers-that-be discovered that there was money in that. Enough money that maybe we could finally get a new stadium.

I've been clear in my support for a new (well, renovated) stadium. This one is seismically precarious and obviously needs fixing. I do not see, however, why that renovation requires a new training facility right outside, in place of a lovely grove of trees, and itself mere meters from a major fault line. Even if there were no trees, it seems patently unwise to put any structure there. There already are too many buildings built up near the fault, but at least one could say they were built before anyone knew any better. The same could not be said now.

And then there are the trees. I like the trees. I used to live up in that neighborhood, and I used to pass by them. But I think what I really like right now is that we have people in the trees, that Berkeley is the kind of place where people would do that.

The university is not so pleased. In fact, it's livid. It's sought injunctions to remove them, it's tried to fence them off... It even sends out mailings telling us that the entrance gates near them will be closed off for fans "safety."

What the university fails to understand is that people like me go to the games because there are people in trees. Not these trees or these people specifically, but because this is the kind of place where people do actively stand up for things they feel are important. This spirit is what lured me to Berkeley in the first place. And it's what keeps me coming back.

The powers-that-be, so blinded by their dollar signs, forget that Cal football is not about a sport; it's about a school. A community. Something bigger than the entire NCAA combined.

This is what keeps me coming back not just the years when we beat Tennessee, but every year, even the long, dark ones when we don't beat anyone.

Epilogue: I wrote this in September, and given how Cal's season unfolded it seems as apt as ever. Despite lofty expectations and a great deal of potential to be a major NCAA football powerhouse, Cal suffered a series of late season and humiliating collapses. It somehow managed to limp into a bowl game, but it hardly deserved such an honor given how poorly it played.

I hope then that the school takes this year to heart. Expanding the number of people who can enjoy Cal's successes is a good thing, but it never should come at the expense of those who already do.

A companion post to the previous one, this was written in November 2006.

Cal recently got itself a new basketball arena. It wasn't completely new - it was built inside the same structure where the old one was, Harmon Gym. Harmon Gym was only slightly larger than a typical high school gym, but that intimacy gave the basketball team an unmatched home team advantage. It was loud, it was intense, and the rabid student fans were barely off the floor.

It was also small, and as Jason Kidd began to lead the team to be a true basketball force to be contended with, games became more and more popular and more and more impossible to get tickets for. I remember one year crowds of students camping out for season tickets. Another year there was some ill-planned idea to announce a mystery location over the radio where tickets were to go on sale, which led to thousands of students stumbling around the campus in the pre-dawn darkness to try to buy them.

So eventually it was decided, perhaps rightfully, to make the arena bigger. And to an extent, it was done well - leaving the original structure and expanding it upwards to add capacity. But I can't tell you for certain, because I've never set foot in the place. And, loyal Cal fan though I am, I never will until what I'm about to describe changes:

Stadiums cost money to build, of course. And they require significant donations. In return for those donations, donors get special perks. In this case, what the donors got were sideline, courtside seats. Now, they always had sideline, courtside seats. But with this renovation they got the sideline, courtside seats the students used to have. Students have instead been banished to behind the basket, though with one small exception. See, donations didn't pay for it all. Sponsors were still required. So one sponsor, the company now known as AT&T, bought the right to be named the sponsor of the small student section on the sideline, courtside. (The original student section used to take up almost the entire sideline from floor to ceiling.) Students who sit there must wear matching t-shirts advertising the sponsor. In order to enjoy the game the way Cal students have for decades and decades before, students now have to be walking billboards for a corporation.

Let's not forget: this is Cal. This is Berkeley. Think free speech movement, student protesters, the best and brightest minds making new discoveries daily. It is completely antithetical to all of this for the student body to be prostituted just so it can retain its access to its team.

After all, sports may be fun, and ultimately they may be good for the university community, helping tie it together more tightly. But it cannot be forgotten: it's a student team. The game is being played by students and it should be for students. Under this new arrangement, however, the team might as well be in the NBA, as obviously the team's money-making potential is all that's really important.