Places

Hearing the Sights

A collection of events from Washington DC:

First, a scene at the Lincoln Memorial: A girl sits on the massive steps holding a camera in either hand, with her friend holding a third in front of her face.  “What are you talking about?  I’m smiling in all of these!” she insists in a thick Brooklyn accent.

Second, a moment at the Air and Space Museum: a man asks someone else in his party, “What’s that?”  His companion answers, “I don’t know but it has something to do with Saturn.”  This occurs beneath the full-size engine bells from the Saturn S-1C – the first stage of the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo the moon.

Third, a moment at the Air and Space Museum: a man says, “Hehehehehehehehe!” repeatedly the entire time he explores the Apollo to the Moon exhibit.  Wait, that wasn’t overheard; that was me (and I kept it mostly in my head).  Besides seeing Columbia itself in the main hall, they have the actual flight checklists from several flights, and all manner of other genuine artificats from the Apollo age.

Plus, in the International Spy Museum I got to crawl through an actual air duct and look down at unsuspecting museum visitors.  At the time I was focused on keeping quiet in my role as Peter Wozniak the spy, but in retrospect I should have said, “Come out to the coast!  We’ll get together, have a few laughs…”

The Magic of Imagination

JK Rowling (which she herself has said is to be pronounced “rolling, like ‘rolling pin'”) gave the Commencement address at Harvard this year. Now you can watch online.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

That part’s funny, but watch the whole thing.  This is the construction and utilization of language that makes English worth listening to.

(And yes, this is a point to Boston.)

Sophie is Cute (Exhibit D)

Sophie was very excited at my arrival when I first got there.  As she walked in the door I could clearly here my name overlaid with tones of excitement.   Ben’s here!

Until she saw me.

Then she immediately ran upstairs to her room as fast as she could go and refused to come out until I was gone… which wasn’t really likely to happen.  When she did have to come downstairs (to eat, for instance), she refused to take her eyes off me, certain, I think, that if she weren’t watching me I’d immediately transform into a drooling monster and destroy her.

When I was still there the next morning, she resigned herself to being in the same room as me, though any time I went anywhere near Mommy she ran over and pushed me away, yelling, “No!  My mommy!”

By the third day, though, the tables had turned.  Anytime I went anywhere near Mommy (or anyone else) she still ran over and pushed me away… but now yelled, “No!  My Ben!”

By this afternoon I had a voice mail that said, first, “Why won’t Ben talk!” (sorry, Sophie, I wasn’t really on the phone) and “Come back!”  Hehe!  I win!  And that’s very cute.

Next Idea: Self-Service X-Ray Machines

The TSA has been experimenting with a setup that lets passengers self-sort into separate “expert traveler” screening lanes for travelers who are fluent in TSA procedures. If you don’t want to be rushed or need more time you can choose the slower “family” lane instead. Some airports also have an intermediate “frequent traveler” category.

The screening procedures are identical for all lanes; the theory is just that expert travelers will follow those procedures more efficiently. I’ve been caught behind idiots who don’t understand that keys are made of metal or that the rest of us took off our shoes for a reason, so I appreciate the potential value of this segregation. Moreover, I applaud the broader effort to try new ideas to smooth out the complex screening process.

In practice, however, this idea fails completely. I just saw it in action at DIA – one of a few airports in the pilot program – and it just didn’t work.

I saw only two lanes designated for the “family” category when I went through, yet both were completely empty – not a single person was in either line. All the remaining lines were designated “expert traveler” and were clogged seven or eight people deep. I forfeited my (deserved) “expert” title and breezed through the family lane without missing a step.

In one sense this was a fluke. Surely at other times the family lane has at least a few people in it, and one uncoordinated parent with a disobedient young child could shift the entire balance. However, it highlights fundamental underlying problems.

First, lots of people want to believe they’re experts when they’re really not. And even genuine experts can make mistakes. Normally I fly through security in a smooth anti-terrorism ballet. Then came the mishap a couple months ago when I waltzed right through still wearing my cell phone and keys. Sorry, folks. I just held up the line. I know keys are metal, I swear!

More importantly, the total wait time in the entire system is exactly the same; it’s just being redistributed. The slowpoke who takes five minutes to sort luggage and remove liquids will still take five minutes, he’ll just be holding up a different line. The assumption is that slow people will be more tolerant of other slow people.

The same theory went into the Box Office Babies program at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline. Parents can bring their babies to the movies and let them cry as much as they want. Crying babies in these screenings are no less disruptive than in any other screenings; they’re just disrupting other people who happen to have babies themselves.  Some parents would still prefer to watch the movie uninterrupted, so they opt not to go to Box Office Babies (and presumably wait for the movie to be out on DVD).

At airports we don’t have the option of just bypassing the security line (perhaps a door marked “No Criminals Allowed” would work?), but some inexperienced travelers will still want to stand on the shoulders of experts before them and breeze through what was (until then) the fast lane.

Finally, this idea solves a problem many airports have already solved by just ushering those who fail the screening for any reason into a separate line to try again. A know-nothing novice with bottled water in his backpack and a knife in his pocket gets brushed aside, as does a seasoned guru who just forgot to empty his pockets this trip.

This system has TSA officials doing the sorting, so there’s no chance of someone being in the “wrong” line. And this way travelers don’t have to learn yet another policy on their way through the security maze. For me, choosing which type of line to join added a second or two of decision-making time, when I’d normally just glance around and hop into the shortest one.  (It doesn’t help that the “black diamond / blue square / green circle” designations, so obvious to those who ski, meant absolutely nothing to me until I read more about it.)

We should welcome new ideas from the TSA even when they don’t work out, but let’s scrap this one before it’s too late and we have to listen to a New Yorker with no luggage mouthing off to the foreigner in front of him who won’t take off his chain mail in the black diamond lane.

Sophie is Cute (Exhibit C)

Sophie came running in Wednesday morning just as I was waking up and decided it was time to become a monster – a routine activity on all lazy mornings.

She sat quietly for a long time, though, shooting me furtive quizzical glances, before eventually asking, “Ben glasses?”

“Yep. I wear glasses!”
“Where?”
“I took them off when I went to sleep.”
“No! Glasses on!”

I put my glasses back on, and she immediately proceeded to roar and attack me.

Apparently without glasses I cease to be Ben, and cannot play.

Sophie is Cute (Exhibit B)

We went with Sophie to play at the WOW Museum in Lafayette – a children’s museum with all sorts of educational games and activities. There’s a bank with a working pneumatic tube. There’s a platform you can stand on and pull an enormous soap bubble around your entire body.

There’s a music room and an art room, a pirate ship and a sandbox, a table full of magnets, an enormous doll house, a grocery store with a checkout lane, a railroad station, and at least a dozen other things I didn’t even get a chance to see.

At one point we played with a huge ball maze, where you drop a ball into one of many tubes on the side of a machine and wait for it to shoot out of one of the other tubes (unpredictably, to a child, at least). Sophie’s approach to this game was to grab a ball and run off to play with other exhibits while holding it.

When it was time to leave, she was quite upset, and understandably didn’t want to leave. There was lots of crying, all of which centered on the words, “My ball! I want my ball!”

She didn’t miss playing so much as she regretted having to leave behind a ball.

Sophie is Cute (Exhibit A)

(I got to play with Sophie, age 2, the whole time I was in Colorado. She is extremely cute, and this four part series will demonstrate that.)

While we were driving, Sophie decided it was essential that she have the umbrella that was sitting on the floor of the car, which she could of course not reach.

Sophie: “Mommy! I want that!”

The obvious “get out of jail free” answer to this request is, “Sorry, I’m driving.”

Sophie adopted an indignant expression, pointed at me in the passenger seat, and said, almost exasperatedly, “What’s that? Ben get it!”

As in, “Uhh, hello? What else is he there for? Duh!”

Sorry, Sophie. We hadn’t thought of that.

And Your Bike is Just Like a Subway Car, Only Smaller

A woman ran onto my LIRR train on Saturday, pushing a very young (one year old?) child in a stroller.  She parked the stroller by the window initially, but then suddenly thought better and mentioned – to herself, to her daughter, or to nobody in particular – “I should point her away from the window.  We learned today she does not like trains.”

The little girl played contentedly (or at least quietly – enough that I paid her no attention at all)  as we pulled out of Penn Station and inched forward underground.  Then sure enough, the very moment we emerged into the daylight and she saw the scenery passing by the window she started crying.

“It’s okay, Cindy,” her mother reassured, “it’s just like a subway!  It’s just a subway that’s outside, that’s all.”  The kid actually stopped crying!

I can understand how a kid from anywhere else, accustomed to ordinary trains, might be frightened to go underground, where it’s dark and noisy and scary.  In this world, trains are supposed to run underground, and when they come to the surface something has gone terribly wrong.

I love this city!

Balletomane or Marketing Dartboard? Choose!

Dear Boston Ballet,

You keep sending me postcards inviting me to upcoming performances – Romeo and Juliet, Next Generation, and Swan Lake so far this year.  “Buy your ticket today,” you encourage me.  That’s so thoughtful!  You assume since I’ve attended performances in the past I might again in the future, and remind me in case I’ve forgotten to get tickets.

However,  you have failed to consider that people who have attended performances in the past often do again in the future.  That’s right: the very foundation of your marketing campaign is also its demise.  I already have tickets to all the performances you’re encouraging me to attend.  You could save paper by putting these ads on the backs of the tickets themselves, so after they arrive I can be reminded to buy them.

Or, you could take the time when compiling your mailing list to remove the names of people who already have tickets to the things you’re advertising.  This will keep you from looking stupid.

Sincerely,
Your Patron

It’s Time for Your Public Humiliation

Trains on the Green Line (as elsewhere) occasionally run express between two stops to help close gaps in service.  They announce this ad nauseam for the benefit of clueless passengers.  “This train will run express to BU Central.  BU Central will be the next stop for this train.  The first stop we’ll make is BU Central.  If you need a stop before BU Central, get off now.  Express to BU Central.”  (Substituting wherever it is, exactly, we’re expressing to.)

Then about half the time someone will ring to request one of the stops in between.  Conductors usually ignore this, though a few have yelled, “I said we’re going express.”

Today, our motorman just quietly deadpanned, “Will the passenger from out of town come to the front, please.”