What Seems To Be The Trouble?

A week ago, I spent a couple of quality hours with Apple technicians, over the phone, to resolve an issue I was having with my iTunes account. The relief I felt when I heard, over the course of two separate interactions, how confused these experts were by my problem was hard to define. I consider myself to be a pretty savvy end user, which is to say that I try to do all the basic steps first before I ever dial that 800 number. I check to see if the cables are connected. I make sure that I have the current version of the software. I go online to see if there is a fix or a patch that I can install quickly and easily. I make sure that the machine is, in fact, plugged in. In the case of my iTunes dilemma, I had exhausted all these alternatives before I initiated a chat with a "genius."
To their credit, the friendly folks at Apple seem to want us to interact with them, even if they do make it a bit of a challenge. I put my name and number in their automated system and waited for a "genius" to get in touch with me. As I waited, I wondered how this process might work if the Apple device I was hoping to get help with was the one that either connected me to the Internet or was my telephone. I was gratified by the notion that if I didn't get any satisfaction from this pending interaction I could take solace in the mp3 downloads from Amazon, and the cloud player that company seems more than happy to promote on their web site.
Then the phone rang. Alexandra introduced herself, and I myself, then we began to discuss my problem. After politely deflecting her suggestion that I simply follow the directions on their support page, since I had done so twice with no success, she began to examine my situation and account a little more deeply. After putting me on hold long enough to hear a whole Dave Matthews song, she came back with the answer: The release of the new iPhones had overloaded the server that kept track of passwords and accounts, and the changes that I had made would most certainly be reflected the very next day. I suggested that maybe having the one server on a day when millions of new accounts would be added may not have been the best business model. Alexandra agreed. She offered to call me back the next day to check on my progress. I told her that I hoped that it wouldn't be necessary and we said our goodbyes.
As it turned out, it was necessary. After more than twenty-four hours, I was still not able to access my iTunes account, the one that had served me so bravely and effortlessly for so many years. I logged back onto their support system and signed up for another call. This time it was Jeff who called me back. He too wanted to expedite the call by running me through the normal hoops. I politely assured him that I had tried the easy stuff, and Alexandra had hoped that the server would be making room for me by this point. To Jeff's credit, he recognized a challenge. He put my account up on his machine, and it froze up. Somehow, my iTunes account had become the undoing of the Apple Empire. This was the part where I took some smug satisfaction on presenting a problem that actually required fixing. It was also the point where I felt that I was working with Jeff as we navigated the arcane complexities of account password protection. This required me sharing the answers to the security questions that had once been part of my login procedure. We became closer as a result, and after another twenty minutes of cajoling and exhorting our collective computing hardware and software to come up with a solution, there was a breakthrough. Jeff was able to crack the code that had been inserted crossways somewhere in the recent past, and I was suddenly granted access to the virtual record store once again.
I thanked Jeff for his effort, and his tenacity. He told me he was glad that he finally had a call that was worth his effort and tenacity. Then, perhaps as payback for the revelations I had offered in my security questions, he told me that he was going to be off work soon, to which I replied that I hoped that he would have a safe drive home. He told me it would be more like a walk upstairs. As it turns out, Jeff had been working from his office downstairs and was going to hang up with me and head off to bed. He was already in his pajamas. On the brink of oversharing, I bid him adieu. Maybe Jeff's a genius after all. I don't get to do my job in my pajamas.

Autumn Colors

It's always a difficult time, as baseball season winds down and football season cranks up. I sit on my couch, alternately rooting on one local team, while wishing for the humiliation of the other. I was pleased and happy to see the Oakland A's bring another American League West championship to the crowd at O.com stadium, though why no one considered the naming rights for this facility would have been better suited by calling it "A.com stadium" is beyond me. Maybe that Overstock thing worked well with the Oakland, but I still feel it was a missed opportunity.
Meanwhile, back on the gridiron, I returned to school on Tuesday morning, fresh from the Monday Night Football drubbing of the Raiders courtesy of my Denver Broncos. I searched for someone with whom I could converse about the details of the precision with which the Silver and Black were dismantled. "Didja see the game?" I asked one of my fifth grade tough guys.
"Yeah," came the dispirited reply.
"Pretty tough loss, huh?" I waited to rub it in, if ever so slightly.
"Yeah. But you guys have Peyton Manning."
I wasn't prepared for this loop of a retort. "Right," I paused, "So?"
"You guys have Peyton Manning." It was the defense for having no defense. The Raiders were yet another notch in the side of the helmet that will one day reside in Canton, Ohio. A decade of learning that "commitment to excellence" may just be an aphorism around the Oakland Raider clubhouse, the youngest in their fanbase are starting to turn.
Not so the fortunes of the Athletics. This is a green and yellow bandwagon upon which everyone seems to want to crowd these days. Those black t-shirts with the pirate on them are giving way to the "green collar baseball" sportswear kids seem to favor on our playground these days. In this way, I suppose, baseball has once again showed is unifying potential. Where football tends to arouse bitter feelings and bursts of passion, baseball is a love affair that just goes on and on.
Into October and beyond.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

It's one of those "twenty years ago today" things. It does help to be more than twenty years old to make this sort of thing intriguing, but if you're sixteen it doesn't matter that much that Nirvana's last album, "In Utero" was released twenty years ago this month. A few years before that, it was Nirvana's major label debut, "Nevermind" that kicked the doors in on the music industry. If you had been alive before that, listening to music that made you feel safe and happy, this was a sound that made you wonder if what you had been listening to was what you were supposed to be listening to. It was loud. It was scary. It was angry.  It knocked Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" out of the top spot on the Billboard Top 100. It was a monster.
It was Nirvana's masterpiece. I have friends who said at the time and even years later that they prefer the band's earlier work. It's a good way to ensure your hipster cred, but I know that only a few of those people bought "Bleach." Thirty million people bought "Nevermind." What made this so amazing was that many of those people were the same ones buying "Dangerous." The evil scourge of hair metal, which had become pervasive in those late days of the twentieth century, was extinguished. Loud and angry replaced loud and pretty. For those of us without hair, this came as quite a relief.
It was also quite a relief for record companies, because it made "grunge" the next big thing. Pretty soon, there were a comparable number of bands with stringy hair and flannel shirts as there were groups wearing spandex and hairspray. Everybody made money. Everybody wanted to make the next "Nevermind."
Nobody did. Even the guys from Nirvana never matched the success of that big, angry noise from Seattle. It was a moment in time that passed just as surely as "Sergeant Pepper" and "Thriller." Kurt Cobain burned out rather than fading away. Dave Grohl went on to lead the fight against Foo. Kurt Novoselic played bass with a number of different bands, but stuck mostly to political and social activism. Twenty years later, the surviving members seem just as puzzled by their success back then as they are right now.
Oh well, whatever, never mind.

Speaking Out

Don't want to go along with the Common Core? Prepare to be arrested. That's the simplified message that has been drifting around since Robert Small was led out of a Howard County, Maryland town meeting. He was interrupting education officials and complaining that new standards were aimed at sending children to community colleges. An interesting observation, but since I'm not completely familiar with Maryland's statutes about complaining, I will reserve judgement. It was, after all, a public forum.
A public forum during which a hotly contested issue was being discussed, and in the words of Maryland's state attorney, "It was clear that Mr. Small violated the rules of the meeting and disrupted the meeting. It was also clear that the officer acted appropriately and did have probable cause to make an arrest on both charges." Like I said, the rules in Maryland about arguing at school board meetings are tough.
Meanwhile, the heated debate against Common Core standards continues to rage. Mostly on conservative talk radio, but that's what they tend to do: Rage. Mister Small wasn't satisfied with his written question being selected to be answered by Baltimore County School Superintendent Dallas Dance. He is concerned about lowered expectations of students, and as a result the children of Maryland will not be selected to attend Harvard but will languish in community colleges. As he was being led from the meeting by an off-duty Baltimore police officer, he shouted at the crowd, "Don't sit there like cattle!"
And so I come to an impasse here: I don't agree with Robert Small that Common Core standards and curriculum will systematically lower expectations for our students. I do agree that parents should not sit there like cattle. Nor should students. Or teachers. Education is a participatory experience. It is something of a relief that the American people seem to be getting stirred up by something pertaining to the education of their children. That's a relief, just like it's a relief that charges were dropped against Mister Small.
And now the debate can continue.

Representation

Things in the Grand Old Party get a little confusing sometimes. At least they do from my perspective. This is a group of politicians who have designated an elephant as their mascot. For some reason, the Oakland Athletics and the Crimson Tide of Alabama have adopted the same beast to represent them, seemingly without connection to the the original team names. I know that we can blame a cartoonist, Thomas Nast, for the Republican's elephant, the Athletics were once considered a "white elephant," and the Crimson Tide might have something to do with a Steely Dan song but more likely it's a Groucho Marx line about "Tuscaloosa" that brought a pachyderm to Alabama's sideline.
None of which explains Mavericks. Or Wacko birds. My recent obsession with all things McCain continues this week with the story of John McCain, the Maverick Elephant, and Ted Cruz. A couple of months ago, Maverick called Cruz a "wacko bird." To be fair, it would seem that Senator McCain was also referencing Senator Rand Paul and Representative Justin Amash when he flung this particular epithet, and he has since apologized for having done so. But it does seem odd that there wasn't a more meaningful connection between John and Ted. See if you can follow my reasoning: John McCain was a fighter pilot, the kind of guy that was depicted in the film "Top Gun." That film's main character went by the call-sign "Maverick." He was played by none other than Tom Cruise. Get it?
These guys don't. Cruz now says that he is embarrassed that he supported McCain for president in 2008. Not that this is an exclusive club, but The Cruiser added this: “I think the Republican Party lost its way. We didn’t stand for the principles we’re supposed to believe in.” Those core principles we all know and cherish, such as learning how to draw water up into their trunk and then pour it into the mouth, eating an extremely varied vegetarian diet, including grass, leaves, twigs, bark, fruit and seed pods, and frequently touching and caressing one another and entwining their trunks. That's what we expect from Republicans, after all.

Floccinaucinihilipilification

Okay, honestly, if the government shut down, would anyone notice? Probably not for a while, anyway. The relative inaction by the one hundred and thirteenth Congress of the United States would be key to this lack of interest. It is the fussing and blustering that has taken place on Capitol Hill has amounted to this: a standoff with Republicans looking to defund the Affordable Care Act while the Democrats are trying to maintain their collective dignity and not whine about it. It's yet another hostage crisis where the prisoners are sitting at home, wondering what all the fuss is about.
Interestingly, public opinion shows that as unpopular as Obamacare seems to be, a government shutdown is even less popular. All those government programs, including the Affordable Care Act, would screech to a halt. If, for example, you were a veteran and you were waiting for your education benefits or a disability check, how would you distinguish the shutdown delay from the standard operating procedural delay? It's our government in action. Pardon me: inaction.
This has become our legacy of lethargy. Rather than come together and generate common sense answers to problems that plague the country as a whole, the United States government seems to have taken on partisan rhetoric as their favored form of discourse. Are there problems with the Affordable Care Act? You bet there are. Does it make sense to turn back the clock and allow health care to be limited to those who can afford to have that first born child first in order to pay for all future insurance premiums? Does it make sense to keep pushing forward with a plan that even the party that supports it can't do it with a straight face?
There I go, trying to make sense of it again. That could be because I'm married to a lady who is a big fan of the "do-over." Okay, so that piece of legislation didn't come out exactly right the first time. Can we get a do-over? Go ahead and laugh, but it makes a whole lot more sense than a do-nothing.

The Water Cycle

If the rain comes they run and hide their heads - Beatles "Rain"
If you live in Boulder, Colorado you probably know what the boys from Liverpool were singing about. In a twenty-four hour period, they received nine inches of rain. And then they got more rain. For days. I thought of the many times I had heard my mother say that "we really need the moisture," and I imagined that she probably won't have that feeling again for a while.
I thought about the coincidence of my younger brother's visit to our home town, and how I used to refer to myself as "bringer of rain" for the way that I brought an end to California's drought by moving here twenty years ago. I thought about the hard work that is in front of every resident of the flood-ravaged Front Range. It will be a long time before things return to anything that resembles business as usual up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
I thought about the creek into which I once sprinkled the ashes of my father. It was his wish, as he once wrote in the pages of our cabin's guest book: "scatter me here." I remembered all the ways I used to demonstrate watersheds for my fourth grade class. Water flows from the highest point to the lowest point, gradually picking up speed and gathering sediment and debris as it joins other streams and rivers. Over the years, I'm sure that my father, in diluted form, made his way down out of the hills and onto the plains, perhaps rolling right past his old high school in that same creek that overflowed its banks just a couple weeks ago. Bits of him may have even drifted as far as Kansas, where he was born.
I thought about Shel Silverstein, who wrote, "And some kind of help is the kind of help That helping's all about/And some kind of help is the kind of help We all can do without." The first kind would be how my older brother and sister-in-law spent those days during and after the deluge, making the city and county safer. The second would be the nimrods kayaking in the storm swollen streams, and the conspiracy twits who insist that this was all part of some government plot generated by secret weather control technology.
Then I remembered that my younger brother was there in Colorado when the rain began. Now that he's back in California, the Bay Area received its first measurable rain in months. There is no causal connection here. I'm just glad that he made it back and my family is safe and sound once again.