The Concrete Cowboys of Philadelphia

The Truth About Your Chinese Takeout Box

A Lesson Worth Learning

From The New Yorker -

The History of Aretha, in Ten Videos

BY DAVID REMNICK

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-history-of-aretha-in-ten-videos?mbid=nl_160331_Daily&CNDID=27124505&spMailingID=8733455&spUserID=MTE0MzE0NDEyNDUyS0&spJobID=883536733&spReportId=ODgzNTM2NzMzS0

JACKIE ROBINSON | An Inside Look | PBS

Let's Agree to Disagree

An excerpt from The Atlantic - 

No Spanking, No Time-Out, No Problems

A child psychologist argues punishment is a waste of time when trying to eliminate problem behavior. Try this instead.

Say you have a problem child. If it’s a toddler, maybe he smacks his siblings. Or she refuses to put on her shoes as the clock ticks down to your morning meeting at work. If it’s a teenager, maybe he peppers you with obscenities during your all-too-frequent arguments. The answer is to punish them, right?

Not so, says Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center. Punishment might make you feel better, but it won’t change the kid’s behavior. Instead, he advocates for a radical technique in which parents positively reinforce the behavior they do want to see until the negative behavior eventually goes away.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/no-spanking-no-time-out-no-problems/475440/?utm_source=atl-daily-newsletter

An Embarrassment

From The Huffington Post - 

John Kerry: Republican Primary Race Is ‘An Embarrassment’

“They don’t know where it’s taking the United States of America.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said the Republican presidential primary is “an embarrassment.”

During an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Kerry said foreign leaders are “shocked” by the rhetoric used in the race, particularly anti-Muslim statements.

“They don’t know where it’s taking the United States of America,” Kerry said. “It upsets people’s sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability, and to some degree I must say to you, some of the questions, the way they’re posed to me, it’s clear to me that what’s happening is an embarrassment to our country.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-kerry-republican-primary-embarrassment_us_56f926c0e4b0143a9b489425

This Must be a Joke . . . Right?

From The New Yorker - 

Sample Questions from the Trump University Final Exam

BY JOHN FLOWERS

Below you will find three examples of questions from previous final exams at Trump University. Use these sample questions and the answer key provided to prepare for next week’s big test.

1. Two plus two equals what?

(a) Maybe four.

(b) Could be four. Could be. Lotta people saying it’s five.

(c) I’m not saying it’s five; I’m saying it could be—could be five. You see these establishment hacks, losers, like Mitt Romney? Real crank. They hate me. They take answers like “could be” and say, “Oh, he says two plus two equals five.” I never said that. I never—I said “could be.” Could be six. We don’t know.

(d) All of the above.

(e) None of the above.

(f) D and E.

2. Describe a major theme of “The Old Man and the Sea.”

(a) Well, the theme is big. That I can assure you. Definitely no problem in the theme department. Quite big. Quite.

(b) I know what you want me to say here. You want me to say “yuge.” Well, I’m not. I’m not gonna say that.

(c) Should I say it? . . . No. I’m not gonna say it. But it is.

(d) Now—and I don’t even wanna bring it up—but you got a lot of people. I’m not going to mention names. O.K., Marco. You got Little Marco, who has a tiny theme. No, it’s true. Very small. Probably why he’s outta the race. Seriously, find me one person who says there was a big theme behind that campaign. But anyway, here’s Little Marco, saying I’m the one with the small theme. Can you believe that? Says I’m like Santiago in “The Old Man and the Sea.” Says I sometimes lose my harpoon—you know, prematurely—when I try to reel in the big fish. Totally not true.

(e) In fact, reminds me of the time I tried to get a date with Brooke Shields. Remember Brooke Shields? Gorgeous. Not like my wife. Gorgeous, though. I asked her out. She said no. Career went downhill after that. Left me like Santiago at the end of the book, hauling this gigantic mast home with nothing to show for my troubles.

(f) Seriously, “The Old Man and the Sea”? Please. Santiago’s not a winner. Here’s what you need to read: “The Art of the Deal.” Best book since the Bible. Probably better. People say that. I don’t. People do. Bible was, like, God with sixty ghostwriters. “The Art of the Deal” was just me, dictating to Tony Schwartz. Great guy. Takes dictation better than Moses.

3. H2O is the chemical symbol for what compound?

(a) What the hell’s “huh-twenty”?

(b) No, that’s what it says, “huh-twenty.” Or maybe the “H” is silent. I dunno.

(c) I didn’t say “huh-twenty.” You said “huh-twenty.” You asked me what “huh-twenty” was. You see, this is what the media does. They claim, “You said ‘huh-twenty!’ ” And I’m like, “I said? No you said ‘huh-twenty.’ I just repeated what you said.”

(d) That’s all they do, ask these totally bogus questions, when what they should be asking about is Hillary’s e-mails. That’s what this question should be about. Because what she did—wow. I mean, that’s why she’s hugging Obama every chance she gets.

(e) You know who else hugs Obama? Chris Christie.

(f) But we love Chris, don’t we? We love Chris.

Answer key:

1. I like A. I like B, too. D doesn’t do much for me, but E and F are real winners.

2. I’m gonna have to look into A and B. C is very compelling. Very. I hear good things about D through F. But I don’t wanna say anything yet.

3. I don’t know why people are saying there were three questions. There weren’t. I mean, do you have video? Show me the video where there were three questions. You can’t, because there is no video. People come here. They try to make trouble, saying we started a question three. We did not. And lemme tell ya, we’re gonna fight back. I’m not saying we’ll sue, but we could. Throw a few punches, ya know. Because this test prep is a great test prep. You thought so, too: you signed the agreement saying that you thought this was the greatest test prep of all time and that you wanted to be sued if video surfaced of you saying otherwise.

Congratulations, this was actually the final. You’ve passed. Now give me $35,000.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sample-questions-from-the-trump-university-final-exam?intcid=mod-most-popular

This Way to 'Conjunction Junction'

This NASA Genius Invented the Super Soaker

This is Fun?

Excerpts from Slate -

Spring Break’s Cleanup Crew

It’s the worst time to be a hotel housekeeper in Miami. The rest of the year’s pretty bad, too.

At the four-star Fontainebleau Miami Beach, the iconic, ocean-facing hotel immortalized in movies such as Goldfinger and Scarface, the service can feel as opulent as the vintage decor. While guests shop or lounge poolside, a small army of housekeepers works its way up and down the angular white and turquoise towers, cleaning about a dozen rooms each over the course of a day.

Among them is Adelle Sile, a Haitian-born housekeeper with cherry-hued corkscrew curls, a compact frame, and deep-set eyes. Around this time of year, thanks to the influx of spring break and Easter break vacationers, the time she has to clean each room during her eight-hour shift gets squeezed as guests stretch their mornings to the final minutes before checkout. When she does finally get in, she sometimes opens the door to find vomit, empty bottles, crack pipes, marijuana buds, and makeshift mattresses of cushions and blankets strewn about—the season’s bacchanalian detritus.

“My back [is] hurting me. Picking up trash, picking up trash, trash everywhere, like this, like this,” Sile said recently, demonstrating the scene in her modest, pleather-upholstered living room in her working-class immigrant neighborhood in North Miami. By the end of the day, she said in a Creole-inflected drawl, “My body dead.” (The Fontainebleau declined to comment for this article.)

~~~~~~~~~~

“Spring break is all about partying, getting drunk, acting wild. … And the housekeepers, they’re the ones that have to do the cleaning up after,” said Kandiz Lamb, an organizer with the hospitality workers union Unite Here, which represents workers at a handful of area hotels and casinos. “It’s all kind of stuff that happens. People getting so drunk [they’re] like almost drowning in pools, falling asleep in hallways, aggressive, getting into fights in the hallways.”

~~~~~~~~~~

And the mess rains down when spring break season hits. “People have shit themselves, they’ve bled a lot. We’ve had to throw away everything from an entire room—pillows, everything—because they’ve shit everywhere,” R. said in a recent interview after work.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_grind/2016/03/spring_break_in_miami_is_the_worst_time_to_be_a_hotel_maid.html?sid=554654ea10defb39638b510d&wpsrc=newsletter_tis

Race Trumps Class

An excerpt from The Washington Post -

Poor white kids are less likely to go to prison than rich black kids

It's a fact that people of color are worse off than white Americans in all kinds of ways, but there is little agreement on why. Some see those disparities as a consequence of racial discrimination in schools, the courts and the workplace, both in the past and present. Others argue that economic inequalities are really the cause, and that public policy should help the poor no matter their race or ethnicity. When it comes to affirmative action in college admissions, for example, many say that children from poor, white families should receive preferential treatment, as well.

In some ways, though, discrimination against people of color is more complicated and fundamental than economic inequality. A stark new finding epitomizes that reality: In recent decades, rich black kids have been more likely to go to prison than poor white kids.

"Race trumps class, at least when it comes to incarceration," said Darrick Hamilton of the New School, one of the researchers who produced the study.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/23/poor-white-kids-are-less-likely-to-go-to-prison-than-rich-black-kids/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%203/25/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Greetings!

My apologies for my absence.  I was under the weather, and then out of town for a few days.

We're on spring break, so I took this opportunity to take care of some business in Qatar, a neighboring country.

It is one of the countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council, or the GCC, as it is commonly known.  The countries are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman and they all border the Persian Gulf. Conspicuously absent from this group is Iraq, which also borders the Persian Gulf.

Qatar is the site of the 2022 World Cup, and pictures from my hotel room show some of the massive building projects underway in preparation of this feat.  It's ambitious, to be sure.

This was taken from my hotel room.
There's a parking lot full of construction vehicles,
and across the highway, scaffolding litters the landscape.

No matter where I go, it's always good to get back home.

Here's wishing you a belated Happy Easter.

More soon.

Witness Protection

From Atlas Obscura - 

The Strange Tale of Echo, the Parrot Who Saw Too Much

A mob's pet is said to be in hiding. Could the bird be a witness in court?BByLaurel Braitman MARCH 22, 2016

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a strange message. It was imperative, she said, that I get in touch with a guy named Geoffrey Mitchell. Geoffrey lives in the Bay Area and works for Caltrans—the California Department of Public Transportation. But before that, he worked as a marine biologist for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries in the swamplands around Lake Charles. 

That’s, he told me, where he heard about the parrot in a witness protection program.

Mitchell’s source was a woman named Suzy Heck, founder and director of an animal rehabilitation center called Heck Haven that takes in roughly 1,000 animals a year. When I called her, Heck explained that usually she rehabs wildlife like injured raccoons or orphaned baby squirrels, but every once in a while a different sort of animal shows up.

One afternoon in the mid-‘90s, she recalls, a wildlife rehabber friend of hers from New Orleans named Corina King arrived with a male parrot in a cage, a beautiful severe macaw—green with red shoulders—named Echo. He was medium-sized, a little thin and knew dozens of words. King told Heck that the bird needed to lay low for a while, and that she should keep his presence at the center a secret.

“It was all very hush hush,” Heck says, “and I didn’t know how long he was going to stay with me.”

~~~~~~~~~~

The mystery continues below.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-strange-tale-of-echo-the-parrot-who-saw-too-much?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura&utm_campaign=0c18cb28e6-Newsletter_3_24_20163_23_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_62ba9246c0-0c18cb28e6-59905913&ct=t(Newsletter_3_24_20163_23_2016)&mc_cid=0c18cb28e6&mc_eid=866176a63f

Keeping the Beat

An excerpt from Quanta Magazine -

The Beasts That Keep the Beat

New insights from neuroscience — aided by a small zoo’s worth of dancing animals — are revealing the biological origins of rhythm.

Snowball’s public debut also caught the attention of two scientists at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif. John Iversen and Aniruddh Patel were interested in the evolutionary origins and neuroscience of rhythm and music. At the time, there was no documented evidence that nonhuman animals could dance — or, in more scientific terms, that they could “entrain” their movements to an external beat. “We saw this video, and it really knocked us out — it was the first time we had ever seen this,” Iversen said. “As scientists, you love these kinds of moments.”

Iversen and Patel tested Snowball in controlled experiments, altering the tempos of his favorite songs and observing how he responded without any training or encouragement. Snowball danced in bouts, rather than continuously, but frame-by-frame video analysis confirmed that he adapted his movements to the match the altered beats. Soon after, other studies by separate research teams showed that numerous species of parrots could entrain to a beat, as could elephants. Monkeys, on the other hand, did not display much rhythmic talent in the lab.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160322-the-beasts-that-keep-the-beat/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March%2023%2C%202016&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Endearing or Creepy?

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-screening-room-dollhouse?mbid=nl_160322_Daily&CNDID=27124505&spMailingID=8697477&spUserID=MTE0MzE0NDEyNDUyS0&spJobID=882461195&spReportId=ODgyNDYxMTk1S0

Google Doodle Winner

Excerpts from The Washington Post -

Today’s winning Google Doodle invoking Black Lives Matter was designed by a high school sophomore

Akilah, a sophomore at Eastern Senior High School in Northeast Washington, has just been named Google’s big winner in the national contest, topping the 53 state and territory champions, whose work had been culled from about 100,000 student entries.

~~~~~~~~~~

This year’s contest theme was: “What makes me…me.” Akilah drew a box-braided Doodle, titled “My Afrocentric Life,” using color pencils, black crayons and Sharpie markers. The Doodle includes symbols of black heritage and signs representing the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Although it felt like forever making this picture, it only took me about two weeks,” Akilah told Comic Riffs last month.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2016/03/21/d-c-student-wins-national-google-doodle-contest-with-art-that-invokes-black-lives-matter/

Linguistic Lesson

An excerpt from The Atlantic -

America Needs ‘Y’all’

English has no standard second-person plural word, and it’s time for that to change.

How y’all doing?

A greeting as Southern as a bowl of grits, it rolls off the tongue in a single open-mouth utterance. Sweeter than honey and often saturated with hidden meaning, it can open up a dialogue with a roomful of strangers with ease.

Part of that ease hinges on the incredible versatility of the phrase’s most important word. “Y’all,” that strange regional and ethnic conjunction, offers a simplicity to speech that can’t be found elsewhere. It is a magnificently elegant linguistic creation.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/the-case-for-yall/473277/

Ben's Interview

http://www.kcra.com/news/sacramento-man-recounts-blown-out-brussels-airport/38644856

H/T Mark Ambrose

Ben Was at the Airport in Brussels Today

Thank God, he's OK.

Ben and four colleagues had just landed in Brussels and entered the airport terminal when they heard an announcement to turn around and head in the opposite direction.  Not sure what was happening, they complied.  Moments later another announcement sent them in yet another direction.  The next announcement had them exiting the building where they stood on the tarmac wondering what in the world was happening.

The evacuation was calm, but the look on the airport employees faces let them know something serious had gone down.

Thousands of people attempting to call or get online clogged the cell service, so they continued to be in the dark.  He and his friends decided to move away from the crowd as much as possible and assess the situation.

They still didn't know the extent of the damage but knew they needed to get away from the airport.

It was at about this time cell service came back online, and then they could see they were in the middle of chaos caused by a bomb.  Two bombs in fact.

One of his colleagues thought to contact their Berlin office and the folks there were able to secure them hotel rooms about five minutes away.  A cab miraculously appeared, taking them there.  That's where he was when he contacted me.

I knew he was traveling, but I didn't realize he was going to Brussels, so when I got his email, I was in shock.

Truth be told, so was he.

Ben is my living, breathing miracle.

This is the third time his life has been spared.

He was living in Indonesia in 2004 when the tsunami hit but had gone to Europe for training.  On his way back to Indonesia, he stopped by Sacramento, to spend Christmas with me.  Also, there was a last minute problem with his visa; that would have delayed him returning to Indonesia anyway.

So when the tsunami struck, he was home.

There was massive destruction in the country, so Ben never did return to Indonesia but was transferred to Texas instead.

Seven months later, in July 2005, while living outside of Fort Worth, Ben was struck by an 18-wheeler as a pedestrian while on the job.  He was put in a medically induced coma, and for the first two weeks, we weren't sure he was going to make it.   Thank God, twenty-three surgeries later, he's perfectly fine.

And now this tragedy today.

There was no doubt before, but today's incident seals it.  Ben is my miracle.

God is watching over my child.

May He continue to watch over us all.

Somebody Screwed Up

The wrong lady was cremated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/nyregion/wrong-woman-cremated-bronx.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share&_r=0