Quantum Hoops

When I studied college chemistry, the text was by Linus Pauling. When I studied physics, the supplemental readings were by Richard Feynman. Both were Nobel laureates. Both were professors at Caltech. Caltech, and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, were largely responsible for the success of the American space program and the lunar landings.

The California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, has a freshman class of only about 200 students. Its faculty and alumni have received 32 Nobel prizes. The freshman with the school's lowest SAT math score would be eagerly recruited by most university science departments.

Quantum Hoops is a documentary, purportedly telling the story of Caltech's 2006 Division III basketball team. In reality, the film -- now in limited release -- also pays tribute to the history of the school, to its remarkable student body, and to student athletics in general, athletics as recreation rather than as career. The film's climax is Caltech's final game of the season, as its coach and players attempt to break a losing streak of over 240 consecutive defeats, a streak that its long suffering coach notes defies believability. The coach had helped his teams improve year by year, from a season when they lost each game by an average of 60 points, to 2006 when the losses were barely in the double digits.

We meet the players, eager kids who just happen to be geniuses. The 2006 team had more high school valedictorians than it had players with high school basketball experience. Students "made" the team by showing up the first day. These were kids looking ahead to futures as physicists, engineers, professors, Wall Street specialists. Playing for Caltech absorbed every minute of free time the players could spare from their studies. They were engaging and likable kids, and humorous in their own geeky way. They were earnest and sincere. Their desire to win was every bit as great as any NBA hopeful at Duke or UCLA.

The game went down to the wire. It went, amazingly, into overtime. (WARNING: SPOILER AHEAD!) Caltech lost by a single point. Their losing streak continued.

The Caltech seniors lost the final game of their collegiate careers -- they lost every game of their collegiate careers -- but, as the film emphasizes, they weren't losers. Basketball played an important role in their education. It served as a respite from, and a supplement to, the sophisticated science and math they learned in class. One alumnus, famous now in scientific circles, remarks that playing on the basketball team was his most vivid memory of Caltech. But team sports was an addition to their education. It was not their reason for attending school. It was not a prelude to the NBA.

Interscholastic sports began at the college level for a reason, a reason having absolutely nothing to do with future participation in professional athletics. Quantum Hoops shows us what college sports should be all about and -- at least in the "major" sports -- rarely is in today's world.

Fayetteville Bulldogs Bark Back

As an attorney, I'm well aware that there is usually more than one side to every controversy. On Monday, I told the story of Billy Wolfe, the bullied Arkansas boy who has been described as a "human punching bag." In the interest of fairness, let me offer some comments from Fayetteville High School students, explaining their side of the dispute. These comments were sent to the author of a post on a community-owned blog ("Blue NC"), a blog that obviously attracts a lot more attention than does my own Northwest Corner!

"The kid in the car beat up Billy because Billy tried to slam his head into a locker the day before.
And in wood shop class, Billy called another student's deceased mother a "German whore." I'd say a punch to the face was justified."
--Student No. 1

"The boy in his woodshop class is one of my good friends and in my German class. His mother died recently and he moved to the United States. Billy was talking about her in a disrespectful way. The boy LOVES his mother, and I've talked to him about her death. He was telling me everything Billy was talking about his mother and honestly I think the hit was justified. Wolfe wouldn't want someone talking about his mother in a disrespectful way so what gives him the right to do it."
--Student No. 2

"The kid that hit him at the bus stop is also one of my friends and classmates. He told me that Billy was provoking him and that he was trying to say all of these bad things about him."
--Student No. 3

"I'm disgusted with this article. It is played up too much, and incredibly one-sided. I attend Fayetteville High School, and because of this one kid who has been in fights, my school is being put into bad light across the nation. Sure our school has many fights, but could it possilby [sic] be normal for teenagers- especially boys- to get their aggresions [sic] out on each other?"
--Student No. 4

"We have a kid at our school who has Cerebral Palsy and Billy Wolfe MURDERED this boys cat by KICKING it to death.
But this kid didn't do anything to him."
--Student No. 5

Well. Ok. One student also said Billy would have been a lot better off if he'd called himself "Bill" instead of "Billy." Well, dude! No wonder they knocked him unconscious, turned the inside of his mouth into hamburger, beat him up regularly, published a Facebook page full of false and defamatory statements about him, and made him fearful of stepping foot out of the house -- even to attend school. Fair's fair. Kids'll be kids. You talk smack, you pay the price.

Sounds like a cool school.

The Lion in Springtime

A fierce British bulldog with a cigar clenched between his teeth. Winston Churchill's visage, his glare, has become an icon -- the very emblem of Allied defiance and determination during World War II. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!"

But Sir Winston was not always a scowly old man with a wicked sense of humor. He once was a dashing young man -- with a wicked sense of humor. I'm reading the memoirs of his childhood and early years, "My Early Life," published in 1930, at the age of 56. He wrote this book, which many consider his best work, shortly after his Conservative party had suffered defeat at the polls, an electoral defeat that had cost him his cabinet position as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In his book, he looks back fondly on the happy and adventurous days of his youth. My Early Life is a book of excitement and humor, with its high point no doubt being the story of his famous escape from a Boer prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa.

Churchill's fame today comes, of course, from his leadership in time of war. Even in youth, he sought fame, calculatingly, as an officer in a cavalry regiment, the Fourth Hussars. Sir Winston was a thoughtful and reflective writer, but decidedly was not a pacifist. He loved the cavalry. He loved dressing up in spiffy cavalry uniforms; he loved the romance of horsemanship; he loved the swooning admiration of the young ladies. In the following selection, he contrasts modern war to his romanticized memories of war on horseback.

Before condemning his glorification of warfare in the nineteenth century, let's not forget: He wrote his book many years later, after World War I had undermined the military and economic foundations of the British Empire, had destroyed the Victorian and Edwardian societies in which he'd come of age; and had cost the lives of many of his best friends. He writes not as a starry-eyed kid just out of Sandhurst, but as a senior politician well aware of the horrors that war in general had visited upon his generation. Sir Winston was not a stranger to irony.

It is a shame that war should have flung all this [i.e., the beauty and subtlety of horsemanship in battle] aside in its greedy, base, opportunist march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles, and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine-guns. But at Aldershot in 1895 none of these horrors had broken upon mankind. The dragoon, the lancer and above all, as we believed, the hussar, still claimed their time-honoured place upon the battlefield. War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of democracy and science. From the moment that either of these meddlers and muddlers was allowed to take part in actual fighting, the doom of war was sealed. Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill. From the moment democracy was admitted to, or rather forced itself upon the battlefield, war ceased to be a gentleman's game.

A sad lament for the supposed joys of old-time warfare. Whatever we think of Sir Winston's politics, or his jingoistic imperialism, or his military tactics, we must concede that when he wrote an English sentence, he had few peers.

Winston Churchill is a joy to read.

Joys of Adolescence

Fayetteville sounds like a nice place to live. It's a medium-sized town nestled in the Ozark Mountains, home of the University of Arkansas. Fayetteville's citizens enjoy an above average level of income and education. Wikipedia's photos reveal a leafy, quiet town, a nice blend of modern and traditional collegiate architecture. Fayetteville's been named one of Forbes Magazine's "Top 10 Best Places in America for Business and Careers."

Billy Wolfe, 15, lives in Fayetteville. He's a sophomore at the local high school. But Fayetteville is not one of the top towns in America for Billy. Kids don't like Billy. No one really knows why. But, I mean, they really don't like him. They beat him up. Regularly. For fun. For years. Since he was 12.

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

It's sort of like that, I guess. They've knocked Billy out, unconscious. They've hit his face so hard that his braces were embedded in his cheek. His middle class parents have come to school to pick him up, and have had to watch him spitting out blood. They have a stack of photos showing the bruises and black eyes he's incurred over the years. When kids don't hit Billy, they call him names. They grab his text books and write things about him on the pages.

Last year, they got together and put up a Facebook page entitled "Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe." Pretty cool, huh? Kind of a bonding exercise for his classmates.

No, Billy isn't popular. He's scared of going to school. His stomach churns each morning. The school doesn't do much. Some teachers think, for unexplained reasons, that he brings it on himself. They just don't like the cut of his jib? Maybe it's because he has a reading disability? They've blamed him for starting the fights. A video of an unprovoked asssault by his classmates proved them wrong. His parents are suing some of his classmates, and may sue the school district.

Billy's story is told today in a feature article by Dan Barry in the New York Times. There are no easy answers to Billy's plight. As Barry points out, "schoolyard anthropology can be so nuanced." It's hard for adults to understand what goes through the immature heads of kids that age. But we know that a pack of wild animals will turn on one of its smaller or weaker members. They'll kill him, apparently for sport. The mothers of some species will themselves kill the runt of the litter. Why should we assume that a 14 or 15 year old kid has progressed much further along the road to civilization?.

But the question keeps gnawing at me: where were the teachers?

I should have been a prime target for bullying. I was usually the smallest kid in the class, the little imp who holds the sign in the front row of his class photo. I had weird interests, I wore glasses, I couldn't thow a ball from second base all the way to home plate. But, luckily, I was never bullied. Nothing more than the occasional snarl and shove that the alpha-males use to remind the betas just which is which. I escaped bullying, probably, because I had an age-appropriate sense of humor that I aimed often at myself, because I couldn't care less where I stood in the social heirarchy or how popular I was, and because my abilities in school and my bizarre interests somehow aroused more fascination than contempt in my fellow students. Maybe I was just inexplicably lucky.

But Billy hasn't been so lucky.

I try to imagine what it must be like to drag myself out of bed every morning and wonder if I'll be lucky enough to attract only sneers all day, or whether I'll actually be physically injured. What's it like to know that friendships are impossible, to realize that even if someone should improbably find you likeable, it would be social suicide for him to be your friend? To be a poor reader, and therefore treated as unteachable by your teachers, in addition to facing the daily contempt of the entire student body? What would give meaning to your life? How would you force yourself to go through the motions of living each day?

Is it any surprise that suicide rates are very high for kids in this age bracket? Would anyone be surprised to read a headline one of these days, announcing to a baffled world that a Fayetteville student had gone berserk and murdered his fellow students, before turning the gun on himself?

In 2007, Washington enacted a statute requiring school districts to adopt programs that are designed to combat "harassment, intimidation, or bullying." RCW 28A.300.285. (Enactment was delayed for a year because conservatives were afraid the statute might be used to prevent kids from freely expressing strong distaste for their gay classmates.) Fayetteville appears to have had a similar program in place. It obviously hasn't helped Billy. Legal compulsion can go only so far when the teachers themselves have no apparent interest in protecting their students.

But even with the best of laws and the most enlightened of faculty, kids will bully other kids, even in towns that don't seem particularly backward, so long as they grow up believing that such behavior is fun and acceptable.

In the 21st century, we're no longer animals. Our human pack is partly civilized. We only occasionally kill our pack's most vulnerable cubs. More often, we just make them wish they had never been born.

A Year Later

One year ago tomorrow -- 366 days ago, in this "bissextile" year -- I opened this blog and posted my first entry: A photo of me sitting pensively on a haystack, wondering what I should write about.

This is my 102nd post since then, just a couple shy of averaging two posts a week. And what did I think of that I could write about? A little bit of everything, it seems -- whatever amused me, puzzled me, amazed me, or made me angry. A lot of politics, some book and movie reviews, some letters from a friend in Australia, some brooding on the sort of things that happen to people as they go through life. Some people and events that inspired me. Thoughts about the seasons and about the passing of time.

Some posts were crap. A few, I'm quite proud of. And most were reasonably workmanlike and able to convey adequately whatever I hoped to convey.

A review of a local commercial theater production (by ACT Theater) received a compliment from ACT's publicity department, together with access to photos of their play that they make available to the press. My review of a book by Peter Cameron, a well known author, resulted in a link on his own personal blog. Those were highlights for me, the closest I came to public acclaim. Also satisfying were the occasional "comments" that relatives and friends left -- but never as often as I would have liked -- on various posts. And always appreciated were those interesting, challenging -- and often barbed -- remarks that a precocious Colorado high school student aimed in my direction.

For the curious, I'm listing five posts which, even in retrospect, strike me as well written and interesting. They aren't necessarily my "best," I suppose, but they're far from my worst. Another day, I might choose another five. Curiously enough, the posts I liked best often received the least interest and attention from my reading audience. But, then, in real life I've found that's also true of things that interest me!

With a Song in Her Heart (May 24, 2007)

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) (July 30, 2007)

Nostalgia (August 30, 2007)

A Cruel Gift (October 19, 2007)

Ash Wednesday (February 1, 2008)

And so, tomorrow I begin my second year of writing. I feel burned out at times, and at those times my rate of production begins to flag. But then something new and startling comes along, my mind is boggled, the juices flow, and the keyboard keys begin clicking anew.

This blog still has legs.

Life = Mr. Smith's afternoon home room? Aarrrgh!

Life is not like high school. Life is like junior high school. Even high school is like junior high school.
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So begins a book review (a pretty good book review, as it eventually turns out, but that's not the point) in today's New York Times Book Review section.

You would not be reading this blog today if I had read those three italicized sentences, written by an apparently knowledgeable adult, while I was in junior high school. My mother would have discovered my skinny 14-year-old body hanging by its neck from an overhead pipe in the basement. Death by strangulation would have seemed a blessing to me, compared to a lifetime in junior high school.

Whoever dreamed up the junior high school (or its cousin the middle school)? Did they hate kids? Or did they hate only intelligent kids? When you're 12, a three-year sentence to junior high school means imprisonment for 25 percent of your lifetime to date. If you're an alert, curious sixth grader with an eagerness to learn, the enforced mindlessness of junior high means spending a term equal to 33 percent of your educational years to date locked into the educational equivalent of a TV game show.

Yeah, a game show. Thinking back, I'm surprised I never noticed a laugh track punctuating every inane comment by a bored teacher, every scatalogical chirp from a hormonal fellow student, every slack-jawed, glazed-eye response by an entire somnolent classroom to the 35th reiteration for the year of the proper way to multiply two fractions together.

And the teachers! Did anyone ever go to college with the hope of becoming a junior high teacher? Teachers who love kids teach elementary. Teachers who love science or math or English teach high school. You knew, even as a wet-behind-the-ears 7th grader, that junior high got the dregs of the profession. Not just teachers who didn't care or couldn't teach, but teachers who didn't care and couldn't teach to the degree that not even the most mediocre high school could put up with them.

So don't tell a kid with any dreams of future joy and achievement that "life is like junior high school." It's not, thank God. At least for most of us it's not (with the exception, I suppose, of junior high teachers). And I'd like to see that poor idealistic kid reach high school and college still alive and still in one piece.

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Rich Cohen reviewing Adam Canfield, Watch Your Back! by Michael Winerip, NY Times Book Review (3-16-08).

A Little Fable From the John McCain Nursery Book

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
T'was half past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t'other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat
(I wasn't there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went "Bow-wow-wow!"
And the calico cat replied "Mee-ow!"
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
(Now mind: I'm only telling you
What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfulest way you ever saw--
And oh! How the gingham and calico flew!
(Don't fancy I exaggerate--
I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning, where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
But the truth about that cat and pup
Is this: they ate each other up!

-------------------------------
Poem:   The Duel by Eugene Field

Gesundheit!

"A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you."
--Bert Leston Taylor

Did it begin last Friday, as I headed home from work? Maybe there were hints earlier? A drip or two out of my nose? A dry scratchiness to my eyes? If so, they were hints that could be overlooked.

But by Saturday morning, all doubt was gone. Runny nose, headache ... and sooooo sleepy. Oh, yes. I was coming down with a cold, all right, a cold of gigantic proportions. And this wasn't just any weekend, mind you. This was the big weekend when I planned to tackle all those irritating little legal tasks that I'd been avoiding for weeks. This was to be "catch-up weekend."

I did not go into the office Saturday. I slept most of the day.

Sunday was a little better. My nose still flowed like Niagara Falls, but I did keep awake long enough to prepare a pre-trial report that had been demanded of me. But no. I can't claim that it was a productive or enjoyable weekend. It sucked. And those many annoying tasks still remained to be done.

Monday was better. But with Monday, came the cough. Nowadays, any cold I catch goes directly to my lungs as soon as possible. Bronchitis is the immediate goal, although those buggy little viruses are aiming ultimately for the viral Superbowl, i.e., pneumonia. My lungs become a cesspool of foul substances. I coughed up gunk all day.

Tuesday it continued. I had to spend the day in court, observing another attorney's trial performance. Hack, hack, hack! The judge, the court reporter, the clerk -- all looked down upon me from their lofty heights, faces displaying a mixture of concern and annoyance. Sheriff's deputies were summoned to the courtroom. In my hallucinogenic paranoia, I could only assume they had come to drag me out of court to "dry out" in some secluded place (of which the courthouse contains many, all well equipped with bars). Counsel kept glancing back over their shoulders, as I interrupted their erudite arguments, coughing out particles of lung tissue onto the courtroom floor.

I was miserable.

I'm still miserable. I hate colds. I hate changes of weather. I hate trying to be brilliant and witty and charming when I just want to curl up in a ball and go to sleep. Where's my mom? Why isn't she around to tell me to take two aspirin and go to bed, and that I'll be fine in the morning? Why doesn't life permit "excused absences," like school used to?

Further details at eleven, together with tomorrow's weather.