Storming Times Square

Karen, the girls and I made a flying visit to New York City on the Wednesday after Christmas. Irene the Organizatrist put together a bus trip for students and families of the Dance Studio. We sent away for Broadway tickets, booked our bus seats, got up hideously early, and drove over to Millsboro to catch our motor coach.

By chance, one of Colleen's friends from Academic Challenge was in the city with her family, from Seaford, for a few days. Against all odds, we managed to meet them for lunch at the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe. Afterwards, they helped us take Standard Tourist Family Portrait #32.



After a short wander around Times Square, checking out the buildings and people, we headed to a matinée of Hairspray. That's a great show: bright, funny and rocking. We loved it.

Waiting in line outside the Niel Simon Theater, I enjoyed watching a young woman from Fox 5 in New York (Vanessa Alfano, maybe? Looking at this again, I think maybe it was Toni Senecal) doing takes for some sort of story. She would walk towards the camera, bouncy and animated, saying whatever the line was supposed to be for her report. Then she would stop, turn on her boot heel, and stalk back to her starting point, fuming and discontented. Next take? Bouncy and happy again.

Everyone in line enjoyed that.

After the show, with dusk falling, we headed up 52nd Street to Fifth Avenue, stopping to shop and take pictures. The girls had a strong urge to check out Saks Fifth Avenue. I thought it a good place to try for a new self-portrait.

Evening on Fifth Avenue, a day or two after Christmas, is crowded. Really, really crowded. We had to play old-fashioned, NFC-style, ground-attack football just to get through the crowds to meet the bus.

Then it was a creep through the streets of Manhattan, out the Lincoln Tunnel, down the turnpike and home. We pulled back into our garage just at Midnight.

It was a long day, but fun.

It Is An Ill Blog Post That Yields No New Words

I was going to swear-off pointing to "I Hate Delaware" blog postings, but one of the several that have resulted from Christmas traffic back-ups on I-95 in northern Delaware offers a word I had not heard: Shunpiking.

I found that word in a set of links on avoiding the Delaware Turnpike at the end of a post entitled "Ban Delaware" on Backwards City.

Shunpiking refers, of course, to finding ways around toll routes. The drive-around for the Delaware Turnpike has been the subject of some on-line conversation lately.

The fuss, by the way, tends to arise from traffic back-up associated with the toll plazas on I-95. Complainers advocate doing away with those tolls, or with Delaware altogether.

We can't get rid of the tolls, though. Our state runs on cash from out-of-staters. It's worked well so far; why change now?

A Very Merry Christmas to You All

In Which We Head Down a Familiar Road (But Get Lost Anyway)

I maintain Google alerts for a few topics, one of which is "Delaware." I'm curious to know what's being written about us out there along the back roads of the information superhighway system.

The results have focused mostly around two aspects of Delaware: the resort area and our roads. Neither subject area is surprising. Our beaches are our pride and our roads are sometimes our shame (as they are for many states).

This morning, Google alerted me to what may be a definitive "roads" site, a blog called On the Road that focuses entirely on the minutiae of American highways. It's the blog of a "roadphile" collective known as All About Roads, co founded by a former Delawarean named Alex Nitzman who had been collecting an posting photographs of Delaware Road signs.

Mr. Nitzman returned to northern Delaware recently and has written a comprehensive critique of recent road improvements and signage changes.

He has things to say about new road work and alignments, such as the new Route 141 Spur, which he argues is not a spur.

So much for the new “Delaware 141 Spur” being an actual spur. Instead the “Spur” is a relocated Delaware 141 mainline. Why is it so difficult to get the nomenclature right in the state of Delaware?

And he has many thoughts about the highway signs that have been replaced along upstate highways.

Not only are new signs installed everywhere, but the signs installed display exactly the same thing that the editions in which they replaced did! I believe DelDOT was quoted as stating that each sign costs between $25,000 to $50,000 each in 1997, and that cost most certainly has gone up since that time. So with that kind of expenditure, was it necessary to replace 80% of the guide signs along Interstate 95 north from Delaware 141 to U.S. 202 given the fiscal crisis?

I was interested to note that he also calls attention to the use of "Must Exit" on some signs in Delaware instead of the "Exit Only" that appears to be a highway signage standard; at least based on the the surprised looks I read about here and in other Delaware highway rants.

TINGB wrote about that wording in her report on driving home to DC through northern Delaware this fall:

Julie: Here's the exit.
Me: Why does it say "Must Exit" instead of "Exit Only?"
Julie: Because this is Delaware, and Delaware is stupid.

I did a little desultory Googling this morning on this "Must" vs "Only" thing. I was unable to find any definitive "standard" language that sets one as the right verbiage to use. I did find a marvelously incomprehensible discussion of research on highways and exits at the Federal Highway Administration's Highway Research Center. It may be in there, but please don't make me read any more of that. If there are any highway engineers in the audience, please leave a polite note correcting me.

This standards-confusion is not unusual, by the way. In government I find many things that are assumed to be "standard" by everyone, even though there's been no official "finding," because almost everyone is following the assumed standard. And, conversely, when there is a standard officially declared, most folks in government will ignore it.

Here are two items that need additional research:

1. What in the name of all that is oily is the derivation of the phrase "exit gore area" that I kept finding in my highway standards spelunking? The definition is "The area located immediately between the left edge of a ramp pavement and the right edge of the mainline roadway pavement at a merge or diverge area." But why "gore?" It can't be why I think it might be, can it?
2. Why do I always type "standrads" instead of "standards?" Is it Freudian?
   

Don't You Mean....

A headline on the WGMD News RSS feed caught my eye yesterday. They ran a short news item about a fire in a local chicken house.

The headline -- Millsboro poultry house fire - chickens spared -- left me thinking, "Yes, but for how long?"

I think the lede could be re-written. They ran:

Fire crews saved 35,000 chickens from becoming dinner after fire broke out in a poultry house in Millsboro Wednesday afternoon.

It more accurately might read:

Fire crews saved 35,000 chickens so that they eventually will become dinner after fire broke out in a poultry house in Millsboro Wednesday afternoon.

I think we all know that those chicken houses aren't housing pet chickens.

Me? I'm Tickled. Tickled Pink.

I am happier than I probably should be about this, but I am quite pleased that Mike's Musings is recognized in the January issue of Delaware Today magazine in a brief list of "10 Delacentric blogs you've got to see."

Mahaffie waxes poetic on many subjects with a high degree of grace and humor. His subjects run the gamut from art to politics to family life, but we especially enjoy his musings on Sussex County culture.

That's very nice. I do try for grace and I value humor.

The list includes a few of my favorites: Down With Absolutes, Delaware Watch, Kilroy, Hube and the boys at Rhodey, and Pulp Culture.

It left out some of my favorites too: TommyWonk, Sneaking Suspicions, First State Politics, and Delawareliberal (where they were somewhat miffed).

The Curve of Your Laugh

Driving the girls to dance this evening, I was half listening to an interview on the World Café. A performer started a gentle, acoustic love song with a phrase that sounded, to my partial ear, like "the curve of your laugh."

That can't be the actual lyric, but I think it paints a great sound. It made me think of Karen's sometimes out of control laughter when something catches her just right.

Years ago, my youngest brother Bob and his fiancée, also a Karen, brought home a new family member: a black lab puppy named Sasha. She was a pedigreed dog, a new thing for Karen and me; we're used to mutt cats and mixed breed dogs.

We eagerly read through Sasha's papers, tracing her line back until we reached a forebear named "Quiver of the River."

That's minor silliness, but it started Karen's laugh, an open, joyous, eyes shut, head thrown back giggle-laugh that lasts until the air runs out, then pauses, almost in disbelief, re-gathers itself, and takes off again.

That laugh has lasted for years, as Sasha grew from a gangly young pup, through her frolicking prime, and into a white-muzzled canine crone. All I had to do was say "Quiver of the River" and the laugh would pick up where it left off.

Now, though Sasha is gone, the laugh remains. It can be triggered by the many wonderful and silly things our girls do, or by comic improv (God bless Ryan Stiles), or by a chance gift of goofiness from the cosmos.

And it still has that lovely curve.

Neologism #1 (Updated)

Confunktified

1. (adj) : The state of being badly messed up or having gone seriously wrong as the result of two or more related things having gone wrong.
   
   "First the car wouldn't start, and then it started raining; my morning was, like, totally confunktified!"
   
   
2. (adj) : Made funkier by the combination of two or more instances of funkiness.
   
   "When the bass joined the drums, things got confunkified."
   

Etymology: This word was first coined by my colleague Dorothy Morris' teen-aged daughter Rebecca. (Circa 2006) May be derived from "funkified" (to make funky).

I believe that this word may actually count as a protologism.

Update: I checked with Dorothy and found that I had gotten the word slightly wrong. I was thinking "confunkified", rather than "confunktified." The former may indeed suggest "becoming more funky," but I think confunktified, with its slight odor of disaster, offers a richer (almost olfactory) imagery.

Phone Call for Mr. Leghorn! Foghorn Leghorn, Call For You!

The universe will provide all the laughs we need if we are but open to it.

There's an article posted this afternoon on the News Journal web site about a dispute over a proposal for a cell tower disguised as a tree in Western Sussex County.

There are opponents. There are supporters. Chief among the supporters is Byard Layton, on whose chicken farm the tower would be placed.

According to Mr. Layton, the area needs more cell coverage: “If you go in the chicken house, you don’t get any reception.”

Could This Be Blogging's "Shark"?

There's a story on Federal Computer Week today about a new utility to allow Congress-people to create blogs. The story, House makes blogging easy, is about a new centralized "House Web Log Utility" that let's Congressional offices create and manage blogs on their official Web sites.

I was tempted to make jokes. In fact, I gave-in and used one in the title of this post. But the more I think about it, the more I like the idea.

I like the notion of making it easier for elected officials and, by extension, government agencies, to adopt the blogging ethos of constantly adding information to the web.

Government web sites get stale. Agencies are parts of hierarchies. They have chains of command. Everything has to go through that chain. Web sites are usually maintained by IT staff, or by PR folks, rather than by the people who make decisions and work with constituents.

It would be great to enable those people to add regular and frequent content and updates to web pages. Maybe this will work?

I'm staying positive.