Stop the mobile cupcake peddlers

Just when I thought that the streets were getting safe, I spotted this ominous-looking van in front of the office building where I work: Talk about attractive nuisance! Notice the growing line of docile people above, each of them helpless to resist the temptation of the active ingredient one finds in cupcakes, C12H22O11. Check out the mountain of icing towering over the cupcake pictured on the side of the van. Talk about superstimulus! "Three dollars per cupcake," said the cheerful woman working in the back of the truck. She insisted that her cupcakes were "made with love." Maybe so, but this is a product that will make a lot of people fat. 65% of Americans are overweight as it is. These cupcake trucks, if allowed to roam freely, would probably kick that percentage up to 95%. We just can't allow that to happen, but how could one stop it? My first reaction was that these cupcake trucks should be made illegal. But then I took a deep breath and pondered the long-term situation. If we made cupcakes illegal, then people would start selling them in dark alleys, and even in the proximity of schools. And then gangs would spring up to defend their respective turfs in the cupcake street wars. Teenagers would start running cupcakes for the young adult pushers. Police would be chasing cupcake dealers from one end of the city to the other. Families would be broken up as parents were caught dealing in cake. People would be hurt. Some people would die ignominious street deaths, shot to pieces by cupcake gang members bearing AK-47s. Prisons would become crammed even more than they currently are. New social programs would need to be created to deal with the cupcake eating underclass. Some kids would see their schoolwork suffer as they abandoned their homework, their shopping malls and their Wii's and, instead, sat around and obsessed about their next hit of cupcake. The attempt to enforce new anti-cupcake laws would jack up the cost of the cupcakes, and the quality of the product would diminish--disreputable dealers would cheat customers by putting less icing on top. Innocent obese people would suffer withdrawal symptoms. Cops would increasingly crack down on peddlers, and the local news would feature pallets full of seized cupcakes that would start disappearing as soon as the hit the "safe" confines of the police evidence lockers. As much as I'd like to put a stop to this new temptation, the best way to deal with these cupcake pushers is public education. We need billboards, Internet ads and television spots informing people that cupcakes do not taste good. We need to educate people that if they see one of these vans along the street, that they need to keep looking straight forward and walk on by, paying no heed to the amoral peddler within.

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My kind of house

Unlike Tony Coyle, I'm an introvert (I've tested off the charts as an introvert). Also, the pace seems to be getting too frenetic down in the city these days. My life seems to be in balance about like this hammer and ruler. You see, I'm not in a Koyaanisqatsi phase. Therefore, when I found this site, I starting thinking that I'd like to live in one of these houses, just for a month or two or three.

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Why income disparity matters

In a series of articles that he calls "The Great Divergence," Timothy Noah advises that in the United States of Inequality, income disparity is rapidly growing and it does not bode well for our country? Here's an excerpt from today's posting at Slate.com:

Income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar. As Ralston Thorpe tells his St. Paul's classmate, the investment banker Sherman McCoy, in Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: "You've got to insulate, insulate, insulate."
Wikipedia offers much more information on income distribution in the United States.

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Tennis via wheelchair

Tennis is a difficult sport to play. The court is large for one person, so you need to be able to move quickly and in coordinated fashion. It also helps to have a powerful tennis stroke, to allow you to drive the ball deep into the opponent's court. I saw all of these qualities in the top contenders playing in the USTA (United States Tennis Association) Wheelchair Tennis Championship in St. Louis. I took a few minutes of video of the Men's Singles final match between Shingo Kunieda of Japan (the number one seed, who won the match) and Robin Ammerlaan of the Netherlands. Kunieda probably didn't surprise many by taking the top spot, given that he has now won more than one hundred consecutive matches. Just prior to the Men's final, Ester Vergeer of the Netherlands beat Jiske Griffioen, also of the Netherlands, for the Women's Singles title. Vergeer has won more than 120 consecutive matches. Here are the final standings for the St. Louis Tournament. It was stunning to watch the speed and coordination of these players. It was especially impressive to watch how they anticipate. I took some still photos of the Kunieda/Ammerlaan match and posted them in a gallery to this post (if you don't see it here, just click on the title to the post). For additional photos, including photos of the women finalists, go here. I also took a few minutes of video--this video mostly demonstrated the lack of precision of my cheap DV camcorder (it's sometimes hard to see the ball), but it will also give you a good idea of the power of the ground strokes these players can muster, along with illustrations of their precision and speed. [Note: the first 20 seconds are actually the end of the pregame warmups]. Again, these are excellent athletes. I hate to sound naive, but before this weekend, I never knew that people using wheelchairs could play competitive tennis. I've long known that people using wheelchairs could engage in all kinds of vigorous sports, but I assumed that the size of the court couldn't be tamed in a wheelchair. Well, one adjustment to the rules does the trick. In wheelchair tennis, the ball is in play for two bounces (rather than one bounce for the standard game). On Friday, my wife and I watched parts of several matches between some players who had their racquets wrapped onto their arms. I inquired and was told that these are the "Quad" players, men and women who not only have physical deficits with their legs, but also with their arms (see the rules here). One of the "Quad" players had no ability to throw the ball up with his non-racquet hand. Instead, he "threw" the ball into the air by grabbing it on the ground with his racquet and his foot and flicking it up, then smashing it with an underhand serve loaded with topspin. As we watched the finals yesterday, I couldn't help but think that I was watching great athletes do extraordinary things, all to a relative smattering of clapping by the crowd of perhaps 500, many of whom were players and their families and friends. If you have an opportunity to see a USTA match someday, whether in St. Louis or elsewhere, I'd highly recommend it.

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