The *2007* school trip to the zoo

I realize you're all zoo-ed out, as am I, but I figure now's probably the last chance to realistically work in the post about the 2007 zoo trip, long promised and long delayed.

As I mentioned on the prior post, I chaperoned YaYa's K5 class last year. We were allowed to wander off and do what we wanted with our groups for the five hours of the trip, and I admit to being a little overwhelmed at first by leading a group of 4 girls.

By the end of the sweltering day I think we'd all had a fun and pleasant time, and I think our group did well, with two exceptions. The first is when we were in the playset area. Unlike the '08 trip it was SUPER crowded with scores of kids, and when it came time to regroup I was missing the blonde girl  in the front of the picture. Never mind the warnings to stay in the area, or the constant head-counts, she skedaddled. I found her minutes later playing in another area that had been called off limits for all the K5 kids, but yikes . . that moment wasn't good for the ol' heart.

I'll get to the second moment later. But first, some animals.  Why? Why not?

In a the last zoo post Beth asked if the zoo had any big cats, and mentioned that it seemed Milwaukee had a fairly large zoo. Yup on both counts. The zoo, which I've never failed to appreciate (even as it bores me most days, having seen it so often) hosts 1800 specimens of 350 species on its 200 acres.

Here's some of the cats from that day. Most shots failed to turn out because of the reflection of the glass. Just our luck they weren't strolling around the outdoor areas that day.

Brief interruption: one thing I failed to mention about the 2008 trip was that a lion suddenly jumped to attention, stood up on a large rock, and began to roar and bellow at the crowd for mintues on end. It was a loud, fearsome, wonderful display of his strength.

Here's the girls holding onto the baby gorilla statue for good luck.

 

Here is one of the 'dinosaur tracks' the girls were intent on following.

I think this next one was in the aquarium or bat area. Either way, YaYa looks cute.

Remember this from this years trip? I honestly would've sworn it was a new addition to the zoo this year.

As I said, it was a sweltering day. I let the girls go hog wild with the water from the hand-washing station near the goat feeding pens.

A waterfight errupted and we all left the area soaked.

Here's the group trying out a foot massager to rest their weary bodies after a long day of walking.

Like I said, a fun day, and a nice introduction to YaYa's friends.

Oh, yeah, that other 'moment'?

After the giraffe area YaYa threw a hissy fit (the joys of chaperoning your own kid) and ran away from the group and hid in a crowd. She didn't go far and I knew she was within hearing range but I was boiling mad, especially since I knew she was egging me on after the play set incident.

She finally emerged from behind a sign, all smiles and 'ha-ha', and I let her have it with both (verbal) barrels. I petered out as I noticed she kept looking over my shoulder. I turned around, and who was there ? ? ?

Why a stunned, emotionally damaged Quaker family, with their children now near tears, that's who. I'm sure they thought me a heathen brute, and I'm equally sure they now use me in sermons as an example of the evil of the outside world.

Thanks YaYa ;)

The NBA Finals, Free 411 calls, Father's Day, and Alphawoman's praise

I was moseying around Technorati and noticed that my longtime friend Alpahwoman had written about me in her journal. In a post that jokingly references her *not* being AOL's guest editor, she lays out her picks for the week.

I adore Dan of Slapinions who never is at a loss for something to say or write about. I, for one, was rolling on the floor laughing (hahahah) several weeks ago when he wrote about a stop he made at a dollar store in a shopping center that was subsequently held up! He is the greatest Dad and the I look forward to reading each and every entry he makes

Thanks! I'll take flattery wherever/whenever I can, and this almost makes up for her calling someone else (!) the best writer in J-Land a few weeks ago ;)

* * *

Meanwhile, let me steal verbatim from Buckoclown's site because I feel it's a heck of a find and something that would have saved me money just this past Friday. Read the info here, but try and stop by his site to thank him for the extra change in your pocket :)

To quote him:

Public Service Announcement - Free 411 :o)

Cell phone companies are charging $1.00 to $1.75 or more for 411 Information calls. Since no one carries a telephone directory in their vehicle, they get away with it. 
 
When you need to use the 411 information option, simply dial 1(800) FREE 411, or 1(800)373-3411, you will incur no charge. This works on your home telephone as well. If you enter this number into your cell phone, you will always have a way to get a phone number if you need one. 
 
Verified at Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/free411.asp 

* * *

How 'bout those bleeping Lakers? I thought Boston had it cinched but LA is going to make the trip to the east coast after all. They really should be embarrassed at how they failed  to stick a knife in the Celtics' heart and finish the deal. If you can't close out the game on your home court, don't expect to win in Boston.

* * * *

To all the Dad's out there - Happy Fathers Day! And thank you everyone for your well wishes!

The June 12th School Trip to the Zoo

Last year I chaperoned YaYa's K5 trip to the zoo. This year Lisa was picked to chaperone for her, while I pulled duty with LuLu's K4 class. This had the unfortunate side effect of preventing us from attending Smiley's 1st ever year-end school picnic, scheduled on the same day. Thankfully my mother-in-law picked up the slack and took him, and I owe her (and Smiley) one.

Lisa and I had planned on linking up at the zoo and merging our two groups, but alas K4 was told to stick together. I had five kids, including LuLu, under my watch. We went the opposite way of everyone else and hit the kids 'family farm' area first.

True fact: cows are prone to swallowing nails and other metal objects mixed in with grass. To prevent that from doing damage they are intenionally given a magnet to swallow, one that sucks up all the nails before they do harm.

4 million animals and the kids reacted the most to seeing a playset to attack.

Then finally, on to some animals.

Then, on to a snack.

We took the snack break on a patio with a gorgeous view of a pond.

A peacock wandered onto the deck and the kids gave (polite) chase from a distance.

We bumped into YaYa and Lisa and caught up on our activities. YaYa had gone on the overhead glider across the zoo and back, but K4 was prohibited (and rightly so, to my mind) from engaging in any activity that cost exra money.

We split up again and K4 had lunch. Then we went through the bat house, the reptile area, the monkeys and apes, the aquarium, etc. Suprisingly we actually had some learning experiences, as a snake was shedding its skin and there were dead mice hanging from a branch as a snack for another reptile.

Here's my group, plus a few hanger-on's.

I've tried hard not to post pictures of the animals because, as I told a mother there 'every year I come here, and every year I take the same pictures' and besides, if you want to see what a giraffe looks like, go hit wikipedia.

But somehow it'd escaped my notice that the flamingo's, which I remembered vividly from my youth, had been removed from the zoo in recent years. They were reintroduced this year, and I feel compelled to post a pic of them here.

By this point the kids were exhausted and fights errupted, so we hunkered down in a park-like area to rest. The adults did most of the resting, to be honest, while the kids played.

I do this gimmick where I put my palms out, encourage my kids to lock their elbows and put their palms on mine, and then I lift them in the air.  The trouble is, when I lifted Lu up in the park all the kids wanted to try it out, and my arms got the biggest workout in quite awhile.

I don't remember where we went after that, but I thought this was neat:

We headed back to the bus just in time, as tornado warning were again threatening the area and a storm was coming. We just barely missed the rain, as the sky's opened up as I was getting into my car in the school parking lot.

A good time. Exhausting, but fun.

Oh, yeah. At the zoo we only had one camera and I had it with me (remember, we were supposed to have been together all day) so all these shots are mine. But she did take some pics with her camera phone. For whatever reason they came out super small, so enlarging themt made 'em less than perfect. But they give you some idea of the fun the kids had with her.

Here's two I sent her in reply

Misc Chatter and YaYa's first communion dress

Still no phone, eight days after the (big) storm. In fairness I haven't asked Time Warner to come out in the last few days, simply because I've been busy and the house is a mess. But saints preserve me, as much as I hate the thing I'm actually beginning to miss having a home phone.

Oh, a belated happy twelfth birthday to my niece Caitlin, who was pretty po'd I didn't announce her birthday here on the actual day. Here's hoping you hear 'happy birthday Caitlin' on at least 88 more days in your life. Love you.

School (finally) let out for the summer on Friday, the day we went to see that movie. After the show we went down to Mayfair Mall and I set foot in Macy's for the second time in my life, shopping for First Communion dresses for YaYa.

The event isn't until next year, but they're on clearance now. We liked several and wound up buying three: one for my niece, one for YaYa, and one as an alternate (since returned).

This is YaYa's, taken that night via camera phone in my parent's kitchen. :

We're still not sure where the ceremony will take place. The school, which is supported by six parishes, idiotically seperates the class and shoves the kids to their respective parishes. The problem is we are not parishioners in any of the six, and so as it stands YaYa will have to attend seperate religion classes at our home parish (this, despite attending Catholic school) and celebrate her communion with a bunch of kids she doesn't know. Grand.

Oh, more good news. The transmission on Lisa's van went out for the third time in two years. That van's always been a lemon, straight from day one, so tommorrow we're going van shopping. The money put aside for a new roof will now have to be diverted to the car situation, which bites.

Ah well. Such is life.

Hope all is well with everyone.

'The Orphanage' is a great movie

                                                    

The Orphanage is a great film, a truly suspenseful and frightening movie that stands in direct opposition to the mess that is The Happening.

A foreign language film, it was released in Spain in 2007 to great acclaim and chosen by the Spanish Academy of Film to represent their country at the Academy Awards. New Line Cinema is talking of making an English-language version, but my advice would be to skip it and go with the original, because I can't imagine a way to improve upon it.

Laura, the main character, purchases the home that once housed the orphanage where she lived as a child. Her memories of the place are positive and joyous, and as she moves there with her husband and son she entertains the idea of opening it again as a home for special needs children.

Enter her son's imaginary friends, and the horror begins. Her son disappears and we feel the emotions of the parents, the anger, anxiety, grief, and loss. There is much more to the story but its my sincere wish that you go rent it, so I won't elaborate, spoiler warnings or no spoiler warnings.

The film is beautifully staged by director Juan Antonio Bayona, and the acting is outstanding, especially that of Belen Rueda as Laura. It's pace is slow but steady, more in line with The Exorcist than modern horror. There is no bloodshed in this movie, no cheap thrill caused by a quick camera movement, no unstoppable golem lurking in the shadows. What there are are moment after moment of film that induce real, fear of the dark terror: the boy at the end of the hall with the strawman mask, Laura's game to draw out the spirits, the pile of shells near the door, the medium's trance, etc.

When you watch it, pay close attention near the end; I can't say more, but the secret of the vanishing is truly heart wrenching.

Don't be turned off by the idea of a foreign film. In this day of DVD's I don't watch English language films without the subtitles on, and both my wife and I quickly adjusted to the format.

Outstanding. 3.5 stars out of 4 or 85 out of 100.

'The Happening' ain't, at least for me.

                

Let's clear the air before I start. I didn't go to see The Happening to bash it or its creator.

 I like M. Night Shyamalan. I thought Sixth Sense was a fine movie (although not as good as its contemporary Stir of Echoes), and by the time  I saw Unbreakable I left the theater a Shyamalan fan. I felt Signs was moving and at times frightening. I thought The Village was beautifully done but empty of suspense. Lady in the Water . . well, let's not speak of that atrocity.

So I went into the movie with a feeling of promise, a hope that Shyamalan had righted his ship and was back on course. I marked the date on the calendar, arranged for sitters, rearranged work schedules, and made a date with Lisa to see it on the day of its release.

What an awful disappointment. What an awful movie.

The premise is right up my alley, an apparent 'end of civilization' event that forces a small group of survivors to try and outrun the plague and fight for their lives. To say more would require a spoiler warning, but don't worry: you'll figure it all out a few minutes into the movie.

I felt like I was watching a campy John Waters film. While they watch people die horrific death the actors run around saying 'Oh No!' with no more emotion then if  they'd stubbed their toe. Still others face death while reciting mathematical questions, or mumble grade-school science text while the world crumbles around them. The deep marriage crisis is about as mature a situation as you'll see - if your love life is permanently frozen in  freshman year of high school.  The'enemy' causing the plague can either be seen as unique or laughable, depending on your point of view. Given the material, I vote for laughable.

Zooey Deschanel is completely wasted in her role, very visibly handcuffed by her part, while Mark Wahlberg does such an awful job I wondered aloud if he was hamming it up on purpose. If he read the script, he just might have thought it was appropriate.

[argument for intentional camp: Mark, aka Marky Mark, tells someone he's feeling 'good vibes', prompting Lisa to start humming his mega-hit 'Good Vibrations']

Aside from the fact that the conflict just ends, without any action taken to stop it or any resolution, I take umbrage with Shyamalan's preachiness. He displays the flagrant bias of the East Coast, showing West Virginians as hicks and the residents of Nebraska as militia members, while Philadelphians (!) are depicted as polite and civil citizens. And naturally, the plague is caused not by our direct actions or by nature, but because mankind is a natural threat to the earth and must be removed.

 Five minutes into the movie he focuses on a quote written on a blackboard, a quote which gives away the movie, and it's so blatant and idiotic a clue I laughed aloud. At that moment I swear I heard campy music in my head  - an exaggerated bit of musical fanfare - or God forbid, Shyamalan actually included it in the film.

Yikes.

Two stars out of four. I'd have given it 'one' but the man can still direct and frame a shot; he just can't write. Out of a hundred, I'd give it 32.

Ken Griffey and On Base Percentage

                           

I'll spare you reviews of 10,000 BC and Alien Vs. Predator - Requiem. All I have to say on the subject is thank God I didn't pay to see or rent them.

Still no phone by the way, and now my cable is whack-a-doodle, shutting off and turning on for no reason. I think the storm did a doozy on my line somewhere.

Thanks for all the condolences regarding Lisa's Great Uncle.

* * * * *

Meanwhile I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Ken Griffey Jr on becoming only the sixth man in history to hit 600 home runs in Major League Baseball.

I'll save the fawning tribute for his eventual retirement, which sadly is not that far off. But the achievement has set off a flurry of pro-Griffey articles, and in response my favorite lurking spot (Baseball Think Factory) has lit up with commentary calling Griffey overrated.

[Keep in mind the folks at BTF are (largely) stats freaks, virulent left-wingers politically and socially, mildly tolerant of the PED implicated players, and cynics to boot. It is in their nature to disagree with the mainstream, and frankly they do so with style and panache.]

A recent thread has argued convincingly that Barry Bonds was a superior player to Ken Griffey, even prior to his alleged PED use at the turn of the century.

They have a point. Bonds was a great player, combining speed, average, power, and great D in left field. Bonds clearly outclassed Ken as a stolen base threat, but in the world of sabermetrics stolen bases are dismissed with a snort. OBP - on base percentage - is where the new center of the universe lies.

Take a look at this comment from the site:

Bonds 1989-98 versus Griffey 1990-99 (Griffey's best 10 consecutive years vs Bonds' 10 years prior to PED use)

Total WARP3 (adjusts for defense and position, though it is BPro's defensive rating)
Griffey 96.0
Bonds 124.7

Best Five Seasons
Griffey 12.8/12.2/11.4/10.8/10.5
Bonds 15.4/14.7/13.8/13.7/12.1

WARP3 is a proprietary statistical formula that stands for Wins Above Replacement Player, in thiscase revision 3.

"Replacement Level" can be thought of like this: take your average lounge singer. Replace her with your tone-deaf Aunt Mildred onstage and you've gone below 'replacement level'. Replace her with Celene Dion and you're (dramatically) above replacement level. Drop in another plain jane singer and your right at an even keel.

Now bear in mind a team with a full complement of replacement players is mathematically awful and expected to produce no more than 25 wins; that isn't realistic, and for that reason among others I find the math (but not the concept, which fascinates me) less than all-impressive.

Still, the math is clear: based on these and other detailed formulas Bonds walks away on top.

But wait.

A vast amount of Bonds worth is rightly attributed to his on base percentage, which was greatly (duh!) increased by drawing more walks than anyone in history. Valuable? Darn tooting. But in some situations is a high OBP a determent to a player's worth?

This is dangerous ground. Dusty Baker was crucified for criticizing some high OBP players for 'clogging the bases'. He sounded stupid, but he may have had a point.

Say you have two sluggers. Both are blessed with speed, defense, great power, and average. Both play for lousy teams and are the only legitimate hitting threats in the lineup.

Player A has a OBP of.380. Player B has a OBP of .320.

This might be an extreme example, because to my eyes Player A kicks B's behind, but those numbers came out of the air.

Let's say player A walks a lot, a realistic assumption given his OBP. Sure he gets to first base significantly more often than Player B, but he is no doubt stranded there just as often when his weak-hitting teammates step to the plate.

Meanwhile, playing for an equally lousy team, player B garners fewer walks. Instead of taking pitches he is attempting to drive the ball whenever he can, albeit with a corresponding drop in average and OBP.

All things being equal, we can guess that B manages to get a few hits with all those extra swings, and that some of them drive in runs. Those are runs that would not be created strictly by OBP. At the very least, the rise in productivity brings the two players to a level playing field. Or not. I could be wrong.

The weakness here, some would say, is that it would fail to account for the fewer times B gets on base and later driven home. My answer is that is that the whole concept is tied to the surrounding lineup - a pure example of a team statistic if you will, and that we have a reasonable expectation that the .220/12/64 hitter behind him isn't going to do much damage.

Mathematically I have no idea how to put this concept, let's call it Adjusted On Base Percentage (AOBP) to life. You would need to study a batters OBP and the slugging percentage of those around him in the lineup. So you'd need to come up with a baseline - the league's average slugging percentage would probably do.

At the league average the batter's actions are neutral in the equation. If his teammates perform above league average  there is no advantage to swinging away. In such cases, OBP is of great worth and should be valued as such, and therefore his AOBP would be higher.  If his teammates are below average OBP is not as important, and his AOBP would be lower than his OBP.

How the average would be calculated . .well, that's beyond me. In the morning this whole idea will probably seem foolish to me, but right now it seems worth considering.

Thanks for reading.

Tags: baseball

What's up with my phone you ask?

For anyone who's wondering what happened to my home phone, the line went dead during Saturday's storm and still isn't working. My phone service is through Time Warner, and while they've been very helpful none of their troubleshooting has worked. I guess I'll have to call out one of their service techs tomorrow.

Anywho, for all you busybodies - yes, I did pay the bill. :)

If you need me email, and if it's an emergency (such as the passing of Lisa's Great Uncle Lee today) then call on my cell.

- Dan

Forget my basement - I was one of the lucky ones

Even as I wrote that post about the water in the basement I knew there were people a lot worse off. Heck, the front page of the Journal-Sentinel had a  picture of people canoeing down an intersection not more than a couple miles past my place of employment.

When I got to work my story was put to shame. One guy had three feet of water in his basement; many more had some degree of flooding and the mother of one of our employees had to pull out the wall-to-wall carpeting in her rec room. My friend Tre chimed in with news that a co-worker of his had 41 inches in his basement, while his own garage took in an inch. My daughter's had school cancelled when their cafeteria flooded badly enough to make the news. A customer told me her newly finished basement near Sherman Park had been destroyed, costing her all the electronics in her rec room, damaging her electricity and sending her to room in a hotel overnight.

I guess I can thank my lucky stars my situation wasn't much, much worse.

Wisconsin was hit hard, and the news out of Wisconsin Dells was staggering. Lake Delton is a popular attraction around that resort community.

Or rather it was. It jumped the banks and flooded a local river, draining the lake down to the bottom in a matter of minutes.

We're not talking a pond here, or a lagoon. This is a decent size, decent depth lake. It was large enough to support beach resorts and the locally famous amphibious Duck rides. Now it's gone, completely gone, and people are mourning their sole source ofrecreation and income.

Along the way, the Lake took out four large 'dream' vacation homes along the banks.

What a mess. And more rain to come this week . . . Hope everyone is well and stays dry.