Ten Year Anniversary of the First Date

While in Atlanta recently, my wife and I decided to go back to one of the restaurants we ate at when we first met some ten years ago. Our first date is a story that I used to tell regularly in my early years of teaching, but it has fallen out of heavy rotation. It is back on my mind due to our recent outing in the ATL (or HOTlanta if you prefer):

At the time when I met my wife-to-be, I was an underemployed wine importer with long hair, a goatee, and living in my parents' basement (see picture at top of blog). I was also doing a LOT of yoga and was super thin. Turns out that Irene did not like guys with long hair, much less facial hair of any kind, and considered me to look “scrawny” (n.b. I would use the word “fit” to describe myself back then)! I was immediately smitten with her but, in order to sell myself, I had my work cut out for me.

So on the first date, all the pressure was all on me. We went to a fancy restaurant with an upstairs seating area. We were seated upstairs right next to an open area into which you could look down onto the bar area. I started off by playing the only card I had: wine knowledge and general European sophistication. We both had ordered glasses of wine. They were fancy-smancy glasses – big bulbous things with a splash of wine at the bottom.

I am swirling the wine in the glass, waxing poetic about the fermentation of grapes and the olfactory appreciation of the finer things in life. I fall into “European Ken” mode and begin gesticulating a lot while talking up a storm. She is obviously slightly amused and so I make an especially emphatic point with a big sweeping motion. I have yet to take a sip of my wine.


My right hand hits the bottom of my red wine glass at exactly the right angle to carry it up and over railing. Time slows down. I see Irene’s eyes go wide. I see the wine glass spinning in place, hovering out over the edge – daring me to catch it before it drops. Like a scene in the “Matrix”, I seem to have an infinite amount of time. Before I can have another thought, my right hand jumps out and catches the twirling glass by the stem between my first two fingers. In one subtle and elegant movement, I had saved the glass and brought it back to its original location on the table. Only it was empty.

Irene is speechless. I am speechless. She looks at me, I look at her. She is clearly thinking, “Hmmm… interesting situation – his true character will be revealed now.” I am thinking, “Oh – no! I really like this girl and now it all comes down to this. What I say next will shape my entire destiny.”

I lean away from the balcony and ask her, “Can you look over the edge and tell me where the red wine went?” She looks over the edge and reports, “There’s a woman in a white dress sitting at the bar, an empty bar stool, and a puddle of red wine on the next stool.” Nobody, including the bartender, had noticed the wine pouring down from a floor above and splashing onto the seat.

I call over the waitress, explain the situation, and ask for a free refill, since I didn’t even get a sip yet!

Must have worked out okay since Irene is still going out to eat in public with me ten years later. (Full disclosure: In the interim, I did get a haircut, shaved the goatee, moved out of my parents’ basement, found gainful employment, and gained twenty pounds.)

(bar picture from hopstop.com for South City Kitchen)

Playing Parcheesi in my Pajamas

Within the last couple of days, Isabelle has learned to play Parcheesi.

At bedtime, a big part of the ritual in the Riddy household is 'putting on the pajamas'.

Yesterday, we were considering make a run to an IMAX theater to catch the new movie Avatar (still haven't done that).

It's an Indian vocab day!

Recently, I found myself explaining what an avatar was to one of my nongaming colleagues (I'd like to call him a luddite, but since he uses more technology than any other teacher I know, I guess I won't go there).  However, my brother is the one who pointed out to me that the word is Indian in origin (from the Sanskrit avatara - originally for the crossing over or manifestation of a god on Earth).  The computer based use of the word really took off after its use in an influential 1992 sci fi novel, Snow Crash.

Pachis means 25 in Hindi, the highest 'roll' (of sea snail shells rather than dice!) possible in the parcheesi precurser Pachisis.

Pyjama come to us westerners via Hindi as well, although it is originally from the Persian word for leg garmet, Payjama.

We are communicating today in a language that has more words than any other and most of that is due to our easy adoption of the foreign words and novel uses of old words.  Our language is our cultural heritage whether we know it or not;  No British Empire in India, and I would just be playing another cross-and-circle game in my leg garments wondering if I will ever get a chance to see that latest film "Manifestation"...

Innumeracy and a New Blog

Recently I was talking a doctor about something and he said "between 30 and 40 percent of people will outgrow this allergy..."  Just to confirm, later I asked "So, there is about a 1 in 3 chance of outgrowing this?"  The doc looked at me like I was crazy and said "No - maybe more like a 1 in 4 chance!"

When I was in AP US history many, many moons ago, the teacher asked the class "What's the approximate current population in the US?" I quickly answered "Around a quarter of a billion."  He looked at me like I was crazy and said "Ahem, the population is around 260 million..."

A few years ago, I remember a reporter on the radio referring to the "100's of millions" of people living in New York City.  Now I happened to know that the population of the city is between 8 and 18 million depending on whether you are counting the surrounding areas too...  This error is like saying 12 people showing up for a party was "hundreds of people."

I suspect that none of these examples would have happened if it had been a subject-verb disagreement or pronoun antecedent issue.  So, I have started a new blog to begin documenting number and science errors that slip through in the media just so I don't have to carrying it around all bottled up inside.  I wanted to name it "two cultures" in honor of CP Snow, but that blog name was taken.  So, then I though "mediacrity", but that was taken as well!   So, I have settled on "mediacisms".  Feel free to email a link to something you notice and I will blog it if I have time!

Doctor "Doctor"

I recently came across this excellent blog (curtesy of my friend BG) all about the misuse of quotes: http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

It's one of those great ideas that you read and think "why didn't I do that?"

Reminds me of an incident in the science office a few months back when a student came looking for a colleague.  This colleague has an MD and therefore uses the title "Dr" - the funny thing is that the student put the title in quotes with her fingers while she was talking as if the title were an affectation... "I'm looking for 'Dr' _________"

At one of my previous jobs, a fellow teacher called all of us "Dr": a person of learning or respect being his operative definition (see #7).

People with PhD's go by "Doctor" routinely which reminds me of a great line of Randy Pausch's posthumous book The Last Lecture that went something along the lines of "My mother introduces me to friends as 'my son the doctor - but not the kind that helps people' " (he had PhD in Computer Science)

And then there's my favorite "Doctor" (quotations marks, of course, completely superfluous and, most definitely, never to be used in the air with my fingers!):

Is Carl Sagan my Guru?

Recently a colleague from work, DR, introduced me to a trippy video montage in which Carl Sagan is made to sing. Aside from being a technological piece of slickness, I found myself thinking about the early years when I used to watch the Cosmos series on PBS. I must have been in middle school and I remember thinking it was interesting and a bit odd at the same time.

Now, so many years later, it seems that Sagan had a bigger influence on me than I thought. Why did I major in Physics? Why do I find science fiction irrestistable? Why am I now a science educator? Why do I love those moments in the curriculum when I get to stick in my (or is Sagan's?) two cents in on how we are tiny little creatures on the surface of a moderately sized rock orbiting a below average star in the backwaters of some rinky-dink galaxy?

But isn't it that super-cool: making you feel special and humble at the same time?

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch - you must first invent the universe"

Hunter Moon Coronation

A week or so ago, I took Isabelle out to show her a spectacular full moon that I had noticed on my drive home. Since it was low on the horizon, it appeared very large. This is an optical illusion, since all full moons are the same size. Humans just tend to interpret things as larger when they are close to the horizon (because of context clues) rather than when overhead. This is also why the rising and setting sun seem larger. It's almost hard to believe until you try a simple experiment: try covering the full moon or sun with a fingertip while it is close to the horizon (and appears extra big to us) and then try it again later when it is high in the sky and you will find that it is indeed the same size...

When I took Isabelle out, we noticed a circular rainbow around the moon which I had never seen before: apparently this is a moon corona and it is caused by the diffraction of the moon's reflected sunlight through droplets of water just like regular rainbows:

(photo from http://www.spacew.com/gallery/image001109.html)

I only just learned (thank you, Wikipedia!) that all full moons have names and this one was the "Hunter's Moon" according to one naming system.

What other cool things are there that I don't know that I wouldn't find out about without kids to share them with?