General

Millennium Park and a sad comment

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Cloud Gate
Today the Chicago Tribune had a special section on Millennium Park. Millennium Park officially opens Friday after many years of budget overruns and delays. (Where’s Daniel Burnham when we need him?)

On the front page was the article Chicago finds `bean’ meets taste test. This article was about the new sculpture named “Cloud Gate” that was unvieled for the opening of the park this week. I have to agree the concept and the actual execution of the sculpture is awesome, at least from the pictures in the paper. Unfortunately, the only image I could find online is the artist’s concept that you see on the left. As I’ve got my camera with me today, I’ll have to try to get a real picture.

In any case, the thing that really bothered me about the article was a comment that the journalist got from a man on the street. What’s worse is that the Tribune deceided to make it a highlight burb. I will do the same, although probably not for the same reason. I’m doing it to show how stupid it is.

“Look at how vivid it is. It looks like a high-definition TV. It’s very cool.” — John Horan of Chicago

I’m a big fan of technology, I own many toys and an HDTV and stuff like that. I also will admit to watching more TV than I probably should. However, I think its really sad that the only thing he could compare the mirrored sculpture to was the sharp image displayed on a TV. We have such a wide vocabulary available to us. Thanks to science we’ve seen the birth and death of stars, the destructive and awesome power of splitting the atom. And all he could find to say about a beautiful work of art was “Its cool, its like my TV.”

I don’t know what it should be compared to, but I think this comment, and the Tribune’s highlighting of it really says something.

[ Update 7/16: On the radio this morning, they said the park is 4 years late and 3 times over budget. Fun! ]

Fatherhood, Omphaloskepsis

Dinah’s name

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Many people ask about how we came up with Dinah Aeryn for the name of our daughter. We get a lot of “Is Dinah a family name?” Strangely, no one really asks us about Aeryn. Must be because its a middle name. Anyway, I warn you, its a tale of monster geekery. However, this geekery was perpetrated by my wife as well as me.

We had the name of Aeryn even before we were expecting. (The name is pronounced like the more common “Erin.”) Aeryn caught our attention thanks to the science fiction television show Farscape, specifically the character of ex-Peacekeeper Officer Aeryn Sun. Mostly what attracted us to the name was the spelling. We thought it was pretty. It doesn’t hurt that the character that brought us to that name is a tough positive ass-kicking female role model. Although, maybe she’s too quick to jump to violence.

My beautiful and charming wife, however, would not stand for having Aeryn as a first name, which I was lobbying for. Her reasoning: I have a first cousin named Erin, and the phonetic similarity would cause much confusion among people, specifically my grandparents. I think its silly, but as part of a marriage, and certainly as one half of a parenting team, one must compromise. Sarah said Aeryn would be a good second name, and I protested some, but eventually gave in.

So, how did we get to a first name? She was one of three Sarahs in her grade school class, and she didn’t like it. Also, we know about 10,000 people named Jason that we talk to quite often. Sarah was looking for something that was an older name and was less common now. She had proposed names such as Eleanor (“Gee, I think you’re swell” or “Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been.”) and Audrey. (Audrey was the name of my Grandma, my Dad’s mom. For some reason, it just didn’t work. A long story, maybe, for another time.) Those are two I remember, but there were more. I vetoed a lot of them. Nothing really worked.

I’m a comics geek, I’m 29 and I’m still collecting. And when I say collecting I mean “I’m reading for the story and just not throwing them away.” One afternoon, I was sitting in the family room reading comics while Sarah was watching tv. I started to read the latest Birds of Prey from DC comics. (As an aside, I’d like to link to a DC page about BoP directly, however, DC’s web page sucks ass. That’s okay, Marvel‘s sucks ass too.)

One of the main characters of Birds of Prey is the Black Canary. The current Black Canary is actually the second one, but I guess that doesn’t really matter to this story. In any case, her civilian name is Dinah Laurel Lance. On the second or third page of that particular issue, Oracle (Barbara Gordon, the original Batgirl) had called her Dinah. I stopped and thought of the last time I heard that name. The only other Dinahs I could think of was was the late Dinah Shore (some thanks go to Adam Sandler) and, of course, the old campfire song of “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah.”

I turned to Sarah and said “Hey, what about Dinah as a first name.” Sarah said she needed a few minutes to think about it. As time went on, she become more and more attached to the name. I think after just 10 minutes, it was set.

We both felt good about it, but waited to tell people until it was closer, or at least the baby was here. As I said a few times, “Nothing is set in stone until we see her and make sure she looks like a Dinah Aeryn.”

I’m not one to believe in signs or anything, but there was a weird occurrence that I want to commit to the web for all eternity: About the same time we found out that we were to have a baby girl and we were deciding on the name, the rock band Live was getting a lot of air play with their single Heaven.

The lyrics to Heaven contain the following: I don’t need no one to tell me about heaven / I look at my daughter, and I believe. For some reason, these lyrics really resonated with me. (With how I feel now, I think I was already falling in love with my daughter, even though I hadn’t seen her. I definitely know that I’ve only been this enamored with one other person.) I decided that I needed to have this song, so I set about going to buy the CD.

I got to the story to buy the record and went to the Ls to look for the Live CDs. I knew the name of the song, but never took the time to look at/for the name of the album. Once I saw the name of the album, I figured it was a sign that Sarah and I were on the right track.

The name of the album is Birds of Pray. I loved the homonym of “pray” instead of “prey,” especially considering the lyrics in Heaven. And I figured, while not exactly the same as the comic where we got Dinah’s name, it was close enough. Close enough to give me chills.

In any case, this is the tale of geekiness that got my daughter her name.

General

Metracide

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I’ve been too busy for the past week to post this blurb, but I didn’t want to let it slip away. I saw the article When Death Rides The Rails on the cover of the Sunday Magazine section of the Chicago Tribute and thought I should read it. However, I didn’t get to any of that Sunday’s paper. Jon Roma reminded me of it last Monday and said I should read it.

The article was about people being killed by trains, and specifically suicides. It also went into a lot of detail about how it impacts the conductors and engineers who have to deal with these tragedies.

I read it online (via my hiptop) on the train. After reading the article, I think anyone who commutes via train should read it. What really brought it home for me, is that many of the conductors that they interviewed were from the Milwaukee District West Line, which is the train I take to get downtown to work.

A couple of things I found interesting from the article:

  • A train hits someone every two hours in the U.S.
  • 16 people have died on metra lines so far this year, 9 were suicides or “suspicious”
  • In 2003, 507 people nationwide were killed by trains. They don’t record self-inflicted death in this tally, so how many are suicides are unknown
  • 14 people have committed suicide by jumping in front of CTA trains or being electrocuted by the third rail since 2000

But those are just the numbers. As I said above, the agony that the people who work on the train go through in one of these events is scary and something that I’ve never though of before. Not only do the conductors have to put up with all the commuters being jerks when being delayed, but then they have to deal with the mental aftermath of seeing a mutilated body. Also, I can’t even imagine how the engineers get over the suiciders looking them in the eyes. Scary stuff.

In any case, I’m a laid back guy, but I still get upset when the train is delayed, especially on the way home. I don’t ever complain, because what are you going to do? However, I will certainly be more understanding in the future.

[Update 8/19/2010: Looks like the Tribune moved the article.]

Fatherhood, General

My father-in-law is amazing

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I have to say that my father-in-law is an amazing guy, for a number of reasons. The most important being he helped produce my wife, but there are other reasons why he demonstrated last week.

My in-laws were up here for a week and a half to watch Dinah during the time between Sarah returning to work and day care starting. Most of the baby watching was done by my mother-in-law, but my father-in-law certainly enjoyed spending time with his granddaughter as well.

However, to keep himself busy, my father-in-law did a lot of work around the house. In the time that he was here he 1) Put down a floor in our attic. A *nice* floor made of planking, 2) fixed the mounting of our bikes in the garage that was falling off the cieling, (looks like I missed the studs or something,) 3) Kept an on eye on the guys replacing our furnace and air conditioner, and finally (the reason for this post) fixed our dryer that stopped working. He really only knew the basics of dryers, but he took it apart, tested a few parts, and found that the thermostat was totally covered in lint. Cleaned out all the lint, put it back together, and boom, we had the heat.

<Time has passed since I wrote the above.>

While my in-laws were up for Dinah’s baptism, my father-in-law mowed our lawn and put in a electrical outlet. He was only here for two days!

In any case, I admire that he’ll just set to these tasks and get them done. I’m way too distracted on tasks unless its something I’m really interested in. I need more focus like that.

In any case, I’m enjoying this “fathers doing stuff for us” thing while I can. It’ll be my turn in 20-some years. Hopefully I’ll do half as well as my father-in-law and my father have done for us.

Fatherhood

Sorry, Dinah

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Its been said that our children inherit the best and worst of its parents. We know that a lot of it is thanks to genetics. With this in mind, I’d like to issue a formal apology today to my daughter when she’s only 1 month and 24 days old.

Dinah, I’m so sorry that one of the genetic traits you got from me was my supernatural ability to generate gas. I was hoping, that since you were a girl, it would skip you. I’m sorry it hasn’t.

General

chicagoist: An honest to goodness useful blog (unlike, say, this one)

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Yesterday, while searching for information about Batman Begins filming in Chicago, I came across a blog called chicagoist. After just two days of reading, this is an excellent source of information on all things Chicago.

Appearently, this site started six months ago, after them having a successful run with their New York focused gothamist blog.

For those with RSS readers, you might want to use chicagoist’s RDF feed.

General

The product name rule

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Yesterday I was reminded of a rule-of-thumb I had created a number of years ago regarding product names. Unfortunately, I don’t remember its origional form, but it boils down to the following:

Any product that has a superlative, a color, or an animal in its title, is generally not good.

Now, there are exceptions to the rule, but in general, here’s evidence I present for this rule:

  1. Red Dog – color and animal
  2. Seattle’s Best Coffee – superlative
  3. Milwaukee’s Best – superlative
  4. Pabst Blue Ribbon – color and possibly suprlative if you consider “blue ribbon” to be first prize

It is curious to note that most of my examples in the theory are beer. 🙂 One corallary is that if the beer type is named after color, it should be excused. Otherwise, passible things such as Leiny’s Red and Killian’s Red, would fall under the rule.

Exceptions to the rule:

  1. Grey Goose Vodka
  2. Johnny Walker Blue
  3. Blue Moon

As I find more exceptions, maybe my rule isn’t that good…..

Keith's attempts to fix the cable of life