Old Yarn - The Dark Alley Incident

Introduction

This is the seventh “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” “The Enemy Coach,” “The Brash Newb,” “The Day I Learned Bicycle Gear Shifting,” and most recently The In-Flight Voyeur). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

The Dark Alley Incident – ca. 1993

I was living in an apartment on Webster Street in San Francisco’s Western Addition, aka Lower Haight. This wasn’t one of your better neighborhoods, but wasn’t too rough either. The rent was low and the architecture was really good, mostly Edwardian/quasi-Victorian row houses that were built not long after the 1906 earthquake. Honestly, in those days—and to some degree even now—architecture and walkability were more important to me than safety.

Doing a little light fact-checking now, I see that in the early ‘90s this neighborhood was worse than I’d realized. It was considered sketchy by most San Franciscans, and compared to today had significantly higher rates of violent street crime, largely due to a crack epidemic that lasted until around 1994. The homicide rate was bad enough that the local media often described parts of the neighborhood as a “war zone.” If Internet research had been a thing back then, I might have chosen not to live there.

Still, it was cheap, I had my own room, it was a short walk to my favorite Thai restaurant, and it offered easy mass transit to my office job downtown. Plus, it was only six blocks to the Market Street Safeway where I shopped. And that’s  where this story (finally) gets interesting: if I was willing to take a little risk and go down an alley next to the tall, fenced-off hill where the San Francisco mint is, and then cross over the subway tracks at a place where you really weren’t supposed to, I could cut the walk down to just three blocks. It was practically a straight shot from my apartment, and from the standpoint of convenience, pretty much irresistible.

Granted, this was a pretty dicey shortcut. I can’t remember if there was an actual fence, but if so it wasn’t high (though looking at Google street view I see now that they’ve since built a giant fence, easily 12 feet tall). This wasn’t the classic dark alley of the imagination—long and narrow and dripping wet for some reason—but it was remote and kind of spooky, especially at night. It drove my girlfriend crazy that I took this shortcut, and she exhorted me to go the long way around, but I didn’t want to listen. Perhaps I had some premonition that one day she’d be my wife, with all the authority that goes with that, and then I’d have to toe the line—so I should enjoy my freedom while I still could.

On the night in question, as I headed toward the tracks well after dark, I encountered three shifty-looking characters off to my right in a narrower, perpendicular alley. They wore large black hooded Starter jackets, sagged pants, and ribbed wool watch caps. They were leaning in toward one another, speaking in low voices. Just as I passed their tight huddle I saw a flash of light, which had to be a cigarette lighter. Even back then, smoking a joint right out in the open in this neighborhood would have been perfectly normal, so their discretion meant something. Wow, I thought. How urban … they’re actually smoking crack!

Of course I didn’t gawk or anything—wouldn’t want to draw attention to having witnessed them. I kept my head facing forward, kept walking, minded my own business. I crossed the subway tracks, went around to the front of the Safeway, and did my shopping.

Now, given what I’d just seen down this alley, you’d think I’d finally go the long way around on the way home, right? But I was really loaded down with groceries and just didn’t feel like walking that far. I had multiple plastic shopping bags hung along each arm, all the way down to my wrists. One hand clutched a couple more loaded bags, and the other a big plastic jug of liquid laundry detergent. So I was lumbering along pretty slowly.

Past the subway tracks, when I was halfway down the alley, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t look over—just kept my eyes pointing ahead, seeing what I could with my peripheral vision. The movement was getting closer. I wasn’t sure it was the three dudes from earlier until one of them spoke. “Yo man,” he said, “hold up.”

I stopped and turned. It seemed important to act as casual as I could. Obviously these guys weren’t asking for directions … maybe they just wanted to mess with me. Could be they were sizing me up. I gave a quick chin-up nod, like, ‘sup? The dude looked me over and said, “Whaddya doin’, man?”

I glanced down at my bags, reflecting soberly upon how utterly impossible it would be to run with such a burden, and yet also how ridiculous it would be to abandon my groceries and flee, on the mere speculation that I was about to be mugged. I mean, I’d be pretty irritated if someone took one look at me and decided I was obviously a criminal. So I played it off. “Just doin’ my shopping,” I said. It’s funny: years before this, when I was an awkward teenager, suddenly called upon to speak, my voice would sometimes come out high and weak, like there was a reed stuck in my throat and I was short of breath, but now, when I really might have had something to be legitimately nervous about, I managed to sound fine. Casual, even, I thought.

“Hey man, I see you got detergent there, man, you gonna do some laundry?” the guy asked. He and his buddies were standing awfully close. Was this some preamble while they got ready to surround me? Or was I just being paranoid?

I glanced down at the laundry jug, wondering if it would make a good bludgeon but reflecting that the soft plastic would be more like a wiffle bat. Plus, loaded up as my arm was, I lacked the strength to even lift the jug that high, much less swing it. So I just looked back at the dude and gave another  upward nod. “Yeah. Of course.”

This is the part you’ll swear I’m making up, but I’m not: the dude reached into his coat and pulled out—not a gun, but a box of Bounce. You know, the fabric softener. “Man, you wanna buy some Bounce?” the guy asked. I couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d pulled out a bouquet, or a puppy. Where did he get that? I wondered. Did he roll some other guy walking home from Safeway?

I shook my head. He persisted: “For the dryer, man, make your clothes softer!”

I shook my head again. “No, man,” I said, feeling increasingly like I was part of some improv skit. “I don’t use that stuff.”

“Aiiight, ‘s cool,” he shrugged, and the three of them shuffled off without so much as a glance back. I faced forward again and resumed my slow trudge home. I resisted the temptation speed up, or to look back. Was that really it? Was the encounter truly over? The whole way home I was simultaneously a) braced for the other shoe to drop, and b) working hard not to burst out laughing. Were those dudes  just screwing with me, or had I passed some test? I will never know. And did I ever take that shortcut again? Honestly, I can’t remember.

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Is It Harder to Get Into a Top College Now?

Introduction

In my last post, I presented a list of college application “frequently asked questions.” Because research is a hassle, I didn’t do any. My answers were all based on what I’ve heard from parents in my community and from my older daughter. I regurgitated these people’s collected wisdom in slightly distorted form to inject humor. My main point was to satirize the doom-and-gloom attitude of pretty much everybody around me (except my wife, who also finds the prevailing attitude pointless and annoying).

                                                                     

That being said, I assumed that my answer to the first FAQ—”Is it harder to get into college now?”—was basically correct. (My answer was, “Yes, it absolutely is. Your child is way, way smarter, more industrious, and more resourceful than you, and yet won’t be able to sail through the process and attend a top college like you did.”) I took everybody’s word for it that top colleges really are more selective nowadays, simply because this opinion was always given with such an air of authority. I took it on faith that my community was actually basing this position on facts and research. It turns out that these people are all just a bunch of ninnies, mistaking fear for reality … Chicken Littles all, spouting falsehoods irresponsibly. This post debunks all that and presents a theory on the origin of this mass hysteria.

The conventional wisdom

All the parents and high school kids around me say the same thing: “It’s way harder getting into a top college than it used to be.” This is stated as irrefutable fact and when I’ve expressed skepticism, I’ve been shot down. The evidence given (if any) is the lower rate of acceptance—i.e., the number of rejected applications. So many more students are being rejected, the logic goes, our crop of kids may well be among them.

I have instinctively doubted this, and in trying to buck up my daughter I said, “It’s probably just more pack fodder. The field is larger, but not the front of the group that actually has a chance.” I chose this bike race analogy to try to make the dialogue briefer and a bit less dull. My point was, if you have 20 good racers who are all competitive, and then a bunch of poseurs buy fancy bikes and jump in to the race, without a prayer of placing high, your race hasn’t really gotten harder. It’s just gotten bigger.

My daughter refuted this counterpoint on the grounds that a) students with really good grades and SAT/ACT scores are being turned away, and b) everybody knows it’s gotten harder—this is just established fact. Out of sheer laziness and a sense that pessimists are usually right, I never pursued the truth. Until now.

The truth

The truth is, the increased difficulty of a top student getting into a top school has been greatly exaggerated. Here is a summary of my findings:

• The number of high school seniors is shrinking
• The number of qualified applicants to top colleges has not significantly grown
• Students apply to far more colleges than ever before, out of fear of being rejected and because electronic application methodologies like Common App have made this so easy to do
• This application inflation is greatly decreasing the acceptance rate
• This acceptance rate number is illusory because so many applicants are not qualified
• Colleges are deliberately encouraging behaviors that shrink this acceptance rate number, to appear more elite
• Looking at the metric that matters—the percentage of top students accepted by at least one top college—paints a picture that is astonishingly rosier

I will cite evidence from six articles (all from mainstream news magazines) to support all this. My conclusion? Virtually every member of my community owes my kid and me an apology for all the unwarranted anxiety they have caused by perpetuating this myth of increased selectivity.

And now, here is my point-by-point evidence of the above, to thoroughly document and explain what is really going on.

The number of high school seniors is declining

This article in The Atlantic states, “The number of American high school seniors is shrinking, having peaked in 2011.” This is also stated by Time magazine here. (Actually, the Atlantic cites Time on this point, but presumably The Atlantic does fact-check.)

The number of qualified applicants to top colleges has not significantly grown

The Atlantic reports that “according to [education company] Noodle[.org]’s data, the number of seats at competitive colleges has grown faster than the total pool of qualified applicants—raising a student’s chances of getting into a ‘selective college.’” Meanwhile, US News & World Report declares, “As selective as they’d like prospective students to believe they are, colleges and universities have been watching enrollment decline for five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Last year alone, it dropped 1.4 percent, or by about 270,000 students, at institutions nationwide…. Part of that is due to the shrinking supply of 18-year-olds and to families’ concerns about the high cost, and relative value, of college.”

Students are applying to far more colleges than before

The Atlantic reports, “Many high achieving students will apply to 10 or 15 schools, so you’re looking at doubling or even tripling the number of applications from the same pool of applicants. Application inflation is linked, [the Noodle.org VP] believes, to the Common App.” The Washington Post reports, “More than 800,000 students used the Common Application last year to submit some 3.5 million applications to more than 700 colleges. Plenty of students today apply to colleges they have hardly any intention of attending.” The New York Times explains it thus: “Enabled by technology that makes it easier to copy and send electronic documents and driven by the competitive anxiety that plummeting admission rates produce, top students have been sending out more applications…. In essence, the growth in applications per student creates a vicious cycle, causing admission rates at the best schools to artificially decline, students to become more anxious, and the number of applications per student to grow even more.”

Application inflation is greatly decreasing the acceptance rate

The Washington Post article describes the acceptance rate number in somewhat useful terms: “The top 20 national universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, for instance, enroll only about 100,000 students out of 17 million undergraduates nationwide. So the denominator is rising as the numerator stays the same in an equation that is more like the odds of playing the lottery for most students and parents.” This explanation is only somewhat useful, though, because of course colleges aren’t accepting students at random. This is the whole problem: the acceptance rate is being treated like odds in a lottery when in fact colleges have an objective basis to discard most applications.

This acceptance rate number is illusory

As reported in Time magazine, “What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions.” The New York Times makes a similar analysis: “[Admission rates] don’t represent the true odds of a well-qualified student’s being admitted to a top school. That’s because anyone can apply to college, well qualified or otherwise. Selective colleges immediately toss the long shots and dreamers from the admissions pile in order to concentrate on students with a legitimate shot at getting in. But they don’t parse their admissions statistics that way, in part because it’s in their best interests to seem as selective as possible.”

Colleges are deliberately shrinking the acceptance rate

US News & World Report declares, “Some [colleges] have encouraged the applications boom, with its resulting effect on their ability to predict yields, by urging marginally qualified students to apply. Known as ‘recruit to deny,’ this practice makes them appear more selective and boosts their standings in some college rankings.” The Washington Post reports, “Colleges buy more than 80 million names of test takers from the College Board annually. In some cases, schools simply encouraged more students to apply as a way to improve their standings in the rankings.”

As far as I can tell, my daughter has received solicitations from every college in the country, even the ones she’s sure would never accept her. She now holds the distinction of getting more junk mail than the rest of the family combined (to say nothing of her e-mail spam, which currently stands at over 2,500 messages with 50 in the last week alone). Hell, Carleton College even sent her a Frisbee!

The metric that matters

My favorite among these articles is the one from the New York Times, which makes a valiant effort to talk us off the ledge: “For well-qualified students, getting into a good college isn’t difficult. It probably isn’t that much harder than it was generations ago. The fact that everyone believes otherwise shows how reliance on a single set of data—in this case, institutional admission rates—can create a false sense of what’s really going on.” The article goes on to say: 

Some students are applying to 20 or more schools: to increase their odds of making a single match. The most important elite college admissions statistic, then, is not the percentage of applications top schools accept. It’s the percentage of top students who are admitted to at least one top school. And that number isn’t 5 percent or 20 percent or even 50 percent. It’s 80 percent. It turns out that four out of five well-qualified students who apply to elite schools are accepted by at least one…. Since there has never been a time when 100 percent of well-qualified students were successful in the college admissions market, the truism that elite colleges are far more difficult to crack than in years gone by can’t be correct: 80 percent is too close, mathematically, to nearly everyone.

Needless to say, this Times article should be required reading for all parents of college-bound teenagers, and for those teenagers.

My daughter’s reaction

When I presented all this to my daughter—the one person I’m willing to bother arguing with about this, because I hope to reduce her anxiety—she was understandably skeptical. She immediately began Googling all this for herself. “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’ve already compiled the relevant articles for you.” She gave me one of those looks. Acknowledging that of course she’d fact-check me later anyway, I asked for a few minutes of her attention to read her some of the passages I’ve quoted above.

My daughter didn’t actually seem relieved. Perhaps all this seems too good to be true given the atmosphere of doom she has been trapped in for the last year or so. Or maybe being optimistic just feels weird and wrong at this point. She immediately came up with some hard questions. “What do they mean ‘top school’?” she asked. I cited the article: it defines top school as “one of the 113 schools identified by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges as the most selective.” My daughter, naturally, looked this up on the spot and read off the list. I’d heard of at last 90% of the colleges listed, and they really are elite. (My alma mater, UC Berkeley, didn’t even make the list.)

Next she questioned how the Times defined a “well-qualified” student. The answer is, it’s “combined SAT scores (or an ACT equivalent) of at least 1300.” My daughter stared in blank disbelief. “That’s not high at all. That’s like 60th percentile,” she said. Then she fact-checked herself: it’s actually 90th percentile. Competitive, sure, but not insanely high. Could the Times really be right about this? Well, they based their findings on the applications of 800,000 students. And they’re the New York Times, for crying out loud.

Why the hysteria?

So the natural question is, how could every adult I’ve talked to about this be so wrong? Why this widespread panic? I have two theories.

First, it’s far more exciting and engaging to paint everything in the darkest shades possible. FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) gives a nice urgent edge to your sidebar chatter at book club. FUD also makes better headlines, which might be all most people bother to read. Consider this one , in Business Insider: “It was the hardest year on record to get into elite colleges—admissions experts explain why.” What’s remarkable about the article is that it doesn’t really support this “hardest” assertion, but rather says much the same thing as the other articles I’ve cited. For example: “The steady uptick of college applicants, especially at elite schools, is stark, driven in part by the emergence of Common App, which allows students to apply to many schools at once.” It goes on to say, “There may be reason to view this lowering acceptance rate with some skepticism.” It trails off talking about how the strong cohort of high-scoring international applicants, “while it may drive down the overall acceptance rate, likely has less impact on US applicants than is sometimes believed.”

Meanwhile, beyond being typical drama queens, I think a lot of these parents are responding to their deep-seated fear that their kid(s) will wash out. (If so, they’re likely sharing their kids’ experience.) Perhaps by portraying the college admission game as nearly unwinnable they’re assuaging, in advance, the shame of their kid’s defeat.

It’s tempting to have sympathy for these beleaguered people, but in fact I’m kind of pissed off. Their willingness to be readily duped by deliberately misleading statistics, and to heap that unfounded fear on their poor children—and mine!—has caused untold unnecessary anxiety. And that’s not the only collateral damage. By creating so much fear and angst, our communities are teaching children to be self-absorbed and monomaniacal. My teen years involved a lot of messing around, having fun, killing time, and basically being a kid. Our current crop of teens are like 16 going on 40. Practically every action they take has their college admission in mind. As a group they’re just a huge buzz-kill. You know who they remind me of? Stressed out middle-aged parents. It’s pathetic.

Will it ever end?

Alas, I’m not sure getting into a good college will actually help. By that point, worrying and hand-wringing will have become a habit that is hard to shake. I’m basing this on a couple of things.

The first is an anecdote shared with me by an acquaintance whose sister works at Duke University, and whose job includes interviewing prospective students—i.e., those who have been accepted—to determine scholarship eligibility. She was struck, my acquaintance told me, by how unexcited and often downright sullen many of these kids were. I mean, here they’d been accepted by Duke, but they seemed so downcast! So finally she asked one of them why he wasn’t more excited. “I’m still waiting to hear from Harvard,” the ungrateful, over-privileged little shit replied.

Here is my second anecdote, from spending an afternoon at UC Berkeley at an internship fair. My role there, as I was quick to explain to every Cal student I talked to, was simply to answer their questions and describe the culture at the company I work for. I made it clear that I wasn’t the one evaluating them. But almost every student treated our chat like a job interview. They all had pretty extensive résumés, even the freshmen (which made up a surprisingly high proportion of the group, given that they were only like six weeks into their college careers). They all had this air of desperation about them.

One interaction in particular illustrates what I’m talking about. This student asked me, “What classes should I take?” I replied, “Well, I didn’t major in Computer Science, so I wouldn’t know anything about that.” She pressed on, “No … I mean, what classes should I take?” She was practically winking at me. I finally grasped her meaning: she meant what classes would look good on her résumé and help her get an internship at my company. I had no idea. I told her, “What I’ve witnessed in tech is that a lot of engineering types don’t write well. I think you should take a couple of writing classes.” She seemed perplexed and asked, “Can I?” I replied, “Of course you can! You can take whatever class you want! And you should … I mean, you’re at a world class university. You should take advantage of your opportunities here!” Her expression was priceless, like a light bulb on a dimmer switch gradually coming on. She had clearly never thought about college in any other terms than advancement and career prospects. “Wow … I guess I can!” she replied, astonished.

Call to action

If you’ve been sowing doom and gloom by parroting all this received wisdom about colleges being more selective, please stop. If you have a freaked out kid, please tell him or her to relax and try not to worry. And if you don’t believe me about any of this, go click on some of the links I’ve included here and read these articles for yourself.

As for me, next time some fellow parent trots out all this malarkey about college admissions being way more competitive, I’m going to tell him flat-out that he’s wrong. No, I won’t subject him to a withering argument … I’ll go one worse. I’ll ask him to read this post. This of course will end the dialogue forever, since as you well know, nobody reads this blog … except, apparently, you (and I hereby offer my congratulations at your intellectual stamina).

Postscript

This post only scratches the surface of my disgust at prevailing attitudes toward higher education. For a more comprehensive (but lighter-weight) survey, check out my previous post.

For further reading

• The Truth About Elite College Admissions
• College Application Frequently Asked Questions
• How to Choose a Major
• The Best Advice I’ve Received
• Going Broke at College
• The Importance of Goals - Debunked!
• Parables from the Rooster Father

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

The Autocomplete Zeitgeist

Introduction

As everybody knows, Google Autocomplete is a function of Google Search that starts providing feedback even before you’re finished typing your search query. The search engine predicts what you’re searching for based on what others have searched for (among other things). As such, it’s a good indicator of where people’s heads are. In this post I examine the national zeitgeist as of March 31, 2018. (To some degree Autocomplete is regional but I’m not going to worry about that right now.)

No, I’m not the first person to do this. But since you’re here, roll with me for a while….

Persecution mania

To start, let’s see what people worry about being busted for. This should showcase an interesting array of guilty consciences and/or unfounded worries.

Typing “is it illegal to” yields the following Autocomplete suggestions:

• Is it illegal to burn the US flag
• Is it illegal to drive without shoes
• Is it illegal to change lanes in an intersection
• Is it illegal to burn money
• Is it illegal to run away

So far, it appears a majority of Internet searchers are unpatriotic free spirits who hate wearing shoes, didn’t study very hard for their driving test, resent their own wealth, and would run away from home if they weren’t worried about being arrested.

Changing our query to “is it against the law” doesn’t change much except we get “to threaten someone,” “to not file taxes,” “to spit on someone,” and “to cheat on your spouse.” So the America-hating, wealth-hating free spirits who are miserable at home are also adulterous and gross.

“Can you be arrested for” causes Google to add “speeding,” “slander,” and “jaywalking,” which all fit our emerging profile  of the scofflaw, irreverent American. Bringing in the search term “imprisoned” yields Autocomplete suggestions like “for a debt,” “for not paying taxes,” and (perhaps most alarmingly) “for drink driving.” (No, that’s not a typo. I mean, it’s not my typo.) Seems that a lot of these social degenerates are misbehaving first and asking questions later.

“Can a police officer” … take a guess. Get a date? Be a winner? No, but nice try. Autocomplete suggests “search your car,” “lie to you,” “take your phone,” “take your car,” and “threaten you.” So it looks like these miscreants expect to get back as bad as they give.

If we back off the legal aspect and soften our query to “are you allowed to,” the suggestions get a bit softer, too: 

• Are you allowed to smoke weed in public
• Are you allowed to bring weed on a plane
• Are you allowed to bring lighters on planes
• Are you allowed to retire at age 50
• Are you allowed to use a calculator on the gre

It’s perhaps worth noting that these misanthropic lawless hooligans can’t be bothered to try to spell “marijuana.” Try searching on “is smoking w” and you’ll get a full rack of weed-related Autocompletes:

But searching on “is smoking m” doesn’t even begin to suggest marijuana:

Whoah, that’s a weird batch of Autocompletes. I saved you the trouble of looking up what “smoking money” means … it’s using dollar bills as rolling papers. Why would anybody do this? Could Zig-Zags cost that much? (Believe me, I’m the wrong guy to ask.) Mullein is some kind of flower that people are evidently seeing fit to smoke. Ditto mugwort. So apparently our carefree, resentful scofflaws are burning money for a reason; will get high on just about anything; and are approaching 50 and fearing some kind of pushback if they leave workforce. If all this weren’t strange enough, they’re also thinking of taking the GRE.

Who, what, where, why, how

Okay, there’s more to life than finding out what we can and can’t get away with. There are larger, existential questions like who, what, where, why, and how. Searching on “what is,” the top five suggestions I get are:

• What is palm sunday
• What is bitcoin
• What is my ip
• What is a rambler
• What is net neutrality

The first suggestions merely tells you when I started researching this post. The bitcoin response suggests either a fascination with alternative currencies or the never-ending quest to get rich quick. So which is it? Well, considering that my thorough explanation of bitcoin has not gone viral, probably the latter.

The question “what is my IP” is a pretty silly one, because most people have their IP address dynamically assigned via DHCP, so the concept of “my IP” is about as useful as smoking dollar bills. So our freewheeling unpatriotic ne’er-do-well, though he may despise paper money, likes the idea of cryptocurrency and wealth, even if he’s a bit confused about the Internet and/or retiring at 50.

As far as “rambler,” that’s a very good question … after several seconds of painstaking research I’ve determined that it’s the nomadic hobo, which for some reason takes lupine form, that is the mascot of Loyola-Chicago’s sports teams. Apparently the average American, while not driving barefoot to an extramarital tryst and/or smoking weed, is watching sports while pondering the deep questions that activity produces.

Moving on to the question of why, we’re presented with a laundry list of compelling mysteries:

• Why is the sky blue
• Why is downsizing rated r
• Why is fortnite so popular
• Why is my poop green
• Why is my internet so slow

I know just what you’re thinking: even though you aren’t personally a person who madly changes lanes right in the middle of an intersection while “driving drink,” or smokes weed on an airplane, spits on people, and hopes to get rich via bitcoin, you really would like the answers to those pressing questions. So I’ll save you a Google search:

• The sky is blue because it’s a beautiful day
• Downsizing is rated R because of multiple scenes of male full frontal nudity, 24 instances of the F-word, and moderate drug use
• Fortnite is popular because it’s a stupid video game where you shoot people (i.e., society is doomed)
• Your poop is green because you smoke too much mullein
• Your Internet is so slow because your ISP gave you a really lame IP address and there’s no net neutrality (whatever that is)

Moving on to “who is,” we discover that the cash-smoking moral degenerates of our time are more interested in Snoke (a Star Wars character) than Jesus, though at least Jesus took second and third place. Next up is “the richest person in the world,” who better watch out lest his cash get burned up (whether out of spite or as joints). Rounding out the podium we have Marshmello, an electronic dance music producer (probably responsible for the music people listen to while smoking mugwort and watching the Loyola game with the sound turned off).

“Where” gives us these suggestions:

• Where’s my refund
• Where am i
• Where is  xur
• Where is the final four this year
• Where to buy ripple

So the freewheeling adulterous drink-driver isn’t so anti-money that he isn’t impatient for his refund, and meanwhile wants to get rich on Ripple, which I’ve learned is like bitcoin. He doesn’t know where he physically is, which is what you get for rolling up plant matter in paper currency and inhaling.

I’m going to guess that Loyola made the Final Four … good job, Ramblers!

But what the hell is xur? Oddly, when I Google “what is  x,” Autocomplete doesn’t suggest “what is xur.” It suggests instead, “what is xur selling.” And when I google “what is xur,” the first result is “Where is Xur? Find Him here and See What He’s Selling.” In fact, the whole first page of responses deals with Xur’s location and what he’s selling. Now, I’m not about to be arrested because the cops track my IP address and bust me for trying to buy a bunch of Xur’s illicit products. So I’m not going to whereisxur.com. I looked up “xur” on Wikipedia and—check this out—there’s no entry. When’s the last time that happened? Suffice to say, if you want to know anything about Xur, you’re on your own.

And finally, the big questions all having been investigated, we reach the practical matter of how:

• How to delete facebook
• How many ounces in a pound
• How to make slime
• How to buy bitcoin
• How to tie a tie

I guess it just figures that a person who cheats on his or her spouse, spits on people, and smokes weed on airplanes would also be painfully active on social media, ignorant of basic weights and measures, and unable to tie a necktie. But making slime? Is this really the new national pastime? God we’re a weird populace.

The future

So far I’ve focused on Internet searches regarding the present. But where, as a people, are we going, or do we hope to go? To find out, I typed “am I going” and Autocomplete dished up a laundry list of common fears:

• Am I going crazy
• Am I going to die
• Am I going to hell
• Am I going bald
• Am I going to die alone
• Am I going insane
• Am I going deaf
• Am I going to heaven or hell

Next I typed “will I” into Google, but unfortunately this yielded a number of false starts involving the musician will. i. am. To jettison these I changed my query to “will I ever,” and the result was possibly even sadder than “am I going”:

• Will I ever find love
• Will I ever be good enough
• Will I ever get married
• Will I ever be happy
• Will I ever get a boyfriend
• Will I ever find true love
• Will I ever get over him
• Will I ever be happy again

The thing is, these are tough questions that would require a lot more information than a Google query can give (even with Google and other cookie-enabled agents presumably tracking our every move on the Internet). It strikes me that the people asking these questions (and thus making these the most popular queries) are using Google less as a search engine and more as a Magic 8-Ball. So why not just do that?

I tried this by going to www.ask8ball.net. (Note that this site isn’t encrypted so you better not ask anything too private.) I asked it, “Will I ever be happy again?” and got back “Concentrate and ask again,” followed by “Without a doubt.” (This isn’t as complete as “Wait … aren’t you happy now?” but I’ll take it.) Disconcertingly, before ask8ball.net answers, it briefly presents the message “Contacting Oracle.” This makes its responses seem less like magic and more like a database lookup. But then, isn’t that just like the Internet?

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Deliverance and Cycling Tioga Pass

Introduction

During my recent camping vacation with my family I tried to get some bike rides in.  You may have read about my Ebbetts Pass ride.  I did one other memorable ride during the trip—memorable more for my difficulties than anything else.  My goal was to head south on Highway 395 toward Lee Vining, where I’d turn west on Highway 120 (aka Great Sierra Wagon Road), which goes over Tioga Pass and into Yosemite National Park.  In addition to the pass itself, I faced several challenges:  the Nabokovian dilemma; shortage of time; shortage of water; fear; even a missing receipt.

Nabokovian dilemma

I guess “Nabokovian dilemma” isn’t a household phrase … yet.  (Quick, send everybody you know the link to this post!)  I’m referring to a memorable passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, when he describes his boyhood mania for butterfly hunting: 

oooOne of [the characteristics of butterfly hunting] was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania….  In this connection, I remember the visit of a schoolmate, a boy of whom I was very fond and with whom I had excellent  fun.  He arrived one summer night ... from a town some twenty five miles away.  His father had recently perished in an accident, the family was ruined and the stouthearted lad, not being able to afford the price of a railway ticket, had bicycled all those miles to spend a few days with me.
ooo On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone....  Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self  disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden   patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself.

The dilemma here is simply the desire to be two places at once, in my case due to conflicting impulses to a) pursue my individual cycling mania and yet b) be with my family.  Like the young Nabokov, I sought to sneak out early.  I hoped to get in a couple hours of riding and then arrive back just in time to make pancakes on the camp stove—but I was pretty sure this wasn’t actually possible.

Normally, this conflict would barely have registered, but the campground we were at was, though very pretty, also kind of spooky.  When cruising around choosing a site we couldn’t help but notice how many of them resembled a shantytown or homeless encampment, or even an Occupy site (Occupy Eastern Sierras?).  Sagging, faded lawn chairs; ad hoc canopies; larger furniture; I could swear I even saw a car or two up on blocks (though surely this is the embroidery of memory).  One empty site was completely covered in broken glass.  Our kids were oblivious, only noting the wonderful little forest of aspen trees.  I came to realize how much I rely on nice cars, spiffy tents, and other newish REI-style gear to signify recreational campers like me as opposed to downtrodden folks who got nowheres to go.  I wasn’t sure how enthusiastic my wife would be to be abandoned in this place at dawn.  (It was obvious she shared my misgivings:  during our reconnaissance, she hummed the dueling banjo theme from “Deliverance.”)

Meanwhile, there was a fellow camper who had given us pause.  Erin first encountered him while depositing our payment in the unmanned registration box.  He wore a t-shirt that said, “If it weren’t for flashbacks I’d have no memory at all.”  He had a mean-looking dog on a leash with a choker collar.  Erin, though friendly to the guy, nonetheless cut to the chase:  “Can you assure me your pit bull won’t attack my kids?”  He denied only that the dog was a pit bull.  Later he came by our campsite and was friendly enough, describing to me in great detail a bike ride I might try the next morning.  He looked pretty much like a cyclist, but he also twitched and trembled, which made me wonder if the build of a meth addict might be fairly similar to a cyclist’s.  True, he had cycling sunglasses, sort of, but they were gas station Oakley knockoffs.  What if his suggestion of a morning ride was just a way to get me out of his hair while he robbed my family?  Of course you’re shaking your head at my paranoia, and rightly so, but I’m just not used to strangers in “flashback” t-shirts being so friendly.

Probably I’d have ignored all of this entirely had it not been for my ill-fated attempt that night to find water.  The campground map showed various locations of (albeit non-potable) water spigots.  At least we could use this to wash up and do our dishes; we didn’t have much drinking water.  I wandered all over the campground and couldn’t find a single spigot.  A pickup truck coming the other way passed me really slow and the front passenger asked what I was up to.  I explained I was looking for water.  He flashed a gap-toothed grin.  “Just keep going thataway,” he chuckled.  “You’ll find water.”

So I kept going and found myself in the campsite at the end of the line.  There was a kid of maybe sixteen sitting by the campfire.  I asked about a water spigot and he looked completely bewildered, even frightened.  “What?” he said, his voice shaky.  Suddenly two adults appeared, looking alarmed, as though I’d been harassing the boy.  At this moment I realized the kid looked exactly like Blaster, the huge scary gladiator guy from “Max Max:  Beyond Thunderdome” who, once deprived of his knight’s helmet, looks baby-faced and vulnerable.  I repeated my simple question to the grown-ups, one of whom engaged me in conversation while escorting me away from his campsite. 

He was gaunt and ponytailed and looked like a classic rock guy from the ‘70s who’s been ridden hard and put away wet one too many times.  “What site you campin’ at?” he asked casually.  Unwilling to divulge this I said, “Oh, down that way a piece.”  (My subconscious slippage into his vernacular almost had me saying, “Down thur a right fur piece.”)  He acted as though the notion of a spigot at this campground was completely absurd, but gave me elaborate instructions on finding the creek.  (Duh.)  I was afraid I’d have to take some false turns rather than lead him to my site, but eventually he stopped walking with me and headed back where he came from.  Dang.

One other thing.  According to the flashback guy, this campground had a resident bear.  This bear was normally unaggressive, but Yosemite-area bears are known to rip cars open like sardine tins to get at the food inside.  Flashback said that this particular bear could recognize a cooler.  Most of the sites had bear boxes but ours didn’t; I wasn’t about to ask a neighbor to share.  So I had to cover up our cooler in the back of the car and make sure we didn’t bring any toothpaste or deodorant into the tent.

Suffice to say, part of me thought it best to keep an all-night vigil with a large Maglite across my lap.  But the other part wanted that morning bike ride, so I went right to bed.

Shortage of time

I woke up somewhat early, but not as early as I’d hoped.  When I’m camping it takes awhile to find all my stuff, unlock my bike, etc., especially when I’m trying to be completely silent.  Plus, there was the matter of the pre-ride, uh, lightening ritual.  The outhouse was really far from our campsite.  I brought my own toilet paper, and good thing:  the outhouse had none.  Given the little aspen forest we were in, I might just as well have gone there.  As it was this outhouse offered nothing except a platform to sit on and a little privacy.  Oh, and of course graffiti to look at in lieu of a magazine.

But then, this was a special campground with special restroom graffiti:

And graven with diamonds in letters plain,

There is written her fair neck round about ;

‘Noli me tangere; for Cæsar’s I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’

What? you’re asking.  Are you kidding?  Of course I am.  Just making sure you’re awake.  But those lines, from Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, did cross my mind for some reason.  Maybe it was the No-Doz.   Needless to say, most of the graffiti was totally unoriginal, like the old “Here I sit all broken-hearted” ditty (too vulgar for this family blog, but I could paraphrase it:  “Here I set, growing petulant, tried to defecate but was only flatulent”).  But then I came across this:

Yo momma is a myth

Atlantis is a myth

So yo momma is Atlantis

You may have guessed that I got out my pocketknife and carved below it, “This argument is not sound, because its first premise is obviously false.  Also, this argument is not valid because it commits the logical fallacy of ‘the undistributed middle.’”  But you would have guessed wrong:  I never, ever indulge in graffiti.  Besides, I couldn’t remember, that early in the morning, the name of the logical fallacy.  I could recall the logical structure the argument was surely trying to resemble—modus ponendo ponens—but what was it called when the mechanism was erroneously reversed?  Before I caught myself, I wasted a good many precious minutes pondering this matter (and related questions like “What kind of idiot thinks that’s worth carving on an outhouse wall?”).  Curses!

Shortage of water

It had been my idea to only buy only one 2.5-gallon bottle of drinking water the night before.  I’m just cheap, especially when it comes to bottled water, which always tastes uncannily like the tap water of the region (except in the Bay Area, where tap water tastes better than bottled).  In my defense, I had reasonably trusted the campground map showing water spigots.  Now, preparing for my ride, I had to decide how much water to deprive my family of.  I eventually set out with only one bottle.

No problem—I could just refill at the Mobil station at Lee Vining, where 395 meets 120, right?  Well, this gas station—perhaps because it has remarkably good food—tends to have a line at the cashier.  And a lot of motorists go through there.  What would I do if my bike got ripped off?  Walk ten miles back to the campground?  You must think I’m the most paranoid guy in the universe, but consider that along the roads near my home, there have been several recent cases of bike theft and even of cyclists getting mugged.

Plus, my bottle was just water, not energy drink, so I was relying on gels for sustenance.  Ever eat a gel without washing it down?  Didn’t think so.  It’d be easier to eat a sleeve of Saltines without water.  Of course I didn’t start pondering this until I was well underway, riding hard over an unknown distance toward Tioga Pass, a climb I’d only ever gone over in a car.  I had no idea what this ride would be like and how long it would take.

Fear

One problem with riding a road for the first time is worrying about traffic.  I had seen a pretty good shoulder on Highway 120 on the drive over on the previous day, but it only takes a short section of shoulder-less road to create a hazard.  Plus, I’d seen lots of these Cruise America rental RVs on this road.  The very idea of Rental RVs strikes me as dangerous, like discount sushi or amateur dentistry.  I recently watched a guy in a brand-new RV spend about 90 minutes backing it into his campsite.  He looked really stressed, as did his wife, standing behind it guiding him in.  She saw me looking, and to ease the embarrassment I said, “That’s a really great-looking RV.”  She replied, “Stick around … we may be selling it soon.”  Now, pedaling my way up the pass, I could just imagine a similarly hapless RV newcomer with no sense of the size of his camper whacking me without even realizing it.

If you’ve ever considered riding over Tioga Pass, I can tell you it’s just fine climbing it from the east.  There’s a generous shoulder the whole way up.  Heading the other direction (downhill towards 395), there are sections of the road where guardrails cut into the shoulder, but these are short; plus, you’re going pretty fast, so the likelihood of being passed at all is pretty low.  Even during the climb, very few vehicles passed me.  They tended to come in clumps:  half a dozen fuming SUVs stuck behind a Cruise America RV.

Another problem was the weather.  Despite having grown up in Colorado, where afternoon thunderstorms are a given, I stupidly set out without a jacket and now the clouds above were purple-black.  The air had that strange electricity you so often get at high altitude.  What is it our brains detect?  A constant shifting in barometric pressure?  The whiff of distant lightning?  A sudden increase in humidity?  The peculiar foreign wind of a storm system?  I wouldn’t say the sky darkened because it had never actually gotten very light.  A cold wind bullied me.  Here is what Tioga Pass looks like with better weather (I didn’t bring a camera on the ride; this photo and those following it I took a couple days later, during the drive home).

As I reached 8,000 and eventually 9,000 feet of elevation, all this became stronger.  I was hit with that delicious cool-rain-smell.  And of course I was suffering.  While my conscience continued to nag at me (“What might be happening to your family back at that eerie campground while you pursue your pleasure/suffering centers?”), I begin to bask in the sheer epic-ness of this ride.  I, a speck of under-fit cyclist, seemed about to be caught in a thunderstorm at 10,000 feet on a little highway in the wilderness.

Missing receipt

It costs $20 to drive to and/or through Yosemite in a car.  Your receipt gets you unlimited access to the park for seven days … if you have the receipt.  I couldn’t find it the morning of the ride and decided to plead my case using other receipts we’d gathered (a rather expensive lunch at the Ahwahnee Hotel dining room, and a batch of groceries that included day-old discounted sushi, which was disgusting) that proved we’d been in the park.  All this just to get past the toll gate so I could finish the last bit of Tioga Pass and say I’d done it.  Worst case, I could pay another $10, though then I’d have nothing to buy food or water with.  And this was looking like about a fifty-mile ride.  Hmmm.

In the event, there was a long line of cars at the entrance gate and I didn’t feel like bothering with it, especially since all manner of social outcasts, possibly including a bear, were probably converging on my family at that very moment.  So I headed back down the east side of the pass. 

The descent was sublime.  My wife and kids had felt something between awe and outright fear when we’d driven down it, but I’ve been descending mountain passes since I was thirteen and can’t get enough of them.  Descending Tioga Pass is sweet.  Good road surface, very few cars (not a single one passed me on my descent), and world-class scenery.  I even outran the rain (which did finally come to pass, but later in the day). 

Epilogue:  Mono Lake

Just a few miles from the campground, at the point in the ride when I needed to eat my last gel but had no more water left, I saw the sign for the Mono Lake visitor’s center.  I headed over there.  Here’s what you need to know about Mono Lake: 

• It’s pronounced “Moe No,” not “Ma No.”
• This lake is the breeding ground for 90% of the seagulls in California, due to a vast number of tiny flies that feed on an even vaster amount of salt-loving algae.
• Those crazy crystalline formations, called tufa towers, are not made of bird dung (which is what I told my kids), nor is “tufa” the Paiute Indian word for “tofu.”  The formations are made of calcium carbonate (i.e., limestone).
• There’s a drinking fountain right outside the doors, perfect for a paranoid and parched cyclist.

When I got back to the campground, my family was just finishing up breakfast.  Nobody had bothered them, not even a bear, and they had plenty of water left.