Tech Review - Is This the Killer Digital Detox Flip Phone?

Introduction

I don’t suppose I need to describe at length what “digital detox” is … surely the national dialogue around this is as ubiquitous as, well, phone addiction. According to this Pew survey, “As smartphones and other internet-connected devices have become more widespread, 31% of U.S. adults now report that they go online ‘almost constantly,’ up from 21% in 2015.” The idea that we could wean ourselves is attractive (particularly since tech companies are fighting any regulation of their products, such as modifications to make them less addictive). An article in the New York Times nicely summarizes our own role in this addiction:

In reality, [the writer Oliver] Burkeman said, whatever you’re working on triggers an unpleasant emotion in you — perhaps boredom, or fear of not being able to complete the task at hand, or concern about not having enough time. You take refuge in your phone in order to escape those uncomfortable feelings.

Another Times article, wherein the author describes her month-long switch to a basic flip phone to fight her own online excesses, recounts that “after about two weeks, I noticed I’d lost my ‘thumb twitch’ — a physical urge to check my phone in the morning, at red lights, waiting for an elevator or at any other moment when my mind had a brief opportunity to wander.”

I have recently purchased and set up what I think might be the perfect flip phone for breaking the cycle of constant phone use while still keeping some of the core features of smartphones that people really do rely on. If you’re considering the switch, or (better yet!) choosing a flip-style phone as your teenager’s first, or would like to know the state of the art in flip phones in case addiction becomes a problem for your or a friend or family member, read on for a full review.

But first…

Full disclosure: I didn’t buy this phone for myself. (I know, that sounds about as authentic as “I’m asking for a friend.”) I will confess that I struggle somewhat to limit my own smartphone use, and do fall prey to the pitfall of unlocking my phone to obtain one piece of information (e.g., current pollen count, since my eyes are itchy) only to see something on my screen that drags me into another investigation (e.g., has the Times approved my bagel comment yet?) and before I know it I’m snared in some article and only when I’ve finally freed myself do I realize—with a stab of remorse—that I can’t remember why I unlocked my phone in the first place.

Whew! That was a long aside considering I was trying to explain why I myself don’t actually need  to switch to a flip phone. I guess I trust in my own discipline to mitigate my usage of this troublesome tool. I fancy myself to be like the well-trained dog that will let the milk bone balance on my snout for as long as it takes for my master to say, “Okay, now Waldo!” except that I’m both the dog and the master (or at least think I am).

The fact is, I bought the flip phone for my younger daughter, who (as I explained in a previous post) wants nothing to do with the always-online, phone-addicted social media realm. (She needed to upgrade from her extremely dumb brick-style phone to something more durable, and thought with a flip phone at least the screen would be protected.) It strikes me that a phone that cannot addict the user in the first place must surely be the same phone that a recovering addict would benefit from.

(So why didn’t my daughter choose her flip phone herself? Because she doesn’t care. Part of choosing a phone is caring about it and geeking out over the selection process, and she can’t be bothered. She’d as soon clean out the cat box as buy a phone, and just as I’m the one who shares an office with the cat box—my daughters having fled the coop—I’m the guy who handles the IT headaches for the family.)

What does a flip phone really need?

Obviously this post wouldn’t have any purpose if all flip phones were interchangeable. But they’re not. Some are quite expensive (kind of lame when you’re looking for minimal capabilities) and some lack the features we may really need in a pinch. Here are the characteristics I think a flip phone should have:

• Voice service that actually works – ideally WiFi calling and 4G LTE
• Basic texting ability – but not more than that
• Decent battery life – ought to be a strong suit for a flip phone
• Lack of a full keyboard – a key component (pun intended, sorry) of making it hard to use
• Nonstandard operating system – removes you from the universe of time-sucking apps
• Pronounced lack of good games – because life is too short
• A basic camera – useful for informational snapshots
• A music player – because nobody has a standalone MP3 player anymore
• GPS – because let’s face it, modern man has lost the ability to navigate

The phone I eventually selected for my daughter, the Nokia 2780, has all this—and more! (And no, I’m not getting any kind of compensation from Nokia, which I would be required to disclose. And while I’m being parenthetical, don’t try to buy this phone from Amazon. Their janky seller strung me along for weeks and never actually shipped anything. I got it from Best Buy with no hassle, and no, they didn’t give me a kickback either.)

So here is how the 2780 stacks up in terms of my wish list.

The basics

First of all, this phone is cheap: about $100 including tax. It also has a nice form factor … compact but not too stingy, and the lid flips up with a satisfying spring (like a communicator from the original Star Trek), which pleases me. Here’s the closed-up view.

And here it is flipped open (cat included for scale). It’s easy to cradle this on your neck like we used to do with landline phones.

Voice service

Part of the point of a flip phone is to return to the good old days of talking live to another human … it’s not supposed to turn us into hermits. (Quite the opposite, in fact.) This Nokia works as a phone and sounds great. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to have a speakerphone feature, but it has great hands-free options that I’ll get into later. It supports 4G LTE, which you don’t find on all dumb phones these days, and this is important because the major carriers are shutting down their 3G networks. Best of all, this phone supports WiFi calling, which is a godsend indoors where cellular signals often don’t carry well.

Basic texting ability

You can send and receive basic texts on this phone (though the typing is clunky, as I’ll get to in a moment), and you can even send and receive pictures (which true SMS texting apps, such as found on very dumb phones, cannot). This is arguably semi-important because so many people still want to send you a photo and who wants to be a party pooper? But fear not, there’s a limit to the nonsense; GIF images come through but only as static images.

Battery life

I didn’t run a full battery of tests (pun intended, couldn’t resist) like CNET would, but I ran this thing hard (configuring, exploring, making test calls, adding contacts, etc.) and it did fine, with half its battery left after about half a day of use. Thus, a charge should last at least a full day, and the battery will probably do great on standby, though I doubt it’ll last for weeks like with truly old-school phones. There’s a configurable low-battery mode, and you can choose if and when to automatically switch to it. One nice feature is the USB-C charging port, because USB-A is no longer cute and we’re finally starting to get rid of all those old chargers.

Something else to consider is that this phone doesn’t have any modern A.I. capabilities, which saves energy beyond the phone’s own battery. ChatGPT, according to a Google query I just ran, uses over half a million kilowatts a day, which could power 180,000 US households. And ChatGPT uses over half a liter of water (i.e., more than a pint) just to write a 100-word email. This phone, by eschewing such stuff, is certainly greener.

Lack of a full keyboard

Let’s face it, typing with only nine keys (e.g., hitting the 2 key once for A, twice for B, three times for C, or four times for 2) is a pain in the neck, and will stop you in your tracks if you start to tell your entire life story in a text message. So instead of sending and receiving 20 texts about when and where to meet a friend, you’ll just make a one-minute phone call, and in the process you’ll get to hear your friend’s voice and remind her how convenient talking is.

The Nokia 2780 offers a particularly good (i.e., bad) implementation of 9-key typing. It tries to emulate smartphones by employing, by default, predictive typing, where you get far enough into a word that it can guess, and suggest, the rest. This works great on a smartphone—and not at all on this phone. I tried to type “hi” by hitting the 4 key twice, to get the H, but the stupid phone decided I wanted a word starting with G and suggested words like gig and gee. There was no way to stop it from assuming G was the first letter; I could not make it understand I wanted a word starting with H. Since “hi” must be one of the most frequent opening words of any text thread, it’s particularly frustrating that you can only get G-words. What useful words start with G? Gig? Gigolo? Giraffe? What’s worse, when you turn off predictive typing, this silly phone doesn’t remember your preference. You have to turn off predictive typing again every time you type.

As someone who appreciates a well-conceived, elegant user interface, I’m completely appalled. But as someone who knows how beguiling texting can be, and how oddly fast a human can get at typing with nine keys, I absolutely love this. It’s like the poison pill, damning any tendency the user might have to conduct non-voice communications.

Nonstandard operating system

This Nokia runs on KaiOS, a proprietary (yay!) platform that nobody, I mean nobody, is writing apps for. This is like a giant firewall protecting the user from giving in, again and again, and installing this or that single-purpose app, like so many appliances cluttering up the kitchen counter. My own smartphone has almost 200 apps, even though I feel like I truly do try to limit them. To not have the Apple or Android OS is the singular feature—the absolute minimum characteristic—required to really call this a digital detox phone.

That said, the phone does have a web browser. This could be a deal-breaker for those trying to live only in the real world, except that the browser works pretty poorly, thank goodness. It’s just useable enough that the user could go to a mobile-optimized website, such as Blogger, and do some light reading while, say, stuck in a line. This sometimes really comes in handy for me, when I somehow end up waiting around for half an hour and forgot to bring a book. And reading good stuff is a lot different from getting dragged into TikTok or something.

One nontrivial use for a simple browser would be the ability to check in for a flight and download the boarding pass with its QR code. This is really handy when you’ve traveled to some place where you don’t have access to a printer, and don’t want to have to print your boarding pass at the airport. It’s also nice to do a quick search for, say, a good taqueria when you’re traveling.

I regret to inform you that the 2780 does have Instagram. I didn’t set that up, needless to say, because just like me, my daughter wants nothing to do with it or any other social media platform, but at least I can say this CNET reviewer found the Insta experience highly lacking on this phone, complaining that “the interface was squished and its cursor was laggy as well” and “the quality wasn’t great.” Whew! The 2780 dodged a bullet there. (This reviewer concluded that using this phone made her “anxious” and “very uncomfortable” because her smartphone is like “an adult pacifier,” and instead of this being a wake-up call she concluded that she’s “more attached to [her] iPhone 15 Pro Max than ever,” which I find defeatist and a bit depressing. But then, as a CNET writer she can’t exactly become a neo-Luddite anyway.)

Pronounced lack of good games

This phone offers Snake, which (like all games) I’ve never played, but it looks pretty damn boring to me:

There are other games, but they look childish and clunky and how could they not be, when the screen is so small and lo-res?

At least a user who indulges in these games to escape his thoughts will feel extra foolish. It also appears that downloading new games would be impossible; presumably there’s no KaiOS equivalent of an App Store or Play Store, or if there is it’s limited and lame.

Basic camera

The camera on this phone is decent, which is to say totally lame compared to the highly advanced (and yet absurdly flawed) cameras on modern smartphones. The point here isn’t to get amazing photos that will wow your friends, but to get a snapshot to capture information. For example, you’re starting a hike and want a shot of the trail map, or you just parked your car and want to quickly record the location. And if you’re a middle-aged person with failing eyesight, it’s also a good enough camera to photograph a menu, so you can zoom in on it. The camera even supports video with sound (again, mainly so you can get a picture of something and easily attach contextual narrative). But you won’t be tempted to turn your life into a real-time photo chronicle, which I imagine your friends and family will (secretly) appreciate.

Music player

This might not seem like a big deal, but honestly, it’s nice to have music, which is really not the kind of distraction we’re trying to avoid. Menial tasks like housekeeping are a lot more tolerable with background music, and less intrusive, in my opinion, than podcasts. We all paid good money for MP3 players back in the day, and just because you’re forsaking your smartphone doesn’t mean you should have to carry around two devices (even if you could find your old iPod).

This phone has a really great music player, which not only organizes your MP3 files but includes the album artwork:

The point of those funky earbuds shown in the photo above is that this phone supports Bluetooth, so you can have great quality sound from your favorite earbuds or speaker. There’s an old-school 3.5mm jack if you’re looking to use, say, your kickass Sennheiser HD 800 S over-ear headphones. Now, in terms of storage, this phone has a micro-SD slot that will take up to a 32 GB card, which should be plenty. And it’s easy to install and configure the extra storage.

In addition to the MP3 player, this phone has an FM radio, and the app is pretty nicely designed (e.g., it automatically finds all the stations in your area and you can save your favorites). Oddly, you cannot use the radio with Bluetooth—it requires you to plug in wired earbuds or headphones. I suspect this is because it relies on them for reception, like an ersatz antenna. Perhaps you still have decent old-school earbuds lying around and won’t have to settle for the crap earbuds the airline gave you (if it even did).

GPS & Google Maps

As we all know, depression is increasing among men. I have a pet theory that part of the cause of this is that men never provide or receive directions anymore. By my non-scientific rough estimate, as recently as the ‘80s navigation represented at least half of all dialogue between males. We’d yack incessantly about not only the best route to take somewhere, but about what route we just took and how well that worked out for us. Now, Google Maps and their GPS-connected ilk, by knowing and sharing the single best route at any moment in time, have made this entire conversational topic unnecessary. GPS is like the opposite of a men extender. It reduces about half of our utility overall … no wonder we’re suffering.

Mental health epidemiology aside, the result of this ubiquitous technology is that if you ask for directions, you probably won’t get them anymore because mankind has now entirely lost the ability to navigate. You’ll just get a shrug which means, “I dunno, just use GPS.” (I try to offer directions sometimes and get the same shrug.) So what happens when you are doing digital detox and have forsaken your smartphone? Well, at least this phone has GPS and Google Maps, with all its essential functionality (e.g., you can search by business name without having to know the address). It’s not going to be that easy to use, and I’m certainly not recommending you try to squint at the 2780’s screen while driving, but you can at least review the route in advance and/or hand the phone to your passenger. (See? This phone encourages carpooling, another win for the planet!)

In case privacy is one of your motivations for choosing a flip phone, I’m happy to report that it’s easy, with this phone, to tell the app not to share your travel history with Google.

Extras

So does this phone have anything I wouldn’t want or need? Or that I didn’t realize I needed? Well, it does support email. I’m not sure how easy this would be to configure, and surely not all providers are supported, but I’ll bet you could fetch your Gmail on it.

This might not be a bad thing … the inability to check for an email you’re expecting might be distracting, though how far this goes could interfere with your detox. At least you won’t be tempted to reply via your phone, since its 9-key predictive typing is so gloriously clumsy and slow.

There’s one other feature I didn’t expect to see: a news app.

Such is my antipathy for algorithm-fueled Internet news, especially during election season, I didn’t even launch this app to try it out. I can only hope it’s the worst user experience ever conceived of for a phone, because if doomscrolling is convenient with the Nokia 2780, the terrorists (i.e., Big Tech) have already won.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Old Yarn - Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge

Introduction

This is the second “old yarn” installment on albertnet (inspired by my pioneering effort “The Cinelli Jumpsuit”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Bike crash on Golden Gate Bridge

During the late ‘90s—I remember because I was still living in San Francisco—I had a catastrophic ride on one of my favorite bicycles of all time, Bomb Pop. I named this bike after the popsicle that had the same red, white, and blue coloration, one color fading into the next. It was a Guerciotti, the team issue for an old pro team. When I was still in college I’d bought it from one of their guys, who’d never even built it up.

Just a couple weeks before this ill-fated ride, I’d replaced almost all of the components on Bomb Pop with the newest Shimano Dura-Ace, and even put new wheels on it. I had seriously considered just replacing the whole bike because this was the longest I’d ever owned a racing frame, and couldn’t be sure how sound it still was. (Steel rusts, after all, and I lived near the ocean.) So, before mounting all the new parts, I stripped the frame all the way down and had a framebuilder inspect it. He scrutinized it, even took it outside into the sun to see better, and summed up his inspection with the simple statement, “I’d ride it.”

Back then, all my bike rides started with a trip through the old, defunct Presidio army base and then over the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. It was almost always windy on the bridge, and a bit tricky because even though they segregated traffic, with pedestrians directed to the walkway on the east side of the bridge and bicycles on the west side (each protected from car traffic by a tall barrier), you tended to encounter confused tourists who either couldn’t read the signs, didn’t notice them, or felt some need to defy them. Meanwhile, it was a bit tricky getting around the bridge stanchions because it was narrow through there and the wind buffeted around and you had to keep an eye out for those rogue pedestrians. On top of that, around the stanchions there were giant steel plates over the concrete which were slick as snot on rainy days or even when there was just a lot of fog (which wasn’t rare).

And, there were the other cyclists to deal with. As described here, I often fell in with this or that random rider to take turns drafting, especially when it was windy. A lot of these riders were as seasoned as I, but then you also had to contend with tourists on rented bikes (wobbling all over the place, usually), and then the aggressive quasi-cyclists who took it as a personal affront when you passed them, and would sometimes put up a fight. I remember on one cold, damp day I passed some dude (non-Lycra, cheap road bike) who subsequently charged past me and stormed off ahead. I thought, oh dear, this guy is gonna try to keep too much speed around the next stanchion, and that steel plate is gonna be wet, and he’s gonna totally stack. Sure enough, when I got to the next stanchion he was on the ground. Steel plate is way harder than pavement and I’ll bet that really hurt. I helped the guy up and got him back on his bike—fortunately, he wasn’t seriously injured—and he seemed really ticked at me, like it was somehow my fault he crashed.

But that was a different day. On the day in question, the beginning of the end of Bomb Pop’s useful life, the road was dry but it was very windy and I was out of the saddle, just past a stanchion, sprinting back up to speed, when suddenly (to quote some Euro pro from a post-race interview), “I was going, and going, and then I was not good.” Out of nowhere, I found myself crashing face-first into the steel plate.

It’s peculiar to crash face-first. A more typical crash would involve sliding out sideways (which is preferable because your head usually doesn’t even touch the ground) or hitting something with the front wheel and flipping over the bars. In this latter crash the entire bike rotates around the front hub, so it’s not really a face-first crash; it usually results in a head-first crash which of course is not good, but there’s always the chance that your tuck-and-roll turns the whole thing into an acrobatic stunt, so you come all the way around like a gymnast and can come through miraculously unscathed. One time, in the UC Santa Barbara community of Isla Vista, I rode my commuter bike down a steep boat ramp at low tide to attempt a gnarly jump off the end, which I executed almost perfectly except that my front wheel landed first and was stopped dead in the deep sand, and I was launched over the bars. This could have been bad—I wasn’t even wearing a helmet, this having been biking home from class, not on a training ride—but I somersaulted in the sand and came up on my feet, arms outstretched in a victory salute, celebrating, I guess, how totally fine I was. To my astonishment, when I looked back (presumably at some pal who was with me), I saw some guy with a camcorder who’d filmed the entire thing. Damn, what I’d give for that footage!

I’ve only crashed face-first twice in my life. The first time was on the Broadway bike path in Boulder, which runs parallel to the road with a nice median in between. Alas, at the spot where I crashed the median was a rock garden rather than the grass featured in other sections, so that’s what my face landed in. I couldn’t figure out why the hell I’d crashed, and my forensic investigation (which began immediately) turned up, before anything else, a bunch of ball bearings. WTF!? Then I noticed that the steerer tube of my fork—this is the tube that extends from the fork crown up to where the top of the headset is, where the handlebar stem is inserted—had snapped.

This is not a known phenomenon in cycling. I mean, it really never happens. In this case it turned out that too little of the stem was inserted into the steerer tube, so there was too much leverage applied to too small an area of metal. Now, before you chide me for getting what I deserved, since the minimum insertion of every stem is clearly marked, I’ll tell you exactly how this happened. I’d bought the stem used from a colleague at the bike shop, and this absolute fuckwit had cut off part of the stem where it goes into the steerer tube (to save weight, the stupid douchebag) and somehow neglected to mention this to me. What’s more, he’d needlessly polished the new end of the stem where he’d cut it, almost as if to hide his handiwork. So he basically set me up to have this crash. (Since you may be wondering: no, his body was never found.)

So, this being only the second time I’d ever crashed face-first, I was just as befuddled as the first time. Right away I noticed that my front wheel was farther away from the rest of the bicycle than it’s ever supposed to get. The second thing I noticed was that my chin was gushing blood like an open water main. (Okay, fine, I exaggerate—which is easy to do when you’re bleeding.) The third thing I noticed was—and this was eerily familiar—ball bearings! WTF?! Again? 

(Wait—stop! I just fact-checked myself. I vividly remember watching little headset bearings rolling across the steel plate, but as the astute reader would be quick to note, the 7700-issue Dura-Ace headset used cartridge bearings. So this particular detail is the embroidery of memory. It makes a better story, but simply isn’t true. I could go revise the previous paragraph but I shall let it stand as a reminder that memory can be flaky. But don’t worry, the main facts of this tale are accurate because frequent oral retelling of the story keeps them alive in memory ... it’s only when I go to flesh out the details “on paper” that I run the risk of fabrication.)

No, the failure wasn’t a used handlebar stem this time. Again, the steerer tube failed, but this time it sheared off right at the fork crown. Probably sweat from riding the stationary trainer had accumulated and caused it to rust.

As I got to my feet and hauled my bifurcated bicycle out of the path of biking traffic, the words “I’d ride it” echoed in my head. So much for the framebuilder’s inspection! Now I faced the problem of how to get home when my bloody bike—literally bloody, as my chin was still dripping—wasn’t even walkable. If I’d brought the tools necessary to disconnect the brake and gear cables I could have carried most of the bike over one shoulder and the rest under my other arm, but as it was this was really awkward, especially clack-clack-clacking along in my cycling shoes. My chin was hemorrhaging the whole way, leaving blood droplets on the ground like a trail of breadcrumbs. Finally I made it to the San Francisco end of the bridge where there was a pay phone. (Cell phones were pretty widespread by this time but I was not an early adopter.) I tried to call my wife but it just rang and rang … she was out for a run.

At this point I was noticed by a group of grade-school aged Asian girls. I couldn’t figure out where they came from—this was in the evening, past the hours for a field trip—and there wasn’t a single adult among them. They looked very freaked out by the blood running off my chin. One of them came forward. She was wearing a very smart outfit, like a private school uniform, adorned incongruously with a fanny pack which she proceeded to root through. She produced a travel pack of Kleenex and pulled some out. Trembling slightly—equal parts fear and concern—she held them out to me. I suspect she spoke no English, or perhaps just didn’t know what to say. I thanked her profusely and began applying pressure to my chin. At that moment I heard a siren. Some fool had called an ambulance!

Last time I’d been taken in an ambulance was after a mountain bike crash in Tilden Park. For $600 I was driven the equivalent of two blocks, to where a helicopter could land. My insurance (through the university) covered only $100 of it. That expense gave me a lifelong antipathy toward ambulances, and I sure didn’t need one now. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely could have used a proper rag to stanch my chin with, instead of the rapidly disintegrating Kleenex, but I didn’t require a stretcher, a neck brace, a sirens-and-flashing-lights trip though a big city, and an outrageous co-pay. So I did the obvious thing: I hid. Fortunately I was obscured from view (behind the pay phone and the pillar it was attached to, if memory serves) and the paramedics never spotted me. I peeked a couple of times and they were just wandering around looking for some guy who’d crashed his bike. For some reason the Asian girls decided I was hiding for good reason and didn’t rat me out. Eventually the ambulance drove off.

I got back on the phone, failed again to reach my wife, and was stumped. Who else did I know who could come get me? I was in that phase of life where I’d moved to a new city after college and spent most of my time working; beyond that, I passed my time cycling and taking walks with my wife, so I didn’t have much of a social group yet. But, there was always the help desk.

The company I worked for offered computer network services to large corporations, with 24x7 tech support, including escalation to network engineers for thorny problems. Thus, there was a pager rotation among us, such that each week somebody was on-call around the clock. So I called the Network Operations Center and asked the tech to page the engineer on-call. The tech asked for the company name. I explained there was no company, I just needed the on-call to come pick me up after a bike accident. The guy was plenty perplexed and finally opened a trouble ticket,  being as vague in the report as possible. Eventually he bridged in the on-call who, after a good laugh, agreed to come fetch me. He arrived before long and drove me home. Surprisingly, my wife still wasn’t back from her run.

I had time to shower, clean up my road rash, and take a seat in the living room with a book and a good thick washcloth to continue the pressure on my chin. The bleeding hadn’t stopped but the pressure helped. When my wife finally arrived, I assumed a pensive pose, hand on chin (obscuring the cloth), while we had a brief conversation. The point of this (as described in this handy accident reporting guide) was to ease her into the news of my accident, while showcasing how okay I was, so she wouldn’t be excessively alarmed. After a couple minutes I casually remarked, “I took a bit of a spill on my ride today. I should probably head to the ER and get looked at.” Only then did I let her see my chin, and she agreed we should head over right away.

This being San Francisco, parking would have been tricky at the hospital. Our car was parked at least five or ten minutes from our apartment, and as the World’s Cheapest Man I refused, especially in those days, to ever pay for a parking garage. Plus, it was only a 20-minute walk to the Saint Francis hospital. It was surprisingly non-crowded and they had me stitched up in no time. Two nurses got in an argument over whether I should cover the wound or leave it open to the air. The doctor didn’t take sides, but did ask me if I had a general practitioner. This got me a glare from my wife—sore subject—and I confessed I did not. “Good,” the ER doc said. “Stay away from hospitals … they’re full of sick people.” My wife and I walked home and got on with our evening.

(In case you’re wondering, I was able to get Bomb Pop back on the road pretty quickly using an ugly green replacement fork, just barely visible in the photo above, which  I got from a friend. This was a stopgap, of course, now that I couldn’t trust the rest of the frame anymore. My next frameset was Full  Slab, which you can read about here.)

My little stunt with calling the NOC and paging the on-call earned me some notoriety at work in the days following the accident. I already had a reputation as a thrill-seeker after some of us got in trouble for goofing off during a snowmobile ride at a company offsite (turns out if you over-steer and goose the throttle you can do a sweet fishtail, sending up a dramatic spray of snow, but that the rental people frown on this sort of thing), and for a high-speed jet-ski crash at another work offsite. Several colleagues gave the stitches in my chin a good, close look. I got to tell the story of the concerned but frightened Asian tourist girls and the proffered Kleenex. On Friday afternoon our manager held his weekly team meeting, and as it wound down, he said, “Okay, one more thing. Who’s taking the on-call this weekend? Because Dana’s riding!”

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Can We Unplug Our Kids? - Part II: Mea Culpa

Introduction

I just read a very distressing New Yorker article, “Has Social Media Fuelled a Teen-Suicide Crisis?” which made me remember an essay I posted here a few months back. In “Can We Unplug Our Kids?” I referenced a new book about the epidemic of mental illness among teens, which cited social media as a main cause, and then I made the case that ahead of any societal interventions to protect teens on social media, parents can help fight the tide by setting appropriate boundaries. I cited my own family’s experience to support this position. Looking back, I realize that my post—by focusing only on my own history—neglected to consider how thorny the issue really is across the spectrum of American families. Now I have a sheepish feeling that my essay, if not outright smug, was naïve and incomplete, with air about it of “let them eat cake.” So I’m revisiting the topic here, to do it better justice.

A bit of background

Having just trashed my first post a bit, I won’t expect you to go (re-)read it now. To summarize, I explained how I guessed that some parents are somewhat complicit in teens’ dependence on smartphones, since the parents can use them as digital leash (i.e., keep tabs on their kids). In return the kids get basically unfettered access to everything these phones bring, including a steady stream of social one-upmanship and algorithm-driven news and gossip. Meanwhile, I asserted, parents themselves often set a poor example with these devices, erring on the side of embracing the always-online culture for fear of missing out. Then I explained the draconian online policies my wife and I enforced to good effect, such as no social media, no gaming, no phone until high school, no smartphone until college, and limits on video streaming and time online. My post explained how this kept my kids from getting sucked too far into the online world, and had the added (and unexpected) benefit of possibly making them more autonomous and resilient as young adults.

Looking back, and especially in light of the recent New Yorker article, I realize my focus was too much on parents and what they can control, without enough examination of the size and complexity of the challenge they’re up against. Sure, my family was up to the challenge, but I didn’t fully grasp how much my own privilege and luck played into that. I hope to shed more light on the larger problem, so that parents who happen to read this can a) cut themselves some slack, and b) understand how important it is that society better regulate this profit-driven online world to take some of the burden off of parents.

Privilege

It’s embarrassing mistaking one’s own privilege for a just, merit-based society. Decades ago I applied for a job and the branch director, who had the final say in hiring me, was the last to interview me. He stood about six-foot-five, and the first thing he said to me was, “You’re tall … I like that!” Obviously he was joking, and I took the joke as a harmless ice-breaker, but over time I’ve come to appreciate that affinity bias is a big deal, and the fact that this director and I could laugh about it really underscored how unfair it was. If I’d been short and he’d joked, “You’re short, but I’ll try to look past that,” I wouldn’t have found it funny at all. I’m reminded of a great New Yorker cartoon (click here and advance to cartoon 10) where a small fish is thinking, “There is no justice in the world,” and a larger fish about to eat him is thinking, “There is some justice in the world,” and an even larger fish, about to eat him, is thinking, “The world is just.”

The ability my wife and I had to set limits on our kids’ online life had everything to do with privilege. If these girls were raised by, say, a single mother working two jobs to make ends meet, they wouldn’t have benefited from nearly as much oversight. My wife was able to stay home with the kids, and thus have all kinds of time and energy to build rapport with them, and read to them, and never needed to use a TV or computer as a babysitter.

Meanwhile, I worked from home part of the time, so I could help set the right example, and have more time with the kids, and (since our one shared family laptop lived down in the home office) could even supervise them somewhat. I had the luxury of requiring them to log, on paper, their online time, and could police this. Moreover, through my job I had a solid understanding of how tech companies market online services, and how concepts like page views, dwell time, and share/forward metrics are used in designing and “improving” their products. I also had enterprise-grade firewall and WiFi equipment, and the know-how to use it, which made it possible to shape and limit my kids’ Internet access.

Obviously not every family enjoys this kind of privilege. This really hit home for me when I read, in the recent New Yorker article, about a couple who lost a daughter to suicide after her torturous experience online, culminating in Instagram’s algorithm sending her suicide-related content. Her mother lamented:

“In the Black community, low-income, where I teach, parents are not educated enough on any type of technology … We [parents] thought we were two well-educated people. I want to educate the parents first and then the students: What’s an algorithm? What do these sites do?”

Here’s an analogy. Suppose the sidewalk between your home and your kids’ school were littered with broken glass, razor blades, and used syringe needles. If you have the time to walk your kids to school, you’d see this for yourself and would take immediate action. If you don’t walk your kid to school, but you’re a connected and concerned parent, perhaps you’d hear about this problem from other parents. Meanwhile, even a totally overworked parent who doesn’t have time to talk to other parents would benefit from the overall community’s awareness of the problem. But social media, unlike my simplistic sidewalk scenario, features threats that are invisible. Addictiveness is built into these products by design, for profit; the algorithms driving teens’ behavior are opaque to anyone outside the industry; and these algorithms care only about increasing dwell time and shares, even if this means sending suicide-themed videos to depressed kids, instead of the phone number for a suicide hotline. How could a typical parent grasp this threat? It is a sad state of affairs that only a parent who has a background in tech, and who has time to read news articles like the one in The New Yorker, knows he needs to inculcate his kid practically from birth on the downside of the online world.

Luck

In my previous post on this topic I also failed to appreciate the role that blind luck played in my family’s navigation of the Internet and social media. For one thing, we got an early start, simply because my brother has kids a fair bit older than mine and I got to learn from their experience. One incident comes immediately to mind. Decades ago, because I wanted personal email with no ads, I bought a service with at least a dozen mailboxes on my own private domain. I used this for my own address, my wife’s, my mom’s, and my mother-in-law’s, and offered it to my brothers and their kids. One of them eventually came to me asking to be set up because, to her great anguish, Google had abruptly shut off her Gmail, deleting her address book and all her stored emails, because they decided nobody under the age of thirteen should have it. (This was probably because of their AdSense context-based ads.) The wrinkle was that Google never know any user’s age until and unless that user tried to sign up for Google+, their fledgling (and ultimately unsuccessful) social media platform that featured an age limit, hence the suddenness of the Gmail lock-out. This abrupt change caused quite a stir on the Internet, and I read—with fascination—the comments that parents put below one of the articles. One outraged parent, lamenting the disruption this caused his daughter, ranted, “My daughter practically lives online!” I couldn’t detect any irony in this statement, so I guess he saw no problem with her behavior, and I found this more than a little spooky.

I was also surprised, although I perhaps shouldn’t have been, that my young niece would blithely sign up for a social media account without thinking to ask her parents, and that if Google+ had accepted her, her parents might not have even known she had the account. This episode got me thinking generally about the ramifications of kids being online, before my own kids were even old enough to participate, which was a really helpful head start. Had I happened to be the firstborn instead of the last, I’d have been blindsided like so many parents.

I also got lucky, as a parent, based on my own approach to popularity and the regard of my peers. My parents were oddballs, and we grew up largely without TV, and my father in particular had an air of superiority which unfortunately rubbed off on me, the upshot being that in elementary school I was nerdy and mostly shy but also a bit arrogant. For example, I was outspoken about hating football, and pooh-poohed other kids for wearing sweatbands on their wrists like their favorite players and for collecting little toy NFL helmets. My shy-plus-slightly-arrogant personality came across as total arrogance, which (in combination with my nerdiness) irritated people and made me an obvious target for bullying. Being a pariah, and then rising above it when I was older, taught me a lot. More than other kids, I think, I realized how tenuous and ultimately pointless popularity was and is, the result being that instead of suffering from FOMO (fear of missing out) like a lot of adults, I have FONMO (fear of not missing out) or perhaps, as one of my nieces puts it, FOFI (fear of fitting in). Thus, I was able to easily model opt-out behaviors for my daughters; my strict policies would have chafed a lot more if I hadn’t walked the walk.

But wait, there’s more. It likely wasn’t just circumstance that biased me against putting very little stock in the feedback loop of social media. I’ve been reading lately about inborn differences in personality around how people respond to social rewards. As detailed here, reward dependence (RD) has been correlated with very specific neurotransmitter system, and “individuals with high RD personalities have a disposition to recognize salient social cues which in turn facilitates effective communication, warm social relations, and their genuine care for others, but these individuals are then disadvantaged in being excessively socially dependent.” My wife self-identifies as being very low-RD, and experience bears that out; she dislikes being the center of attention to the extent that I had to practically beg her even to have a wedding. I’m not much different (for example, I’m perfectly content to labor over this blog even though I receive very little indication that people are even reading, much less enjoying, my posts). So by random chance, we both appear to be predisposed by our brain chemistry to avoid online likes and smileys, which has given us a concerted parenting approach that includes, for example, disallowing social media on our WiFi. Many high-RD parents might naturally assume that the positive feedback their kids get online could be an unalloyed good thing.

On top of all this, reward dependence is thought to be innate and moderately heritable, and indeed my kids strike me as fairly low in RD, just like my wife and me. Thus, the success we’ve had with our restrictive policies may have as much to do with genetic traits as it does with our ability to explain and justify our position on phones and social media. Other parents, with higher-RD kids, might not have it so easy.

My final examination of luck involves the love my wife and I have for reading. We both have had a lifelong appreciation of books that so far nothing—not Netflix, YouTube, podcasts, or social media—has been able to compete with. This made parenting easier because we could enjoy, right alongside our kids, the books that had to stand in for other forms of entertainment. I can honestly and sincerely tell you that I enjoyed all the books I read to my kids, even the earliest ones made of fabric so the hapless kid couldn’t accidently whack himself with it and dent his forehead. It is without exaggeration that I can say I actually looked forward to reading Clifford’s Bathtime —a board book so basic and simple I had it memorized after only like the twentieth reading—every time one of my daughters asked for it. I combed the online used bookstores to buy up the books I’d enjoyed as a boy, like Cowboy Sam, the Moomintroll books, and the William Pène du Bois Otto books, so I could relive them with my kids. While other dads were watching sports on TV or manning the grill, I was sitting in the La-Z-Boy with one or both kids reading Bridget and the Gray Wolves or Hepcat. I realize this behavior is not normal, and in fact (though I probably shouldn’t admit this), half the reason I even wanted kids was to get to read to them from whatever book struck their fancy. I look forward to having grandkids for this very reason, and in the meantime here’s a recent photo of me reading to my great-niece.

In contrast, I once saw a dad reading to his kid in a doctor’s office waiting room, and he was skipping words and even entire sentences, apparently figuring his kid couldn’t tell the difference so why not get through the book faster? I was scandalized and my impulse was to drag the guy outside and beat him. And yet I realize not all parents are that into books, especially kids’ books, and thus they may have a harder time keeping their kids entertained without resorting to laptops, tablets, or a phone. What a random gift, this love of reading. I highly suspect that the sting of a non-digital life was made easier to bear for my children when they could curl up in my lap for a dose of not just dopamine but serotonin, or (later in their childhood) a good discussion of dramatic irony, or a debate about which translation of Nikolai Gogol is superior.

In conclusion

I hope you, too, love reading, since I admittedly rambled a bit just now. Suffice to say, if you are a parent struggling to compete with the endless barrage of images, videos, and messages flooding your kid(s) through their devices, and with this nonstop virtual party they’re attending that you weren’t invited to, just do your best. And, as a voter and a concerned citizen, please also do what you can to help reign in these tech companies who clearly are putting profit above any sense of social responsibility. I realize now that not all parents are in the same position I have been to impose strict limits on their kids’ activities online, and I apologize if my earlier post implied that it all comes down to responsible parenting. The problem is much, much larger than that.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - The CarbonTech Debate

Introduction

I just read a profile in The New Yorker about Grant Petersen, the founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works, a company which makes retro steel bike frames with touring-type geometry, which are built up (generally) with upright handlebars and puffy tires. They’re the kind of bike that you’d put a big weird Brooks saddle on, from which you’d hang a hand-tooled leather bag containing perhaps an old fashioned tobacco pipe, a silk handkerchief, a pince-nez, some hand-tied fishing flies, a leather-bound book, and maybe even a beautifully crafted letter opener. You’d dress up in flannel and loafers and ride this bike to the brewpub or coffee shop where crumbs would get stuck in your beard. Myself, being someone who (somewhat) recently advocated in these pages for modern aerodynamic wheels—the better to cheat nature and ageing with—I can’t really relate to the vision of low-speed, low-intensity, woolly hipsters on kinda heavy, needlessly lugged bicycles that cost $2-5K but aren’t much faster than my $265 1981 Miyata 310 … just a lot more elegant.

All that being said, I do respect Petersen’s ethos, and bristle a bit at wealthy wannbes on excessively high-performance racing bikes wearing skintight $200 Rapha jerseys. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that these guys are supporting the bike industry, and it’s their money to spend on whatever they want (and better this than a jet ski or a $1K bottle of wine), but the sport starts to look a bit silly when it tips too far into this high-end poseur realm, and the Lycra is stretched over a pot belly. Wool both hides that belly better and excuses it, because nobody is pretending to be a pro racer.

I’ll also admit that I sometimes get a bit nostalgic for an era when cycling was more affordable, and more Euro, and cyclists were more like outlaws, or at least outcasts. Many years ago I even sent an essay of my own to the Rivendell Reader, which they were nice enough to print (and which you can read here). This push-pull between tradition and tech has been with me for decades and today I offer you the below dialogue among a couple of college racing pals and myself, which had originally circulated among our bike club. I won’t share the entire thread, but here is the gist: one friend, T—, had asked about stripping the paint off of his beloved carbon fiber Miyata CarbonTech 7000 so he could repaint it. Another friend, R—, pooh-poohed the idea, saying that sentimental value notwithstanding, the expense of restoring the Miyata (hundreds of dollars) would be silly, and it would be better to buy a new, superior frame. This touched a nerve with both T— and me.

Here’s a picture of the bike in question, from the catalog, with the laughable thou-doth-protest-too-much opening line, “Put any misgivings about the reliability of carbon fiber out of your mind.”

The CarbonTech Debate – October, 2007

On October 23, 2007, at 6:33 PM, T— wrote:

Yeah, but your so-called “new far-superior modern” frames are fugly and not worth the price. Watching the peloton these days is like watching the detritus from a McDonald’s garbage can blowing down the street in a wind of eau de cologne.

And repainting the Miyata certainly isn’t silly for a few hundred, or even twice that, frankly. I know this bike rides well, damn well, because I raced it for two years, to quite a few significant victories (a few of which I believe you were taking up space as pack filler [sorry guys, this what R— likes to bring out in me, thus his use of the words “silly” and “modern,” and I am sure he is giggling near-uncontrollably (there are innocents reading this one R—, so behave ourself)]).

Are you telling me I can find a decent frame for $3-500 that will ride as well? In an industry that is increasingly pre-fabbed and preoccupied with production costs and experimental methods, where riders are more likely to be listening to 50 Cent than anything else, where frames are offered in S, M and L, and with bad angles, I doubt there is much out there that would fit the bill without breaking my little bank. In fact, triple that amount and I might only be getting close to something in steel, and double it again to get something close in carbon.

Also, R—, what “modern” bikes today capture the imagination like the ones mentioned in the recent exchanges? Sorry, rhetorical question, but you knew that.

T—

On Oct 23, 2007, at 11:58 PM, Dana Albert wrote:

Well, I don’t know about the rest of y’all (though I can guess), but I for one am giggling like crazy. Sizzling stuff. If I had a “pleasure vein” in my forehead like Dr. Shimano (aka G—, cc’d herein) it would be ready to burst. Naturally I couldn’t stay away from such a delightfully bombastic fray.

Can you really strip a cawbun fibuh frame? I thought it would damage its fontanel or something.

Given the most impressive of T—’s victories on that Miyata (national collegiate road race in ‘90, for those on this distro who weren’t there), I would personally have the frame bronzed if it (and that achievement) were mine, except that the bronzing process is almost sure to damage cawbun fibuh. Sentimental value is too rare these days, especially with regard to bikes. And as I’m about to get to, only the irrational, emotional part of our minds could conscionably champion the modern bikes.

To love a modern bike is to abandon your senses as would a fool-for-love. Why? Because they’re just whores, that’s why. First of all, you can’t count on them. They’re not designed to last, because the pros they’re designed for all have multiple bikes they jettison at the end of the season, if not mid-season. These bikes are not designed to withstand crashes, because that’s what the spare bike on the team car is for. Remember stage 17 of last year’s Tour [de France], when ‘Roid Landis soloed, and flatted at one point? He dismounted the bike and just dropped it on the ground like a piece of trash. I didn’t necessarily expect him to set it down carefully or hand it to his mechanic, but he could have at least winced or something.

And yet ... I did love my Orbeas. Both of them [though actually I ended up having—and breaking—four before I gave up]. To the very end, each time, I was just smitten. I’d be working in the home office down here and glance over at Fava [my late Orbea] leaning there against the wall, and I would sigh. Why? Sheer good looks? Well, it did look cool. And had flair. But no, it was more because I’d immediately remember what it’s like to ride that bike. Man. T—, you really would have to ride a modern bike to appreciate what R— is talking about. They’re amazing. That first ride on Spentje [my nickname for my first Orbea]... I’ll never forget it. I swept up Spruce two minutes faster than I ever had before. Two minutes! All I could think was oh my GOD, I can’t believe this! It was like having a 40 mph tailwind or something. And then on the basically flat section of Wildcat before South Park? Man, the bike just accelerated like nobody’s bidness, and those modern wheels, you feel like you’re just slicing through the air like, well, like a Ginsu steak knife or something. (T—, I know you’ve had some pretty trick time trial wheels, so maybe that part wouldn’t be quite as noticeable to you.) And on the downhill? More plush than any steel bike I ever had. As far as the riding experience goes, they’re simply better in every single category—except that you can’t get attached to them.

Because they break! What a drag that is! Going back to my old steel bike, Full Slab, after each Orbea broke and I had to wait for a warranty replacement ... those were dark, dark days. And Full Slab was full Dura-Ace, hollow crank, hollow BB, titanium here and there—not like some ancient thing (other than that godawful frame). Even with the modern wheels, I was miserable. Just miserable. It was like salsa made in New Jersey, or wearing a beige shirt to a bank robbery, or trying to get good tech support from some offshore guy making his developing country’s paltry minimum wage. You might as well just bag it. Now, I’m not saying your Miyata CarbonTech 7000 would be like that, but it would be on that side of the coin. (My backup bike, an aluminum/carbon Salsa, is very much of the modern era. It’s fast, really fast, kind of O-Thank-God-fast after Full Slab, that wretched thing of evil.)

But these modern bikes ... they break! It’s ridiculous. I didn’t even get 10,000 miles or two years out of either bike. They break for no other reason than they’re not made to last. Now R—, I know what you’re going to say—it’s just Orbeas that break. Bah. The only reason you don’t hear of other bikes breaking is because the modern riders treat them like the whores that they are, discarding them out of boredom before they ever have a chance to break. The modern cyclist has the fickleness that only wealth can bring, like an investment banker who trades in his wife every few years for a younger, hotter model. Nobody wants to keep a bike long enough to get attached to it (people don’t even name their bikes anymore!). Modern bike consumers are like junkies building up a tolerance—they can’t wait to have that exhilarating feeling again, the one I described a couple paragraphs ago, and they’ll buy and buy and buy to try to get more of it. They’ll never get it again, of course; you can only jump bike eras once every decade or so. They’ll shave off a few ounces each time, but they won’t drop five pounds while picking up extra stiffness and yet comfort. They’re just tinkering, at that point, and if they ever quit doing that and tried to love the same bike year after year, that bike would give out like a faulty boob job, quickfastinahurry, I don’t care what company made it (or, rather, had it made under the auspices of their brand).

Now, you make a pretty good point, T—, about bad angles in the modern frames. I assume you’re talking about the compact geometry, that makes an expensive road bike look like a BMX bike, with two feet of seatpost showing and a stem with all that rise (and/or gobs of headset spacers). But even beyond the aesthetics, I have a problem with the epidemic of cawbun fibuh frames out there (or “plastic bikes” as my pal P— calls them). What’s wrong with cawbun? As a material, nothing—I think we owe most of the comfort of a modern bike to cawbun. But you don’t get to pick your geometry anymore! And let’s face it, the stock geometry for the American market is about as reasonable as the stock ingredients in an American deli sandwich. All these short top tubes, steep seat angles, ultra-short chainstays, high bottom brackets—it’s garbage, pure garbage. Specialized made a big to-do this spring about how they spent all these millions (!) to get Tom Boonen a longer top tube, because the poor guy was having all these back problems. S, M, and L indeed. Straight-up pure garbage. And you get these new Time bikes (I think it is) where the seatpost comes built-in, and you gotta cut the top off to fit. Well, what if you guessed wrong? Or decided you hated your saddle (and who wouldn’t, these new things with the big valley down the middle, for paranoid stockbrokers whose prostates are shrunken by bad living, with so little leather you couldn’t make a child’s coin purse out of it) and bought a new (or better yet, old) one with taller or shorter rails? Screwed, simply screwed—go drop another three grand. For all that money, you get stock geometry ... somebody forgot about ergonomics somewhere along the way. It’s like buying a suit at the factory outlet store and they won’t tailor it for you. That’s my gripe with full cawbun. Certain modern frames, Cyfac and Orbea among them, offer custom geometry because they’re made out of metal tubes that can be cut to the perfect size by a human who knows what he’s doing, instead of you having to settle for a frame that seems to have been extruded somehow, like a giant robot taking a dump.

[This is the frame geometry I came up with for my Orbeas, which was absolutely perfect, but which is why the warranty replacements took so long. The name “Fava” refers to a joke I made to T— once about compact geometry … I said of it, “I think of it kind of how I think of lima beans. They have a right to exist, but I don’t know why anybody would want them.” After my first Orbea, the company adjusted my design to be semi-compact, as you see below. All the important characteristics were maintained with an only slightly sloping top tube. I told T—, “I wouldn’t call it a lima bean. A fava bean, maybe.” Click the image to study it at length.]

Oh, Lord, who needs caffeine? I’m ready to brawl! Against whom? Anybody! Everybody! Like D— W— rushing onto the soccer field because a fight had broken out ... did he know who started it? Did he care? No! He just started swinging! Full of the spirit, like when he won that sprint in training, sat up, and yelled “FUCK!” (By the way, T—, that’s what it’s like to ride a modern bike, if I haven’t made that clear enough.)

The question is, what is the bike for? To appreciate aesthetically, as a connoisseur? Or to go as fast as you can, to defy the ageing process and deny that your glorious youth is behind you? Both are worthwhile pursuits. Spiritually speaking, though, this dichotomy is worthless. Now, I’m not sure if rhetorical questions are ever supposed to be answered, but I’ll take a crack at your last one, T—, about which modern bikes capture the imagination like the glorious bikes of yore. My answer is, precious few. I hear people rave about Cervelos. Meh. And Felt ... that’s not even a real bike company, that’s somebody’s silly made-up brand. Scott? Please. A marketing company trading on their good reputation for skis. Skis! I’m offended. What else? R—, I know you love the way Treks ride and I’m quite sure they’re brilliant. But let’s face it, they’re the Dell Computer of the bike world. Next. Ridley? Ugly and terrible. And what’s with these pro teams riding Cannondales? Have they no shame? Nuff said on that sad topic. Man, I’m actually starting to get depressed. Even Orbeas, that weird Spanish brand we’re probably mispronouncing, are starting to get a bit trite. I can only hope the ugliness of their cawbun versions scares off the new enthusiasts by the time I get my new [aluminum] one, if I’m even that lucky.

Okay then. Needless to say I have more I could say, in response to the other excellent points made in this long and growing email chain, but it’s waaaaaay past my bedtime.

Dana

P.S. I’m not going to proof this thing and I’m sure it’s riddled with clumsy mistakes. I grant you permission to heckle me one time, in aggregate, for all the mistakes.

Epilogue

In case you’re wondering, my lengthy tirade about modern bikes ended up being kind of a last gasp. My best friend rides a Cervelo, with hydraulic brakes and electronic shifting no less, and it hasn’t even occurred to me to give him a hard time about it. I myself have—and love—a carbon fiber Scott mountain bike. I rented a Felt for a week of cycling in the French Alps and liked it just fine. The modern, carbon frame I have now is a Giant (the second-best-selling brand in America) and has lasted for over ten years and about 50,000 miles. On top of all this, T— himself, unable to elegantly repair a knackered rear dropout on the Miyata, eventually succumbed and has a carbon Trek that he bought from R—. Oh well … at least we put up a fight.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Major League Baseball FAQ - A Guide for Foreigners

Introduction

I am no expert on Major League baseball. That might make me seem like a poor authority to consult about the sport, but most Americans are far too steeped in its lore to be of much help to a foreigner. Ask almost any baseball fan what “the count” means, and you’ll get an answer like, “Oh, it’s simple. If it’s like, 3 & 0, that’s ahead of the count, and 0 & 2 would be behind the count. Very basic.”

I recently attended an MLB game with a variety of family members including my Dutch nieces and nephew, and it occurred to me that this seemingly simple game is actually pretty complicated. As a service to foreigners trying to wrap their brains around our national pastime, and for native-born Americans who could use a chuckle, I offer this guide.

Major League Baseball Frequently Asked Questions

Is baseball modeled after cricket?

No, baseball and cricket both descended (or, you might say, ascended) from other games, and though the history is murky, the sports of “rounders” and “stoolball” are the most direct antecedents. “Stoolball” holds the distinction of being the most disgusting name ever applied to a sport.

I get that the point is to hit a ball and try to run around the bases, which seems straightforward enough. But why does the language of the game have to be so complicated?

I don’t know what you mean.

Come on. When the batter swings at a pitch and misses, such that there is absolutely no contact between the bat and the ball, that’s called a “strike.” And when the batter just stands there doing nothing, it’s called a “ball,” even though the baseball is involved throughout every activity of the game including a hit. How is that not confusing?

Gosh, I guess you got me there. I guess it’s only perplexing if you haven’t been immersed in the culture of the game since childhood. I’d speculate that the weird terminology serves as a shibboleth. We like it better because we’re in on it.

How come the batter can get a strike called against him when he doesn’t even swing?

That is an excellent question, and I learned the answer the hard way. I was playing baseball in elementary school gym class, and was absolutely terrified of striking out because in those days, at least in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, mercilessly mocking a fellow student was not only tolerated by the gym teacher, but expected and even encouraged, as part of our education. I figured as long as I didn’t swing, I couldn’t strike out and be teased about it, and walking to first after four balls seemed entirely civilized. And yet the umpire, who was not the gym teacher but my regular teacher (whose very attendance during gym class was a mystery to me) kept calling strikes. I thought I wasn’t holding the bat still enough, and concentrated harder and harder on holding it absolutely still. My teacher kept yelling at me, with unconcealed disgust, “What is your problem? That was a home run pitch!” It would have been helpful if she’d explained the strike zone. It’s the area of space above home plate, at a reasonable elevation, meaning the batter has no valid excuse not to swing. If batters weren’t required to swing at pitches in the strike zone, I suppose the game could get pretty boring because lousy batters could just walk all the time. Like I’d dreamed of doing.

I gather a foul ball counts as a strike, but if a batter has two strikes already he can apparently hit as many fouls as he likes. What gives?

There is a special rule about this: you cannot strike out on a foul ball. As with the strike zone, I had to be corrected on this. A bunch of us kids were playing baseball in the street, and David K— hit a foul after two strikes and I declared him “out.” He protested, and we argued, and I told him not to be a baby, and he ran home literally crying to his mom. She stormed up the street in her apron and her horn-rimmed glasses and gave me a good scolding. “You can’t strike out on a foul ball!” she shouted. “Everybody knows that! What’s wrong with you?!”

(Was David’s father similarly supportive? Well, sort of. He did frequently host pickup baseball games for all the neighborhood kids at a nearby park, so his son could get extra practice, but Mr. K— also had a “house rule” that it was permissible to get D— (and only D—) out by throwing the ball at him like in kickball. This looked painful, and one time D— started bawling, and his dad gathered everyone around the poor kid and said, “Who wants to see a crybaby?” That was Boulder in the ‘70s.)

What exactly is stealing a base? How does a player decide to do it?

Normally, a runner can only advance to the next base after the batter has hit a non-foul ball or a pop fly that has been caught. But when the pitcher has started the wind-up to his pitch (and is committed to it such that he can’t change his mind and throw to a base), the runner can try to run to the next base because it takes time (though not much!) for the pitch to reach the catcher, who will throw the ball where needed to try to get the runner out.

You mentioned a “pop fly” just now as though I had any idea what that is.  So … what is it?

A pop fly, also called a pop-up, is a ball that goes really high and really far but isn’t that hard to catch, and has so much hang time any player in the outfield is allowed to catch it. The runner has to “tag up” (i.e., return to the base to tap it if he’d advanced a few feet beyond it, which is called “leading off” and is legal), and can do so only after the pop fly is caught. Interestingly, advancing on a pop fly isn’t technically stealing.

This is so terribly arcane. How am I supposed to know and keep track of all this?

You’re not. It’s really not that important. The real point of the game is that these players can hit and throw a baseball incredible distances, and that fans in the stands can sometimes catch (and keep!) the ball, and there’s food and beer and it’s all very pleasant in a distinctly American way that other sports, like soccer, are not.

What is the World Series?

This series of games (the number of which depends on how things unfold) determines which MLB team is the world champion for the season.

Is it like the Olympics where the best players in each country play for their national team?

No, it’s the normal league trade teams competing. It wouldn’t work to have national teams because all the teams playing are American.

You mean other countries never qualify? How is that possible?

Actually, they simply aren’t invited. Our national pastime, our rules.

Have foreign teams ever participated?

Yes, the Toronto (Canada) Blue Jays played in 1992 and 1993.

How did they do?

They won, both times.

Did they ever qualify again?

No. (Which I find a bit fishy.)

Cuba has won more Olympic medals for baseball than any other country but they have never played in the World Series. How can MLB baseball call it the “World” Series?

Because America.

What is the seventh inning stretch?

This is when all the fans in the stadium stand together and stretch, since they’ve been sitting so long on those uncomfortable bleachers.

So it’s like yoga or Tai Chi?

No, just stretching out your arms a bit, and singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Is it always the same song, across the nation?

No, in Boston they sing “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond.

Why Boston? Why don’t they sing “Sweet Caroline” in North or South Carolina?

Nobody knows. That is to say, I don’t know.

Why are the benches called bleachers?

According to Wikipedia, the uncovered wooden boards that traditionally comprised these benches were so named because they got bleached by the sun.

What is the “nosebleed section” of the stadium?

These are the bleachers that are so high up and so far from the action, you can barely see anything. The nickname derives from how mountain climbers can get nosebleeds at very high altitudes.

Why would anybody want to sit that far from the action?

Because it’s cheap. MLB baseball is actually a sport that you can afford to watch live, for as little as $4 for a whole game (which lasts, on average, over two and a half hours). This sets it apart from, say, football, which is far pricier (averaging about $150 a game).

Do baseball fans look down on other sports?

I don’t know for sure, being only a cycling fan (whom the fans of other sports all look down on). But at a Colorado Rockies baseball game I attended recently, I happened to wear (along with my brothers, as shown above) a University of Colorado (CU) Buffaloes t-shirt. (The Buffs are a football team.) Lots of people called out to us (“Go Buffs!” etc.) and made some hand gesture resembling horns. It was as though our modest show of support for a local football team elevated us somehow, even at a baseball game. Maybe it was the beer talking.

Speaking of which, are there baseball hooligans?

Violence at baseball games isn’t nearly as common as at soccer games in Europe. Maybe it’s due to the different energy in general. Baseball games don’t seem nearly as intense as soccer (or even American football), perhaps because there are so many games, and so many opportunities to score points. I almost get the impression that the spectators aren’t actually that focused on the game.

Seriously?

Yes. At the game I attended, I had a nice conversation with my niece’s husband about our fathers’ deaths, while watching the Rockies pitcher strike out several Cubs batters. Having something to focus my gaze on made it a lot easier to have this dialogue than if we were, say, across a table having coffee.

Are you suggesting that most baseball fans are just using the game as a foil to have deep heart-to-hearts?

No, I am not saying that. Honestly, I’m not really a fan and really have no idea what most fans do.

Is baseball cooler than soccer?

Hard to say. Soccer requires more physical stamina, but then it has the problem of flopping, which is disgraceful.

Is there doping in Major League baseball?

Yes, of course. There have been many highly publicized cases of steroid use. Even more prominent is the use of chewing tobacco, a known stimulant, which—though it’s legal, and not technically doping—is completely disgusting.

Is Major League baseball as dangerous to players as pro football?

No, not at all. There’s no tackling, and each player kind of has his own territory, so other than getting beaned by the ball or accidentally colliding with another player, there’s not much risk of major injury.

Is “bean” a technical term?

Actually, yes. The verb “bean,” and its noun form “beanball,” refer to the pitcher deliberately throwing the baseball at the batter’s head.

Wow! Does the pitcher get arrested and booked for assault?

No. As with hockey, the rules of the game supersede the law of the land. In all cases, the batter who’s been beaned is allowed to proceed to first base, to punish the pitcher’s team. In egregious cases, the pitcher can be ejected from the game. But the assault is not treated as though it were criminal.

Why do baseball uniforms have belts? Surely these teams can afford trousers that fit?

There is a rule stipulating this, which goes all the way back to 1882. It’s not clear that this rule is still in effect, but I guess these traditions die hard.

Given how hideously ugly modern cycling helmets are, particularly those worn in time trials, couldn’t it be said that baseball is actually far more elegant and tasteful, in its adherence to tradition over whatever-works?

Yes, it could be said.

What is a switch hitter?

Baseball players are typically expected to do two things well: 1) whatever position they play on defense, and ) batting. Some players suck at batting, so they get to have somebody else hit the ball for them. As a former bike racer, I find this ridiculous. Cyclists have to be good at pretty much everything: climbing, descending, sprinting, cornering, and tactics. Imagine if a rider with poor bike handling skills could just tag in a teammate for a descent, or if a pure sprinter could have somebody else tackle the big climbs for him. It would be a mockery of the sport.

So it could be said that you’re more elitist than the baseball fans who openly celebrate the CU Buffs football team?

Guilty as charged.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.