I've been tagged

Bad mom good mom (my wife's blog) tagged my blog. To paraphrase her blog, being tagged means:

1. I have to post five things about myself that I haven’t already mentioned on my blog
2. I need to tag 5 people I’d like to know more about

I'll knock off number one here.

My email address is bikeboy at gmail dot com. It's now on my profile.

Grace recently outed me as a randonneur. I was an avid long-distance cyclist until my daughter was born, when I ramped down my activity considerably. In 1999, I completed Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP), the premier randonneuring event. PBP involves 1200 km (750 miles) of riding in 90 hours or less. 3500 riders participate, riding day and night with only short stints of sleep. I also was an avid participant in the California Triple Crown series of double centuries (200 miles in one day). The picture is courtesy of bikeaholics, from the 1997 Eastern Sierra Double Century. It's taken from the back of a tandem, and I'm the lead rider in the picture (I like staying near the back of tandems).

Travel and the outdoors are also passions. Some of my best travel experiences have come by accident. In 1997, I won a KCRW (public radio) prize of a trip to Buenos Aires. Grace and I turned it into a three week vacation, visiting the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile (adjacent pic) and Iguazu Falls at the Argentine-Brazil border. In 2005, Grace got sent to a two-week school in Corsica (lower pic) and the family got to tag along. I threw this in so I could add some pretty pictures to the post.

I have been reading the Dickens novels in order and have been stuck for years on Barnaby Rudge. Although I know that the path to David Copperfield and Bleak House goes through Barnaby Rudge, it's hard to get myself energized to get through it. By the way, The Pickwick Papers is much more fun than I was led to believe.

My previous addresses have been San Diego (born and raised), Cambridge Mass (MIT undergrad), Berkeley CA (graduate school in Chemistry), and Boulder CO (postdoc). When Pat Buchanan gave his famous (infamous?) speech about the cultural elite, I was living in Boulder and he mentioned my two past addresses. I felt personally honored.

After six months of binging, I am now a recovered sudoku addict. Unfortunately, I discovered a site which has introduced me to Hashi, Kakuro and Hitori. Check out the link at your own risk.

That's it. Now I have to find five blogs to victimize.

The Iraq Paradox

Many have said that we should not leave Iraq until we achieve victory. My question is: how will we really know if we have won until we see what happens when we leave?

January in LA

When I moved to Los Angeles from Boulder, Colorado in 1993, my colleagues felt sorry for me and treated my move like a prison sentence. As a southern California native, I knew that California was a much different (and better) place than that imagined by Boulderites. We reaffirmed that last weekend (see Grace's post as well).

Here we are on a January day at Playa del Rey riding our Santana Sovereign tandem towing our BurleyPiccolo tag-along bike. It was our first real ride (25-30 miles) using this equipment combo, and it worked out great. It's fast on the flats and downhills and extremely stable; however, we did struggle a bit on every uphill. The uphill performance may reflect our conditioning more than the equipment. We rode city streets and the beach path. Occasionally we had to ride on major thoroughfares and drivers were very understanding and cooperative, usually getting out of our lane to pass. We have pledged to do this every good weather weekend from here on out, working up to an overnight tour in the summer.

Iris complained about a sore rear end throughout the return phase of the ride, but was an excellent sport. We did promise her that if she liked the ride, we'd buy her a jersey and bike shorts. She is usually keen to pursue any activity that has fashion accessories. We found some kid-sized bike wear at Performance, and she should feel much better next time out.

The Gay Lion?

Grace just blogged about our day in LA. At 5:00 pm, I knew Iris was running out of patience, so I watched a screening of The Wizard of Oz with her at the LACMA film series, while mom toured the exhibits. For the first time, I realized that the cowardly lion is gay (He is just a "dandy" lion, and displays a rather limp wrist). Judging by the moments that got laughter from the adults in the audience I wasn't the only one who thought so. Googling "cowardly lion gay" produces some interesting hits, proving that I'm not the only person hell bent on destroying childhood.

Inspirational Movies (don't care for them)

After coming home from seeing Little Children, we were discussing movies with our babysitter, and she mentioned that she wanted to see Freedom Writers. Without much thought my reply was, "I don't really like inspirational movies". I also thought that I must come across as a terrible person for saying that. I was referring to the dozen or more pictures that come out each year about either a teacher who connects with seemingly hopeless students, a ragtag sports team that transforms itself, or a hero who overcomes addiction or illness. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all inspirational movies seem the same, whereas one can always find new and interesting ways to be cynical or depressing.

It's easy to mistake nobility of purpose for quality. The Academy does it all the time choosing Rocky over Network, Taxi Driver and All the President's Men or Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, or Dances with Wolves over Goodfellas. The bottom line for me is that all great movies no matter the tone or topic are inspirational (as is any great human achievement). I walk out of movies as diverse as It's a Wonderful Life (yes, I do have a weakness for it), Kill Bill or Requiem for a Dream feeling pretty much the same way, exhilarated.

You can see the AFI's list of 100 most inspirational movies here. Quite a few of these are excellent films, but the voters took a very broad view of what inspirational means (a cynical movie like Bridge over the River Kwai is inspirational??). I'm looking for a fight, so I'll add that in the top 10 are two good (and certainly noble) films that are consistently overrated as among the best of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Grapes of Wrath.

The Future and its Enemies

I just finished The Future and its Enemies by Virginia Postrel. It deftly describes dynamism, the messy but incredibly vital process which creates the inherently unknowable future. The book describes these processes as they apply to diverse human enterprises, including high technology, evolution of cities, and even fashion. It's also a polemic work, which cautions us against stasism ( resistance to change) and technocracy, which values change but seeks to control it (usually producing unintended consequences). I agree with the author that we should not unnecessarily stand in the way of dynamism (and she provides excellent examples of bad policy); however my definition of what is necessary would probably differ from hers. Nevertheless, it's a recommended read that will change the way you look at the world.

If you're further interested in the processes that shape the future, Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is an outstanding work which describes cultural and technological evolution over the entire sweep of human history. The emergence of agriculture, cities and written language are shown to occur by processes identical to those described by Ms. Postrel (I don't know if either author would agree). In both books, the ability to trade and compete with diverse partners is shown as vital to human development. However, there is a key difference between the books. While Ms. Postrel's work emphasizes the unpredictable nature of the future, Mr. Diamond shows how geographical considerations (most importantly the availability of native plants and animals for agriculture) inevitably lead to the development of the touchstones of civilization. Of course, this inevitability is only evident to us when we're looking back in time!

Full disclosure - Grace (my wife) and I recently met Ms. Postrel socially, which inspired me to read her book.

The iPod

Santa brought me an iPod, and like all great devices that enrich our lives, it's been sucking all of my time away from useful enterprises. First, I had to convert our CD collection to MP3. Then I had to find a way to play the tunes in our car so we could have our whole collection along on every roadtrip. The cassette adapter was a disaster (terrible sound). Fortunately my friend Rich told me about a product by Blitzsafe, which hooks up to the CD changer port on your car stereo (there are different versions depending on your car make and model) It charges your iPod while it's hooked up and for twenty minutes after turning the motor off.

Our Toyota Sienna fit the hardware inside no problem; I just used some sticky back velcro to secure the Blitzsafe hardware to the top of the car stereo, and reattached the dashboard panels leaving the iPod cable sticking out. I only dropped one screw which will be rattling around in our Sienna for all eternity. My wife doesn't know I dropped the screw yet, but she'll find out next time she checks out the blog. The next and much simpler project is getting the iPod on our home audio system (an interim measure until we get a product like the just introduced Apple TV).

Iris and the Movies: Introduction

A recurring theme at Bad Dad will be exposing my six year old daughter to movies most would deem inappropriate (in accordance with the Bad Dad theme). Don't worry, I don't think she's ready for A Clockwork Orange or Taxi Driver yet. A. O Scott just wrote a piece on taking kids to adult fare, and it resonated pretty deeply with my philosophy.

Children are very lucky to live in what I would call the golden age of children's movies. The Harry Potter series, Pixar movies and a host of others are far ahead of what passed for children's fare in the '70s, or possibly at any time in movie history. Our parents gladly dropped us off at those dumb '70s movies, whereas now I find myself dropping hints to my daughter about kids movies that I want to see. However, a good part of my childhood moviegoing involved being dragged along to movies made for adults and about adults. Children got in for about a third of the adult price, so it was cheaper than a babysitter and I usually wanted to go. There were quite a few movies I didn't understand, but that was OK because children are accustomed to not understanding everything they see and hear; I can recall that once the adults got going at the dinner table they might as well have been talking in a foreign language.

Society's current need to cocoon children is most evident in the MPAA ratings. Growing up, one of my good friends going up was banned from attending movies with a rating other than "G". My research for this posting indicates that he could have seen: The Italian Job (1968), Oliver! (which has the vicious murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes), 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gone with the Wind, four of the five Planet of the Apes movies, Fiddler on the Roof, Airport, the Andromeda Strain, and Ice Station Zebra. Many of these would be PG-13 today, yet they were considered appropriate family fare in the "good old days".

Incidentally, the real reason (IMHO) for the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1984 was not that movies were getting more violent. By 1984, the criteria for a G rating were so severe that only a few sugar-coated outliers could achieve the rating. With all those formerly G movies getting pushed up to PG, the PG category was simply too broad. Creation of the PG-13 rating enabled the territory once occupied by G to be split into PG and G.

My own precocious recollections include seeing Lawrence of Arabia as an early grade schooler, the French Collection at the age of 8 and the Godfather as a nine year old. Somewhere in there I saw Cabaret, and didn't have a clue of what was going on (although I liked the musical numbers). The James Bond movies were favorites from age nine on. These were not scarring experiences that turned me into a psycopath, but moviegoing adventures that I recall vividly (especially Lawrence)

Next I'll talk about the best place to start with even the youngest of children, musicals, an area where my daughter is now an expert. When she was two, she would tell people that her favorite movie was Chicago. I'm also going to try out the silent clowns; I'll let you know how that works out.

Mission Statement

For about a year now my better half, who resides at badmomgoodmom, has been urging me to write a blog. At home I love to spout off about the movies, arts and politics, and she probably thinks that if I blog about it, she'll no longer have to listen. Plus, if I have to communicate these ideas down in writing, perhaps they'll be better formed, or I'll just realize how idiotic they were to begin with, and spare everyone including my readership (which so far is just me).

The blog is titled Bad Dad because it will talk about what Dad is doing when he is being bad and neglecting family life or the house. Even the time spent blogging is a part of being Bad Dad. The passions I pursue as Bad Dad include bicycling, bike commuting, travel, the movies (including an embarrassingly large DVD collection), and omnivorous reading. Mostly, I'll be documenting these passions for myself, but it's a blog so everyone is welcome.