what's-it's-name Park

I'm not necessarily opposed to all stadium naming deals. As long as the name isn't replacing a historically significant name and is on the stadium long enough to form a lasting recognition between the name of the stadium and the team which plays there, fair enough.

But there's a few problems with the current spate of brand-new ballparks with brand-new sponsor naming rights.

Stadiums in the first wave of the building boom have already moved on and changed from their initial name. I still think of the stadium in Houston as Enron Field, and I still refer to the Giants' park as PacBell.

The other problem is with so many new corporately-tagged stadiums, the names just blur together. I saw a game in Philadelphia just a couple weeks ago, and I had to look up the name of the stadium when I started to write this post.

The name (Citizen Bank Park) blurs away in my memory, and the park itself generally does the same. It has all the requisite new-retro styling. The concessions are varied and plentiful (and in a nice touch, a decent selection of microbrews are the same price as the big-name standards).

There are a few nice touches. The bullpens are both in centerfield, with the visitors' pen stacked a level above the home pen. When a visiting reliever is called into the game, he has to run down the stairs and past the Phillies bullpen staff to reach the field. Above the bullpens is a standing-room concourse, so fans can perch at the rails and look down at the pitchers warming up. It's like a balcony seat, with a pretty good view of the game as well.

There's also a few confusing touches. Television monitors are mounted above the back of the lower-level sections along the third-base line, so fans in the concourse or the further-back seats can see the action. There are no such monitors along the first-base side, even though the areas are otherwise symmetrical and I believe the price levels of the seats are the same.

I bought an upper-deck seat, but mostly stayed with the standing room crowd. I wandered the stadium, stopping to watch each inning behind the seats of a different section. (Ushers were stationed just about everywhere checking tickets, although I probably could have made it into a lower-level seat long before I actually did in the eighth inning).

The atmosphere reminded me of St. Louis. Same red-clad crowd, same general feeling of a baseball-savvy crowd. There was a surprising crowd of more than 42,000 for a Wednesday afternoon game. In a nice touch, the ushers prevented anyone moving from the concourse into their seating area during an at-bat.

The game was a good one, as well. Tied up late before the Phillies pushed past the White Sox for what was, in the end, an easy win.

details

I'm getting married in less than two weeks. It hit me today: in two weeks, I won't have to deal with any more details, any more getting ready for the wedding. After this, I won't have an endless to-do list to deal with. I might have some evenings free without the specter of details forgotten hanging in the air.

After this, all I'll have to worry about is finding work. Piece of cake.

heat

Hand

Originally uploaded by slack13

The past couple of weeks D.C.'s weather has officially gone from "pleasantly sunny" to "muggy as hell."
It hasn't been as abrupt as that - the first hints of the humidity showed at times, but the next day or so the air would clear and it would just be beautifully sunny, the type of weather that cries for you to go outside and revel in it.
The last couple of days, however, the weather has turned into the type that screams at you to stay inside, and turn on the AC while you're at it. I lasted until early June before even installing our window unit (although we did break down and buy a fan a week or so earlier). Today marks the first time I have needed, and I mean needed, to turn it on two days in a row.
When Kirsten first started to complain about the sultriness of the weather, I was able to laugh it off. After all, I'd just returned from New Orleans. Nothing here in early June could compare to New Orleans (and I don't think, even now, it's reached New Orleans-in-May levels). Now, however, the New Orleans trip has worn off. Even the four years in Mississippi and time spent in New Orleans never prepared me for the onslaught of stickiness summers below the Mason-Dixon line bring. A childhood of the dehydrated air of Montana ensures my body will never accept the continual oozing of sweat from the pores. It'll only be worse, much worse, in mid-July after having a two-week humidity-free vacation in Montana.



A few weekends ago, the weather was less humid and merely brain-meltingly hot. This happened to be the weekend my brother and sister-in-law were in town before leaving the country for a Peace Corps stint. The weekend they decided it would be a good idea to walk from my house to Georgetown, then down to the mall. I wasn't prepared for a three-mile walk with the 90+ degree sun beating down, and the concrete soaking it up and then spitting it back to bake us from below.

Awakening
Originally uploaded by slack13

The next day was a little better. We drove to Hain's Point, where we watched the planes take off from National Airport and clamored about on this big silver guy trying to claw his way up out of the ground.

phone phun

Since moving into D.C. we've noticed an odd phenomenon - when we're talking on a cell phone at our house (where we don't get a real strong signal) and a plane flies over (which happens often, since we're under the flight path to Reagan National) our service momentarily cuts out.
I don't know why a plane overhead would affect signals from the ground-based cell towers. Our only (tongue-in-cheek) theory is the CIA is jamming cell signals underneath planes over DC.

Anybody else got an explanation?

Fire

The day after
Originally uploaded by slack13

Here's a post I just never got around to writing-

Two days after my arrival in D.C. (April 30) a pair of local landmarks burned. The one which caught most of the city's attention was in the Eastern Market. On the same day, the Georgetown Library, just down the street from my house, also caught fire.
I've still never been to the Eastern Market (the merchants are still up and running, although in temporary locations while the building is being repaired). I've never been into the Georgetown Library, either, but I'd certainly planned to. Now I don't know what the closest library to my house is, but it's not within easy walking distance.
I'm not sure if the spate of fires in interesting buildings upon my D.C. arrival bodes poorly for my future in the city.

back in Thailand

Memories of Thailand came flooding back Saturday night. The reminiscing wasn't prompted by a travel discussion, a photo or a similar landscape. The memories were prompted by a bar.
Specifically, Dr Dremo's in Arlington. The lower level of the bar is a dive (although the crowd turns it into a trendy dive) built in the style of Southeast Asia.
I'm sure this isn't on purpose. But the wall-less, roofed area on a concrete slab sets the scene just right. The colored lights and crazy-quilt decorating scheme continues the trend. And the plastic patio-furniture tables and chairs set up on the concrete, sitting in the humid air under weakly turning ceiling fans, perfectly captured the ambiance of just about every Southeast Asia bar, or restaurant, we entered.
Of course, the details shattered the illusion. There was a wide variety of beer, and it all cost considerably more than 80 cents a bottle. It didn't even come in the preferred Asian 600ml bottle, but in plastic keg cups. And once we walked upstairs, the bar transformed into a multi-level pool hall.


Image from Flickr user Furcafe

Saw my first urban deer today, driving into downtown. The doe was just hanging out in a well-upscale yard, grazing away just a few blocks from the park. A bit out of place, but a nice addition to the neighborhood all the same.

Turner Field

Part two in what could be an ongoing series:

For my trip to Atlanta, one of my friends picked up a few tickets to see the Braves take on the Mets. Turner Field made a good first impression - the tickets for the upper deck were on Tuesday two-for-one special, which put them at $4 a seat.

The upper deck seats also pleasantly surprised - although we were only a dozen or so rows below the top of the stadium above third base, the view was decent. We could see the whole field, and the stadium was built up enough it felt like we were looking down on the field, rather than out at it. It's enough of a distinction. I've sat in stadiums where the upper decks were pushed away from the field, and you felt like you were separated from the experience. Turner avoided that problem (although it still doesn't compare to Tiger Stadium, my gold standard for close-to-the-action upper deck seats).

The game was decent - an easy Braves win, but the lead was built up inning by inning, to keep people interested.
It wasn't a perfect day to watch a game - smoke in the air from Southern wildfires made my throat feel like I'd been swallowing sandpaper by the end. The overall experience at Turner, however, was pleasant.
The stadium is, like all the other stadiums built in the last 15 years or so, built on the Camden Yards neo-retro model. Lots of brick and green-painted steel. All nice, but there is only one feature of the ballpark that truely stands out and captures your attention. The center-field video screen scoreboard presented a sight to behold.
Apparently the high-definition screen was the largest in the world when it was installed, or at least is one of the largest you're going to find. The picture is about 80 feet tall and 80 feet wide, and unlike old-school video screens, the picture jumps out at you no matter what viewing angle you're at. (Well, I didn't sit directly in front of it, so I can't vouch for the close-up, directly-underneath view).
The big screen was complemented by something I've noticed elsewhere - in the two years I was out of the country most stadiums seem to have replaced the runs/hits/errors lighted scoreboards that used to sit somewhere on a narrow front of the upper seating decks with similarly narrow video screens. The screens show the scoreboard info during the action, and advertising or promotional info between innings.
The gadget-geek in me loves the high-def screens and video boards. The baseball purist in me isn't sure what to think - the old light boards weren't particularly aestheticly pleasing. As long as Fenway doesn't replace it's hand-operated board (and at least a few of the new parks keep their hand-operated out-of-town scoreboards as an homage) I can't think of a reason to decry the change.

Here is a wonderful essay on the character of New Orleans from a New Yorker writer who is writing a book on the city post-Katrina. Essentially, he talks about how the tyranny of time prevalent in most American's lives has far less of a hold in NOLA. It's certainly worth taking the time to look through the archives of the rest of the blog.

The essay reminded me of an observation I'd been struck by after we'd spent some time in the cities of Southeast Asia. New Orleans is often described as the "most European" of the U.S.A.'s cities, because of its unique character and French and Spanish influences, especially in the pedestrian-friendly (also a phrase you can't use very often in the States) French Quarter.
To me, however, the description doesn't quite fit. New Orleans, for better and for worse, is the closest thing the States has to a third-world city. The decay-inducing intense humidity, the cracked streets, the political system - these would be some of the "for worse." The easy-going lifestyle, the very loose adherence to time and appointments, the day-to-day absurdities which force you to laugh and loosen your own interpretation of what needs to happen - these I would include in the "for better."

FEMA trailers

FEMA trailer
Originally uploaded by w0bbly

A point I feel needs to be made:

The phrase "FEMA trailer," heard often on the post-Katrina news about New Orleans and Mississippi, conjured up an image in my head of the mobile-home type of trailer. The type which takes -wide as an adjective: single-wide, double-wide, triple-wide. The trailer of the trailer parks I know and make fun of.

No. The unfortunates who live in the FEMA trailers as a home of last resort have a trailer, a vehicular appendage which can actually be towed down the road.
It's a shocking sight to see streets lined with a FEMA trailer in every front yard. To see the lengths of PVC pipe on the outside forming a semi-permanent plumbing system, and to know in some cases this will be semi-permanent housing. Many of these trailers have been called home for more than a year and a half, and in what I assume is a weighty proportion of cases, the residents will have little option but to call them home for the foreseeable future.
At least when you see the FEMA trailers parked in the front yard of a flood-damaged house you know the residents have a chance of moving out of the front lawn and into the house at some point. Far more depressing are the FEMA trailer parks. Rows upon rows of the trailers parked on lots of white gravel, fenced in by green-mesh-covered chain link.

FEMA
Originally uploaded by yellowjacket186

One day I watched a couple kids run along the row of gravel between the trailers and realized they probably have no home to hope to move into. Perhaps their house was washed away. Perhaps they were renting, and the post-Katrina housing crunch has priced them out of the market. Either way, they are likely to spend a lot more of their childhood playing on gravel and sleeping in a mid-level RV.