Contemplations on Mr. B's Room

One of the fun things about being a substitute teacher is that I get to 'test drive' a lot of different classrooms. I get to see how other teachers have their rooms organized and what kinds of things they do with the space—decorations on the walls and so on. I was in a room yesterday where the teacher had a number of posters, pictures, and bumper stickers posted, many of which I found thought-provoking. Here's a sampler.
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"Never let school interfere with your education"." - Mark Twain

Better advice for teachers than for students, perhaps—especially if you add "...or the education of your students." to the end.
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Please do not annoy, torment, pester, plague, molest, worry, badger, harry, harass, heckle, persecute, irk, bullyrag, vex, disquiet, grate, beset, bother, tease, nettle, tantalize, or ruffle the teacher.

Yeah, this one's going right over my desk when I get one.
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"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." -George Orwell

Very true, especially the last part. I have the Hollywood Left and the Christian Right specifically in mind....
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"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." -Jimi Hendrix

Pretty smart for a guitar player.
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[next to a picture of President Bush] 9/11, WMD, NOLA - Three Strikes You're Out!

It's hard to argue the WMDs, and I can even see the New Orleans argument—even though I personally think local leaders should have been A LOT more prepared for Hurricane Katrina. But to lay the entire blame for the World Trade Center attacks on the current administration is a big stretch, in my mind—pure partisan politics. It's hard to imagine that "President Gore" would have taken that kind of heat for something that happened eight months into his administration. Almost as hard as it is to imagine Dubya with an Oscar.
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Science Goals For A Lifetime:

Using all of your senses, including your feelings, observe, and not just look at, the world around you.
(Observation is the foundation of science.)

Look for and understand connections in the world.
(Everything is interconnected and influenced by everything else.)

Remember how you connect with the world.
(Personal understanding is the basis for global understanding.)

Record, contemplate, and share understandings and feelings.
(Sharing is an essential human trait.)

I think it's interesting that the nameless author(s) chose to include feelings as part of this mission statement. Most people in science encourage, and even require, a strictly dispassionate approach to science. This makes me think of something my Thermodynamics professor told us, something his own father had said:
"If science or whatever else you have chosen to do is just an eight-hour day and then on to other things, you're probably not going to change the world." -Henry Eyring
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The Paradox of Our Age

We have bigger homes and smaller families;
More convenience but less time.
We have degrees but less sense;
More knowledge but less judgment;
More experts but more problems;
More medicine but less healthiness.
We have been all the way to the moon and back,
But we have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbour.
We built more computers to hold more information and produce more copies than ever,
But have less communication.
We have become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods, and slow digestion;
Tall man and short character;
Steep profits and shallow relationships.
It is time when there is much in the window,
And nothing in the room.

-His Holiness, the XIVth Dalai Lama

This is one of the most profound things I've read in quite a while. How did we allow ourselves to become so obsessed with things and so disconnected from other people?
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Let education change you, then go and change the world.

There's plenty in the world that could stand to be changed. It starts with us.

Meme-ing Again

Part I: Friday's Feast
Friday's Feast for Friday, 23 February 2007.

Appetizer Where on your body do you have a scar, and what caused it?
I have matching scars, each about 2 inches (5 cm) long, on the front of each ankle. I had surgery on both ankles to remove bone spurs. Fun!

Soup What is something that has happened to you that you would consider a miracle?
A rollover accident when I was 16 that totaled the pickup I was driving but left me literally without a bump or scratch. Pulling a B- in Quantum Mechanics. Finding Nancy.

Salad Name a television personality who really gets on your nerves.
Oh, so many easy targets...Simon, Randy, Paula, Ryan, and the rest of the American Idiot Idol family comes most immediately to mind. Yeah, I know, WAY too easy. How about Hot Rod Hundley, voice of the Utah Jazz?

Main Course What was a funny word you said as a child (such as "pasketti" for "spaghetti")?
Grapeapplejuice.

Dessert Fill in the blank: I have always thought ______ was ______.
I have always thought keeping up with the latest fashion was overrated.

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Part II: Top 5 On Friday
Top Five on Friday from The Music Memoirs:

Top 5 songs or albums that make you "think spring".

» "Spring Cleaning" by Girls from Mars

» "When It's Springtime in Alaska (It's Forty Below)" by Johnny Horton

» "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" by Bette Midler

» "Silent Spring" (Part 1 of "Talk") by Yes

» "Spring" from The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi

A Discrete Bit of Laughter

Check out today's comic strip over at User Friendly:



"What do you think of quantum computers, Erwin?"
"I'm simultaneously for and against them. Heh."

That's pretty darned funny, in non-deterministic sort of way.

Spam-tastic!

I was talking to someone recently and I mentioned that I had racked up something like 50 messages in my spam folder. To my amazement, she replied with, "I probably get that many every day." That was hard for me to swallow. Fifty spams a day? Wow. I knew I got a lot, but it wasn't that many. So that started me wondering just how many it was. Only one way to find out, right?

I set up a spreadsheet in OpenOffice^a to track my daily dose of spam. Each morning when I first opened my e-mail, I'd also open my Spam Tracker. I entered the number of spam messages I'd received,^b then delete all of them until the next morning, when the process was repeated. I did this from January 22nd until today, February 21st.

The results were interesting:^c

Total spam e-mails received: 448
Mean spam per day: 14.45
Median spam per day: 14
Mode spam per day: 10
Standard deviation: 5.00
Highest daily spam count: 25
Lowest daily spam count: 5

In other words, I can reasonably expect to see between 9 and 19 spam messages per day on average.

I even made up a couple of charts. The first shows how many spam messages I received each day. The second is a histogram showing how often each spam count occurred over the past month.





Too bad my advanced degree's not in Statistics. There's probably a thesis in here somewhere....

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^a No, I don't use Microsoft Office, including Excel. I'm morally opposed to giving Bill Gate$ any more of my money than absolutely necessary.

^b This included not only the messages in my spam folder but also any that had slipped through into my Inbox. Fortunately, G-Mail is pretty good about filtering, so this only happened a time or two.

^c For those who didn't have to suffer through a Statistics (or Analytical Chemistry) class, here are a couple of helpful definitions:
* Mean: A shorter word for 'average value'.
* Median: The value that's right in the middle when all the values are listed in order.
* Mode: The value that shows up the most times.
* Standard Deviation: A measurement of how spread out the data is. In this example, it means that if the trend observed over the past month continues, then 68% of all values observed should lie with the range of 14.45 ± 5.00.

Who, Me?

Yes, this is me, with my great grandmother. Circa 1970, I think.

CH3CH2OH

I found out yesterday that a guy I went to school with died Saturday night. He was two years younger than I was, and while I wasn't all that close to him personally, my family and his family were very, very close. My youngest brother and his youngest brother are best friends to this day.

What appears to have happened is that he checked into a hotel in Greeley, Colorado early Saturday evening. Not very long afterwards, the police were called to his room after he'd reportedly threatened to kill himself with a knife. He charged the police with the knife drawn and was told to drop it. When he failed to comply, the officers fired.

I don't know what led him to this course of action and ultimately to this untimely end. In talking to my family last night, Mom told me he'd been in and out of alcohol treatment programs for the past several years. She said that on one occasion he was released from rehab and got another DUI that same night. He was facing a lot of jail time, she said, and maybe he just wanted out. I don't know. I don't think I ever will. I don't think anyone will ever know. But whatever the situation, it looks like alcohol was a factor.

If that's really what happened, then this is the second person I knew personally in high school that has died an alcohol-related death. The first was someone I was in concert band and jazz band with. Somewhere amongst my memorabilia, I have a picture showing him, myself, and Dilliwag on the front page of the Greeley paper. He died while I was on my mission. As I understand it, he was on his way home from Greeley one night after he'd had too much to drink. In his impaired state, he missed a turn on a road he'd driven literally hundreds of times. He was going about 70 miles an hour, and he died instantly.

The guy who died Saturday night left behind both his parents, a brother, and a sister. He also left behind a wife and three children under 12. Mom and Dad said they'd talked to his parents and they were having a really hard time. When I asked how they were doing, my Dad said, "How would you be?" Mom said that his wife is feeling like it was her fault. Survivor's guilt? I can't imagine what life is going to be like for her. I can't imagine being a widow in your mid-30's.

Psychiatrist Dr. Murray Banks once said, "Some people turn to liquor to drown their troubles. Now, liquor will never drown your troubles. It'll only irrigate them a little." This was in the late 1940's. It's still true today—perhaps even more now than then.

It scares me to think that had I not found the LDS Church at the age of 14, either one of these guys could have been me. It could have been my family mourning its loss—my loss.

I don't have any kids, but when I do, I want them to read this. And here's what I want them to get out of it: Alcohol destroys lives. And not just the lives of those who die; those are the lucky ones. Alcohol destroys the lives of those left behind. It destroys the lives of parents, children, siblings, and friends who have to bury loved ones and then try to move on. Alcohol destroys families.

I think the Church is spot-on with this one. The only safe amount to drink is none.

Wearing Out the Panic Button

You can find prophecy in the most unlikely places, if you know where to look. For example, I found the following link and headline posted on Fark.com yesterday:

KSL.com: Wackjob Utah mall shooter was a Muslim. EVERYONE PANIC

This morning, listening to KSL radio here in Salt Lake City, I heard that certain radio hosts and other political commentators—almost all of them people I would consider right-wing wackjobs themselves—are castigating KSL and other news media outlets for not making a bigger deal of the fact that 18-year-old Sulejmen Talovic was, indeed, a Bosnian-born Muslim.

This makes me crazy. Slow down, people, and take a deep breath. It's not that big a deal. This was NOT an act of Islamic terrorism.

How do I know that? It's pretty simple, really. When Islamic fundamentalists decide to murder someone in the name of Allah, they can't get in line fast enough to take credit for it. And that hasn't happened.

The fact is that no person kills (or offers to die) in the name of their god without making damned sure that everyone knows what that name is. If Talovic's killing spree was in fact motivated by religion, he would have been shouting "DEATH TO THE INFIDELS!" at the top of his lungs as he made his way down the halls of Trolley Square. He would have left a suicide note. He would have had something on him to tell the surviving unbelievers that he'd just earned his way into paradise by killing half a dozen or so of them. He would have rejoiced in his glorious martyrdom. And that didn't happen.

We may never know why Talovic did the unspeakable things that he did. But it seems pretty clear to me that Islam wasn't the driving force behind it.

I'll admit, it's possible that I'm wrong about this. And if that ends up being the case, I will gladly post a retraction right here in the biggest, boldest font I can find. But before that happens, I'll need to see proof. Which brings me back to my original gripe: that certain people are critical of news media outlets for not making a bigger deal of the fact that the shooter was Muslim.

Let me say it again: the fact that he was Muslim isn't news, because it had NOTHING TO DO with his actions—any more than the fact that he was Caucasian or male or eighteen or a high school dropout seems to have had. The real news here is the knee-jerk reaction from the far Right on this one.

This is profiling at its very worst. It's scapegoatism and it's jumping to conclusions and it's playing the religion card from the bottom of the deck. It's a scare tactic, and it's downright irresponsible.

And you know what the worst part is? It's that there are millions of Americans who are so stupid, so scared, and/or so tied to a political agenda that they're going to fall for it, hook, line, and sinker, just because of who said it.

I thought we knew better than this.

Best Wife Ever!

You'll all be pleased to know that we enjoyed a festive Valentine's Day yesterday. After a day of Nancy at work and me doing homework and a few household chores, I took the bus down to her office. From there we made our way to Jordan Commons for dinner and a movie. We caught the opening of Music and Lyrics. It was a fun show, a nice romantic comedy. It was pretty formulaic and didn't really break any new ground, but Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore were really, really funny together. And the 80's pop music homages were hilarious. It's definitely worth seeing.

On our way out of the theater, I sent my youngest brother a text message. It read something like, "Yo Sam! Just writing to wish you and Kendra a Happy VD (Valentine's Day). Enjoy!" Five minutes later, I got back his response: "Ha ha!! Thanks! Happy VD to you and Nancy too. Isn't it fun to spread a happy VD?" To which we answered, "Always happy to share the love!" Yes, we're nuts.

Back home, we opened our V-Day gifts. Nancy already knew what I was getting her, because I practically told her. You see, we've been watching a lot of TV on DVD recently. (I may write more about that later.) And for the past couple of months, she's been introducing me to the wonderful world of Friends. Yes, that Friends, the one with Joey and Chandler and Ross and Rachel and Monica and Phoebe. And to my surprise, I've really been enjoying it. The characters have a bit more depth and humanity that I gave them credit for when the show was on in prime time.

Anyway, we'd watched seasons 1-4, and Nancy was talking about some of the deals she'd seen on the other seasons. (This was a couple of weeks ago.) I told her not to buy anything, because there was a holiday coming up, after all, and she just might be getting the next season as a gift. The truth of the matter is that I had already ordered season 5 from Amazon and had it shipped to her office. Imagine her surprise when she got the company mail one day and found a Friends box set addressed to her. Yeah, she was surprised.

It took us less than two weeks to watch season 5, which left us in the same boat we'd been in previously. So for her real V-Day present, I got her season 6. It was no surprise to her at all. Her gift to me was a total surprise, though:



Yep, she got me the Babylon 5 Movie Collection. It includes the series pilot, three made-for-TV movies (including one that recounts the Earth-Minbari War in detail), and the spin-off for the follow-up TV series Crusade. It's good stuff. Now I just have to acquire seasons 1-5, along with Crusade, The Legend of the Rangers, B5: The Lost Tales, et cetera. >sigh< Time to start saving pennies.

It was a great gift. It was almost as good as what she got me for Christmas:



Yes, if you were wondering, that is a replica 1980 USA Olympic Team hockey jersey. Personalized. Does my sweetheart know me, or what?

I really do have the best wife ever.

Remember Me?

In September, October, and November, I substituted at a West Side Junior High School for about 7 weeks while an Algebra I teacher was having and recovering from surgery. While many of those experiences were memorable, one that stood out involved a young man who, for the sake of protecting the not-so-innocent, we'll call 'A'.

It had been a difficult morning, and the kids in first period were pretty wired. I'd been having some particular difficulties with one kid, 'A'. I'd had to discipline him verbally for something, I don't even really remember what at the moment. But he wasn't the only one. Kids had been throwing things, and I told the class that the floor needed to be cleaned up before anyone left. We'd done this song and dance before, and I took my place in front of the door.

Well, the bell rang, and 'A' was first in line to leave. I reminded everyone that nobody could leave until the place was cleaned up, but 'A' tried to push his way past. Now, the Prime Directive of Substitute Teaching is never to touch a student. There are just too many things that can go wrong. Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of choice, as A initiated contact in trying to get by me. So I put my hands on his shoulders and moved him back into the classroom. He immediately started shouting bloody murder and so forth.

Anyway, after the class had managed to clean things up a bit I let them go, telling 'A' he needed to stay after and talk to me about his behavior. He left, and I shouted down the hall to him, "'A', get back here." His response was short and to the point: "F--- You!"

I made mention of this little conversation to the folks at the office during my lunch break that afternoon. 'A' was out of school on a 3-day suspension by day's end.

Fast forward now to yesterday. I returned to WSJHS for the first time in months. I saw several kids that I remembered, including one who even called out to me in the hallway. This was strange, because the last time I saw her, she was telling me how mean I was for insisting that she actually do her keyboarding assignment rather than surfing the Internet. Anyway, I'm greeting kids as they come into third period, and I turn to find myself face to face with 'A'.

His words on seeing me: "Oh, f--- no!"

Well, that answered any questions I might have had about if he had forgotten me or sprouted a little maturity in the intervening months. This was not something I was prepared to tolerate. So I told him straight out, "I hear you swear again, 'A', and you're gone."

His response was again a model of brevity, even more so than the last time. He said, "Fine!" and stormed out the door. I didn't see him again for the rest of the period. Big loss. /sarcasm

I checked with the office during the planning period to make sure he made it down there. Yes, he'd been to the office and seen the principal, the secretary told me. When I explained to her what had happened, she looked shocked. 'A' had neglected to mention his use of the same kind of language that had got him suspended the first time. Small wonder. She said she'd make the principal aware of the additional details.

I never found out what happened to 'A' yesterday. Frankly, I don't really care. Without him, third period was the best-behaved class of the day.

I was content to file 'A' under "N" for "No longer my problem".

Railroaded!

Last Friday night we had another couple in the ward over for the evening. They brought along their kids, four little blonde-headed boys who are just about the cutest things you've ever seen. We played with them for a while, then set them up with a video (Toy Story, followed by Robin Hood). Meanwhile, we adults went into the kitchen and the other couple introduced us to one of their favorite board games: Ticket To Ride.

It was a lot of fun, and really easy to learn. The object of the game is to build railway routes between cities. It's a card-based game, and you draw different colored cards that let you build on the corresponding colored routes. For example, there are two parallel routes running from Edinburgh to London, one with four black spaces and one with four orange spaces. So to build a route, you need either four black cards or four orange cards. The more cities you can connect, and the longer routes you build, the more points you get.

We enjoyed the game so much we decided we needed to look into getting it ourselves. The other couple mentioned a game shop nearby, one I'd actually seen but never really investigated. So one evening shortly thereafter we made our way to Game Night Games to take a look around. It's a cool store, and they have TONS of games, including several I've never heard of. We found our target game, the original Ticket To Ride^‡, right next to the front door. It's one of their top sellers, apparently. Game firmly in hand, we took it home and played it. And while I had the overall longest route, running from Seattle to Washington DC via San Diego, Denver, and Chicago, Nancy had more completed routes that were longer. She beat me handily.

So, if you're in the mood for a fast-paced, challenging, easily learned board game that's as much fun for two as it is for four or five, let me recommend Ticket To Ride. The European version has some extra game-play features that the American version doesn't, but they're both a lot of fun to play. I give them both four out of four train whistles.

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^‡We'd played the European edition on our double date night, so we decided to buy the American edition for our own use.

From My Inbox

Rick Morris looks at the four leading GOP presidential contenders in 2008 -- John McCain, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani -- and notes "the only one of these guys who hasn't had multiple wives is the Mormon."

This arrived in my e-mail today. I don't know the source, can't find an attribution, and don't even really know if it's true. But it made me laugh.

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Edit: Nancy found the attribution. It's from the New York Post editorial Help Wanted: Righty for '08 by Dick Morris & Eileen McGann. Now we know.

Brought To You By The Letter D

That's right, 'D', like the Roman numeral 500. According to Blogger, this is my 500th post.

Part I: Friday's Feast
Friday's Feast for Friday, 2 February 2007.

Appetizer What was one of the fashion fads when you were a teenager?
Polo shirts with the collars turned up. Yes, I'm a Child Of The 80's.

Soup Name one thing you think people assume about you when they first meet you.
I think many students assume that I'm just another substitute teacher, that I don't know anything about the subject I'm teaching. In that respect, they would be incorrect.

Salad On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being highest, how hard do you work?
This is best represented not by a number, but by a formula where effort is inversely proportional to the time remaining until the scheduled completion of the task in question. In other words, as time to the deadline approaches zero, effort approaches infinity. Yep, I'm a bit of a procrastinator.

Main Course If you were given a free 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl to sell anything you currently own, what would you advertise?
The HP L1706 flat panel monitor. Yes, I broke down and bought one. It's nice.

Dessert Fill in the blank: I love to ________ when it is _________.
I love to eat fresh-baked bread when it is still warm from the oven.

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Part II: Top 5 On Friday
Top Five on Friday from The Music Memoirs:

Top 5 songs that you consider "stinkbombs". (Bonus points for you if you don't use songs by any pop tart or boyband).

» "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston
I'm with Curtis on this one. Whatever sound you were going for, Whitney, you missed. Absolute drivel.

» "How Am I Supposed To Live Without You" by Michael Bolton
When Laura Branigan sings this song, it sounds passionate and full of longing. When Bolton sings it, it sounds whiny and desperate.

» "Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus
The only redeeming feature of this song is that it made for an amazing Weird Al cover.

» "Passage to Bangkok" by Rush
Yes, I'm listing a song by one of my favorite bands here. Unlike "I Think I'm Going Bald", which makes you ask, 'What were the guys smoking when they wrote this?', this song leaves no doubt whatsoever. It's catalogued in exquisite detail right there in the lyrics. A weak effort on what is otherwise one of the greatest albums in the history of progressive rock.

» The first 4-6 weeks of "American Idol"
For the love of mercy, spare me the endless procession of boy-band and pop-tart wannabes who sadly lack the talent to pull it off--and that's really saying something! And then they get all upset because Simon tells them just how dreadful they are. People, have you never watched the show?

Ticket To Ride

With some money that unexpectedly became available, Nancy said she'd like to get an exercise bike. I'll admit I was initially a little hesitant on the idea, mainly because I had no idea where we were going to put en exercise bike if we did get one. But we (meaning she, mostly) did some comparison shopping, and we checked out some bikes at a couple of local sporting goods stores.

After testing half a dozen different models, the Schwinn 226 started to stand out as the bike of choice. It got good reviews online and from the store people we talked to. And it was on sale. We weren't really ready to buy at that moment (approaching 9:30 on a Saturday night), but the department manager at the local Sports Authority store said they'd honor any sale prices for up to six days after the sale. So we kept looking around, confident that we could come back and get the deal if that's what we decided to do.

We spent the next week looking at other options, mostly comparison price shopping on the Schwinn 226. It normally retails for $600, but Nancy found two ads showing it at $449. So the following Saturday, we went into a different Sports Authority location to find out if they would match the price. The guy we ended up talking to said he'd check on it...then disappeared for about the next 20 minutes. When he finally came back, he said no, they couldn't match the price. He'd called on both of the ads we gave him; he said that one ad showed the bike as a clearance item, and on the other the store he called didn't carry the bike in stock. Long story short, he was more than happy to sell us the bike at his store price, which was $499, as I recall. Thanks, we said, but we'll keep on looking.

Nancy found a couple more ads the following week online for the bike at $449, one of which was through the Sports Authority website. Armed with these two ads, we made our way back to the original store, because the guy at store #2 had been kind of a jerk, frankly. It's one thing if you can't match a price, but it's quite another to be condescending about it. Anyway, back to store #1. Alas, we found that they wouldn't match prices with Internet ads—not even their own. The online store is handled differently by the corporation than their brick-and-mortar stores, so price comparisons are like apples and grapefruit. And the issue was kind of moot at this point anyway, because they didn't even have their display model of the bike left—they'd sold quite well, apparently—and didn't know when they'd be getting another one shipped in.

At this point we got to talk to the department manager, a pleasant and unexpectedly helpful young man named Paul. He listened to our story and said he'd make a couple of calls. He called the two closest Sports Authority stores in SLC, only to discover that neither of them had the bike at the moment either. So he called the Orem store and talked to a manager there named Justin. Not only did he have the bike in stock, he said he'd hold it for up to a week for us. Better yet, he also said he'd honor the $449 ad price. Well worth the drive, in my book.

It was, once again, late Saturday night when all of this came to pass, so we made plans to go get the bike after Nancy got off work the following Monday. I had to meet Nancy that morning for some stuff involving her car, and afterwards, instead of returning home, I headed south. I was halfway to Orem at that point anyway, and I figured it'd make for a nice surprise. So I found the Sports Authority store attached to the University Mall and made my way in. Sure enough, the bike was there and it was the right price. The sales guy who helped me, whose name I unfortunately cannot remember at the moment, got everything together and made sure the girl at the register charged me correctly. Then he asked the one question I had neglected to think about: how was I going to get it home?

I wasn't driving the Dreadnought at the time (more on that later), and it wouldn't really have helped if I had been, because the tailgate doesn't open at the moment. I thought maybe we could get it into the back seat of the car I was driving. Closer examination of the box, which was almost as tall as I am, shot that idea right down. So the trunk was the only viable option left. I moved around the stuff in the trunk to make way for the humongous box the bike came in. He secured it (and the trunk lid) with a couple of bungee cords, and with the addition of an orange safety flag at the back, I was gone with the Schwinn.^*

Getting the bike home was a bit of an adventure, simply because I had a hard time seeing behind me. The trunk lid prevented the use of the rear view mirror, and the side mirrors were smaller than I'm used to. But I made it home and pulled into the driveway. From there it was a little complicated to get it out of the trunk and into the apartment—the weight listed on the box was 177 pounds—but I eventually succeeded.

Nancy was sure surprised when she got home that night and found that she didn't have to drive to Orem like she'd been planning. We put the bike together that night, and it looked just like it's supposed to look:



Nancy took the first ride, and we've both used it a couple of times since bringing it home on Monday. It's as good as advertised. It's fun to ride, and it's a real workout. I rode it this afternoon while listening to the last 8 minutes or so of the BYU-UNLV basketball game. I did the Pikes Peak program at level 1. (Hey, it's a start.) In my 20 minute ride, I went 4.6 simulated miles at an average speed of 14.2 miles per hour and burned 120 calories. Not too bad, if I say so myself.

Maybe by the time this summer rolls around, I'll be able to ride a virtual Tour de France. Okay, probably not, since I have no access to blood doping services or performance-enhancing chemicals. But it should still be fun to ride, and heaven knows I can use the exercise.

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^* It's from The Muppet Movie. If the line's not familiar, it's been too long since you've seen it. You might want to do something about that.