theparkerfamily.org

Tag: Long Reads

  • dear mr. alex rodriguez, sir …

    arodpursei have to confess, that up until this moment, i’ve hated you. i’ve hated you as long as i can remember. heck, before i knew you … i hated the idea of you.

    a bloated contract from the yankees that signifies everything wrong with modern baseball. a personality uniquely unsuited to (and unappreciative of) the public spotlight. a track record of behavior on (and off) the feild that is awkward at best, or painfully embarrassing at worst.

    but, with this week’s revelations about your steroids use you have a chance to turn a new leaf, and the respect of an entire nation of baseball fans.

    in short, it’s up to you to save baseball.

    baseball needs *you* to come out of this latest round of steroid rumors better than you went in. the public can’t handle ten years of continual reminders of the steroids era as you bat your way towards the top of the home run list.

    we need you to hit this one out of the park for us. the key? a good, thoughtful, honest response from you.

    first off, let’s see what you don’t do … let’s look at how everyone else took their turn at the steroids plate. barry bonds lied (that didn’t work out so well). roger clemens denied (and is still digging his grave). mark mcgwire refused to talk (good luck with your next 10 years in new york if you choose that path). rafael palmeiro’s “i didn’t know what i was being injected with” defense has proven to be less then effective as well.

    so, let’s try something different … like, being honest.

    yes, you used steroids, but it was only one season (right?) way back in 2003. since then, you’ve been the most tested athlete on the planet, so people will be reasonably receptive to the notion that you aren’t still using.

    so, let’s get a head of this thing and say:

    • i did it. i was stupid. i used in 2003, but realized that using is a betrayal of the game and an offense to my fans. i saw all the big boys using around the league, and gave into the excuse that i needed to keep up … i have wanted to be the best for as long as i remember, but steroids just aren’t the way to do it.
    • with a steroid test on my record, i know that i have a lot to prove to get into the hall of fame, but i am committed to working everyday for the next ten years to earn my way back in.
    • i believe that my record can stand without the 2003 season, which is why i am voluntarily returning back to the league the (now tainted) awards i got that season, including the MVP trophy, and the award for being the best hitter in baseball. those awards are not a reflection on who i am, so i don’t want them a part of my resume, or sitting on my mantle.
    • yes, the tests that “outed” me were supposed to be confidential, and yes i am the only one out of the 104 who has been identified, but there is absolutely no reason to breach that confidentiality by releasing the rest of the names. two wrongs do not make a right, and i will take this round on my shoulders.

    • players and owners need to rededicate themselves to testing. our fans are rightly skeptical each time they hear another steroid denial, and we need to test early and often, to prove everyday that we deserve their respect.

    i know that’s a lot to say, but you have the chance to quite literally shift the landscape of baseball with just one press conference.

    please, mr. rodriguez … as the biggest figure in baseball, and the idol of everybody this side of boston, so you are uniquely positioned to save baseball from the steroids era.

    and, who knows, if you do this right … you may just earn your way back into the hall of fame at the same time.

    sincerely,
    baseball nation

  • the darker side of the inauguration

    we had a lot of time to think about the inauguration on our way out of the mall … it took us over an hour to go two blocks, and then another couple to get back to civilization (or lunch, at least).

    ironically, the thing that stuck with me — more than the speech, the people, the hope — was the complete lack of respect the people on the mall had for the President until around 12:03 pm.

    living in my own little world, I’d never really thought it through … sure, he had bad approval numbers, sure my hippie-prog friends had little respect for his policies on, well, anything.

    but he was still President, right? i have always firmly believe that you have to respect the office, even if you believe the occupant doesn’t respect the office himself.

    there is a basic level of civility that is needed to maintain ourselves as a nation, and violating that civility doesn’t no good in our efforts to establish a new tone of mutual respect in the nation’s Capitol.

    now, don’t get me wrong … i didn’t hear anything that wasn’t shouted at Clinton eight years ago, but that’s not the point.

    it’s very difficult to take the high road on an inclusive society, when we are exclusive ourselves. in the same way, we can’t fight intolerance with intolerance, regardless of how intolerant we feel the last eight years have been.

    i already have conservative friends predicting assassinations, preaching the apocalypse, and plotting out their future lives in foreign countries — which is ironic because the best place for conservatives right now is probably France.

    by being intolerant ourselves, we not only excuse this type of behavior, we encourage it. now, i’m about as opposed to neo-cons as anyone, but even I was able to give Bush the benefit of the doubt for his first two years in office.

    if we really are going to bring change in Washington, it can’t just trickle down from the top. this started as a grassroots movement, and that’s the only way real change is going to succeed.

  • ben affleck likes having his picture taken, and other life lessons

    we scored some tickets to the “google ball” through the lady sparkler’s work — she actually asked *whether* i wanted to go (crazy lady!).

    it wasn’t a ball as such (no obamas, so no dead swan dress) but was instead billing itself as a sort of pre-/post-ball party for the other (more official) balls.

    the space was gorgeous. big enough to be spectacular, but small enough to be (surprisingly) intimate. and, to be fair, i didn’t even know the space existed (it’s in the old IRS building at the corner of 15th and Constitution).

    we heard rumors that fancy-pants people would be there, but assumed they would be all roped off in some back room. it was great enough to have an excuse to dress up, but … i mean, JOHN PODESTA was there. and *WOLF BLITZER*!!!

    anyway, the conversations were progressing along nicely, when the lady sparkler suggested our little group take a lap around the place. in a back room, the lady sparkler spotted ben affleck, and then it was all over …

    i felt safe in my relationship, because i knew that she was only talking to him to get matt damon’s phone number … but it turned out that she wanted a picture, too.

    she negotiated her way up to him, and tugged on his shoulder. i have no idea who he was talking to (someone later told me it was his brother Casey) but he barely broke (conversation) stride as he turned around, looked dashing for the picture, and went back about his business … not at all disturbed to be accosted by my wife.

    john cusack, on the other hand, turned out to be a bit of an #$%. my beloved slid in for the kill, and he started negotiating with her about whether he would take the picture or not … i finally just took it, and think the expression is, well, perfect.

    we actually ran into good friends shortly afterwards who gave us their tickets to a real, official ball (dead swann dress included). we headed over not too much later, but it turns out that the obama’s were gone even before we had the tickets in our hands.

    still, one heck of an evening … especially riding home on the metro in our prom attire, with not a single raised eyebrow.

    damn, i love DC.

  • inauguration tickets

    n5409143_32670501_3448i’ve got a nice pair of inauguration tickets in my hand, courtesy of the immortal jojo, who will *easily* go down as the very best middle sister in the history of the sparkler family.

    we headed over to Capitol Hill today, a little after lunch, to pick up said tickets from jojo’s member (who is super cool himself, and someone i worked with a lot back in the days of comrade bernie sanders).

    we got there a little after 2pm, thinking it would be an easy in-and-out before they shut down around three … but instead, we walked straight into the fourth circle of hell.

    the metro platform was backed up, with an easy hundred people waiting to just get *out* of the turnstiles.

    it only got worse when we got topside.

    there are probably three entrances to each of the three house buildings, so a total of nine different paths to get to your tickets. when we arrived, each of the lines had hundreds (if not thousands) already lined up.

    i was surprised, but then i started doing the math … 435 members of the house (times) two-hundred tickets per member (equals) approximately 87,000 tickets.

    factor in that (a) everybody had to be present to pick up the tickets, (b) they only allowed one day to pick up the tickets, and (c) there was only six hours in which to distribute them …

    a little more math reveals that the powers that be thought *each* door/security queue/metal detector could move just about 2,000 people *every* hour.

    i’m sad to say they were wildly, and stoopidly optimistic.

    now, there is a happy ending … because we lucked out. i worked in said house office building for four years and i knew it had a back door … and thought to check to see if there was a line there.

    we also lucked out, because the throngs were so bad at the front (it went up and down the length of the building twice) that they decided to open the back door (where we were looking) at the exact moment we arrived.

    we were (maybe) fifty or sixty people back from the door when it opened.

    after that, it was all gravy.

    we just had to find our room, the lady sparkler had to pretend she was her sister (we had an old passport for ID that it turned out we didn’t have to use) and i had to smile, nod, and say “duude” a lot (trying to pass myself off as a left coaster).

    it wasn’t until we walked out the front that we realized how incredibly fortunate we were. there was an easy two thousand people waiting to get in just that *one* entrance.

    i would love to know how late those offices had to stay open tonight. my guess was that there was a line well past dark.

    first the bus yesterday, now the tickets today. let’s see if the luck holds through tomorrow …

  • knitting and snowing

    100_0074two signs of the coming apocalypse: it’s snowing at the beach, and i’ve learned how to knit.

    the weather down this way has been crazy. in the last month, we’ve had just as many days above 60 as we had below freezing. it’s rained, it’s typhooned, it’s snowed, it’s blizzard-ed.

    i wouldn’t be surprised to see dennis quaid snowshoe by, murmuring about having to save Jake Gyllenhaal (tho, to be frank, i would toss Jake back and focus my attention on saving Emmy Rossum).

    i digress.

    the lady sparkler and i are spending the long weekend on the coast of Delaware with Lighting Chick Knits, whose sister happens to have a house out here with a spectacular view of the sound (pictures of the view on facebook).

    much as her blog would suggest, Lighting Chick Knits, well, knits. and, being the Renaissance man that i am, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add another tick to my “wide, not deep” resume of skills, probably best symbolized by my musical skills (guitar, bass, piano, violin, and harmonica) or my interest in foreign languages (russian, arabic, spanish) — all of which i can “do,” just none particularly well.

    and so it is with knitting … i am neither exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. knitting fits nicely into my need for immediate gratification, but my skills are no where near the point they’d need to overcome my internal demand for perfection.

    we’ll see. so far, i’ve made it through 20 rows of a scarf, which is just enough to make smallishly-sized bookmark … which seems like a just reward for annihilating the last remaining shred of my masculinity.

  • a (mostly) friendly Christmas competition

    working in online fundraising, the fact that the end of the year is coinciding with the complete and utter collapse of our economy is casting a bit of a pall on what would otherwise be a festive time of the year.

    this minor set back (alone) could have be taken in stride … but, when our philanthropy department neighboors started getting all up in our grill about how they were going to out “festive” us for the holidays, it was game on.

    i mean, we can handle trying to compensate for the decline of western civilization, but to be called out for decorating supremacy was just a bridge to far.

    we responded to this tyranny with resolve. we raided our collective attics, mobilizing all sorts of lights, ornaments, bows and garlands towards the decorating war effort (photos of the mobilization above).

    but, in the end, it was over before it really even began … and philanthropy surrendered before we had the chance to get much past the “shock and awe” stage:

    ok ok, you guys win this one. you really went above and beyond. I apologize for the trash talk and concede the title to you guys.

    i’m a tiny bit sad they caved so quickly, because we had one more salvo of decorations we could have deployed had we needed the reserves to secure our merriment objectives.

    i love the smell of trash talk in the morning.

  • lost license: airport security without an ID


    airport security, originally uploaded by d5o3

    so, a funny thing happened on the way to the airport …

    we had a rental car for the first half of thanksgiving week, so that we could drive down to eugene, and so that i could spend a day hiking around central oregon.

    unfortunately, at one of those trailheads, i stuffed my wallet in the glove compartment … and then never bothered to pull it back out again. and then i returned the car. and then Enterprise re-rented the car.

    obviously, much madness ensued — calls with Enterprise, arrangements with the sparklers-in-law to forward a photocopy of my passport, and discussions with TSA and United.

    long story short: i got to go through security at the airport without a government-issued ID.

    we weren’t able to get much out of TSA or United before we got to the airport, but pretty much everybody said to get there early. our flight was at 7:45 am, so we got to the airport when it opened at 5:30.

    the aforementioned photocopy of my passport was more than enough to convince United to give me a boarding pass … though, in retrospect, I could have side-stepped their ID check completely had i thought to check-in online.

    the TSA-manned security checkpoint weren’t quite so ready to accept copied documents that (admittedly) had no security value what-so-ever.

    after meekly presenting by situation to the ID checker, i was waived out of line (expected), but the lady sparkler was sent on without me (not so much).

    now, i would have thought that TSA would want to use her (or at least her ID) as some sort of corroborating identification, but they were just as uninterested in her as they were in the photocopies i had of my passport, social security card and birth certificate.

    i was let off to a secure, undisclosed location.

    now, when i get nervous, i get chatty … so i started talking up the nice young lady who was escorting me. turns out, people try and fly all the time without identification … and most don’t even have a good excuse.

    she guessed that she sees 15 or so people try and go through security each day without an ID, and only one or two of them have had their identification lost or stolen. most just left it at home, and didn’t have the time or inclination to go back and get it.

    we arrived on the admin floor of the terminal building, and i was ushered into the one small room that functioned as TSA headquarters for the airport.

    It had a faux-command center feel: plasma screen televisions were showing security cameras and CNN, and a military-style bank of clocks allowed them to monitor the passage of time in such disparate locales as Tokyo, Portland, Washington, London and Riyadh.

    I sat down with two very nice TSA security ladies, who absolutely had the “Cagney and Lacy” flavour of retired police officers. After introductions, they dialed up Homeland Security central for a teleconference, and asked me an quick series of questions.

    Three minutes later — and one amusing retelling of my rental car experience — I was on my way.

    Back at the metal detectors, I was taken to my very own security line where I got to go through a puffer and my baggage got hand searched and sniffed for explosives before they sent me through.

    couple of thoughts if you decide to lose your wallet, too:

    Get there early — the first thing the TSA officer said to me was “what time is your flight” and “good, you’ll still make your plane.” they had no doubt i was getting through, so long as i had enough time.

    Ace the interview — TSA didn’t (seem to) care about anything except the interview. They didn’t care that I was on a round trip fare (so I obviously made it through security once), they ignored my wife (who had ID, and shared my last name, and my home address), and wasn’t interested in any cooroberating evidence that I was me (I had a bank statement addressed to me, and photocopies of my passport, social security card, and birth certificate).

    Be friendly — I took every moment I could to chat up those escorting me and interviewing me, and it was a surpisingly posative experience. They seemed very interested in getting me on my plane, so I was very interested in not being an @$%&.

    The whole event took less than 20 minutes, on the busiest travel day of the season. I’m not sure I could have expected a better ending.

    UPDATE: I got my wallet back. Enterprise (who was great through this all) tracked down the people who had the car, while the new renters were unable/unwilling to find the wallet … it was there in the glove compartment when they returned the car.

  • happy beginnings

    [Photo]
    IMG_5705, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    some of you may have been following the saga of foster mom adventures, an absolutely courageos friend (and m.o.h.) of ours who ignored her own sanity and has given over her life for two children in need of sanctuary.

    we were their neck of the woods this weekend, and got to spend some time quality with our maid-of-honor-emeritus and her charges. and by “quality time” i mean “lots of piggy back rides.”

    it’s really a beautiful thing how a person can give over her life to children in need, and even more beautiful to see how resilient and wonderful children can be in even the most adverse of circumstances.

    it sounds like it’s going to be a long week for the girls, so keep the whole fostermom clan in your thoughts and prayers.

    update: turns out there is a happy ending (er, beginning?) to the whole situation. if you haven’t been following, now is the time to start.

    Explore the Photo Set (Flickr, friends only):
    foster mom’s adventures

  • three reasons why it sucks to be a Republican right now

    for me, this election cycle has highlighted three glaring reasons why the Republican party should be more than a little worried about 2012:

    first problem: party unity

    the party illuminati are already deconstructing the election, and half the party is saying they lost because they pushed away minorities and the intellectuals by pandering to the conservative base. of course, the other half says they lost when they left the party’s traditional base and moved towards the center (where the minorities and intellectuals seem to be hanging out).

    this argument is going to resonate well beyond 2012, but the next nomination cycle is going to be an ugly battle for the Repubs … between a candidate who energizes the party’s base, and a candidate who energizes the party’s intellectual / policy / more progressive center.

    that bruiser of a process is going to disenfranchise half the party, and make it very hard the nominee to win out. for those who weren’t paying attention, sarah palin brought about party discord, not party unity. her presence in 2012 is only going to make the situation worse.

    second problem: policy not security

    we are starting to see the signs that simply changing the subject isn’t going to work anymore. Republican candidates are going to have to retrench to a time when they had holistic policies (contract with america, anyone?) and didn’t just rely on national security to win the day.

    sure, it’s great to have two wars going on, and to be under attack by the terrorists, but eventually the repubs are going to have to get comfortable on a new set of issues and not just keep changing the subject to national security.

    (oh, and taxes… dems are starting to figure out how govern without raising taxes, so the “all dems raise taxes” line ain’t going to work forever.)

    third problem: the “other” conservatives

    the republican party seems to be defining itself only through religious and social conservatives. under Reagan, there was room for every flavor of conservative under the big tent (fiscal, pragmatic, progressive, military, intellectual).

    today, people who don’t meet the strict social/religious litmus-test are either tossed out of the party (for not being “right” enough) or are forced to assimilate in order to stay. the world is becoming way to diverse (ethnic, religious, cultural) for the Repubs to rely on owning the white, conservative, and evangelical votes.

    here is the problem: 89% of mccain votes were from white voters, but they represent only 74% of the electorate. 58% of mccain votes were from conservatives, but they are only 34% of the electorate. 42% of mccain votes were evangelicals, but they are only 26% of the electorate.

    this isn’t a knock on any of the above demographics, just a recognition that winning these demographics isn’t likely to be enough moving torward. it’s also a classic sign of “engaging the base,” and not competing on the field of ideas and policies.

    well, good luck, my republican friends — it’s going to be an interesting time in the wilderness for you. may you come back in less time (and maybe a little more progressive?) than the dems last time around.

  • some assembly (not) required

    well, i’m officially old now. interestingly enough, this realization didn’t come from a mortgage, or a life insurance that gives the lady sparkler financial incentive for my death, or from friends having wedding after wedding after wedding, or from going to a party and being the only one there without kids.

    it came, instead, from pottery barn.

    last week, we went anniversary present shopping and settled on a 33%-off console table to replace a piece of crap we bought at Ikea five years ago. it wasn’t in stock, but they had extras at the big, bad warehouse in the sky, and promised to ship one over to a store-near-us as soon as they could.

    well, we got the call yesterday, crossed the bridge into rural Arlington to go pick it up. when we pulled up front, a very nice boy wheeled the box out to our car … and that’s when all hell broke loose.

    the box was enormous. like really big. like “size of a piece of furniture” big.

    there are apparently places in the world where you can buy furniture that doesn’t require assembly. more importantly, there are apparently places in the world where you can buy furniture which requires something bigger that a Volkswagen Jetta.

    now, don’t get me wrong … i had heard rumors of such extravagance, but bushed them aide as if tales of the fortress of Atlantis, or a land filled with Unicorns, or a country of people who’d reelect some one from the Bush family. i mean, really … would would have thought such a place existed?!?

    after getting a grip on our new found alternate reality, “very nice boy pottery barn boy” led us to the conclusion that the Jetta just wasn’t going to cut it (and we galloped off to rent a pick up truck from ZipCar).

    but, let this serve as a cautionary tale for the youth of america. there comes a time when you will be allowed to vote, sent to war, drink, and afford to buy furniture that comes assembled — assuming that you catch a really good sale.

    so, excercise your rights (responsibilities?) with caution …