Out on the Town

[May 2019]
Last post from spring, then we can start talking about early summer. Actually, the only reason for this post is to show off some architecture photos from my wanderings across campus. I’m not an architectural photographer and I’m still shooting on my kit lens, so no super wide-angle facades, zoom lens details, or tilt-shift. Here are some buildings:

 North Campus quad with the Duderstadt Center in the background.

Also known as the Dude, the building houses the Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library.

Interesting combination, but the three schools located on North Campus are the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (ampersand and no Oxford comma according to their site), the College of Architecture & Urban Planning (again with the ampersand), and the College of Engineering.

Mosher-Jordan Hall.

The internet tells me that this is a first-year mixed-gender residence hall.

Kinesiology Building.

I don’t know what this building is used for, but the School of Kinesiology is moving into the Natural Science Building, currently under renovation, in 2020.

The Natural Science Building was originally finished in 1915 and was home to Botany, Geology, Minerology, Zoology, Psychology, and more.

The Henry Frieze Vaughan Public Health Building.

Who was Henry Frieze Vaughan?

An American epidemiologist born in Ann Arbor in 1889 to Dora Catherine Taylor Vaughan and Victor C. Vaughan, M.D., the 4th of 5 children. Thanks Wikipedia.

Hill Auditorium, site of band/orchestra/chorus concerts, with Burton Memorial Tower behind.

The tower contains the Charles Baird Carillon¹, which, despite having over double the number of bells as the Cornell Chimes¹ in McGraw Tower (53 to 21), doesn’t seem to play anything half as recognizable.

¹Carillons have at least 23 bells; chimes have less than 23.

Rackham Building.

Rackham is the graduate school that generally oversees the masters/PhD programs.

Everything else² was under construction.

²Not really. Everything else was either under construction, I couldn’t get a good, unimpeded head-on view of the building, the building looked boring, or I didn’t take a picture of that building for any one of seventeen thousand other reasons.

Sportsball [Detroit Pistons]

[March 2019 (another post from spring)]

Once in a while, my research lab decides to do something social beyond eating lunch together at the tables thirty feet from our office and sharing memes. I think this idea started because we were talking about bad sports teams (hi, Revolution) and cheap tickets. In particular, cheap tickets for games when two middling to bad teams that nobody cares about play each other on a weeknight. My coworker mentioned that Detroit Pistons (basketball) tickets would probably be pretty cheap, and when we looked, we found a Thursday night game against the Orlando Magic. Two mediocre teams? Check. Lukewarm fanbases? Check. Weeknight? Check. Cheap tickets ($14)? Check. Time for a lab excursion.

We put out the call on Facebook and ended up with 9 interested parties, a decent fraction of the lab. So after work on the determined day, we set off for Detroit. Traffic was light, street parking was reasonably easy to find, and getting into the stadium took less than five minutes. Our cheap seats were up in the balcony, but basketballs are big enough that you can sit in the back of the balcony and still see the ball and follow the game. Same for soccer, but if you ever go to a baseball or hockey game and want to actually, you know, watch the game, maybe pay a little extra to not sit in row ZZZ of the Skydeck, or whatever it is they’re calling the fourth balcony.

View from our seats

As for the game itself, the Pistons led basically the whole time, which wasn’t super exciting, but my blood pressure can always use a break from the Revolution. And sometimes it is nice to see a comfortable win from the team you’re rooting for. Besides the Revolution, I’ve sat through some rather painful sports games courtesy of Cornell athletics and my high school football team. Though I do kind of wish I could have seen the football game between Columbia and Cornell where they were playing to be the team that didn’t finish Ivy League play 0-8. Cornell won that game 3-0. Yes, this was an American football game.

We didn’t have anyone sitting in the row in front of us, so we had almost unimpeded views, we could see the ball, and the game was decent. They had cheerleaders doing routines during the breaks, which was not the real reason I went to the game. The only thing I regret is not bringing my earplugs, because the speakers were right by our heads blasting the whole time. Other than that, for ease of access, cost, and an overall pleasant experience, I’d go to Little Caesar’s Arena for a basketball game again.

Spring

There’s more soccer news, plus visitors to Ann Arbor, fireworks, and a road trip, but we’re going back to spring for this post. In between all the other things I was doing, I continued going to the Arboretum and also paid a visit to the Botanical Gardens, to get some dirt under my shoes and get away from the constant traffic noises. In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, I don’t like people/cars/cities/noise in general. Or umbrellas, jeans, scarves, celery, or excessive air conditioning, but we can talk about those other things another time. Right now we’re here to see pictures of plants.

The Botanical Gardens, like the Arboretum, are run by the university. Last time I was there, I went with a friend with a car; this time, it was just me, so I biked. It’s not a terrible bike ride in terms of length or traffic. It was early April when I was there, and I wasn’t sure what would be sprouting/in bloom when I got there.

Lots of life in the outdoor gardens

Turns out, not much. With my vast knowledge of flowers – I can consistently identify about three whole separate flowers (dandelions, tulips, and Queen Anne’s lace) – I wasn’t too disappointed. My favorite thing to photograph at the Botanical Gardens anyway are the cacti. The cacti live inside the conservatory, and I spent some time adding to my collection of cactus pictures. I guess since there aren’t any waterfalls or gorges nearby, I’ve settled for photographing these friendly spike balls.

These guys were in bloom this time

A few weeks later, I was back at the Arboretum hoping to catch the leaves coming out. The peony stalks had made their appearance, but there still wasn’t much else growing. (I finally figured out this year that tree peonies are bushes and herbaceous peonies are stalks that die/regrow each year. There are also Itoh or Intersectional peonies that are a cross between tree and herbaceous peonies.) The undergrowth was coming in and some leaves were budding, so I did end up getting a few pictures. Soon after this, we entered peony watch season, which is a whole other event in itself. More on that later.

Top left: peony stalks.  Top right: undergrowth starting to come in.

Bottom: leaves.

A Little Night Magic, part 1

To recap, as of the firings of Brad Friedel/Mike Burns, this is what the first half of the Revolution's season looked like:

The good:
1) Carles Gil.
2) Rookies DeJuan Jones and Tajon Buchanan looked promising at times.

The bad:
1) The rotating door of goalkeepers, in which the starter was either determined by Brad Friedel’s horoscope for the day or rock, paper, scissors.
2) The defense literally standing still while ostensibly defending.¹
3) Teal Bunbury’s (lack of) form.²
4) Subpar performances from the rest of the attacking line as well. It took 8 games before an attacking player not named Gil scored, and 9 games before a striker did.
5) So, basically everything. Hello, 2-8-2 record.

¹Seriously. 3 Revolution players in the six-yard box plus 4 more in the penalty area plus their goalkeeper against 3 Union players and they still can’t keep the ball out of the net.
²I’m not here to call out particular players, but Twitter actually has a #DammitTeal hashtag that I just learned followed him from Kansas City. And if you’ve got a stat called “number of shots that go out the opposite side of the field for throws ins,” you might be going a little more wrong than the rest of the team.

The reason everyone was surprised when Friedel and Burns were fired is that historically, the Krafts/Revolution have done very little in terms of coaching, player acquisition, and facilities to convince fans and the general public that they’re serious about soccer. After Steve Nicol, they hired former defender Jay Heaps, who was working for Morgan Stanley at the time and had no coaching experience. Heaps took the Revolution to the 2014 MLS cup, helped along by MLS’s first and last blind draw that sent USMNT player Jermaine Jones to New England. He did what he could with what he was given, but consecutive poor seasons in 2016 and 2017 led to his dismissal. Since that experiment ended so very well, the Revolution thought they’d try it again with Brad Friedel, former USMNT goalkeeper and general manager Mike Burns’ college roommate . . . who also had essentially no coaching experience.

Friedel never really seemed to get the Revolution to click. He also had a habit of throwing players under the bus during interviews, and reportedly lost the locker room and micromanaged his players during games by screaming at them to move two steps to the right. At least that’s what #NERevs Twitter says, but I can buy it based on player attitudes and the number of players who left the team unhappily. As for Burns, he served the club as a player, director of soccer, vice president of player personnel, and finally general manager, but by that point he had gained a reputation as the worst manager in MLS to work with, which is . . . not good.

With Friedel and Burns gone, this is where Mike Lapper comes in. This is where things get crazy again. Bruce Arena is hired shortly after the firings, but won’t be coaching for several weeks, so Lapper, Friedel’s assistant coach, is tasked with filling in until then. And in his first game, New England wins. They score, they defend, they look good doing it. They look . . . happy? Lapper wins over the fans, not just because the team has gotten a positive result, but because he genuinely seems like a nice guy that the Revolution enjoy playing for.

He follows the San Jose win up with ties on the road against Montreal (a road point that would have been at least a three-goal loss with a red card a week ago) and at home against DC United [a home point that probably should have been a home win, according to the Twitter outrage (I missed watching this game)]. He leaves the Revolution with a 1-0-2 record, undefeated in MLS play, to the dismay of fans.

Now enter Bruce Arena. Arena’s first game is on the road at the LA Galaxy, the very team he coached against the Revolution in their heartbreaking fifth MLS cup loss in 2014. I debated whether I should stay up for the game, because 7:30 pm California time is 10:30 pm Michigan time, and it was a Sunday night, but I decided to see how Arena’s first game would pan out. The Revolution proceed to show up to the game and outplay the Galaxy. Cristian Penilla has multiple shots on goal before he gets one (off a Carles Gil pass) into the goal. Gil picks up another assist when none other than #DammitTeal not only hangs on to the pass but also gets around his defender, puts the shot on frame, and scores. Turns out that’s the game-winning goal because Zlatan “I will break all the records”³ Ibrahimovic scores a pretty average bicycle kick goal to pull one back for the Galaxy.

³Most career red cards in MLS is 10. Better start fouling, Zlatan.

Instead of giving up a stoppage time goal on a corner kick, the Revolution weather the remaining minutes of the game plus stoppage time to secure their first win under Bruce Arena and go into the Gold Cup break 2-0-2 since Friedel was fired. Worth it to stay up past midnight watching soccer, because for the first time in months, it feels like the Revolution are playing for something.