Socially Distanced Summer

We are well into summer around these parts. Temperatures in the 80s, humidity anywhere from 40-90%, depending on the time of day and weather. The backs of my hands are happy, my palms not so much. This will reverse in about six months. Michigan kicked off the month by reclosing indoor bars after a coronavirus outbreak was traced to an East Lansing bar known for its college-age clientele. Nationally, the number of cases continued its steady climb upwards, taxing medical staff and facilities in multiple states. But let’s all go to Disney World and get ready to send the kids back to school, why don’t we?

I started the month of July by finishing a fairly typical work week with research, Netflix, and lying around dehydrating from the palms and soles. On Friday, July 3, I snuck out early to bike the Border to Border trail for the first time this year. I’d been avoiding it for coronavirus crowding reasons, but I was hopeful that early on a Friday morning of a holiday weekend would not be a popular time to be physically exerting oneself. I was right, and the people who were out were the people who tend to be more intentional about walking/running/biking and generally have better trail etiquette, as opposed to the family of six who spreads out across the whole path and lets little Timmy zigzag along the trail as he likes or shirtless jogger guy with headphones blasting who wouldn’t hear you if you were dragging a string of cowbells behind you.

Saturday, July 4 was grocery day. I hid out in my apartment for the rest of the day and finished Community, which I would recommend, though the first three seasons are better than the last three. To replace it in my Netflix rotation, I started Parks and Recreation since people say if you like The Office you’ll like Parks and Rec. Full judgement forthcoming. I headed back out on my bike on Sunday, July 5 to check off the parks in northwest Ann Arbor. I might have gotten back a little late for the start of church, but I did not miss the Facebook sermon.

Monday, July 6 began another week. I started editing changes in my code into the official version and running test simulations. Long live Fortran. While the apartment was still a nice cool 79 F at 7:30 in the morning, I baked a batch of orange cranberry muffins on Tuesday, July 7, except I didn’t want to eat an orange so I didn’t get an orange for orange zest when I went grocery shopping so the muffins didn’t taste very much like orange. On Wednesday, July 8, I finally returned the library books and DVDs I’d had since March so someone else could enjoy Spider-Man: Far From Home.

The big news for Thursday, July 9 was that the Revolution played their first soccer game in four months at the MLS Returnament and won. I finished off the research week and ventured (on bike) to the downtown area for the first time since March on Saturday, July 11. I was lured in not by the prospects of specialty boutiques or exotic bistros but library summer game points¹ and my self-inflicted checklist of parks, which overlap in a major way thanks to a series of badges featuring the Ann Arbor parks. The main streets downtown were more crowded than I expected, but I mostly avoided them on my journey to visit no less than 18 summer game sites in one trip.

Huron River, Barton Nature Area

It was back to work on Monday, July 13, but by Thursday, July 16, I got fed up enough with the banshee-screeching children outside my window to go for an afternoon bike ride and get some more parks off the list. I tried another morning bike ride to the west side of Ann Arbor on Friday, July 17, but spent most of the first half of it playing leapfrog with the compost truck. The Revolution’s second group game in the Returnament was Saturday, July 18, which they tied thanks to an atrocious back pass gone wrong. They finished group play on Tuesday, July 21 with a scoreless draw, which was enough to get them into the knockout rounds.

I spent the rest of the week mostly doing what I’ve been doing for the past 4 months. In other exciting news for the week, Jeopardy! opened their vault and showed episodes from the first decade of Alex Trebek hosting. We got to see the first game of its current syndicated run, buzzing in before the clue was read, really bad final Jeopardy! betting, his and hers tennis racket prizes, a maximum cash winnings cap, and more. A couple more bike rides over the week leaves me with mostly parks along the southern reaches of Ann Arbor. At the very least I can say that I didn’t get less fit because of coronavirus. Saturday, July 25 was groceries in the morning, my longest bike ride of the year so far (~17 miles) in the afternoon, then I had a video call with friends from Cornell at night and I stayed up to watch the Revolution lose to the Philadelphia Union in a late-night MLS in Florida during a pandemic special 10:30 pm match. Why do I keep doing this to myself? Why did I come to grad school? Why do you always plug the USB in the wrong way the first time?

I finished out July spending until midnight on Tuesday, July 28 making a birthday card, which required taking out my colored pencils for the first time in months. It was just like being back at Cornell working on problem sets at absurd hours. And on Thursday, July 30, my turn to give virtual group meeting came around again, so I talked about my micelles and computational simulations.

Heading into August, the coronavirus numbers aren’t great – cases have been slowly but steadily rising, though hospital usage, at least in Washtenaw County, has remained low. The university is planning for some in-person classes, so students should start coming in next month, but we’ll see how long we make it before something goes wrong. I hope we get to Thanksgiving as planned, because that would mean people are behaving responsibly and thoughtfully, but I wouldn’t be surprised if things go pear-shaped by/in September.

Blue jay feather

¹The library puts on a combination summer reading program/scavenger hunt/events spectacular where you earn points for reading, writing reviews, attending events, searching the catalog, and visiting certain locations. In the catalog and at locations you either get a code to enter directly for points or have to find specific signs/objects to assemble the code (e.g. if you’re at a park the code might be “color of the slide + number of swings” and you’d enter something like “orange5”). Some of the codes are grouped together in badges and completing badges gets you more points. The points can then be traded for a finite number of objects in the summer game store.

Every Puzzle I Own (and one I don’t)

Even before stay at home orders, lockdowns, and quarantines sent people scrambling for non-electronic activities that could be done from the confines of their homes, I was assembling jigsaw puzzles like a technology-shunning hermit. My current collection is curated mostly from the Friends of the Library bookstore at the library, plus a couple from a family at church, and one on loan. The loan has gone on much longer than expected. Thanks corona.

I’ve done enough puzzles that I have opinions about them, both in terms of content and manufacture. If you know me, this should be approximately zero percent surprising. Let’s begin, shall we?

[Click photos to enlarge]

We start with a puzzle of beer brands from White Mountain Puzzles. The 90s and Finger Lakes puzzles below are also manufactured by them. They also make more “traditional” style puzzles of landscapes and bucolic Americana, but I’d say they bring more to the jigsaw puzzle industry with their “collage” puzzles, whether they’re maps + highlights (Finger Lakes) or a mélange of related images (beer, 90s). Because these puzzles don’t have endless stretches of sky or 50 shades of grass, they tend to be easier than their pastoral landscape counterparts, but they’re very fun to do and would probably be good for a group who might be less enthusiastic about puzzles. Out of all my puzzles, White Mountain makes the second tightest fitting pieces, especially when new, to the point where you can pick up the entire puzzle by a corner when it’s complete. Overall an enjoyable and well-made brand of puzzles.

The puzzles on the right in the image above are my two Ravensburger puzzles. This brand is known for making high quality puzzles, which I find to be true. The pieces fit together nicely and are cut well, and you don’t see much, if any, peeling off of the image. The Pixar puzzle, because it’s essentially nine smaller puzzles in one, is a fast assembly, but that’s not a complaint.

Top left below is by Kodacolor and is of a standard subject, being one of 1) moored boats, 2) a mountain meadow, or 3) hot air balloons. Well-constructed, and otherwise nothing to write home about. Does Kodak even still make puzzles? [I found some on Amazon under Kodak Premium Puzzles that have mixed to decent reviews. Looks like it’s a different line than Kodacolor though.] Top right – the Las Vegas strip, made by Buffalo Games, who carry a variety of styles of puzzles in various sizes, as well as card and board games (most of which I’ve never heard of). This puzzle has a lot of hotel windows and is also my largest puzzle at 2000 pieces.

Bottom right is the borrowed puzzle from Hinckler’s Mindbogglers series. It has the dubious honor of being the worst-made puzzle in this post. The poor cutting left pieces still attached to each other and caused the bottoms of tabs to peel off. To add insult to injury, the pieces didn’t feel good when being put together. Bottom left comes from Springbok. No complaints about this 1500-piece puzzle.

In the next set of puzzles, we begin with the abstract squares by Talicor, winner of the tightest-fitting, almost overtight, pieces award. It’s a two-sided puzzle that will allegedly “test your best effort,” but at only 81 pieces, it has absolutely nothing (nothing, I’m telling you) on the infamous Dalmatian puzzle. To at least make it a moderate challenge, they do make the horizontal and vertical cuts on opposite sides of the symmetric, oddly-shaped pieces so you can’t immediately tell which side is the top or bottom. It’s still fixable in less than an afternoon. Moving on to a shuttle launch from Eurographics and a Thomas Kinkade mountain cabin from Ceaco. Like Springbok, these two manufacturers offer a variety of puzzles that are decently made – it’s reasonably clear when pieces fit together and small groups of pieces will stay together when moved. Lots of sky in the shuttle launch, interesting textures in the Kinkade.

The penultimate puzzle is Van Gogh’s Starry Night, made by Go! Games. My senior year apartment at Cornell had a copy of a Starry Night puzzle that a previous resident assembled and glued onto cardboard. My roommates put it up on the living room wall as decoration, which already made it about a hundred times better than most of the guys’ apartments. This puzzle wins the loosest-fitting pieces award. Some people may be put off by this; I call it an additional challenge to go along with 800 pieces of blue and yellow swirls and 200 pieces of mostly darkness.

Finally, it’s my only shaped puzzle, winner of the most missing pieces award, a dragon from F.X. Schmid. Turns out F.X. Schmid was acquired by Ravensburger in 1998, so who knows how old this puzzle is? The pieces fit slightly tighter than Starry Night, and the novelty of the shape is fun. So there you have it. Eleven puzzle manufacturers, two of which may not exist anymore, fourteen puzzles, and over 14,000 puzzle pieces.

#MLSisBack (again): The Returnament

Thanks to expansion and an ever-growing number of MLS teams, the start of the season has crept from the beginning of April to early March to Leap Day. Although this means the more northern teams have to concern themselves with freezing temperatures, winter weather travel delays, and snow, besides the actual playing of soccer, this year it also meant that teams got in the first couple games of the season before the country shut down for coronavirus reasons. In Bruce Arena’s first season opener with the Revolution, New England headed north of the border for the #MapleSyrupDerby with Montreal on Leap Day. With last season’s MVP Carles Gil injured, Teal Bunbury scored the Revolution’s first goal of the season, but Montreal answered with two of their own to secure a 2-1 win.

The next week (Saturday, March 7) New England opened their home season at Gillette with a 1-1 draw to Chicago. Adam Buksa, the team’s newest designated player, scored for the Revolution, which was encouraging. Otherwise, they again gave up a lead while looking not terrible, but not great either. And then things got interesting, by which I mean everything was cancelled and the Revolution unknowingly played their last game for four months.

Over the next couple months, the players and staff joined the millions of Americans Staying Home and Social Distancing. They did soccer drills in their backyards, ran outside appropriately distanced, showed off their piano skills, and gave cooking advice, among other activities. As things settled down, they returned to small group, then full team training, and rumors arose about teams returning to play through a tournament, promptly dubbed the Returnament by fans. All the teams would gather in one location and be tested, cutting down on travel and virus spread. The format was finalized and the location chosen – the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando, Florida, where they would have accommodations and sports facilities in one place. Great choice, except that in the weeks leading up to the tournament, coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in Florida were in the process of exploding. But MLS decided not to cancel¹, and 24 of 26 teams made it to the Sunshine State without major incident. FC Dallas and Nashville SC, after receiving multiple positive test results, made the decision to drop out, with their group stage games (which count for the regular season standings) hopefully to be played at some future time.

For the rest of the teams, bubble time began, and at 8 pm on Thursday, July 9th, the Revolution restarted their season with a game against their Maple Syrup Derby friends, the Montreal Impact. This time, with Gil playing, and for the first time ever, three designated players (Gil, Buksa, and Gustavo Bou) on the field together, the Revolution looked, dare I say it, good. The finishing was lacking, but the movement and passing looked better than I’ve seen in a while. Ten minutes into the second half, after several missed chances and wayward shots, Bou turned near the edge of the box to pound a shot past the Montreal goalkeeper. And that’s all it took. Well, that, thirty-five minutes of defending, and a last-minute save from Matt Turner. Which the broadcast, streamed on Twitter (seriously, Twitter), cut off. I wish I was kidding. I should have switched to the Spanish stream, but I didn’t want to expend that much energy translating. So I stuck it out on Twitter. Fortunately, because the English announcers were so bad (not maliciously bad, like blatantly insulting one team or players, just bad), I kept the video from Twitter going and borrowed the audio from Brad Feldman and Charlie Davies commentating for the Revolution on the radio, so I heard the final minutes of the game, even if I didn’t see them. The audio was at least ten seconds behind the video, but this was still preferable to “There’s Bruce Arena. He is wearing . . . a shirt. Here is a player. He has . . . kicked the ball.” Like I said, not good. But the Revolution picked up a 1-0 win to start off their Returnament run, so #NERevs Twitter was temporarily happy.

Eight days later, New England took to the field again against D.C. United. Unlike Montreal, who sat back and allowed the Revolution a lot of possession, D.C. pressed more, but the Revolution held up until early in the second half when Buksa headed a deflected shot into the back of the net. Twenty minutes later, New England reminded their fans that they’re still the Revolution by horribly misplaying a back pass to Turner. A D.C. player swooped in to claim the ball and the goal. Final score: 1-1. This broadcast (on ESPN) was better than the previous game. For one thing, they didn’t cut off the final minutes of stoppage time. For another, they used field noise, so we got to hear the players and coaches yelling at each other, instead of fake, generic crowd noise that was inserted twenty minutes into the game and overpowered the commentators (seriously, that happened too).

For their last Group C game, the Revolution played Toronto FC, at nine am on a Tuesday to avoid the worst of the Florida heat and humidity. Arena rotated a good number of his players and was again without Carles Gil, who was out with the same injury as in preseason. But I guess you don’t win five MLS cups and get to coach the US Men’s National Team for eight years without knowing what you’re doing, because the Revolution looked like they were playing some weird sort of Bruce Arena 4D chess. After a lackluster first half with something like no shots on goal and a few saves from Matt Turner, they went into the halftime break tied at zero. One substitution later, New England came out ready to play. Within minutes, they had multiple shots and chances and continued to push for a goal throughout the half. In the end, they had some near misses, and some close calls at the other end, with a couple penalty claims for added excitement, and the game ended in a pretty fair 0-0 draw.

With that, the Revolution got 5 points for the regular season standings and booked their spot in the round of 16. There’s another two and a half weeks of soccer to go before the tournament final, and then who knows? I don’t know if even MLS knows what they’re going to do, based on the resurgent numbers of cases across large portions of the United States. Even though deaths have (so far) seemed to rise only marginally, full ICUs, ambulance rerouting, the threat of crisis care, overworked medical professionals, and cancelled non-emergency procedures are not the signs of a happy and well-functioning health care system. Maybe we’ll have a 5-game 2020 season? Or move the league to Antarctica? Put all the players in inflatable bumper bubble balls to keep them six feet apart? Rebrand the league as Major League Foosball in Real Life where every player is assigned to a spot on the field and can only move a certain distance laterally?

¹There’s some backlash about MLS and other sports leagues getting rapid-result testing to play games while everyday citizens are waiting over a week for test results to return to essential jobs. However, the way I see it is that the reason sports teams haven’t been able to get back to playing games is because everyone else won’t get their act together, so they should just go on ahead and use their resources to get players tested. Also, the number of tests being done is a relatively small percentage of the total, and what I’ve heard is that leagues are contracting with private companies for testing.

Top Ten ____ [TV shows]

I don’t watch that much TV, but I have watched more than 10 different TV shows. Notable shows I haven’t seen include Parks and Recreation, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones, so that’s why none of them are on the list. As a rule of thumb, if I don’t mention your favorite, undeniably great show, just assume I haven’t seen it.

10) Fresh off the Boat – The first Asian American-led TV show since All-American Girl (1 season, 1994-1995) gets the last spot on the list. It’s not always the strongest show in terms of plot, but I’m a fan of the cast. The show follows the Huang family after their move to Orlando, Florida in the 1990s. While Louis establishes his steakhouse and Jessica works on her mystery crime novel, they both parent Eddie, Emery, and Evan as they navigate elementary/middle/high school, enter into relationships, learn to drive, and make college plans. The jokes don’t always land, but there are a lot of good moments.

9) Sherlock – BBC’s take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective has Holmes and Watson sharing a flat in modern-day London where Sherlock runs his consulting detective agency and Watson blogs about their adventures. The first two seasons, which primarily adapt Doyle’s stories, are really, really good – the plot is engaging, the dialog is tight, and the camera work is excellent. Season three has a couple of my favorite scenes, but starts moving away from being strictly a detective show. Then came season four. It’s too clever for its own good. It starts reaching conspiracy theory levels of what-the-heck. Just for that season, Sherlock ends up this far down the list.

8) The Magic School Bus – In this show that teaches children science, the elementary-aged characters regularly climb onto a magical transforming bus that shrinks, grows, and turns kids into reptiles, bats, water, and more. Sounds safe and realistic to me. I actually appreciate that there’s absolutely no attempt to explain how the bus works. Everyone just accepts it. The science, while often simplified (it’s a 25-minute children’s TV show; give it a break), is generally theoretically sound. I’m now in engineering, so a show that relates math and science to everyday life gets a thumbs up from me. [Other educational/semi-educational TV shows from my childhood: Cyberchase, Reading Rainbow, Between the Lions, Zoboomafu, Fetch!, Zoom, and Liberty’s Kids. Thanks, PBS.]

7) Community – Seven students find their way to Greendale Community College and form a study group that becomes more than a study group. Episodes are centered around the classes they take, but tie into other events that happen throughout the year. One of the show’s big strengths lies in its ability to spoof other genres/styles in the context of Greendale. The season 1 and 2 paintball episodes (imitating action, western, and sci-fi movies) are some of the best TV I’ve seen. There’s also a funny bottle episode and a Claymation Christmas. That said, I see the problems with season 4 that are a result of the showrunner (Dan Harmon) being fired after season 3. The show goes off the rails a bit. Although Harmon was brought back for seasons 5 and 6, they don’t quite capture what they had in the first half of the show’s run, but Community’s worth a watch even just for the first three seasons.

6) Star Trek: The Original Series – Due to budget and technology constraints, TOS is not great television, especially season 3, but this was the Star Trek that started it all. Even if the plots are formulaic, they address pertinent questions about moral and social issues ranging from the use of technology to discrimination.

5) Star Trek: The Next Generation – TNG has some of the same problems as TOS in terms of plot, and it takes some time for the characters to settle into their roles, but once they do, it’s classic Star Trek. The casting overall is strong, but Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard is brilliant.

4) The Great British Bake Off – A baking competition in which the contestants are pleasant to each other. What more could I ask for? I prefer the original hosts, because the current hosts are downright bizarre sometimes, but I’m not really complaining.

3) Jeopardy! – Last year during the MLS season, I discovered that I have TV service through the internet, which I used to watch the Revolution’s one nationally televised game in Spanish. For some reason, I didn’t think about also using my newfound TV access to watch Jeopardy! until after I went home for Christmas and came back to Ann Arbor. Since then, I tune in for my week-nightly viewing of Jeopardy!, where I can put my stores of semi-useless knowledge to use.

2) The Office – Everyday life at the Scranton branch of the Dunder Mifflin paper company. The characters are all flawed, but ultimately likeable, and yes, the office dynamics and shenanigans are exaggerated, but I’ve worked with some interesting people and done some pretty ridiculous things in my office, so they’re not that far out of left field. I can see why the show’s not for everyone, but I think it’s hilarious. The first season is a little rough, it really hits its groove in the middle seasons, then the last two seasons have a few questionable episodes before the final three episodes, which have some incredibly funny, strange, poignant moments.

1) Avatar: The Last Airbender – Like Star Trek, it considers important issues regarding gender roles, racism, propaganda, and animal abuse, among many others. It also has amazing characters, plot, and animation, so it earns the top spot on this list.

Other noteworthy shows (not necessarily vying for a spot in the top ten, but interesting for one reason or another) – lesser known, but Person of Interest is relevant to current questions about technology and surveillance. A computer program, “The Machine,” can predict crime before it happens and can output the social security number of a “person of interest” – a perpetrator, victim, or bystander. The first couple seasons have mostly self-contained episodes with variations on a standard plot, then an overarching plot is woven in. The last season was regrettably cut short, so the finale is a little rushed, but still done well. And not lesser known, but The Walking Dead. Only the first ~3 seasons, maybe the first ~5, and only more if you want to see what a train wreck it becomes. Starts out great, turns into a zombie soap opera. That’s all I’ll say about that.