Dog Days of Summer

When we last left off, I was sweating in my apartment, watching lots of Netflix, and working my way through 3.5 pints of ice cream (chocolate peanut butter). Well, guess what? I’m still sweating in my apartment, watching lots of Netflix, and working my way through my carton of ice cream (it’s time for a new flavor soon). Coronavirus county numbers look decent, just in time for school to start and thousands of students to converge on campus. Ann Arbor public schools start out virtual this fall and will reevaluate as circumstances change; U-M seems determined to continue with move-in and ~30% in-person classes. So far at least UNC Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, and Michigan State have walked back plans for in-person activities, but it’s possible they may have been less strict about some things than U-M is being. I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to try this reopening thing out since Washtenaw County looks okay (low hospital occupancy, no deaths for the past two weeks, 1-2 dozen cases a day for ~370,000 people), but I’m also ready to kick people out again if cases start taking off for the stratosphere. With that, here’s how I spent August.

I kicked off the month on Saturday, August 1 by cutting my own hairs and making a pot of curry that I ate for most of the week before freezing the rest for later. It rained on Sunday, August 2, but I was desperate enough to get away from the screaming children that I hiked out to a nature area by the river. Pros: low traffic, few people, nature, mud. Cons: a little damp. Over the week, I finished my single jar of kaya hand-transported from Singapore and picked up when I went home last Christmas, plus did research and all that other stuff.

Kayakers on the Huron River.

On Sunday, August 9 I continued my quest for Ann Arbor parks and summer game points in southwest Ann Arbor. (S)LPT¹ – Make your 82-degree apartment feel cool by biking 18 miles in sunny, humid, 88-degree weather in the middle of the afternoon. When you get back, it’ll be like you have air conditioning, except only for about ten minutes, and you don’t actually have air conditioning. Actual LPT – Have a cold fruit waiting for you in the fridge. It’ll be the best fruit of your life. I did basically nothing of interest the rest of the week besides finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and start the 80s mass-market fantasy book I picked up at the library bookstore for 50 cents months ago.

I headed to southeast Ann Arbor on Saturday, August 15 for my second-to-last group of summer games parks. I don’t go down there much because it’s not commercial so there’s not much in the way of places of interest, it’s not a bike commuter corridor so most of the way doesn’t have a designated bike lane, and the main roads aren’t residential so your options are questionable sidewalk (great for lower body massages) or “sharing the road” with five lanes of “35” mph traffic. Sunday, August 16 was laundry day and was also cool enough to bake a batch of banana walnut muffins. I continued doing little of interest throughout the week, though the internet drama regarding colleges starting fall semester in-person began mounting. I completed my mandatory online courses on sexual harassment (summary: don’t be a creepy jerk) and returning to campus in the times of coronavirus (summary: don’t be a jerk who parties mask-less while sick) to get them over with on Wednesday, August 19. And on Thursday, August 20 after group meeting I visited my last batch of summer game parks, again in the southern regions of Ann Arbor. With that done, I can now decide if I want to fill in the parks I skipped because I didn’t need to visit them before the end of the month or return to some of the hiking areas that didn’t suck to bike to/have bike parking. Or both.

August 20 was the same day the Revolution returned to regular season play (again), playing the Philadelphia Union at a fan-less Gillette Stadium to a 0-0 draw. It looks like the plan for MLS is to schedule about a month of games at a time with near-ish opponents so that the away team can arrive and return on the same day via charter flights. After the shortened season, playoffs will commence, culminating in MLS Cup on December 12. On Friday, August 21, my second major accomplishment of the week was finishing my rewatch of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It remains worthy of being my favorite TV show.

That weekend, Saturday, August 22 and Sunday, August 23, I took a break from hauling myself across Ann Arbor and started The Legend of Korra. I’d seen the first season before but remembered very little of it. Over the week I took a couple walks in the woods as students moved back to campus, and finished up my summer game badges. The Revolution beat D.C. United 2-1 on goals from Gustavo Bou and Teal Bunbury on Tuesday, August 25 in their first multigoal performance of 2020. On Saturday, August 29, friends from Cornell and I had a Skype call where we talked about, among other things, cat backpacks, jigsaw puzzles, and electric kazoos, and played skribbl.io, basically online Pictionary where I had to draw with a mouse with my nondominant hand, which went about as well as I expected.

Post-thunderstorm still pond.

I finished out the month with field trips to Target on Sunday, August 30 for water filters and sunscreen (bad idea; all the students were shopping for towels and plastic storage bins) and to the library to check out my first book since March. The library is doing contactless pickup so you request a specific item, then they put it on the pickup shelf for you to collect. When you arrive at the library, you’re watched over by a librarian on a TV screen who you can say hi to and who will also answer any questions you might have. Today, Monday, August 31, was the first day of classes (first day of 21^st grade!) but I don’t actually have any classes, so I stayed in my apartment all day thinking about my micelles. Lunch this week is ham and cheese sandwiches, so I made a batch of spicy peanut tofu for dinner.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the coronavirus situation, but it’s already shaping up to be an interesting fall to go with an interesting spring and an interesting summer.

¹LPT = life pro tip. The S makes it the opposite of a LPT on a subreddit. It stands for something else on Reddit, but here we’re going to say it means “subpar.”

New Bus Route, Who Dis?

Anyone know the schedule for this bus route? How often it runs, the route map, etc.?

[Pictured is the bus shelter at the Central Campus Transit Center, the hub for the university’s campus-focused (vs. Michigan medicine-focused) buses. During normal operation, the electronic signs display the arrival times for incoming routes (e.g. “Bursley-Baits 4 min,” “Commuter North 9 min,” and so on). However, on weekends when few routes are running, they sometimes display a message along the lines of “No route information available. Sorry for the inconvenience.” For whatever reason, they dispatch this information split up as “No route information available/Sorry for the/inconvenience.” There’s room on the sign to display the whole message at once – look at the sign behind it with hiring information – but no, they wish to broadcast INCONVENIENCE 1/3 of the time.

Photo taken last spring, but I think it would be a pretty good route to represent 2020. Instead of showing up when you need it, like the Knight Bus in Harry Potter, the Inconvenience Bus is always running extremely late or pulls away from the stop early as you’re running to catch it, takes scenic detours at least 50% of the time, breaks down if you’re on your way to important meetings, and keeps disappearing from tracking apps, then reappearing either at the stop past yours or in Siberia. Wait, this sounds like public transportation as it already is under normal circumstances . . . just kidding. Mostly.

For real though, both the university and the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority (AAATA) are planning to reconfigure their routes this fall to prioritize common destinations and reduce the number of people on buses/time spent on the bus. This does mean that instead of one 25-minute bus ride you might have two 10-minute bus rides, plus time spent waiting to transfer, but depending on how the probability of virus transmission varies with time, it might actually be better to be in contact with more people (two separate bus rides) for less time. For example, assume the probability you get infected is directly proportional to time spent on the bus with an infected person (say 1% for every five minutes) and there’s a 1% chance someone on the bus is infected. If we compare one 30-minute ride to two 15-minute rides, the chance you get infected on the 30-minute ride is 0.01*(6*0.01) = 0.06%. Conversely, the chance you don’t get infected is 99.94%. For one 15-minute ride, you get infected with a probability of 0.03% and stay healthy 99.97% of the time, so for two 15-minute rides, the chance you don’t get infected is (0.9997)² = 0.99940009 or 99.940009%, a (very) slightly higher chance of not being infected by taking two shorter bus rides vs. one longer ride.¹ I have no idea if infection is directly proportional to time, and this also assumes random distribution of infectious people and that total time on the bus is the same, but it’s at least possible that the university isn’t doing some sort of smoke and mirrors/song and dance thing to make people think they’re making these plans to keep people safer.

Of course, this could all still be a CYA move by the university since the route reconfiguration is to make all the routes 15 minutes or less, and part of the CDC’s definition of “close contact” for contact tracing is spending more than 15 minutes near to an infected person, so now U-M technically never has to contact trace anyone from the buses. File this one as more probable than 5G causing coronavirus but less likely than the Earth is round.

¹The funny part about this analysis is that the “safest” thing to do is split the bus ride up into an infinite number of infinitely short rides. Which isn’t the most physically possible solution, so maybe now we need some optimization of “coronavirus risk” vs. “# of times students will willingly transfer buses before mutinying.” My guess is two buses before revolt, because bus transfers are a pain in the neck.]

Top Ten _____ [Musicals]

I’ve documented my musical viewings, but what you really want to know is what’s worth watching out of all those overtures, choreography, love songs, and . . . ABBA?

10) Mamma Mia! – That’s right, we’re starting things off with a jukebox musical romantic comedy set on a Greek island featuring a Swedish pop group. It’s light and fun, and doesn’t try to be anything it’s not. Watch at your own risk of getting the songs stuck in your head for weeks.

9) The Phantom of the Opera – One of two musicals I’ve seen on Broadway. Some people can’t stand Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, but I don’t think he’s too bad. Phantom has a coherent enough plot, good songs, a dance number, and generally ticks all the boxes of what you want in a musical, which may be why it’s Broadway’s longest running show.

8) The Music Man – Too classic to leave off the list. It’s got a lot of recognizable songs. The competing conman/falling in love plots are similar to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but it’s more well known, maybe because its title doesn’t take three years to type.

7) Rent – Yes, the characters are kind of lazy jerks, but you don’t always need fully lovable protagonists. The score is rock solid, and I can’t speak to how much or little it parallels Puccini’s La Boheme because I’ve never seen or read about it.

6) West Side Story – The other musical I’ve seen on Broadway, and I recently watched the 1961 movie on Netflix. It’s based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, so if you think about the plot too much it makes no sense. However, it’s a Leonard Bernstein score, Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, and Jerome Robbins did the choreography, so that more than makes up for all the characters’ questionable decisions.

5) Mary Poppins – There’s something about the 1964 movie that just feels magical. Well, besides the fact that Mary Poppins magically descends from the clouds, transports children into paintings, and hosts a floating tea party.

4) Into the Woods – Scored by Sondheim, book by James Lapine. It’s a clever musical adaptation and intertwining of fairy tales. I’ve seen the Jr. version staged live and the movie, but not the full live musical.

3) Les Miserables – Probably the only musical on this list that could possibly be described as epic, in terms of both the music and the plot. It’s a sung-through adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 3000-page novel, which I have not read. (Rent and Phantom are both almost sung-through, but do have some spoken lines.)

2) Guys and Dolls – Based on Damon Runyon’s short stories of the New York underworld. Reasonable plot, interesting characters, strong songs, and interspersed funny moments make this a very solid musical, and one of my favorites.

1) The Sound of Music – Couldn’t not have a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on the list. Based on the number of times I’ve seen this movie, I’ll call it my favorite. Besides the classic Julie Andrews 1965 version, I’ve also seen the recording of NBC’s 2013 live production starring not-Julie Andrews as Maria. Doesn’t compare to the original movie.

I've compiled a list of musicals the library has that 1) I haven’t watched and 2) aren’t random obscure productions like The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall (run of a single show on Broadway). There’s nothing huge on the list that I think would unseat anything in my top ten musicals, but you never know. I also haven’t seen Wicked, Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, etc., or any of the Disney spectacles, so this ranking is subject to change. But this is the list for now, and here’s where I try and convince you all that Shrek The Musical is not terrible, and also surprisingly, the songs for School of Rock (scored by Andrew Lloyd Webber) are pretty good.