There’s a Fungus Among Us

In my latest wilderness wanderings, I’ve encountered some fungal friends. Actually, I have no idea if they’re friendly or not. Probably not. Besides bracket fungi, I haven’t been able to identify many of the others because online sources are all concerned that you’re trying to figure out what they are so you can eat them and don’t want to get sued to Mars and back. Don’t worry; I’m not particularly interested in eating the mushrooms you can buy at the supermarket, so I’m very uninterested in eating random mushrooms I find on the forest floor. I do know they’re not the highly prized morels, or the highly poisonous Amanita ocreata (also known as the death angel, destroying angel, or angel of death, which besides often being fatally toxic, is similar in appearance to multiple edible mushrooms). Anything in between, including species that are merely “inedible” or “not recommended” to be ingested, is possible.

Don't know what this guy is, but it was a solid foot wide.

Just your average bracket fungus.

Another bracket fungus.

Some sort of honey fungus?  Don't quote me on that.  Likely at least mildly poisonous, not that I have any intention of letting it anywhere near my mouth.

No idea.  Might be a fungus.  Could be a lichen.  Or maybe paint.

Your biology lesson for the day: fungi are a kingdom of organisms that include yeasts and molds, as well as mushrooms. They’re eukaryotic, meaning they have a nucleus within a membrane; heterotrophic, so they can’t produce their own food; and have spores. Mushrooms don’t have roots, but rootlike mycelium, made up of hyphae, which are collections of cells that form long branching filament-like structures surrounded by a cell wall. In fungi, the cell wall is primarily chitin, as opposed to cellulose in plants. And lastly, there are approximately 14,000 species of mushrooms, tens to hundreds of thousands of types of molds, and around 1,500 yeasts, so there is indeed a lot of fungus among us.

#MLSisBack (. . . again, for real this time, probably): part 2 of stage 3

After stopping and starting play more than traffic on I-95 past New York City (not really, but you get the point), this latest group of games has been the longest stretch of continuous play for most teams. The Revolution have at least met the benchmark of not being terrible, but they still haven’t convincingly proven that they can play a game resembling soccer on any given night.

Wednesday, September 2 vs. NYCFC – 0-2 L – Still at home at Gillette, the Revolution suffered their first loss in eight games (which isn’t as great as it sounds – the seven prior games included five ties). They were outpossessed, couldn’t hold on to the ball in the middle of the field, kind of shot (hey, at least they registered shots on goal), and generally looked . . . not good. Michael Mancienne, replacing Andrew Farrell at center back, scored, for the wrong team, not for the first time. Look, everyone makes mistakes, but one of your big concerns for your center back should not be if his header/slide tackle/attempted clearance is going to end up in his own goalkeeper’s net whenever he touches the ball in the penalty area.

Sunday, September 6 at Chicago Fire – 2-1 W – Back on the road, Chicago and the Revolution began the game by trading goals off of defensive mistakes. New England scored early after Gustavo Bou won a ball in the midfield and centered it for Adam Buksa, who dropped a header behind his defender for Tommy McNamara to run on to. McNamara passed the ball across the face of goal where Teal Bunbury was waiting to knock it in. On the other side of the field, the Revolution were not dealing well with corner kicks, and conceded after the initial corner was cleared, but Brandon Bye kept a Fire player onside when the ball was played back into the box by Chicago. Nevertheless, the Revolution were rescued by none other than Teal Bunbury, who in his Bunbury-est goal of 2020, scored when his attempted cross to find Bou or Buksa curled beautifully into the top corner of the goal. To make things even better/worse, former Revolution player Bobby Shuttleworth was in net for Chicago. After that goal, New England decided not to test their luck any further and dropped back a lot and played defensively for the rest of the game.

Midweek – In the latest installment of “Bruce brings back Friedel’s fired footballers,” Lee Nguyen was reacquired by the team from Miami, joining Kelyn Rowe (and Seth Sinovic, but he left much earlier, when Steve Nicol was coach) in coming back to the Revolution after Brad Friedel chased them off. I still don’t agree completely with Nguyen’s behavior in bargaining for a higher salary in 2018 (he had recently signed a new contract), but Friedel was definitely a large part of the problem. A team doesn’t go from losing two games in five days with a combined score of 11-1 to grinding out ties and wins with the exact same players after the coach is fired, unless there was a problem with the coach. Nguyen’s older now, and hasn’t been playing the same kinds of minutes as he was with the Revolution, but at this point in this season, why not give him a try? The Revolution didn’t play with the same kind of fluidity after he left until Carles Gil arrived, and they haven’t looked like that since Gil’s been injured. He knows the league, the team, the players, the location, the stadium and field. [But the training facility is new. No more riding golf carts to the practice fields. Which seriously was how they used to get to their grass fields from the locker room.] So why not? Let’s give it a shot.

Saturday, September 12 at Philadelphia Union – 1-2 L – On the Revolution bingo card: lose a game they might have tied on a last-minute-of-second-half-stoppage-time-corner-kick goal – check. For the third time in eight weeks, the Revolution had a game against the Union, this time heading down to Pennsylvania for the away game. Gustavo Bou, having played the majority of the five previous games in seventeen days and seeming visibly tired in the Chicago game, started on the bench. Joining him was Lee Nguyen, who shortened his quarantine by driving (not flying) directly from Florida to Massachusetts, the same evening he was traded, in a Tesla. Because of course. Anyway, the players on the field had an uneventful first half, managing to keep Philadelphia off the scoreboard while not creating many chances for themselves.

Shortly into the second half, Matt Polster picked up a second yellow card for pulling a Union player back, which is rightfully a foul, but I would argue the play also included the Union player flinging himself to the ground like he’d just been karate kicked in the back of the head. The Revolution then park basically all of their players in their half of the field, which goes decently until Philadelphia scores on a typical defensive circus of errors. However, after already subbing in Scott Caldwell to cover for Polster, Diego Fagundez, and Tajon Buchanan, Bruce Arena uses his final two substitutions to bring on Bou and Nguyen for the last fifteen minutes of the game. Almost immediately, New England’s presence in the middle of the field improves. Whether it’s because Bou has gotten some rest or because the Revolution really have been missing someone who can keep and pass the ball in the middle of the field, I don’t know, but in the moments leading to their tying goal, there were glimpses of the 2014 MLS cup team there. The goal came off a give and go with Bou and was Buchanan’s first ever MLS goal, so congratulations to him. In typical Revolution fashion, they then hang in there until the very last corner kick of the game, when Fagundez’s clearance travels about five feet out of the box to an unmarked Union player directly in front of the goal¹ who takes his time and space to score a(n admittedly nice) goal. No points for you, New England.

¹Defending 101, taught to literal children: clear the ball to the sidelines, not the middle of the field, especially if you’re only going to kick it about three feet and literally almost any other action (kicking the ball way, way down the field; out to the side for a throw in; or into empty space in the midfield), would probably slow down the game enough to make it to the final whistle.

Takeaways: Not much Matt Turner could have done. Andrew Farrell and Henry Kessler continue to look like the team’s best center back pairing. Alexander Buttner, at left back, had a couple decent crosses and one very good one. Polster, minus red card, has been a good fit at defensive midfield, but Caldwell had the most solid game I’ve seen from him since Montreal at the Returnament, especially once Lee Nguyen came on. Based on his limited minutes, Nguyen still looks like he could play very well with this team. And even without the goal, Buchanan has looked better in his recent appearances – less likely to dribble directly into opposing defenders and take absurd shots. So it’s on to the next set of three games. Montreal has been freed from Canada, so get ready for #MapleSyrupDerby time again.

#MLSisBack (. . . again, for real this time, probably): part 1 of stage 3

In the latest installment of the 2020 MLS season, the league released a set of six games for each team against teams in their general geographic area so that the away team can take charter flights to and from the game on gameday itself. One more funny thing to add to the absurdity that’s already been the 2020 season so far is that because crossing the US/Canada border is currently restricted, the three Canadian teams (Toronto FC, the Montreal Impact, and the Vancouver Whitecaps) can only play each other right now. The majority of teams (all except FC Dallas, Sporting Kansas City, Orlando City SC, and Real Salt Lake¹ is what I’m finding online) have not had any fans present, though the Revolution had socially-distanced drive-in viewing parties in Gillette during the Returnament², which were a big hit based on what I’ve seen. After these six games, the league is planning for twelve more games before the playoffs, ending up in a 23-game season – the 2 games played before the season was postponed, the 3 group stage games at the Returnament, these 6 regional games, and the final to-be-released 12 games.

So far in the season, the Revolution have at times looked pretty good, and at others been uninspired. However, uninspired is miles better than last year’s “how do I play soccer” team under Brad Friedel, so I’ll take it. Here’s how New England did in their most recent set of games:

Thursday, August 20 vs. Philadelphia Union – 0-0 T – Following their return from Florida, the Revolution resumed training in preparation for their rematch with the Union, their first game at Gillette since March. The broadcast wasn’t too bad – the crowd noise wasn’t too overpowering, but they put fake virtual tarps over the empty seats that block the ball in the air. Otherwise it was soccer as usual, with a couple twists. Five substitutions per team allowed at a maximum of three different stoppages plus halftime, and hydration breaks at the referee’s discretion if it’s above 82 F, but we’re talking about New England at the end of summer going into fall so we’re more likely to need the orange snow ball than water breaks. Without the injured Carles Gil, the team at times struggled to create chances on goal, but they had a few decent attempts, and the defense was solid. Matt Polster, acquired during the tournament, looked pretty good as their defensive midfielder; Andrew Farrell and rookie Henry Kessler might be the team’s best center back pairing right now; and Matt Turner continued making saves when he needed to.

Tuesday, August 25 at DC United – 2-1 W – In this trip to the nation’s capital, New England opened the scoring after Gustavo Bou collected a missed corner kick clearance for his second goal of the season. Shortly after, the game was put on pause for a lightning delay. Upon its return, Teal Bunbury scored a header off an Alexander Buttner corner kick, which turned out to be the game winning goal when DC was awarded a penalty kick in the middle of the second half. Based on how much the Revolution weren’t arguing the decision, it was probably a pretty blatant handball in the box. Again, not a bad performance from the Revolution, but this was their first multigoal game of the season, and a lot of questions remain. (Their last weather-delayed game before this one was their July 4th game in Colorado last year. They also won that game 2-1 as part of their climb out of the basement of the MLS standings, Teal Bunbury had the game-winning goal there as well, and Matt Turner was in goal making great saves. Maybe they should install lightning rods at all the other teams’ stadiums.)

Saturday, August 29 vs. New York Red Bulls – 1-1 T – During the week, new Revolution players Tommy McNamara and Kekuta Manneh joined the team after 10 days of quarantine. McNamara and allocation money were acquired from Houston for Wilfried Zahibo plus a temporary international roster slot while Manneh was a Cincinnati player traded for another temporary international roster spot. So the Revolution gave up a player who wasn’t getting many minutes and international roster slots they weren’t/aren’t using for two players and money. Say what you want about the front office’s penny-pinching ways; their stockpiles of allocation money and roster flexibility do occasionally come in handy. As for the game itself, it wasn’t terrible. In the first half, the Red Bulls scored by breaking down the Revolution defensively, but the Revolution equalized minutes later on a goal from Bou, assisted by Bunbury and Cristian Penilla. The second half was less eventful until the final minutes, when New England pushed for a goal, but it wasn’t enough to scrape out a win. Kessler and Turner continued to look solid, though Andrew Farrell had a bit of an off night; and McNamara saw some minutes and looked okay.

This got longer than I thought it would, so I’ll stop here and return with the final three games of this six-game stretch. Believe it or not; things get ever weirder.

¹So generally teams from states that could be said to not have taken coronavirus as seriously as they should have. (Though it looks like Inter Miami FC and the Houston Dynamo, who share states with Orlando and FC Dallas respectively, aren’t having fans at games.) Maybe also worth noting that FC Dallas was one of the two teams who didn’t play in the Returnament because of positive COVID-19 tests, the other team being Nashville SC, which again plays in a state that falls more on the “what’s the big deal?” side of the coronavirus matter.

²To the (non)surprise of most Revolution fans, New England was knocked out of the Returnament round of 16 by the Philadelphia Union, ending their time in Florida.

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.]