Snow Closings

It is snowing in New Jersey. People are going home from work and the kids are out of school (and, reports my wife, running amok in the public library).

I guess I can understand that. It is snowing pretty hard.

But has anyone noticed that these days they have a hair trigger on the ol' snow closings? Last week they let the kids out of school early in Flemington on a day when it didn't actually start snowing until after the school day would have ended. Today, several people left work hours ago, even though even the snow still hasn't stuck to the roads at all.

"And they wonder," says my friend Jill, who raised five kids, "why American kids are going soft."

(Not to sound like some grizzled old crank, but along those same lines, a few weeks ago I was playing full-court basketball with some teenagers. An hour and a half into it, one of them said he didn't want to guard me because I was sweaty. Yes, sweaty. As in "sweat-equity" and "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration." Of course, sweaty is a problem at work, and sweaty is a problem when you want to hug your clean loved ones. I did not think sweat would ever be a problem in the gym.)

Meditating

Sort of the ultimate weirdo thing to do, isn't it? I mean, talk about an activity that you could be chastised for!

I just did it for the first time in a very long time. I sat on the floor. I eventually convinced the dog not to lick my face. Then I closed my eyes and took some deep breaths.

It lasted five minutes. Less time than it takes me to shave.

But wow. The feeling afterwards is totally different than the feeling before. It's sort of a strong, calm, realistic optimism. Good stuff.

NBA Trading Deadline

I have had about ten e-mails in the last few hours to talk about the big trade in the NBA today: which brings the Philadelphia 76ers Chris Webber, long the star of the Sacramento Kings, to compliment Philly's franchise player, Allen Iverson.

Here's my take: this trade puts Iverson in the hot seat.

He has been a top NBA player for years, he was even the league MVP in 2001, but he hasn't won a title. For much of his career (except that magical run that resulted in a trip to the 2001 Finals) his teams haven't even been all that good. The excuse through the years has been that he hasn't ever had a big-name teammate.

Chris Webber is certainly a big name (and big contract!).

Iverson's not getting any younger. The Sixers are spending money. The next two or three years are Iverson's chance to show he can lead a team to the promised land--and secure a place in the Hall of Fame.

I think it's iffy. But stranger things have happened.

Bird Flu

They're talking about the gravest possible chance of a global pandemic that will kill millions. Nothing Al Qaeda is plotting can rival that. But I haven't heard anything from the Department of Homeland Security on this one. (Loose bird flu and loose nukes--if the government just solved those two, who cares about Al Qaeda?)

I have questions:

• What is the value of the Asian poultry industry? Is it conceivably affordable to just buy all their damn chickens and kill them? Grotesque and expensive, I know. But if there is a global pandemic, we'll be kicking ourselves...
• There is talk of a vaccine. What's stopping us from just giving this to anyone who has contact with high risk poultry in Asia?
• I'm not a fan of big government programs solving all of our problems. But when the flu vaccine shortage came up earlier, it occured to me that massive vaccine production plants would be a good thing for taxpayers to own. This would be real defense against many of the things that might be threatening us in the era of Al Qaeda and globalism.

Hunter S. Thompson

Time magazine apparently named this the best blog or some such thing. I spent thirty seconds reading it, and felt it was time well spent simply for Hunter S. Thompson's exhilarating trashing of the Bush administration. I see clicking over there for a second as a little homage to our gonzo friend. Remember to scroll down a little, and remember not to bring the kids...

We're Getting VOIP

Having a blog has done wonders for my geek credentials. Suddenly it seems like I am technologically advanced--even though I am by nature not that way at all. (I was blown away last weekend when a thirteen-year-old put a CD in my DVD player, and listened to it through the TV.)

Well look out world, because Henry Abbott is taking another big tech step: in the next few days, we'll be signing up for Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP). This is where you get your telephone service via your high-speed internet connection. So long as you have high-speed access to the web, you can kiss the phone company goodbye, and save a lot of money. There are residential plans that start in the neighborhood of $20 per month for unlimited calling in North America, with voice mail, caller ID, call waiting and all that for free. You can even check your voice mail on the web. And there are a bunch of other freebies.

If all goes as planned, that means our current set up of four lines (two for business, one for business fax and DSL, one for the home line) will cost something like $120 per month, instead of the current $300-plus. Big difference!

What's the downside? There are reports of dropouts in service and occasional poor quality. And when the internet service isn't working, neither is your phone service. But I have heard from some truly geeky people that if you get a good company, NJ-based Vonage has been recommended, then you don't have to worry so much about that.

I'll let you know how it goes.

A Radical NBA Reform

There are a lot of people who find the current NBA game less fun to watch than the days of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird. They talk a lot about purity of the game and all that, but I think that what most people miss is the scoring. Although average scores are up slightly this year, in general, they've been going down.

Why is that? It's true, today's players don't shoot or pass as well as yesteryear. And the dedication to making one's teammates better is a little lackluster, to be sure.

But I think a huge factor in scoring being low is that the defense is just better. Players are notably bigger and stronger, and coaches really get on them to play defense. Look at photos from the seventies--you'll see Dr. J or George Gervin dunking, and a whole bunch of defenders standing on the ground watching. You'll never see that today. Guys get up in their faces and play tough D all night.

As long as that continues to be the case, I can't see how the NBA will ever have the same kind of non-stop scoring that fans love. Unless you implement my reform: reduce the number of players to four on four.

Anyone who has ever played basketball knows that fewer players means more running, more room for offensive creativity, and more scoring. The size these players are today--and the average size of an NBA player increases nearly every year--there isn't room for ten of them.

Four on four would be amazing to watch. Tons of fun. And the owners would love it: they could carry two or three fewer salaries every year. It would fix a lot of the games economic problems: fewer players to play, more scoring, more focus on the marketable stars.

I've never heard anyone else even dare to mention this idea. It's just too radical to consider. But I'm convinced it's the right one.

And it's not that radical. Basketball used to be nine players per side. Then eight, then seven, then six. The organizers whittled it down over time, because they kept finding the extra players clogged things up and made it hard to score. We have the same problem today, and the same solution is still the best.

You Don't Know Snot

Everyone has their favorite cold remedy. I know a lot of people ride out a cold on the Nyquil/Dayquil train. Then there's the Advil Cold and Sinus crowd. I have had very smart people explain to me that Zicam is something we should all be using. Cold-Eeze does, I think, help prevent colds if you suck on those losenges early and often as you're coming down with the thing.

But I don't like taking a lot of cold drugs. I can't really explain why, but especially decongestants make me feel weird. So my approach, for the last couple of decades, has been more or less to try not to get sick, and if I do get sick, to suffer miserably and blow my nose so much it bleeds.

A couple of weeks ago, as I grappled with a snot tempest, this approach wore extremely thin. So I did what any self-respecting 21st century hombre would do: I called my mother.

She threw out an idea that we have all heard a million times (but most of us, I'm guessing, have never tried): flush your sinuses with salt water.

OK, sure, sounds great. But how in the hell do you do it? She didn't know.

But it was a plan. And when you're drowning, it's good to have a plan.

I called my grandmother-in-law Betty. She's a big one for remedies, and turned out to be a gold mine on this topic. She outlined 7-12 different products I should be flushing my nose with regularly, and I even pretended to take down the toll-free numbers she gave me to start ordering away.

Eventually, she got to the issue of irrigating the ol' honker with salt water. Turns out her dad used to make the kids snort saltwater up their noses until it ran down the backs of their noses and into their throats. She saw this as a hateful thing to make a child do.

Me, I just wanted to know logistics. Do you use a straw? How much salt? How often? Warm water or cold?

And then there was the question I had been avoiding, but which I had to ask before I would experiment. Was there any risk, I asked casually, of drowning?

"Well sure there is," she answered, "if you do it in the middle of the ocean." Then she belly laughed.

After more than an hour of receiving Betty's wisdom on the topic, I thanked her, and signed off with: "Betty, don't ever let anyone tell you that you don't know snot."

It was time for action. I went to the kitchen, poured a little salt into a cup of lukewarm water, stirred it, and poured it into my cupped hand. Standing over the sink (this is important) I simply jammed my nose into the water in my palm and snorted hard. Then I did it again, on the other side. And a couple more times for good measure.

There was a bit of a sting from the salt. And that uncomfortable sensation you get when you're swimming and get water up your nose. But then...

Magic. What some people call "nasal oysters" or "lung butter" (ooh, should have warned you this would get a little graphic) just rolled forth from my little nose. Gallons of the stuff. It exited my head, and the angels sang. It felt like I had lost ten pounds, all from my breathing passage. All that sinus pressure, all that difficult breating, all that snot--gone.

I felt so good, I swear my posture improved.

After spending a long time cleaning my face and the sink, I went to bed and breathed easily, without even having to blow my nose, for twelve hours. If there is a God, surely he is behind this saltwater thing.

We should all be doing it. I'm not kidding. If we all snorted out our snotty snoots a couple of times a day, there'd be a lot less snot around on our tissues and hands and faces and all that. And snot, they say, is the main way colds are transmitted. Plus, in the last week I think I personally have saved a forest of trees in reduced tissue use.

Once you try it, you'll be surprised how well it works. And you'll also be surprised to learn that you are joining a secret club. That's right. There are those who clean out their noses, and there are those who do not. And once word gets around that you are a nose cleaner, people will start coming out of the woodwork, welcoming you, in their way, to the club.

In fact, after only a few weeks of nasal passage flushing, I have even been invited to join the high priesthood of this secret clan: "people" have told me (and now I am telling you!) about the Neti Pot. "In Europe," I am told by a high ranking member of the sect, "everyone uses Neti Pots all the time, preventatively, and they never get sinusitis and that kind of junk." Hmmm.

Bo Kimble and I Talk Boobs

Remember Bo Kimble?

I ran into him on Saturday. We were in a lobby at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine waiting for the Orlando Magic's shootaround to end. He was dropping in on his college coach Paul Westhead, who is now an assistant coach with the Orlando Magic. I was waiting to interview some Magic players for an upcoming feature article for HOOP.

(For those of you who don't remember, Bo went to high school in Philadelphia, and college in California, with Hank Gathers. The two of them were incredible together, the best college tandem in the country. Then, tragically, Gathers lost his life to a heart condition. In the 1990 NCAA tournament, Kimble, a right-hander, earned the nation's adoration by shooting several free throws left-handed in honor of the lefty Gathers.)

Anyway, so Bo and I were killing time there, chit-chatting, and discovered that we were both fans of Chappelle's Show. He recounted his favorite skit: the one where Dave, who is black, plays a vicious, blind, racist who thinks he is white. We were both laughing hard. In fact, we laughed so much that at one point, Bo slapped my knee. I spend a fair amount of time talking to basketball players, and find it is a precious rarity to enjoy conversation so much. I was dying to contribute something.

For some reason, the only Chappelle's Show skit I could think of at that exact moment was the one where Dave (who is for some reason accompanied by a guy from the TV show Fear Factor) hands out awards on New York streets for "great New York boobs." Mostly the women who get the awards seem surprised but sort of proud. One woman is with her parents, who are clearly taken aback. Then at the end, essentially after the skit is over, there is a huge man, who inarguably does have breasts, standing there with one of these big "Great New York Boobs" ribbons stuck to his chest, and he's saying something like "what, is this supposed to be f*%!ing funny?"

Yes, yes it is.

Sadly, as I finished that story, we both had to stop laughing and look serious as we made our way into the practice.

I would love to close with a "Bo knows boobs" line, but I can't think of a good one.

In which I disagree with the New York Times

In the current Sunday magazine, Michael Sokolove does a nice job of explaining a lot of what's wrong with the NBA these days--the gist is that a lot of players are not terribly deft at the finesse things that make basketball fun to watch. His solution: ban the dunk.

What is he smoking? I could go on all day about this one, but I think all my arguments boil down to this: when teams selflessly share the ball, and when NBA offenses are working to perfection, there are simply more dunks.

Take Amare Stoudemire and the Phoenix Suns. I haven't seen numbers, but I guarantee Amare and his teammates are dunking more than ever this year. Why? Because selfless point guard Steve Nash has inspired that team to share the ball like never before. People are getting open now, and their game has become very pretty indeed. In short, their offense went from what's wrong with the NBA to what's right, and it has made the dunks come easy.

Sure, the desire to have your dunks on Sportscenter may lead a player to selfishness and, ergo, boring play, getting to dunk regularly against tough NBA defenses requires exceptional teamwork. Dunks are generally close-range, lightly contested shots. Unless you're Michael Jordan, you just don't the opportunity for those unless your teammates have helped you do something to fool the defense.

Tough Parenting

We are lucky that our seventeen-month-old Molly is generally a joyous, agreeable, and social little person, which means that 99% of the time we can appear to be good parents simply by keeping her washed and fed.

Inevitably, however, there are times when parenting demands a bit of firmness.

One of our little battles recurs just before bedtime, when I usually spend a few minutes reading her some of those little board books. (Ever wonder why baby books aren't made out of paper? 'Cause they'd rip 'em to shreds, that's why. There are some fabric ones that are kind of cool. My children's book, if I ever write one, will be printed on Tyvek.)

At some point in her maturation process, she elected herself Lord High Executioner over my choice of books.

Fair enough, I am happy for her to express her independence (after all, when she's a US Senator I hope she won't hesitate to break with her party from time to time to take a principled stand). But there is one book that I have never let her veto. It's the last book I read to her every night, and it's called Time for Bed. There are precious few rituals in our busy lives, and I obstinately decided that reading this book as the last thing before sleep, dammit, is something we do around here.

The art is classy, and the message is simple. Essentially it's a story of various different animals saying goodnight to their babies, ending with a human child.

For about a week, Molly saw that book coming and tried to force it shut with her strong and surprisingly long arms (which will no doubt serve her well in the WNBA, where she will make millions before entering politics as her generation's Bill Bradley). She said "Daddy, no" in her sternest voice. I soldiered on: "Time for bed little fish, little fish." She feigned disinterest and whimpered.

But after a week or so, she let me win. She chooses the first five to ten little books, and I get that last one without protest.

And as of tonight, Time for Bed has ascended into ritual sainthood, because the book now has a hypnotic effect on the child. A few minutes ago, for instance, she was full of beans, wriggling around in my lap, playing with little owl puppettalking a lot, pointing out all of her favorite pictures in the books. (Dog, dog, dog, dog, DOOOOGGG!)

But then I opened it up, started reading the zen monotone of a parent who wants a child to sleep, and her whole body went slack. She leaned back, gazed at the pictures, and yawned. Halfway through, her eyes lingered in a blink. By the time I reached the last page, she was reaching for my neck, to help me pick her up and carry her to the crib. Amen.