Field of Screams

I started playing baseball when I was 8 years old.

I'm not sure what originally attracted me to it, but I was certain it was something I couldn't live without. There was something beautiful and inexplicable about the sound that those old wood bats made when connecting perfectly with the ball. And better yet, how cool it was to slide into second just ahead of the throw when stretching a single into a double. And what kid could ever forget that feeling of being on the mound and striking out an opposing player on three consecutive pitches?(Don't worry, it didn't happen often).

But as good as all the memories were, there was still one that I wish I hadn't taken with me.

I'm not talking about the obvious like a season ending injury, an awful coach, or popping up with two outs and the bases loaded. This one trumped them all - -

Overzealous Parents.

They were always well represented on both sides, and they made sure their voices could be heard. Everyone was fair game. They yelled at the umpires, their Coach, the opposing Coach, and most importantly....their own children.

It was specifically their vicarious natures which forced them into a hypercritical mode. You just wanted to say, "Hey look, pal. You played baseball a long time, but those days are over. Now the next generation is picking up the mantle. So just sit back and keep your trap closed." Of course, the less than politically correct dialogue that actually swam through my head was much shorter and closer to "shut the F up."

So now that I have a daughter playing competitive softball, I'm prepared to keep my opinions to myself, especially when on the field. There's just one problem.

I can't.

Something just comes over me as soon as the ball is put into play. I yell where to throw the ball, or where a player should stand on the field. I scream about hitting the cut-off man (or woman), or holding onto the ball. And I'm not even the coach.

Have I now fallen into the same trap as the hoards of parents before me?

You're damn right. But it's not for the reasons you may think. I don't yearn to play girls softball, and I recognize that at 10 years old, this isn't exactly Triple-A ball. You see, the true essence of the problem is baseball itself.

Baseball plays more games than any other professional sport. It's the equaivalent of an NBA and an NHL season combined. So there's never been a shortage of exposure to the game. Also, between Little League and softball, I've been in hundreds of games myself over the course of a lifetime. After awhile, you've just seen everything. You've seen so much that you have insight into something before it even happens. And with that kind of knowledge, how could I keep it to myself? I'm compelled to share with the group.

My daughter doesn't want to hear it. Neither does her coach. So why do I continue to rant?

It's simple. I was an athlete. And athletes are born to compete. If you show up on a field, a rink, a court, or whatever, you're there for a single purpose. To win. It's in my DNA; programmed like a character in the Manchurian Candidate. There's the sound of bat hitting the ball, and my mouth just opens by itself.

You're here to win. If not, why would you play?

My daugther has found several other reasons. She has hot chocolate on the bench during the cold Saturdays of April. She gets to show off her new glove and cleats every season, and giggles with the other girls about who knows what as they stand around in the outfield.

She'd like to win. But if she doesn't, it's not an issue. There's always a playdate later that afternoon. She's just enjoying an afternoon in the sun with her friends. The game is secondary.

I wish it was for me. However, there is something positive to look forward to. My grandchildren won't be constantly critiqued by their Mother when they grow up.

I just can't say the same about their grandfather.

Happy 50th Anniversary To Me

It took over one full year, but I've finally written my 50th blog. Please hold your applause. For most professional bloggers, this is far from an impressive feat. Most can crank out 2 per day and hit their 50th in any given month. But that's not my style. I'm more of a quality over quantity kind of guy. And depending on who you talk to you, that quality is still in question.

Needless to say, I'll be celebrating my anniversary all week. I'm not sure how I should be rejoicing. Maybe I'll buy myself a new keyboard or upgrade my IPad, where I wirelessly write many of these pieces. Then again, this blog isn't exactly profitable, and I'm on a tight budget.

Thankfully, Blogger is free, and so is their proprietarty data. In turn, (50) blogs have revealed a few interesting statistics. For one, I'm now up to 1100 page views! Look out Google, here I come. With these numbers, I anticipate going public in the next 6-8 months, with a stock valuation somewhere between Facebook and Twitter. I've also been read in a grand total of (10) different countries, making this blog an international sensation. This kind of global reach will undoubtedly help with the pricing of my IPO.

I'm also proud to report that there are (2) followers of my blog. It's not exactly a record, but they are both female which does wonders for my ego.

I don't have specific demographics. Hopefully that won't affect my chances of selling banner ads to advertisers. I've also had about (5) people comment on specific blogs, making me a force in social media. A majority of my page views emanate from Facebook, so I can thank Marc Zuckerberg for creating a site to rate the attractiveness of Harvard students and inadvertently creating a great feeder website to my blog.

I really am a self made man. My family rarely reads my blogs at all. This should help to shorten the number of people I have to thank during the acceptance speech I'll have to give once Time Magazine announces me as the 2011 Man of The Year.

You know, this anniversary thing could really get to a guy's head.

Maybe it would be best to get back to some semblance of reality, and begin working on the next blog. However, first I must begin preparing for what I'll say after being awarded a Pulitzer.

Advertising vs. Advertising

Has the world gone mad? AMC just announced that for the first time since 2007, "Mad Men" will not make its season debut in July. In fact, the world will not see the future exploits of Don Draper until March of 2012! For those as devoted to the show as I am, this delay is the pinnacle of a television buzz kill.

I was in denial. Surely, there must be some explanation for this. My gut told me that it must be a contract dispute with the entire cast. We've all seen this before. A show becomes an unexpected hit, wins a few Emmys, and then the cast bands together in solidarity in an "all for one-and one for all" battle with their producers. We saw this with "Friends" and later with "The Sopranos." In the end, everyone got their money.

But this layoff wasn't about actor compensation. This ensemble was fair about their collective worth and negotiated accordingly. I guessed again. Maybe the dispute was over producing credits. Everyone likes the word "producer" on their business card, so the disagreement must be about some of the actors or writers demanding credit for production. I looked around, but saw no signs of Hollywood narcissism. I was starting to run out of logical explanations. So I started on the illogical.

Maybe AMC didn't like the competing voiceovers between Jon Hamm and John Slattery for Mercedes and Lincoln, respectively. Or possibly, they decided that January Jones was just too pretty to be this mean and they had to revamp her character. Wait a minute, I've got it. Showrunner,Matthew , was leaving the show to return to "The Sopranos." Alright, I give up. What's the real reason?

Drum roll, please.

Mad Men, the show about the old world of advertising was in conflict with AMC's new world of advertising. We've all been privy to the show's penchant for product placement and interstitial trivia questions about upcoming spot advertisers. But now they wanted even more time to sell a few more :30 spots in each show. Matt Weiner initially refused, citing fear about the integrity of the program. And talk about a man of principle. He made this claim, even after they signed him to a highly lucrative contract extension.

So the battle for advertising on the show about advertising raged on until a compromise was reached. The network could take back two minutes from the Mad Men's content, so they would have four more commercials to sell each week. This would apply to each episode with the exception of the season premiere and the season finale. There's nothing greater than a story with a happy ending.

This tussle reminded me of that season on "Seinfeld" where Jerry and George had to pitch NBC on "a show about nothing" while Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander were starring in a show about nothing. The whole concept of a show within a show carried Seinfeld for an entire season. So it would be great if "Mad Men" could return the favor and dedicate one episode next season to an ad agency in the 1960's that wants to place an advertiser's commercial on a hit show, but has to wait several months due to a network contract dispute.

Sometimes fiction is stranger than real life.

Groupon Shmoupon

Some people are professionals when it comes to saving money. My Mother is one of the best, and a bit of a traditionalist in this area. She has a scissor with her at all times, and typically goes through the Sunday paper and all its circulars like a farmer cutting her way through overgrown corn stalks with a machete.

Yesterday, she told me about one of her greatest all time triumphs. This win came at the expense of Minute Maid Orange Juice. I came over for a visit on Saturday and craved a little OJ. She asked me to guess how much she paid. I saw that she had 4 cartons in the refrigerator, so it must have been pretty impressive. Before I could even take a stab at it, she offered the answer.

"First, it was on sale at 50% off, then I had a coupon, and Shop Rite was offering triple coupons, so in the end, it cost me 19 cents."

Holy crap. 19 cents?!! Did that include tax? Did she also get an employee discount? Is she a closet shoplifter?

I looked around the room to see if anything had changed. After all, at that price, I could have been transported back to 1951. (I saw "Hot Tub Time Machine", so anything is possible.) I did a quick search, but everything seemed to be in order. Obama was still President and the Mets still sucked.

After hearing this, I wanted to tell my Mother all about Groupon, but it was fruitless. First of all, "Groupon", sounds like something that could be found during your colonoscopy. Secondly, what fun would my Mom have with downloadable coupons? "You go to the computer and you don't cut anything out? You have to use a printer? I'd rather pay full price."

Groupon really takes the fun out of the hunt, doesn't it? All the coupons are in one place. Groupon would singlehandedly remove the need for her regular scavenger mission of searching through a series of local newspapers, circulars, Valpaks, and more to find incredible savings at prices we haven't seen since the Korean War.

A few hours later, while watching television, I saw a commercial for Apple where they were touting all that can be done with iPhone apps. One of the highlights was scanning a bar code at check out with your iPhone to receive a discount. I had to tread lighlty here. This could bring my Mother into the future much too quickly and run the risk of injury.

But I knew better. She wasn't going to change her strategy now. Not after all these years of success. The most amazing part of her coupon finding accumen was not finding the discounts. It's actually making the time to drive to each store for the savings. She has to map out her route in advance. 50% off milk...one mile away(take the backroads) Buy one, get one free toothpaste...two miles (make the first U-turn). Triple coupons...3 miles.(take the highway) All this work, and without a Garmin. This represented real skill. One woman against the elements all in the name of saving cash.

But I couldn't help but think. With the current price of gas, could all this driving reallybe worth it?

It is when you can buy orange juice for 19 cents. Long live the traditional coupon and those who collect them like stamps and baseball cards.

Quiet Please

I am a commuter. But not just any commuter. I'm a New Jersey Transit commuter, which places me in a very unique category. I ride the train to and from work each day, and both trips are relatively short. At least on paper, anyway. The schedule calls for 42 minutes, but you can always tack on an additional 5-10 for a variety of different reasons:

Rain, snow, fallen trees, Amtrak delays, electrical outages, police actions, and of course, the occasional suicide on the tracks.

If this isn't reason enough to make you decide to walk to work, they periodically sting you with multi-year fare hikes. This usually affects riders like a case of bronchitis, particularly when they come to the realization that they'e now paying more money for less than adequate service. Needless to say, the average rider has ample reason to be disgruntled. I even have one friend that forms a personal protest when trains are running behind schedule. When the conductor walks by to check tickets, he removes his monthly pass from his wallet in Super Slo-Mo, giving the delayed train a taste of its own medicine.

So recognizing that they needed a leadership change, NJ Transit lept into action and hired the former President of Amtrak, another dying railroad. In fact, Amtrak hasn't been profitable for years, if ever, and has been fully subsidized by the Federal Government just to merely stay in business. Wow. It sounds like a quality hire to me. I'd like to meet the headhunter.

Nonetheless, I was optimistic. I thought that if we brought in an Amtrak guy, maybe NJ Transit would adopt some of their practices. Like a food car. Or something exciting like a car with blackjack tables, roulette wheels, and poker tables. (A man can dream, can't he?) The new NJ Transit President didn't sit still. He mandated an order for double-decker trains to alleviate some of the crowding, but then built a multi-million dollar transfer station in Secaucus where residents of Bergen County and Central New Jersey can jump on. Now the bi-level train is just as crowded as when it was a single level. One step forward, two steps back.

But if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. The latest "innovation" is the creation of "The Quiet Car." Just what is the Quiet Car? Well, some genius decided that if they can't reduce fares, get the trains to Penn Station on time, or reduce crowding, the least they could do was provide 2 cars with complete silence. (the first and the last) To make this even easier for commuters with mapping issues, they converted the first and last cars on the train to Quiet Cars.

Is this supposed to make up for everything? Is this the NJ Transit version of a dozen roses after you screwed up? They claimed that people asked for this. What people? Perhaps it was the people from NJ Transit. They sat in a meeting and brainstormed a way to reduce the number of customer complaints. Create cars where no one can talk. Brilliant! The conductors love going into these cars, especially on a delayed rush hour train.

What makes this even more shortsighted is that a majority of the entire train has now been relegated to complete silence. This is thanks to the many Blackberrys, Android phones, iPhones, iPads, Kindles, and Nooks that have suddenly appeared. Who has time to talk to anyone, when you could check your Facebook account, text your kids, read a book or play Angry Birds?

What they should do is put all the talkers in one or two cars. Coversationalists are the new minority, so NJ Transit shoud give them a place to vent. It would be pretty noisy, but a great party atmosphere.

NJ Transit has always been in the wrong business. Commuter transportation is not their area of expertise. Maybe one day, the Amtrak President will figure it out, and the trains will only operate as party rentals.

And the noisier, the better.

Unreality Bites

I remember when CD-Roms were all the rage. We'd proudly place those discs in our drives and these CDs quickly became the quintessential computer games of the 1990's. This archaic technology eventually went the way of the dinosaurs and was replaced by the Xbox, the Wii, the Playstation, and voluminous online websites for people who like to refer to themselves as "gamers."

But during the glory days of CD-Roms, one of the more popular creations was a reality game called The Sims. Essentially, you created your own family. You made decisions on their clothing, determined where they would travel, scripted conversations they would have, and even made choices on their schooling and occupations. In this world, you truly played God.

I was given The Sims as a gift once, but never really made it that far. I thought it was nothing more than a big time waster and after all, there was this really cool new dial up service called America Online that I loved exploring, but only after I waited for my dial up signal to make that explosive noise that informed me that I was connected.

So now that we've moved into the new media age, with blazing wireless download speeds, and several options for social media, a new version of The Sims-like technology has taken the world by storm. This is all courtesy of a company called Zynga. Through a relationship with Facebook they are responsible for online games such as Farmville and Cityville which have attracted a countless number of "followers." The popularity of these games moved into the forefront last week as Zynga announced that they were planning on a public stock offering. And the potential evaluation? Several billion dollars!

I asked myself how a company that creates fictitious farms and cities could be valued so high, but then I read more. Zynga made over 400 million dollars in net revenue from people buying items like seeds for their virtual farms. Let me say that again, 400 million!

So we have a shaky economy where people must spend more prudently. And between work, children's soccer and basketball games, ballet lessons, and other social commitments people still found the time and the money to pay for seeds on a farm that doesn't really exist.

For most of us, we struggle daily with just having enough time and energy to deal with the things that matter most. Time with our children, staying in touch with friends, working one or two jobs to make ends meet. While hopefully all along, feeding our hobbies, whether they be softball, fishing, tennis, pottery, dancing, creative writing or whatever drives you. At the end of every week, usually on a Sunday, we say that next week will be different and we'll actually get to these areas of our lives that will make a positive difference. But most of us simply fail again.

Is it possible that we're letting online videogames get in the way? I don't spend nearly as much time on Facebook as many of my friends; especially those who are insistent on telling me where they are all times, which kid just threw up their dinner, or which traffic jam they're immobilized in. But to think that millions of other people still find the time to build computer farms and cities and actually pay for it just blows my mind.

Maybe if we spent more time tending to our kids, our careers, our finances, friends and families, Zynga wouldn't be going public after all. They would just be a fad that would soon be replaced as easily as The Sims was all those years ago.

Sometimes I wonder which truly came first. Did we create Zynga or did they create us?

Baby Food

Do you remember the days when your were expecting your first child, and you went to Barnes and Noble to buy a countless number of baby naming books? Remember how difficult it was? You looked through thousands of names, and narrowed it down to about (5) choices on each side of the potential gender.

Then came the hard part. First, we didn't want to give our kids the same name as our friend's kids. So that knocked a few choices off the list. Next, if you already knew an adult with the same name on your list, and you didn't like them.....well.....those choices were forever doomed. And if you were Jewish, you had the added pressure of selecting a name with the same first initial of someone deceased. How's that for uplifting?

After a few disagreements, you finally settled on a name or two. And it's a lot of pressure. After all, this kid has to live with this moniker for the rest of his/her life. (Marriage can change the surname, but never the first.) Then, you had to worry about whether or not the other kids on the playground would find a way to make fun of your selection. These kids in elementary schools are literary geniuses. They can somehow twist and turn any combination of letters into something incredibly embarrassing and just like that, your kid has to live with it for at least a decade. Personally, I didn't take the brunt of this behavior. The worst I heard was "Adam Madame." I could live with that. It was my last name that fell under attack. "Rowe, Rowe, Rowe your boat...." could be heard near the monkey bars on a regular basis.

Most of us are well past the point of having another child, or perhaps having one at all. But now that I'm older, and just slightly wiser, I realized that our approach to baby naming was off course right from the beginning. We were all looking in the wrong books. We didn't need expensive, and quite heavy baby naming books, especially when we had one in our homes that could have done a more stellar job.

The Zagat book.

Think about it. Many restauranteurs also need to select a name that will be synonymous with strength, quality, and popularity. They derive from a wide variety of nationalities and have already found a positive place in our vernacular. A quick skim through the Zagat's first few pages of top restaurants by cuisine or the best restaurants by neighborhood will easily provide more than enough male and female choices to make you the envy of young parents everywhere.

I could provide endless choices, but I'm only going to highlight a few standouts for a variety of different ethnicities:

FEMALE

Avra - Greek, and somewhat angelic
Oceana - great for nature lovers
Remi - very pretty, and simple
JoJo - playful, and already sounds like a nickname
Aureole - almost has a Disney feel to it
Novita - rolls off the tongue
Pastis- anything French sounds good
Barbetta - very Hollywood

MALE

Nobu - c'mon, who doesn't like Nobu?
Veritas - strong and powerful
Bouley- a name that will get all the girls
Babbo - a little Flintstones, but original
Balthazar - already sounds like a novelist
Pylos - like a Greek God
Tabla - it doesn't rhyme with anything

Now you might ask why on earth would I want to name my kids after anything that reminds me of food, particularly places where I've eaten? But why not? When scores of people look upon these names it can only remind them of the most positive times. Great business lunches, birthdays, anniversaries, retirement parties, holiday parties, and other causes of celebration. How many other names have that kind of equity naturally built in?

I just don't get the same feeling from Ashley, Tiffany, Christopher, and Noah. Most likely, neither will you.