The Age of Aquariums

One of the good things about so-called Middle Age is that it is so poorly defined. And so, if one is in danger of approaching this stage of life, or indeed is in danger of having reached it already, one can simply move the goalposts - as we fans of assocceration football like to say - and so pretend still be to "young", even if, in moments of totally honesty, one would admit that all the messages being received from ones elbows, knees, teeth, bowels, children and birthday cards suggest otherwise.

(I should clarify at the outset that Middle Age is in no way to be confused with The Middle Ages, which is something else entirely. The latter was a brutal period of human existence when people with rotting teeth worked all the hours God sent and never had any fun. The former, on the other hand, ...Oh, never mind.)

Now, just like Ebeneezer Scrooge, and indeed the Baby Jesus, The Referee has recently been visited by three wise messengers, each bearing clues which suggest that You-Know-When is perhaps approaching. And so, despite the considerable personal risks of self-revelation, I have decided to introduce you, dear reader, to my three messengers, in the hope that you might later recognise them, should you experience a visitation at some point.

1. Gluten

I don't know about you, but I had no idea what gluten was until, relatively recently, with no apparent provocation that I can recall, it started an argument with my lower intestine, causing all sorts of digestive chaos. After the argument had been going on for a while, I decided to admit defeat and simply give up eating anything involving wheat, which turns out to be the host of this sinister gloop. The improvement in my health was almost instant, but so was the sense of missing lots of things I liked to eat. However, the good news which awaits one in Middle Age is that there are lots of tempting foods which are made especially for those who find themselves in these circumstances, including disability bread, disability cakes and disability cookies. These "speciality" foods may have looked and tasted like cardboard a few years ago, but now, I am pleased to report, scientific improvements mean that they are almost edible.

2. Myopia

Now, until quite recently, as far as I can remember, road signs and shop signs and the like used to be painted up very clearly and, in the main, were mounted in a sturdy manner such that they would generally keep still, even in windy weather, and so were reasonably easy to read, even from a distance or from a passing car. It has come to my notice recently, however, that such signs tend to present themselves rather more sloppily than previously, such that some of the lettering can be difficult to read, and in some cases tend to move around in a very annoying manner, just at the moment one is trying to focus on them.

Having identified the potential root of this problem, I set off with some trepidation to visit an optometrist. (Have you ever wondered, by the way, what happened to all the "opticians" out there? I like to imagine that their bodies were somehow taken over by an advanced race of "optometrists", rather like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.) Anyway, after investigating me with a variety of weird and wonderful contraptions, the young and female doctor asked me - and this is true, word for word - "Can you get dilated today, sir?". I have to admit that I was sorely tempted to say something highly facetious along the lines of "I have no idea but, with your help, perhaps we can make sweet music together". Needless to say, I said nothing of the sort. In fact, I said something much more along the lines of "Well, it's not all that convenient just now because I have to go back to my office and read some emails".

Anyway, after returning to be dilated at a more convenient time, I emerged with a prescription for mild shortsightedness and the news that I have a freckle on the back of my left eye. This is obviously important information which is bound to come in useful one day. For example, if I am ever separated from my left eye and need to identify it in a line-up (using my right eye, of course).

3. Young love

There may be many potential measurements to test whether things are going for one or against one in life. But few could be more telling and poignant than this one: Am I getting more or less romance than my children? Although it pains me to admit it, if the answer is "less", one really must be arriving in You-Know-When.

I raise this only because the senior offspring recently announced, with considerable poise for one yet to turn 11, that he has a girlfriend. He then proceeded to explain to me, perhaps thinking that I needed a lesson in these things, that, at his age, a girlfriend is a girl, who is a friend, whom you like. I tried briefly to encourage him to explain how that distinguished one particular girl from many others, but decided not to pursue the point very far. I knew what he meant, and so did he, even if he doesn't quite yet have the vocabulary to express it.

More surprisingly, having announced with some conviction that I knew which of the young ladies at his school we were talking about, it turned out that I was completely wrong. As usual, my finger was right on the pulse. Having spent much of the last few months hanging out, as they like to say here, with a particular young lady, it turned out that he had had his eye on someone else "ever since 4th grade". The tone in his voice had the unmistakable "doh!" of Homer Simpson, as if to say "get with it, daddy-o". I had been put firmly in my place, and, more disconcertingly, in my Age.

And so, there you have it. My advice - offered entirely free of charge - is to watch out for the three messengers of Middle Age and, if you see them coming, run as fast as you can. Followed, obviously, by a little lie down.

A Game of 18 Halves

Not since my message of 16 May 2006 have I mentioned America's pastime, rapidly becoming The Referee's second favo(u)rite sport, and its most famous exponents, who also happen to be my local team, the New York Yankees.

So, in response to what, in my fevered imagination, is mounting demand from you, dear reader, for an update, I proudly present the second in a series which might be subtitled "Why everything that one needs to know about life can be learnt from baseball".

After a deadly dull and frigid winter, when the only sport(s) to watch are football (not assocceration) and basketball (college or otherwise), the baseball season arrives here like the spring - bringing with it the promise of something better just around the corner.

And, so far, one has not been disappointed. Let me explain why.

My kids were keen to see the Yankees again, and this time my wife said that she wanted to come along as well. So, off I went to procure the earliest tickets I could get - at home at Yankee stadium against the Baltimore Orioles (or Oreos, as The Referee likes to refer to them, to the amusement of no one but himself). (You might at this point like to note something I have recently been forced to face up to personally - that, if you can't get your 8 year old child to laugh at a joke, it's probably best not to pursue it a great deal further.)

Anyway, the big day came and we scaled up the steep sides of the stadium in a chill wind threatening flurries of snow. Not all that springlike after all. Sure enough, the early stages of the game did not deliver much seasonal warmth. The debut of new Japanese pitcher Kei Igawa, who promised more than he delivered, was such that we were 7-2 down by the 4th inning.

After that, precisely nothing happened for three innings, except that everyone got colder and I was forced to scale down from the heights to forage for chips - by which I mean chips, not chips - just to keep everyone warm. Despite the fact that I was gone for what felt like several weeks, I missed only a single run for the Yanks, making it 7-3 to Baltimore.

At that point, something odd began to happen. People began to leave. Not just in their ones and twos, but in their droves, whatever they might be.

The senior offspring turned to me in some bemusement about why people were leaving in the 7th inning. "Do they think we're going to lose?", he asked. I explained that they might, but that you should never give up until the end, and perhaps not even then. That response seemed to go down well, mainly because it left open the possibility that something interesting might happen.

By the 8th inning, the stadium was perhaps a little over half full. And then, with just the dedicated faithful left, something interesting did indeed begin to happen. The Yankees found 3 runs out of nowhere, and suddenly it was 7-6 - only one down and an inning to go. What was left of the crowd suddenly realised that we had a role to play and started to make a noise.

The great Mariano Rivera came out to close for the Yankees and finished off the last of the Baltimore hitters without much ado. The crowd was by now feverishly screaming for some action.

The chance of that happening seemed to dissipate as quickly as it had arisen after the next two Yankee hitters were out almost immediately. Surely, with only one out to go, we were expecting too much?

Then someone got to first base. Then someone else did the same. The crowd started to sizzle again. Then Bobby Abreu came out, got hit on the leg by a pitch, and hobbled, rather than walked, to first base.

Bases loaded. Only one out left. And the crowd went wild when they realised that Alex Rodriguez was up next. For those who have not followed his story, Rodriguez is one of the most precociously talented players in baseball, who hasn't always delivered, despite being one of the most highly-paid sportsmen in the world (including players of assocceration football). The result has been a love-hate relationship with the immensely demanding Yankee fans. And the buzz around the stadium said, more or less, "OK, show us what you can do".

You couldn't make up what happened next. He fumbled at the first couple of pitches - two strikes - one more and the game was lost.

As the next pitch came in, he swung at it with everything he had, and the whole stadium followed as it sailed way over the hapless pitcher's head and carried on soaring for a beautiful home run right over the middle of the park.

For those unfamiliar with the game, that's what is known as a "grand slam" - a bases-loaded home run, worth one run for the hitter and one each for the three runners. The Yankees had won 10-7. And this was not just any old grand slam - rare enough - but a walk-off grand slam, ie a grand slam which ends the game.

Everyone in the stadium leapt in the air. Rodriguez skipped around the bases, clapping his hands and beaming as he went, only to be mobbed by his entire team on arrival at the plate. The second that he did so, the stadium speakers belted out the familiar opening strains of Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York". It was a pretty good moment to be a New Yorker, even an adopted one.

The next day, the NY Times reported that, in the 105 year history of the Yankees, they had at that point played a total of 16,116 games, of which this had been only the eighth to end in a walk-off grand slam. If my math(s) is correct, that means that the chances of my wife witnessing such in her first Yankees game were 1 in 2,014, and a half.

I was tempted to conclude that I should immediately send my wife out to buy a lottery ticket. But, instead, I reminded the senior boy about our agreement that one should never give up, nor should one ever leave a baseball game in the seventh inning, even if one is worried about how long it might take to get out of the car park.

As we say in our house, "Let's go A-Rod!". Whatever that means.

Ohio Boy Accidentally Buried by Snow Plow OK

My message of 30 October 2006 demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, at least in my mind, the importance of proper and orderly punctuation in all our lives, or, at the very least, in all our sentences. Responses that I have subsequently received to that message from a number of "regular readers" (in my dreams) have suggested, in the nicest possible ways, that The Referee perhaps tends towards the affliction of punctuation anorakism. This is, as far as I can tell, a specific and acute strain of the more general and common affliction of grammar anorakism, although perhaps one can have both simultaneously. I certainly hope so.

Anyway, bouyed by these generous compliments, I am proud to present the second message in an ad hoc series that might be entitled something along the lines of The Referee's Guide to the Importance of Proper and Orderly Punctuation in All Our Lives.

In researching this series on your behalf, dear reader, I have noticed that the "tabloid" media is particularly helpful in providing examples that spotlight the importance of good punctuation, if I may have your permission to use "spotlight" as a verb for a moment. (It won't happen again.)

I'm not sure why this should be so; perhaps it's because the more low-brow media tend to pack as much meaning as possible into breathless headlines, so as to grab the attention, and/or to be able to keep the accompanying article as short as possible.

Whatever the reason for it, my attention was caught recently by a headline on foxnews.com - and the brow doesn't get a lot lower than that - about a young man in Ohio who fortunately walked away unscathed after a rather wintry scare. In fact, after having gone unnoticed by a frozen precipitation removal operative, his plight was reported by a friend, and he was then whisked away to a hospital, where he was declared unharmed and not in need of admission.

So, all's well that ends well, and there was apparently no more to the story than that.

If only the same could be said for the headline, which has almost as many words as did the story; and, if you sit back and look at them, those words seem to be scrambling over each other in a desperate attempt to blurt out the span of the whole story before the edge of the page turns up to spoil the party.

These seem to be perfect conditions for multiple potential meanings and nuances, and therefore ideal circumstances for demonstrating the importance of proper and orderly punctuation.

This time, however, I'm not going to mollycoddle you (and it's not often enough, I'm sure you'll agree, that we see the word mollycoddle these days). No. Because you, I surmise, are an educated reader who requires no stabilisers in order to navigate the rocky terrain of punctuation.

And so, without further ado, I give you a few alternatively-punctuated versions of the same headline.

1. Ohio boy accidentally buried by snow plow OK.
2. Ohio: boy accidentally buried by snow plow; OK?
3. "Ohio Boy", accidentally buried by snow plow, OK.
4. Ohio boy accidentally buried by snow. Plow OK.

There may be others.

You're on your own.

I expect you can almost feel the wind of punctuation blowing through your hair...

Return of the So(u)n(d) of Monster Magnet

Those readers who are parents - and I expect you would have noticed, one way or the other - will understand the next sentence; those who are not parents will have to take my word for it. There is nothing quite like the thrill of seeing your offspring perform, particularly if they're any good. The thrill is rather reduced, I'll admit, if they're awful and you have to pretend that they're any good. But, if you don't have to pretend, there's nothing quite like the swelling chest and "that's my boy!" sense which grips the proud parent, even if it's your daughter.

The Referee enjoyed such a moment last week at the school band winter concert, featuring the senior offspring in the percussion department.

Now, before you beat me to it, so to speak, I know as well as you do that the answer to the old joke "What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?" is "A drummer", and perhaps there's something in that. But, it seems to me, the percussion department of a band or orchestra is quite a different matter. Percussionists have to play all types of drums, and other things that need to be hit, with sticks or otherwise, as well as things which actually have notes, like vibes - sometimes all in the same tune.

So, I watched with considerable pride as the senior boy furrowed his brow and hopped dextorously between instruments, pausing to glance at the conductor, or at fellow band members, before beating the cymbal into submission at precisely the right moment.

As I watched, and listened to the selection of classical pops and pop classics, it occured to me that I had heard something very similar before. I wracked my brain for a while and then, right in the middle of "We will rock you", it came to me. I turned to my wife and said "Peaches en regalia". She gave me that smile that wives give when they're hoping that you're about to go straight back into your own little world without bothering them any further.

But you, cultured reader, will no doubt have realised what my wife didn't immediately realise (until I expained it to her at length) - that I was referring to the legendary opening track of Frank Zappa's debut solo album after the demise of the Mothers of Invention: the seminal Hot Rats.

That's right. I had realised something of devastating musical importance that I had not realised before. Not that Zappa sounds like Queen - or even vice versa - he doesn't. What I realised was this: a large gathering of 5th graders who are just in the early stages of mastering their instruments but who nevertheless follow the conductor's instruction to belt out the classics with carefree gusto at the maximum possible volume sound almost exactly like a small band of virtuoso musicians playing incredibly complex arythmnical 1970s jazz/rock.

Now, you might take the view that this revelation doesn't really matter one way or the other. If that is the case, I'm afraid I can be of no further help to you.

On the other hand, you might realise the potential consequences of this near-scientific discovery, but simply have difficulty in believing it to be true. I have some sympathy with that latter response and, in the interests of science, I offer the following assistance. Come with me, if you will, into the land of interactive blog experimentation...

Which is not quite as scary as it sounds. All you have to do is follow these 3 steps:

1. First, look at the lovely photo above of the band in action.

2. Play, as loud as possible, and preferably out of some speakers near your computer, the tune "Peaches en regalia". Unfortunately, if for some unfathomable reason this wonderful track doesn't already feature in your collection, you won't find it in i-Tunes, which features shamefully little by way of the huge FZ back catalogue. This means, for the benefit of those under 21, that you would have to go into a shop and hand over some cash in exchange for one of those thin plastic music boxes.

3. To complete the effect, hold your computer a few inches above the desk and shake it vigorously in time - if you can! - with the crazy rythmn.

I rest my case.

May you never become a Dancin' Fool, nor be struck unexpectedly by Cosmik Debris.

How Green Was My January?

Yesterday in New York it was 68F (or 20C for those of you reading this in Europe). On the 6th of January. Or January 6th, as the preposition-shy Americans prefer it.

In case you didn't catch that - perhaps you were distracted by a thing, as they like to say in The West Wing - let me run it past you again. In New York, on 6 January, it was 68F.

What is going on? Normally at this time of year, New Yorkers remark on the weather only if it rises above freezing, and tend to spend most of January wearing furry ear warmers and (at least in the suburbs) looking for good places to go sledging.

This year, on the other hand, something strange is happening. A high of 68F makes yesterday the warmest 6 January in recorded New York history. Or it was the warmest January day ever recorded. Or both. Or neither. No, hang on - not neither.

What's more, we have had no snow at all so far this winter. This is very unusual. In fact, it's the latest New York has gone without snow since 1878. Which, the New York Times pointed out yesterday, was before the arrival of the Statue of Liberty, and before NYC existed in the sense of comprising the five boroughs as it does today (see my message of 18 September 2006).

(Which reminds me that the Statue of Liberty is only a short-hand informal way of referring to the famous landmark. What is it's official title? Answers via the comment button, please. When I say "button", I don't mean "button" in the sense of... Oh, never mind.)

In response to the question "What is going on?", some people answer: "Nothing". These people must be avoided. They are dangerous lunatics. These people appear to believe that we should not admit that the climate is changing because, if we do, we'll have to try to do something about it and, as soon as we make any efforts in that direction, everyone in the world will instantly lose their job and/or go out of business. I exaggerate somewhat for emphasis, but you get the general idea.

The problem with this argument is that most of us, if we are honest, and over about 20 years old, can tell from our own experience that things have changed since we were younger, even without drawing up historical charts, or waving a sock in the air, or whatever else it is that meteorologists do.

And, once we have agreed that things are changing, the next logical question is "Why?". Is there a serious chance that the answer has nothing to do with human behaviour? About the same chance, I estimate, that the whole thing is an evil plot for world domination hatched by Little Jimmy Krankie. (Americans will need to ask a passing Brit about this reference. On second thoughts, don't bother.)

Which brings me to one of the cinematic highlights of 2006, Weird Al Yankovic's fascinating dental/meteorological documentary, An Incontrovertible Tooth. If you haven't seen it, see it.

Is everything presented in the film necessarily accurate and/or directly relevant to the weird things which appear to be happening to our climate? I don't know. What I do know is that a documentary about a middle-aged politician giving a lecture about the weather had no right to be that gripping or entertaining.

Regardless of your view on the thorny issue of climate change, anyone who has seen his film will have to admit that Mr Yankovic is (i) intelligent, (ii) articulate, and (iii) a man with something to say.

As they like to say over here, "Go figure". Whatever that means.

Happy New Year('s).