Rite of Passage

Rite of Passage
Originally uploaded by xadrian.

G-man didn't originally take to bike riding like his sister. He was very hesitant and favored the safety of his big wheel. Even his bike with training wheels was seldom used. A few months ago we finally got the training wheels off and made a few successful runs at it, but he seemed to not want to ride it still. Just recently he finally mastered the two wheeler and is now fairly unstoppable. While he's not as fast as his big sister, he's still as enthusiastic.

He also wiped out pretty hard while at the school. Too much speed coming off a sloped sidewalk and the front wheel wobbled out from under him. He hit the pavement pretty hard, right after shouting, "Daddy watch me!" So I watched as he did a belly flop onto the asphalt.

Luckily a soccer mom was driving by. (And I literally mean a soccer mom, she was taking her little girl to soccer practice.) She had an impressive first aid kit and gave us a big band-aid. G-man was in just a little pain but soldiered on home. Once safely home he limped around as though he'd just had major surgery. I gave him a little grief for that (mainly because it's worse to limp on it) but I stopped when I remembered I did the exact same thing when I crashed.

Carry on.

How Far We've Come

Yes.  We've come a long way.  In 17 short years, we've gone from individual pages, university library searches, email and pictures hosts to...well, the same thing but with Google.

What strikes me as telling in this video is not so much the camp and quaintness of the Today show hosts not knowing what the @ symbol was, though I find this hard to believe as that symbol has been around for ages.  Those working with quantities and prices (merchants, grocers, accountants) would use @ all the time to indicate how much something was given a certain quantity.  Sandwich boards in front of small corner stores still say things like 10lbs @ $2/lb.  It's not completely unreasonable that an intelligent person, apparently not a talk show host, would know what this meant.

No, what struck me was just how violently ignorant Bryant Gumbel was.  I'm surprised he made it this far in the world of television sounding so dismissive, petty and snarky.  This isn't the first time he's seen acting this way but if you search now for "gumbel snarky" all you find is this video.  And it's like this with all talk shows.  There's always a jerk on the show who is balanced by softer spoken, chipper but equally dim-witted co-hosts.  Learning of new things and events on these shows is like learning about them from your grandparents.  It's worthy of being noted, but it will be presented with scoff and maniacal-nostalgia.

So maybe we haven't come a long way after all.