Pardon the BloggEruption

Mr. Rogers Unwelcome in the Ivy Neighborhood?

According to this story, students at Dartmouth are upset that Fred Rogers of PBS and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood fame will be delivering their commencement address. Apparently he went to Dartmouth for a few years. What a bunch of whiny, snivelling Ivy League kids. Check out this quote from a student:

``I had hoped for someone more awe-evoking,'' said Chris Moore, a graduating philosophy major. ``Some secretary of the U.N., or (Rudolph) Guiliani, or a human rights leader.

Wow. I know Kofi Annan would really evoke a lot of awe from me. (Oh wait, Kofi was on Sesame Street not so long ago.) Or how about Javier Perez de Cuellar? U Thant? Kurt Waldheim? (Oops, forgot the whole Nazi deal.) Hmm, what sort of "human rights leader" would evoke awe for Mr. Moore? What the hell is a "human rights leader" anyway? My guess is that he'd like to have Bono.

Fred Rogers has done more for the youth of this nation than any smarmy, pissant philosophy major at Dartmouth will likely ever do for anyone. He's also done a hell of a lot more good than any UN Secretary General, without wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. Hell, the introduction of a Russian version of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood helped foment some of perestroika. I'm sorry that you can't have someone who inspires awe in you for your university commencement, Mr. Moore, but look on it this way -- at least you're not getting the Surgeon General. Now that was vomit-inspiring.

D-Day, or Drive-Day

Something of an interesting day today. I will be heading to Austin to help staff the NAQT High School Championship Tournament. Potentially the last quizbowl appearance I ever make, barring any masters/freelance play I might take up. I'll be out of town until Sunday night.

The drive from Houston to Austin is perhaps the most enjoyable three-hour car trip you can take in the South. From Houston you take IH-10 to Columbus, then get Texas-71 to IH-35 just outside of the Austin city limits. Hill Country all the way, best observed between March and June. Wildflowers bloom all along the roadways, along the rolling hills, among all the cattle. Stunningly beautiful. The road is contoured nicely with the rolling mounds we call hills in Texas, with lots of gentle curves, turns, and dips. Actually, most all highways in Texas are done in that way. I'll give Arkansas credit for doing the same.

This is in stark contrast to what you see a lot of the time in the midwest and east, where keeping the roads straight and flat seems to be put at a premium, with the only exceptions being when you have to go up a hill. Take IH-70, for example. Start just outside of DC and go west -- the only interesting part of the drive is the route from Breezewood, PA to just beyond Wheeling, WV. After that, take some Vivarin, because it's straight and flat and boring as hell until you get to the Mountain time zone. (Western highways are an animal unto themselves.)

Back to the Houston-Austin route ... about halfway through the trip you encounter the site of one of the most interesting scandals in recent Texas history. La Grange. Sound familiar? ZZ Top wrote a song commemorating the strange goings on in "the shack outside La Grange" ... the Chicken Ranch and model for the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Houston's own Marvin Zindler was responsible for the takedown of the ranch, the fame from which he parlayed into doing the weekly "Rat and Roach Report" on Houston restaurants.

Zindler used to be fairly entertaining doing the "Rat and Roach Report," as he would spice it up by saying things like "improper temp-a-toors" and yelling "SLIME IN THE ICE MACHINE!" This last tagline became so famous locally that a second "Slime Report" followed the "Rat and Roach," only that now Zindler's cry of "SLIME IN THE ICE MACHINE!" was gone, replaced by some god-awful song of the same name by a local band and the occasional group yell by some elementary school class. Marvin, we miss the old days. We miss your white suits and blue sunglasses. We miss your hard-hitting assistance to people who got screwed by the Pawn shop. Oh well, at least we still have "Good golf, good tennis ... or WHATEVER makes you happy. MARVIN ZINDLER, EYEWITNESS NEWS!!" followed by the pained expression on Dave Ward's face as he says, "Thank you, Marvin." It's so obvious Ward hates him, which makes me wonder if Ward was a regular at the Chicken Ranch ... hmmm ....

At any rate, I get to spend four days amongst quizbowlers ranging from 14 to 40. Average age of the players? I'll guess 17. Average age of the staff? I'll guess 25. UT has a nice campus, and Austin is a very nice city, but I'm still very glad I didn't go there. That's for another day though. I need to pack.

Adios, Amigos.

Inna Blogga Da Vida

Something struck me as highly familiar about the whole blogging bit. I'd been following the trend for the past year or so -- Andrew Sullivan first brought the whole phenomenon into my attention -- but I'd been remiss to join in on the fun myself, until today. About an hour ago, I realized why this was all so damn familiar -- I did this in high school. Looking at my previous "Comments" on my long-dead High School homepage, I can say with some measured sense of pride that I was something of a blogging pioneer.

At least, that was my idea at the time. Funny how life gets in the way. At any rate, the first entry (Internet Freedom) was actually referenced by someone in what appears to be a term paper. Found it on Google after doing a search on my name. Do yourself a favor -- if you have a non-generic name that won't pull 1,000 Google hits, search for yourself at least once a year. It's often quite an interesting read.

Doing the search just a moment ago, it's nice to see that Google does place the real me all on the first page. I suppose that's the great advantage of being a part of a large quizbowl community that does most organizational work online. The whole world can see my pathetic points per game.

A slightly more interesting thing happens on page 2, though, where I learn that there is apparently some person with my name who happens to be an advertising executive. The fact that there's another Eric Steinhauser is unsurprising. The fact that there's another American Eric Steinhauser is. As a matter of fact, there seems to be at least one more who played high school basketball in New Jersey last year. At least one German, but likely many more if the more Germanic "Erik" were used instead of the Latin "Eric".

Random musings. I guess it really is a Blog-Eruption.

Humbled by Hubble

If you're ever in need of something to make you feel humble or, alternatively, like an insignificant speck of dust on the whole cosmic scale, there's nothing that will do the job quite like a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. In particular, check out this visual spectrum photograph of the
Tadpole Galaxy. The Tadpole is the wispy one in the middle of the image, being stretched out by the massive spiral galaxy (don't know the name) in the upper left. But to feel really humbled, check out this quote from Space.com:

But in the background was an important surprise. Roughly 6,000 galaxies were detected at various stages of evolution stretching back 13 billion years in time, nearly twice as many distant galaxies as detected earlier during the 1995 Hubble Deep Field project, the most comprehensive survey Hubble ever completed.

Six thousand galaxies. Astronomers estimate the Milky Way has 100 billion stars. Assuming that we live in a fairly average galaxy, in this one HST photo we have just stumbled 600 trillion acrosspreviously unknown stars. How many of them have a planetary system? How many might harbor life? Just how gigantic is this universe anyway?

The Juice Box

The Astros have announced that the team has reached an agreement with Houston-based Minute Maid for the naming rights to their pathetic bandbox of a stadium, now to be known as Minute Maid Park at Union Station, thus providing it with one of the more ... disturbing ... acronyms in sports: MMPUS. Brings a few things to mind, notably blisters and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Maybe they can replace Junction Jack with an Oompa-Loompa.

I was in the Astrodome the day the team and city signed the agreement to build what was then called the BUS (Ballpark at Union Station). Milo Hamilton did his usually horrendous job of emceeing the pregame ceremony, managing to not only mispronounce his boss' name, but also to throw in an ill-timed "Holy Toledo." As I recall, the Astros beat the White Sox by a hefty amount, thanks to a pair of back-to-back dings by Bagpipes and Alou.

At any rate, the new association between the 'Stros and Minute Maid might have some interesting effects, though some on my list may merely be wishful thinking:

* The new fan moniker for Minute Maid Park just HAS to be The Juice Box.
* Someone will try to foment a rivalry between the Astros and Devil Rays with the subtext of Minute Maid vs. Tropicana. They will fail miserably.
* Coca-Cola is now fully entrenched with the organization (MM is a CC subsidiary), meaning the awful "Coca-Cola Patrol" and asinine Coke Rally Deck (or whatever the hell they call it) will continue.
* Replace Junction Jack and/or the Home Run Train with a more appropriate, Juice-based theme. I'll take the Syracuse Orange ball.
* Go back to the classic orange uniforms! (Definitely wishful thinking ... Drayton's enamored with his "brick, sand, and pinstripes" theme).
* SportsCenter will continually refer to any home runs in MMPUS as "juiced."

Sadly, none of this means that their bullpen will learn how to be effective or that we'll get any consistent run production. Unless, of course, the team starts following Cammy's advice and gets ... juiced. :-)

Happy Birthday to Me

Huzzah! It's my birthday, and the birthday of this site. Convenient.

As I get older, birthdays become less and less important or even relevant. As a child, it was nice having the B-day six months removed from Christmas, thus ensuring a semi-annual influx of presents or cash, but the major drawback of having it in June was the fact that I never once celebrated a birthday at school. Houston being a hot and humid place, schools always dismissed around Memorial Day. . I never got my free cafeteria cookie. The birthday parties weren't great, either.

OK, that last one may have had more to do with my general nerd-itude than the date.

At any rate, I'm a year older today. Huzzah.

Howdy!

Well, here we go. The title and description for this blog are, rather obviously, inspired by ESPN's "Pardon the Interruption," probably the freshest, most entertaining debate-style shows ever (and not just because it's sports.)

My objective here is to keep a running tab of my ideas, thoughts, and analysis throughout the day. Not terribly earth-shattering in the whole scheme of blogging, but I hope to keep it fresh and entertaining, nonetheless. As stated in the description, my topics will generally range from US politics (I'm an unabashed conservative/libertarian) to education issues (something too often ignored by Americans with the largest stake in the process) to science topics (I'm an engineer by training) and, as always, sports. Other stuff will be touched on as it touches me.

I don't intend to get very personal at all, but for anyone interested, my name is Eric Steinhauser. I live near Houston, Texas. My biggest hobby at this point is cooking, and trying to convince family members to eat what I have prepared. This last part is more difficult than one might imagine -- the food's good, but they're just picky. And so it goes ...