The Boogey Man

In mid April i got up one morning to find my rear tire flat.  Just sitting overnight in my living room it had gone down.  Slow leak.  Damn.  I was in a  hurry to get to an appointment, and ever the optimist, i hoped that it had just gotten low without me noticing.  So instead of reaching for my tire levers i reached for my floor pump.  The tire seemed to hold air so i rode off.  It lasted the whole day, but the next morning it was flat again, so i changed it. The nice thing about a slow leak is being able to change the tire at home instead of on a roadside.

I've changed a lot of tires in the past 40 years. A lot.  Hundreds.  Lots of my own and lots for other people.  That's not bragging, it just is what it is.  I can do it in my sleep.  I'm careful and pretty quick.  That morning i quickly got the tube out but, i could not find a hole in it.  I thought another valve might have failed (i got a bad batch of tubes from a dodgy bike shop a few months ago, all the valves failed after only a couple weeks).  I finally resorted to the bucket of water method and even then it took some work to find the extremely tiny hole barely pushing out a bubble every few seconds.  I patched the tube.  I used a big patch instead of my tiny patches because, well in the back of my mind i was a bit worried about The Boogey Man.

I searched the tire and i could not find what caused the puncture and that's always concerning.  The most important part of changing a tire, of course, is finding the cause and pulling the tack or prying out the glass to make sure it doesn't happen again immediately.  I guess at that point i really should have started to think about The Boogey Man but i didn't.  I fixed the tire, pumped it up and pedaled off and didn't think about it again. However, i did buy a new tube later that day.

A few days later i went on a 50 mile ride far from home, no problems.  But after a week of riding every day i got up one morning to find it flat again.  I was planning a bike repair party in a few day so again, i just pumped up the tire each morning at home and was able to ride on it all day each day until it was convenient to repair it.

At the end of the week, at home, i pulled off the tire and, with effort, found the tiny leak right at the edge of last week's patch.  I spent a lot of time looking for what could have caused it, running my finger around the inside of the tire, examining it closely, even using the trick of rubbing cotton on it (hoping for a snag). I couldn't find anything. 

I started to talk myself into the idea that maybe i just did a bad patching job.  It's possible after all, maybe the edge of the patch failed.  It took some effort but i convinced myself this wasn't a puncture but a patching failure.  However i guess i wasn't completely convinced because i didn't use the new tube, i patched the old tube again:  proof that in the back of my mind i was scared of The Boogey Man.

I don't have to change tires very often on my bike, and it's not just because of my partially-in-jest superstition against saying the f-word (f-l-a-t) while on the bike.  I don't like to tempt fate, but i also try to be protected.  I do a good clean job of changing my tires, but mostly i select good tires.  I often tell people that's the one part of the bike you should really spend money on.  In almost all areas, used or cheap will do fine, but not tires.

When i first moved to Western Washington my Bridgestone RB-T had it stock tires on it.  I didn't even consider replacing them when i moved -- they were fine in Wisconsin after all. But after a full winter of riding 400 miles a month on the wet roads (it rains a bit in Seattle) i changed my mind.  I changed my mind while changing a flat in downtown Shelton:  the 4th flat in the 60 mile ride from Seattle to Olympia.

Many bicycle tires (especially the cheaper ones) are made of a rubber fabric, woven strands of rubber, which spreads when it gets wet creating many tiny holes in the tire.  Not good in the rain.  A fully pressed rubber tire is far superior.  I quickly found the legendary Avocet Cross II K tires: solid tires with an inverted tread which acts like a slick when you want it to and like a knobby when you need it to. Best of all they also have a kevlar belt for puncture protection. After 12 years (with only 2 flats) i got another set which i eventually sold with the bike.   I loved those tires.  They are unfortunately hard to find.  I know people who have several sets stashed in the garage because they are so amazing.

The Avocet Cross tires on my road bike had me spoiled and i eventually found some tires with puncture protection for my city bike and for at least 10 years now i've ridden heavy, expensive, protected tires.  It's saved me a great deal of time and bother.  The last 12,000 miles or so i've been riding on Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires on my combination road/city bike.  I first tried them when a friend gave me a pair (she didn't like the weight).  I've found them to be wonderful, dependable tires that are comfortable on the road or on the trail.  They work great on my highly customized on road/off road Bianchi Volpe.  I very, very rarely have to change a tire.  Every few weeks i examine the tires and pry out pieces of glass and shards of metal that didn't make it through to cause problems --these are very durable tires.

So trying not to think about The Boogey Man i remounted my tire, pumped it up and set out on my errands. As usual, once i got on the bike, i didn't think about the tire at all. And once again, i got another full week of riding without a thought and without problems until one morning i got up and saw my bike in my living room.  Another flat; DAMN!

I had several appointments to get to. I changed the tire so fast i wasn't sure if i knew exactly how the tube was oriented, so i wasn't 100% sure it was the same spot on the tire, but the puncture was in the same spot on the tube, just a few millimeters from the previous two patches.  I patched it up quickly and was on my way.  Now i really was consciously thinking about The Boogey Man.  All the signs were there. It had me scared.

Once again after rolling out the door, i thought no more about it and once again i got a full week of riding, including a half century away from home.  This time, after 8 or 9 days of not thinking about it i grabbed the bike to hurry out of the house and as i rode out the driveway i knew.  Damn!  It was flat again.

Once again, it was a slow leak.  After 3 more days of pumping every morning. I piled yet another patch on the little pile of patches.  For this one, and the next one the following week i used the super tiny patches less than half an inch in diameter. They went right next to one of  the larger patches, so it looked a little like the cartoon of a water molecule, or Mickey Mouse(tm)!  I took the tire out in the bright sun with a magnifying glass and my pocket knife and examined it as closely as i could.  I was certainly not using the new tube at this point because now, i couldn't deny it, i was running from The Boogey Man

After the fifth go round i called up my buddy Kent and told him my story:   slow leaks, nothing can be found in the tire, lasts a few days each time.  He confirmed my fears.  It was The Boogey Man.  Actually what he said first was: "You're fucked."

Michelin Wires are kind of the Boogey Man of cyclists.  I have to say, i'm not sure i really believed in them.  I had heard about them, but i had never encountered one in over 70,000 miles.  And even though as august an authority as Kent regaled me with horror stories, it sounded almost like a campfire ghost story to me.   Beware The Boogey Man! Boo!

Just to twist the knife, Michelin Wires actually come from cars.  They are part of the steel belt in steel belted radials.  The steel belt is not solid, it is a woven fabric of hair-thin steel wires.  When someone drives that tire down to the steel belt, the wires, or the whole tire can wind up on the side of the road.  When the wires are long they are not much of a problem, but as they decompose they wind up as little teeny tiny shards.  These almost invisible bits of wire can slowly work their way into your tire.  My personal demon probably spent weeks working through that 5mm protective layer.

It's a good tire, it's got 4,000 miles on it and i'm sure it's got another 4,000 more left in the tread.  At this point i'm scared to use it.  But i don't have another one and i don't have any money so i don't really have any choice.  I went to the storage locker and pulled out my previous set of Schwalbe Marathons with 8,500 miles on them.  But they are worn almost through in places.  I didn't trust them.

The offending tire was already marked up with sharpie and chalk markings as i tried to limit the area of the search. Sigh.  So i patched that same tube again.  I tried booting the problem area of the tire with duct tape in hopes that would help (Kent said it wouldn't.  As usual, he was right.) I was also hoping that maybe the big pile of patches already there (six, for those who are counting) would start to form a layer of protection against my own personal Boogey Man.

I put the wheel back on this time with a Sisyphean certainty of yet another puncture.  Every previous time i had some secret, overly optimistic hope that i would be ok.  This time i knew better.  It went against my instincts to put a any tube in that tire, new or otherwise. I had this morbid understanding of the futility;  but i was hoping that next time i could take the tube out carefully enough to pinpoint (pun intended) the precise location of the offending Michelin Wire and extract it with tweezers.

To add to my stress, i had a long planned metric century (64 miles) far from town planed for next week that i was really looking forward to.  I didn't want to miss it!

It punctured again only 5 days later.  I noticed it, at home again, mid-afternoon when i had appointments that evening.  I can't begin to express my frustration.  This time i wrestled with the tire for a couple of hours.  I could not find the damn wire.  This is a great tire and i love the protective layer, but it's possible that protection is working against me here.  I think the little booger is retreating back into that layer when the tire is not inflated making it impossible to see it, to feel it, or to grab it. With a complete hopelessness i put a seventh patch on the pile.

Then i did something strange. There are these "tuffy" style tire liners on the market.  In my experience they cause more flats than they protect against (because the tube gets cut or pinched by the liner) and they weigh a lot, but i was desperate.  I gave in against my best instincts.  I put one in and i duct taped the place where the two ends met to try to mitigate the pinch problems.  I rode to my appointment and back home without problems. Unlike before i did not forget about my tire, i was constantly aware of it. Then the next day my errands went off fine.  By now i was checking the tire every 15 minutes.

Tuesday, the day of the metric century in the forest,  i set out early in the morning for light rail.  I got the short distance to the train and met my friends for our ride. It was raining, which i really enjoy, but is hard on tires. Once we were through Renton and out in the forest we had a wonderful ride.  I checked my tire regularly and thought about it constantly.  It poured rain and we rode through some very remote areas.  I noticed a little slippage side to side on the big downhills, but i attributed it to the rain. 

Forty-three miles in, right where the lovely country road meets a highway, as we rode back towards civilization, i started to bonk.  We stopped under a bridge out of the rain and i very quickly downed a protein shake.  We were up and rolling again in two minutes, and as we were merging off of the country road and on to the busy highway i asked Dennis, behind me what my tire looked like.

"Flat", he said, passing me.

I hopped off the bike on the very narrow shoulder of the busy highway in the heavy rain and pumped up the tire as fast as i could.  My arms were really tired. 

Then Karen and i split off from the group and rode as fast as we could into town.  I was extremely frustrated about the tire and i was bonking.  I am very grateful to Karen for pacing me the five miles into Auburn.  Once in town, as the sun came out, i stopped to pump the tire up again while everyone waited.

Everyone just thought it was a normal puncture, that a quick tire change was all i needed.  They didn't know about The Boogey Man!  I knew this tire couldn't be changed, i had to pump and ride, that was my only hope. From that point in downtown Auburn it was about 8 miles to the town of Kent and another 6 or so to our end point at Tukwila and i thought there was a chance i might make it just pumping several times.  I wasn't thinking clearly. Damn the Boogey Man!!!!!

When i got the tire pumped up a bit i took the pump off and the presta valve came apart in my hand, blasting all the air out. As if that wasn't enough of a sign, i was sitting one block from the train station.  I really, really, really wanted to finish the ride, but i knew this tire was a goner.

Finally i read the signs and accepted my fate.  I told the group to leave without me.  I walked 1 block and waited for the train.  It was an 80 minute wait. While waiting i called Bike Works and ordered a new tire.  You can't fight The Boogey Man.

I was frustrated while waiting but i was pretty happy once i was on the train. Trains always make me happy.

The next day i took the old tire off.  The flat in Auburn was not caused by the Michelin Wire. The "tuffy" tire liner seems to have held that thing back, at least for a couple of days.  However the tire liner itself cut the tube, that's what caused this flat.  And the tire liner badly abraded the tube in three other places, (including near the pile o patches) all looked ready to fail in the next 20 miles.

A couple of days later i got a call that my tire had come in at the shop, but it turned out that the distributer couldn't get the tire i ordered so sent something different.  I called several other local shops and no one can, at the moment, get that tire. They all have the 32, the narrower one, but not the 35 to match my front tire. I finally ordered one from the always dependable Peter White Cycles (he only had 3 left!).  I put on one of the old badly worn tires in it's place and will ride that with my fingers crossed until my new tire comes. Although knocked down by The Boogey Man i will ride on.  But now i believe.

First Ride.

About ten years ago i was sitting around socializing with my coworkers after work.  We worked at a Bicycle Advocacy agency and so bikes were a big part of our lives.   The conversation turned to when we learned to ride a bike.  People started talking about learning when they were 5 or 4 years old.  Linda's partner Mike said he was THREE!

In 35 years of riding so much it became part of my identity it never occurred to me that 7 was a bit old to learn to ride.  (But on the other hand, maybe it was just that no one could convince me to let go of that awesome red tricycle!)

When we moved across the country Dad bought me a new (used) bike with training wheels.  A few weeks later our new neighbor Logan (he was the "big kid" in the neighborhood) spent a Sunday afternoon teaching me how to ride a bike.  I was thrilled (still am).  That evening Dad composed a wonderful photo to commemorate the auspicious occasion. Dad is a very good photographer and he got an amazing action shot of me riding past.

30 August 1970 with Logan Russell who just taught me how to ride a bike!

What an awesome bicycle!!!  It was a Columbia.  I'd love to have a bike like that today, and it would be very fashionable! Look at those shiny fenders!

Obviously i'm having a great time.  I rode it every day for the next four years.  And i'm still going 12 bikes later!

Is it surprising that pitchers are doing so well?

A friend who doesn't follow baseball but has seen the excited reports of pitching gems in the news recently asked me if it is suspicious that very rare pitching accomplishments seem to be happening more often than in the past.

Of course rare doesn't mean they can't happen close together, in fact, they are more likely to.  I can't give any certain answers, but i have some ideas about the background.

Baseball, like cricket before it (and probably like other sports that i don't know about) is a balancing act.  What makes baseball interesting, and, well, even possible is the balance between how hard it is to pitch (and get someone out) and how hard it is to hit (and score). 

And that balance changes over time.  Sometimes it is changed on purpose.  On a number of occasions through the 1800s, 1920s, even as recently as the 1970s, the powers that control baseball have changed the composition of the balls, changed the height of the mound, the distance to the plate, and even (long ago) the number of balls and strikes. All of that was done to intentionally adjust the balance between offense and defense.

And of course, quietly, behind the scenes, the players are always trying to get away with things to adjust that balance.  Just like Lance.  Spitballs, corked bats, amphetamines.   All kinds of things.

It's important to point out that the natural, random cycles of things also have a huge part in these swings between 10 or 15 years of batters dominance and 10 or 15 year so of pitchers' superiority.  The balance goes back and forth.  The 1910s were a famous pitchers' era; when the most successful pitcher of the era was converted to a batter (Babe Ruth) it turned into a batters' era with unprecedented offense.  The swings went back and forth.

In the 1920s a Commissioner's Office was established independent of the players, owners, or  anyone else.  It was required by an act of congress to allow baseball to keep their anti-trust exemption.  If baseball would govern itself, Congress would not allow any rival league to compete with them. The Commissioner was responsible for the integrity of the game, was responsible for finding a balance between the fans, the owners, the players and the media.  Any change had to come through that thoughtful process.  It wasn't always perfect, but it worked well. 

Fast forward to my life, the 1960s were a pitchers era.  Pitchers did very well, records set with 30 win seasons and very low ERAs.  Batters did poorly, batting averages were low, not many offensive records set.  So in the very early 70s the Commissioner lowered the mound a fraction of an inch.  That took away a little bit of the pitchers' advantage.  And they invented the designated hitter, adding a slugger to every AL team.  The result was the booming 70s, a hitters time. 

Nothing OFFICIAL has been done to adjust the balance since the early 1970s. But we can look at what did actually happen.

After 15 years of slugging, it was the pitchers' turn again.  The 1980s were all about pitching and some of the best pitchers of all time had careers running simultaneously.  There are probably many reasons, including randomness, but i can think of three important ones:

• Relief pitching was invented. No longer could batters feast on tired pitchers in the late innings, now they had to face a 95mph fastball in the 9th. That made a HUGE difference.
• The horrible ballparks built in the 1970s.  They had artificial turf, they were HUGE (fences far away), they were fully round (no wind) giant bowls, often indoors.  The surface was concrete and runners tore up their legs.  And they were all the same shape.  Pitchers loved those stadiums. 
• Probably the drugs that were being used in the 80s were more pitching friendly. 

That was followed by an astonishing swing of the balance in favor of the hitters from about 1994 to about 2008. This is more important for answering my friend's question.

Perhaps the most important thing that happened was that in the 1980s baseball was surpassed by first football, and then basketball as America's favorite sport.  Baseball had held that title for 100 years and the rich owners were pretty pissed at being 2nd.   There was a theory amongst the owners that home runs were the only way to attract people.  

What the owners did then was terrible and it was THE REASON i stopped following baseball.  They fired the (un-fireable) commissioner and started running the game themselves, with only their own short term profits in mind.  That was against the law and a lot of people yelled, but Congress did not act.  (grrrr).  Still haven't.  (GRRRR!)

How did that effect the balance?  There are a few big reasons i can think of.  

1. The Commissioner was gone!  The only office looking into performance enhancing drugs went away right at the same time as some amazing high tech drugs (see Cycling, Soccer, Running etcetera) were being developed. 
2. They juiced up the baseball so it would fly farther.  Now i have to tell you that they have never admitted to doing that.  They didn't announce it and they deny it to this day.  But this is not a conspiracy of one, where Mark has this unusual idea either wacky or insightful.  No it's pretty much accepted as a fact by 99% of the baseball establishment.  Watch any baseball game on TV or radio and you will hear them mention it as fact.
3. Collusion, Free Agency and the reserve clause.  In 1974 the federal courts handed down the original decision overturning the reserve clause (which allowed owners to control players, to own them, and terribly underpay them).  But the owners responded with an unwritten agreement to not negotiate with any player from another team, and that collusion had the same effect as the reserve clause.  It was also illegal and they were found guilty by the courts of colluding:  THREE TIMES.  After the first two convictions they just kept doing it.  Finally in the late 1980s after the "Collusion 3" trial, free agency actually went into effect.  Players could sell their services to the highest bidder just like anyone else in the USA.
4. The owners added FOUR more teams to MLB teams in the early 1990s.  That's 100 more players added at the top level and almost 500 more players added to the professional ranks.  Overnight.  One hundred players who weren't good enough last week, were suddenly in the majors.  For some reason that weakened pitching way more than batting.  Even the fairly dense sportscasters doing the games noticed the effects of expansion on pitching, it was that obvious.
5. The owners, of course, control the checkbooks, and with no authority governing them they started paying players more if they hit home runs.  In some cases it was the ONLY criteria they looked at.  Pitchers salaries stayed (comparatively) flat, but batters, especially the one-dimensional sluggers, got paid more and more.  So players who could have chosen to hit singles were motivated to hit doubles and home runs.  The players who hit the ball farther but less often got contracts over players who hit for average.  Up and coming players were encouraged to focus on power.  And worse, there were even BONUSES for power.
6. As always, those power hitters really sucked on defense.  They couldn't find enough places to hide all those three thumbed guys out in the field so there were a lot more errors made and range went way down -- effectively the field got even bigger.  More hits.
7. Cable TV gave the owners more options for selling their product (TV rights) and the prices paid by networks skyrocketed.  (Remember, the owners themselves are now in charge, not a fair and balanced commissioner.)  Then satellite and internet came along giving them even more sales opportunities.  But a great many of those sales opportunities were only 2 minutes long.  It's hard to show a great pitcher throwing a 2-hitter in 90 seconds, but you can show a home run.  That became the product:  the home run.  And the hundreds of clueless new sportscasters who all told us that the players who hit long home runs were the great players -- because they didn't know anything about baseball.
8. Owning a baseball team has been the most profitable thing you could do in the USA for almost 100 years, but the astonishing amount of money that owners make not only went up in 1990s, but more importantly, word got out.  Suddenly the person making the final decisions wasn't a rich baseball guy, it was someone who had never seen a game before.  And they made some really bad decisions.

And there were other things, not directly caused by the owners overthrowing the commissioner that added to the swing to offense:

• As we got into the 1990s a whole class of pitchers (from the 70s & 80s) who were amongst the greatest in history all retired at the same time.  There were others that came up, but that was an extraordinary group that disappeared and they were replaced by rookies.  The average quality of the pitching dropped when they left the game.
• Starting in 1990, the nasty staidia started being replaced by real grass, outdoor, "old fashioned" staidia. At least a dozen of these were built. They were odd shaped, and not fully round, always outdoors, and often smaller.  Better for hitting. 
• There was an unprecedented focus on individual play during the 90s and 00s.  Almost all idea of teamwork fell apart (maybe it was just Reaganism reaching the Majors, i never thought of that!).   Lots of players played their whole carriers sacrificing wins for home runs.  The simple fact that anyone actually thinks Ken Griffy Jr is Hall Of Fame material shows the focus on selfish play rather than team play.
• More high school kids could make it to the majors (100 more slots) and they knew they had a better chance as a slugger than as a pitcher or fielder or singles hitter.  So they taught themselves the slugging style rather than the hitting, running style of play.  And they bulked up.
• There was massive innovation in almost all areas of the game in the 1980s & 90s but coaching did not change at all.  Coaches were still focused almost entirely on colloquial knowledge from the 1940s passed on by older coaches. (They even made a movie about it.)  
• Fantasy League baseball really took off.  This is a hobby where you select a group of players from different teams and follow their progress, adding together INDIVIDUAL statistics to calculate how well your "team" is doing.  This  just increased the focus on the individual over the team.

So, we saw better drugs, juiced up ball, friendlier stadiums, closer fences, bad fielders, money for sluggers, player individualism, bad coaching, bad owners and a draft focused on power.  Is it any wonder that the offense just went wild for 10 or 15 years?  Pitching stats plummeted to record lows while almost every imaginable offensive record was broken by some hyper engineered superman.

Finally things started to change.  Slowly of course.  I see the Red Sox 2004 Championship the beginning of the end of that era. 

• The Sox were the first team to hire a statistician and the first team to hire a general manager who ran the team by the numbers rather than by instinct or mythology. When they won the World Series the rest of the teams woke up.
• In the 2010s we are now watching dozens of major court cases. Legal trials of players who became superhuman using those high tech drugs.  It's almost all batters who are suffering, some pitchers, but mostly hitters.  They were performing at astonishing levels, far above anything ever before, far above anything anyone thought humanly possible. It got so out of hand, so completely unmanaged after 10 or 12 years that the JUSTICE SYSTEM stepped in.  Baseball wasn't watching itself (which it is supposed to do) so the Courts took over.  It's been ugly.  The courts singled many of them out, forced a bunch more into quick retirement, and scared everyone else.  Doping seems to have really dropped a ton. Power is off by something like 45%.
• Since 1994 the owners have added more and more and more games every year, expanding the playoffs to an utterly ridiculous extent..  At first this didn't appear to have much effect, but injuries have gone way up.  The players play more games, there is more wear and tear and the protective drug use is down.  Finally players are easing back a little, trying to not get hurt.
• Pitchers however are doing better. Not only have they finally gotten used to pitching in the new ballparks, but kids have gotten smarter about not pitching too young and there are fewer injuries and burnouts in college and the minors.
• A bunch of players came in from Japan, which had never been effected by the hyper-individualism, and slugging focus, of the 1990s USA.  They brought a more thoughtful, team, winning based attitude instead of the screw the team swing for the fences even if you strike out a bunch idea.
• Scouting has gotten much more extensive, and scientific.
• The greedy owners introduced inter-league play.  The American League is significantly better than the National League.  Always has been.  The NL has sometimes had better pitching, but they've never caught up to the AL in offense.  And on top of just being a better league, the AL has an extra hitter on every team.  Since inter-league play started the AL has just torn the NL apart every time.  It's not close.  Several of those recent pitching gems (including the Mariners' no-hitter my friend asked about) were against National League teams.  Easy pickins.
• I also think that there has been an increase in coverage of things like perfect games and then the addition of the internet, even more access to the information.
• Much of the coverage of baseball in the last 5 to 10 years, just like much of the coverage of everything else, has become simplistic but wildly exaggerated.  Sensationalized.  A 'string' of perfect games is brought to our attention by a sensationalized newscast, but with no analysis, explanation or understanding.  A 'near' perfect game is sensationalized without any mention of how common they are.  It leaves us shocked when it's really quite normal.

So the doping went away, the focus moved off of slugging, pitchers got used to the natural stadiums, coaching got smarter, teamwork came back and a lot of the unbalanced factors from the 90s went away.  We are definitely 3 or 4 years into a pitchers' era.  Actually in my opinion it's not a pitchers' era but a more balanced era, but it's being called a pitchers' era.

Of course, just like absolutely everything else in life, things just cycle.  And these bigger cycles of balance are effected by smaller cycles.  For a few years the high schools will turn out better pitchers, just by chance, then a few years with none.  For a few years maybe weather changes, maybe coaching strategies or maybe just randomness.  Although players HATE it, a lot of sport is  randomness.

Statistics That Shape Our Life

When i worked in radio, there was one overnight job i had where my only responsibility was to sit in a studio for 7 hours.  That's it.  Just be there.  The station was automated, i had to sit there and listen in case something went wrong.  I got a lot of reading done.

At 5:00 in the morning the newspapers were delivered to the station, i'd grab them and browse..  There were 3 of them, the local paper, the New York Times and USA Today.  I would often read USA Today cover to cover.  It took about 5 minutes:  not much substance. 

At that time in USA Today there was a ridiculous feature called Statistics That Shape Our Life.  This is annoying for so many reasons, not least of which, is that we shape statistics, not the other way around. I usually glanced briefly at it and then moved on.

But one morning in about December 1986 there was a Statistics That Shape Our Life that left me slackjawed.  It was so funny i just had to cut it out. I stapled it to the acoustic tiles on the wall of the studio so everyone could see it.  This was a big mistake.  It meant that i had to stare at that stupidity 7 hours a day 3 nights a week.  I wish i could find it; i've searched and searched on the internet to no avail.  So i'll have to re-create it. This farcical Shaping Statistic was a pie chart titled:

What School Kids Think of Jello With "Stuff" In it.  

It  looked like this

The labels said, Tastes OK  29%, Tastes GREAT 23%, Fun to throw 48%.

Excuse me?  That's just weird. 


It took about two weeks of staring at it before i figured out how it was written.  (I'm slow.)  I had found it funny, but for the wrong reason.

Any worthwhile graph or statistic will tell you the sample size.  This one didn't.  That was the give away! I think i can deconstruct it.  The key was that the author was working from home, in an era when that was so rare no one would think of it. Here's what i think happened:  the guy who's job it was to create this little corner of the page was just about at deadline.  He was sitting in the dining room wracking his brain on what silly, pretend, life shaping graphic he should put in the "nations newspaper" the next day.

Meanwhile his kids and their two friends were in the kitchen raising hell like kids do.  He gets tired of yelling through the door at them to quiet down so he storms into the kitchen and tells them to eat their desert and be quiet. Then he has an idea.

He asks the first kid, probably the older of his two, what he thinks of the Jello.  The kid is trying to be cool in front of his friends so he shrugs and says, "Tastes OK".  (That's 1 out of 4, one quarter, tweak it a little for effect, 29%).

The next kid wants to out do his big brother so he shouts, TASTES GREAT!   (That's 1 out of 4, one quarter, tweak it a little for effect, 23%)

Then the next kid, the weird friend who's trying to get attention, makes up something she thinks will make her friends laugh: FUN TO THROW! And the fourth kid can't top that so, laughing, he says the same thing.  Bingo.  49%.

This ridiculous "statistic", run in a supposedly reputable newspaper, had a sample size of....  four, and they weren't independent, their answers were based on previous responses.   It is impossible to fail more completely at statistics, and journalism, than this USA Today graph did.

The Best Tire Change

Just weeks after first moving to Seattle in 1992, i found an excellent 30 mile loop through forested parks and winding curves -- The Mercer Island Loop. It's a wonderful ride and i did it several times a month for the first six or eight years i lived in Seattle. I love the curves coming north on the east side of the island; it's gently downhill, the road runs through heavy forest, curving around deep ravines with fairly little traffic.  It feels like i'm cruising through an alternate world. It's a joy and i always just fly.  Every time i come out of the trees at the north end of the island it's jarring.

Here's the route -- if  you don't live in Seattle, just skip down.

I would leave home in Eastlake, cross over I-5, wind through gorgeous Interlaken Park, briefly join the very fast traffic through the Washington Park arboretum, ride down the Olmsted curves, cruise south along Lake Washington past a certain Seattle Rock Star's house and pedal uphill through Frink Park and over the floating bridge.  Then i would ride 13 miles counterclockwise around the edge of Mercer Island.

One drizzly day in November 1994 i was riding this loop, enjoying the sweeping curves, the forest, the lake and the rain.  After the loop around the island, when i was returning on the floating bridge the rain started pelting down harder.  For some reason, which i cannot remember, when i got to the Seattle side of the bridge that day, i decided not to return through Frink Park as usual, but instead went through the bike tunnel above I-90, and rode up 25th Avenue through the Central District neighborhoods to Jefferson Street. This is a very familiar route for me now, i ride it several times a week, it's a perfectly comfortable neighborhood, (it has an undeserved reputation as being somewhat dodgey).  But this was the first time i had ever ridden in this area and i was finding my way, trying to figure out my next turn. That's when i got a flat.

Everyone who knows me knows that i enjoy riding in the rain, but changing a tire in the rain is another story; so i walked across the street to the bus shelter. There was an 85 year old black woman sitting on the bench in the shelter.  She said she'd never ridden a bike, and looking at her walker, said she didn't think she was ever going to.  I asked if she minded if i joined her and when she agreed, i sat down and quickly popped off my wheel.  As i started shoving the tire lever at the tire she said, "Why are you doing THAT?"

I explained tire beads and pinch flats.  She seemed very interested.  When i pulled out the tube she asked about that, and i explained.  When i felt around in the tire for the offending piece of glass, she asked why and i explained preventing a second flat.   I patched and pumped, tucked and palmed.  At each step she asked questions and i spent the 10 minutes till her bus came teaching her how to change a flat.  We both had fun.  It turned what could have been a miserable experience into a memorable one.