the honeymooners

"Mom, have you ever been to Chicago?"
"We went there for our honeymoon. It was awful."
"What happened?"
"Before we went, my father said to me 'You go there, you look straight ahead. You don't look at anyone, or they'll stab you'."
"."
"And then we were staying on the nineteenth floor of this hotel and it had a fire."
"."
"That wasn't really so bad. What was bad was the entire time I was there I just kept thinking somebody is going to kill me."
"Well, that was 54 years ago."
"Yes, that was back when there wasn't as much crime."
"If you come visit, I promise you won't get stabbed."

water, water everywhere / nor any drop to drink

I received an e-mail this morning from a friend saying that the Today Show was broadcasting a dispatch from Fort Dodge, Iowa -- only 16 miles away from my hometown of Manson -- because of flooding in the area. I look online and the story is that Manson is even more the center of the flooding than Fort Dodge. This was the first I heard of it, so immediately I called my mom.

Our land is on a rise, so for us to get flooded out would require something Biblical. * Still, apparently we have water in our basement, which we've had recurrently since moving into the house 27 years ago. Worse, says my Mom, something with all the rain has caused the switch for our well to break, so my parents have no running water. They are catching rain in barrels to use as their non-drinking water. Plus the septic tank is full and so the toilets won't flush. I didn't ask for details on how they are handling that.

I have a photography-inclined reader from Manson--if you read this, you know who you are--so maybe I'll get some photos of the flooding. The golf course is always an especially compelling flood zone.

* Or, more properly, anti-Biblical, given the whole rainbow thing. I remember my Sunday School learnin'! (Although, wait, is the thing with the rainbow symbolizing God's promise not to flood the world again actually in the Bible, or is it part of the non-scriptural overlay given to various Old Testamant episodes?)

baby got bell

From NYT magazine story about anti-immigrant sentiment in an Illinois town:

A lot of my constituents have brought the question to me: What is he hiding?” Sigwalt told me. “I don’t want to get my butt in a ringer, but I wonder what ICE” — the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — “would find if they went in there.”

Do the NYT copyeditors really not know the word "wringer"? Anyway, "butt in a wringer" is definitely one of those phrases from back in my hometown that I seem not to hear much around Harvard. But what would "butt in a ringer" mean?

note regarding information diffusion dynamics within the freese family

Sister C called me up just now to congratulate me on the job at Northwestern. She had just heard about it from someone in my hometown who reads my blog.* Obviously, she and I don't talk on the phone very often. My mother, however, was among the first people I told when I accepted the job, and Sister C and my mother often talk on the phone multiple times a day. It's kind of unsettling to imagine months going by without my arising as a topic of conversation. Sometimes I feel like a ghost who floats about on the periphery of my family, making intermittent corporeal appearances around holidays and then slipping back to the ether of academe. Understand, I'm not faulting anyone else in my family for this; I have nobody to blame for it but myself.

* To that someone: You know who you are. Thanks for providing the update!

the eagle turns out to be more like a phoenix than i would have imagined

My hometown is Manson, Iowa, population 1893. I graduated from Manson Community High School, nicknamed the Eagles with the colors purple and white. Shortly thereafter, my high school was consolidated with another high school, changed its name, nickname (to the Cougars), and colors (to navy blue and gray). Many in my hometown resented this, resulting in such mischief as an incident in which my hometown watertower was supposed to be painted navy blue to celebrate school spirit but instead was painted this magical color that looks navy blue from far away but when you walk close you can tell is plainly purple. Even so, after consolidation, my thought was the Manson Eagles were no more.

I was wrong! My hometown now has a minor league football team, called the Manson Eagles, with the colors purple and white and a fancy purple-and-corrugated-metal-themed official website. The teams in the league show an interesting geographic nesting: the Manson Eagles, even though Manson contain only about 1/1500th of the total population of Iowa, has to play the Iowa Threshers (based out of Des Moines), not to mention the Minnesota Maulers (a much larger state), and the Midwest Pioneers (who, coincidentally, play in the stadium of Chris's local high school). I don't know how well Manson will fare when put up against entire states or the whole of Middle America, but I know they will face their gridiron fate with characteristic rural Midwestern bravery, stoicism, and awkward squirming should strangers stand too close to us or want to hug.

BTW, my hometown had its Greater Crater Days celebration last weekend, in honor of it being built on top of the largest meteor crater site in the US.* I really think they should invite me back to be the Grand Marshall for the GCD parade. Come on! I have a blog! And a wikipedia entry!

* I explain all this on the webpage I used to have dedicated to my hometown.

post-ptolemaic social science begins at home

From the 2006 GSS, probability of someone with my mother's basic demographic characteristics indicating that she doesn't know the Earth goes around the Sun: 50% (N=26). (previous post here)

"Hey, Mom, does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?"
"Jeremy, the Earth goes around the Sun."

Not one freaking second of hestiation or inkling of uncertainty, either, I'll have you know.

Probability of someone with my father's basic demographic characteristics indicating that he doesn't know the Earth goes around the sun: 31% (N=19)

"Ask Dad when he gets home."
"You need to take care of that cold!"
"Pretend like you don't know. 'Eldon, I was sitting here and wondering to myself, does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? Do you know?'"
"Jeremy, he's going to think I'm stupid."
"You can tell him afterward that I put you up to it."

E-mail later from my mother:

hey j, dad knew the correct answer...............mom

I am tempted to offer a reward to the first person who provides a full and honest account of asking a noninstitutionalized, nondemented adult this question and getting 'Sun goes around the Earth' as a sincere reply. Apparently such people are all around us--including, according to Omar, more than 1 in 8 women with graduate degrees--so an exemplar in one's midst shouldn't be hard to find.

i will be very disappointed if there does turn out to be a ninth circle of hell and people who buy the 'suffering seniors' mailing list are not in it

If you are worried that you are having too good of a day today and feeling too upbeat about the world, be sure to read this story in the NYT about the mass-marketing of phone lists of vulnerable seniors.

Judging by the mail laying around when I go back to the farm, my father is totally on the "Gullible Senior Adults" lists. My father has also been nearly deaf for the last twenty-five or so years as a result of all the noise in the meatpacking plant where he worked, a situation that has been modestly (but still miraculously) improved in recent years by cochlear implants. I can be become very sad very quickly if I think about all that my father has missed out on by not being able to hear. So now I'm sitting here feeling horrible because my first thought as I was reading this story was that maybe it's not all bad that my father cannot use the phone.

i guess maybe he really is an angel after all. but what kind of angel?!

I have already told the story about my family and David Blaine on this blog. I've been trying for the last several minutes to upload this video from YouTube, but there's some problem at the YouTube-Blogger interface. (Don't be surprised if ten posts of it suddenly show up here.) In any case, it is absolutely hilarious, so click over and watch.

shout-out to the birthday girl!

(my mother and me, on a road trip in the early days of this weblog)

My mother turns 71 today. When my mother was my age, her sixth child was already over a year old and showing signs of being alternately the shyest and the most talkative member of the family.

On a related front, I learned last week that the father of a chair of a sociology department on the East Coast worked at the same meatpacking plant that my father did, and has a nephew that lives in my hometown. I'm used to sociology being a small world and rural Iowa being a small world, but not those two small world colliding.

overheard

"I'd ask you to say hi to [name] for me, but you won't."
"Sure, I'll say to [name] for you if you want."
"Say hi to [name] for me."
"Of course, that means that you'll then be taken up as a topic of conversation. I mean, that's what 'say hi for me' really ends up meaning: topicalize me. So, would you like to be a topic of conversation between [name] and me?"
"Okay, I think I'd prefer you not say hi to [name] for me."

Meanwhile: My father turns 73 today. My father worked thirty years in a meatpacking plant and then retired (at least, from that job). It's amazing to think that was more than twenty years ago.

one item already crossed off the freese family 2007 to-do list

Mother:

''HAPPY NEW YEAR''
.......................love to all
............ruth

Son:

Happy New Year to you, Mom!  And remember: if you want to type a quotation 
mark ", you just need to hold down the shift key while pressing the ' key. 
The CAPS LOCK key only works for letters.  You should make it a goal to 
master this in 2007!

Mother:

 "GOTCHA"

fan of the year!

So, my father has always been a huge high school sports fan.* About a decade ago, after an incident involving my father, the principal of my hometown high school, and my father's middle finger, my father ceased his allegiance to my school, and indeed he later worked to help defeat referendums that sought to raise additional tax revenue for it.

Then he started following sports for the consolidated school of the towns to the north and west. Now that he is retired, he goes to home and away games for both boys' and girls' teams. Anyway, all his loyal travelling and attendance has been this year rewarded, as my father was recently selected "Fan of the Year" by this school:




Apparently one of the things this school does at the halftimes of its basketball games is have this contest where you pay $1 and get to attempt a halfcourt shot, and after halftime is over half the pot is divided among whoever made theirs. My father has won this contest several times, although because his hands are arthritic he's had to get approval to be able to wear these special gloves that help him grip the ball:



During football games, the cheerleaders from this school do jumping jacks every time the team scores -- one jumping jack for each point of the total score at the time, so they do more jumping jacks as the game goes on. My father, to "help motivate the team," does the same thing from some place off the sidelines, only he does a sit-up per point instead of a jumping jack. My father is 72 years old. For a game in which the team scored over forty points, this amounted to over 150 sit-ups over the course of the evening. I could maybe do 150 sit-ups, over the course of a month.

My father believes he can affect the outcome of high school sporting events using the power of prayer. However, he only uses this power when a team that truly deserves to win would lose if not for his/His intervention. He has a story about a time when this school was losing as a result of poor refereeing but then won on a last-second desperation heave by an unlikely player who was falling out of bounds as he shot. I mean, it's a fine enough basketball story in itself, but when my father tells it, the last two minutes of his play-by-play are interspersed with his supplications to God to allow true hoops justice to prevail. However dubious I may be of the idea of a supreme being who meddles with high school sports, the spiritual asides do make the story much more intimate and compelling, and if anything I've come to be disappointed by his accounts of other games where it's only about the players and not also his calling God for aid.

* We will not here discuss on this happy blog the implications of my father being such a huge high school sports fan and having a son so devoid of athletic aptitude. To his great credit, knowing other families with dads who are really into sports, my lot could have been far worse.

i love you mom

HI JEREMY,PC HOOKED UP YESTERDAY,ANTTENA IN LIVING ROOM,
PEG HERE TODAY AND

TO HELP ME BRING UP MY MAIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THANKS JEREMY,  LOVE 
U...........MOM

With this e-mail, my mother announced her return to the Internet. Way back, I gave my mother an old computer and an Internet connection. Last summer, at her request, I discontinued it. Then, when I was home in January, my three sisters independently told me that my mother missed e-mail more than she let on. So I returned to Cambridge with the mission of catapulting my Mom back into cyberspace. This involved me arranging the shipment an old computer from Madison to the farm (thanks Sal) and my sister coming over to hook everything up (thanks Peg). It also involved arranging for some kind of microwave connection that goes from the living room of my parents' home, through their window, to a receiver on top of the grain elevator two miles away.

After getting the e-mail I talked to her on the phone. She had gone through all the messages that had accumulated in her Hotmail account. She asked what was the deal with the message I had sent a few weeks ago regarding "something about nymphos." I had to explain to her how spam could be sent to make it look like it came from someone you know. I am not sure my she was fully convinced--the e-mail did, after all, have my name right there after "From:".

Peg will surely show my mother my blog one of these days. If it's soon enough and she scrolls down far enough: Um, hi, Mom. Do not believe anything that those who may leave comments on this blog may have to say about me. And, click here and put a tack on my map. All the other bloggers' mothers have put tacks in their maps--you don't want me to be the only one. The way I was the only boy who didn't have an Atari 2600.