Of Hooves and Horsepower

Our two cars are getting long in the tooth.  I’d like to say I’ve been thinking about the next car I want to buy.  However, I’ve been wondering whether I will get a next car at all.  With the price of gas stuck in the stratosphere and the threat of global warming, perhaps it would better to forego a new car and just buy a horse instead.

According to the First Time Horse Buyers web page, a horse runs about five thousand dollars.  The cheapest new car I could find was a base model Nissan Versa that ran almost three times as much.  This is not a true comparison.  New horses are actually much more expensive than grown “used horses”.   One website puts the break even cost of a foal at almost thirty thousand dollars.   Whether mechanical or organic, the initial purchase is just the beginning of the cost of ownership.  Edmunds has a “True Cost to Own” calculator for cars.  This includes estimated costs for fuel, maintenance, repairs, insurance, taxes and depreciation.  I couldn’t find an equivalent equine calculator, but I tried to figure out the costs as close as possible.

The average new car lasts about eight years.  The average horse has a life expectancy of twenty five years.  Results vary; race horses may only live ten years.  While I couldn’t find hard data, I assume sports cars don’t last as long as minivans.  Cars run on gas, horses run on hay.  The average horse eats about half a bale of hay every day, roughly twenty pounds.  Horses eat every day, whether or not they are used.  The price of horse fuel goes up and down like automobile fuel, actually for the same reason.  Tractors are used to harvest hay and tractors run on oil based fuel.  The higher the price of oil, the higher the price of hay.

Cars require regular maintenance.  Horses do too.  Expect to change the oil in a car and deworm a horse every few months.  The hourly rate for an equine veterinarian is comparable to a mechanic at a Nissan dealer.  However, vets make house calls.  Nissan doesn’t.  Horses require annual vaccinations and periodic checkups.  A Versa has a similar maintenance schedule.  One advantage of a car is tires.  Car tires can last a few years whereas a farrier will be required for horseshoes about every six weeks.

Horses need a place to live.  Stall size is based on how tall the horse is at the shoulder.  This is measured in “hands”.  A small pony can be squeezed into a stall eight feet square.  I have a two-car garage or a one-Clydesdale garage.  If I lived in the city, a horse would need to be boarded somewhere.  This runs about five hundred dollars a month.  However, a parking spot in Chicago can cost twenty thousand dollars.  Advantage: horse.

The deal breaker for me is performance.  While the Versa is not the fastest car in the world, horse acceleration is unacceptable.  A horse goes zero to sixty in… never.  I don’t do much off road riding where a horse might have the advantage.  It’s illegal to ride a horse on the tollway in Illinois, probably because they charge based on the number of axles.  The base engine in a Nissan Versa generates 109 horsepower.  The average horse generates – well – one horsepower.

Santa Claus vs. The Tooth Fairy

Daniel came home from school the other day with one of his baby teeth in a bloody plastic bag.

“I lost it during reading,” he said.  “I was playing with it with my tongue when it fell out.”

“Well, be sure to leave it under your pillow tonight,” I said.  “Then the Tooth Fairy will come.”

He smiled.  “Maybe I’ll get a DVD burner!”

“Daniel, don’t you think that’s a bit much from the Tooth Fairy?”  I said, “Maybe you should ask Santa for a DVD burner instead.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said.  “Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, I mean.”  I had an anxious moment, but he continued.

“I get a lot of stuff at Christmas,” he said, “but all I have to do to get it is be good.”

“Well, it’s good for you when a baby tooth falls out,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.  “But being good helps everyone out.  It’s a matter of the number of people that it affects.  That’s why you get more at Christmas.”

“But this happened in class,” said Daniel.  “I have twenty eight kids in my class, plus the teacher.”

“Yes, but –“

“And I was good when my tooth came out.  I followed the rules,” said Daniel.  “I was bleeding, but I raised my hand to go to the bathroom and I didn’t run in the hallway either.”

“This isn’t Scrabble,” I said.  “If you’re good and you lose a tooth, it’s not the moral equivalent of a double word score.”

“I had to bleed real blood for the Tooth Fairy,” he said.  “That just isn’t fair.”

I thought a moment.  This conversation was getting into some deep philosophical territory.

“Well, all the holiday people – Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy – they all draw from the same Daniel fund,” I said.  “If you get something nice now under your pillow, that means you may only get a dollar in your stocking on Christmas Day.”

“That’s okay,” said Daniel.  “That way I don’t have to be as good at Christmas.”

“No,” I said quickly.  “You still need to be good or the whole fund goes down.”

Daniel frowned.  “You mean I have to be good for the Tooth Fairy, but it doesn’t count for anything except at Christmas?”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Those are the rules.”

Daniel sighed.  “I need a better dental plan.”

Free Range Tree

Daniel and I made the trek to Rockford, in search of trees.  We have a tree in our yard, but since it isn’t quite as tall as our bushes, it doesn’t count.  We stopped at Ack Ack Nursery to see what they had for sale that met all of our arboreal criteria.  The tree had to be taller than we were.  It had to be big enough to support the weight of the occasional bird.  Most importantly, we needed a tree that couldn’t escape.

I’m a fan of free range.  I like when chickens and cows get to run around before I eat them.  I wish we had free range ground squirrels.  However, I want my bushes and trees to stay in the yard.  Meka and I bought a blackberry bush a few years ago and planted it in the back corner next to the fence.  It never grew well there.  It was on top of the swale between the yards; water wouldn’t stay there long.  The fence kept it in permanent shade, but didn’t seem to stop the wind very much.  When the bush wasn’t being blown over or dehydrated, rabbits would come to feed.

“We should put some rabbit fencing up,” said Meka on more than one occasion.  We never did though.  The rabbits ate the berries, the leaves and eventually reduced the entire bush down to a single woody stick poking out of the grass.  I thought that was the end of that.

A few months later, I noticed a weed growing up next to the cable junction box on the other side of the fence.  The ground is muddy and the gap is too narrow for me to mow there.  The weed grew taller and taller.  One day I noticed it was covered in flowers.  Soon after that, it was covered in blackberries.   I stood in the corner in the mud, promising this time things would be different.  However, the blackberry bush has made no sign of moving back.  I think it’s moved on and it was time for us to do the same.

I took Daniel with me to the nursery.  We picked out a locust tree from the “scratch and dent” aisle.  Daniel gave it a hug when I bought it.  The tree will be delivered by flat bed truck.  There will be no harrowing journey sticking out of the trunk like a rectal thermometer.  The tree will be planted by professionals and Daniel promised it will be watered faithfully.  I think it will like living with us in our yard.

But to be on the safe side, we’re getting the fence fixed before the tree shows up.

All You Can Eat

Rockford has not one, but two all you can eat buffet restaurants and they are only about a block apart.  The competition is fierce.  Even in Belvidere, we get coupons from one restaurant or the other about every other week.  Despite the siren song of savings, I wasn’t really tempted to eat at an all you can eat buffet until Daniel started wearing a shoe size larger than mine.  I thought it might be a good idea to make a test run prior to his becoming a teenager.  It might allow us to stay financially solvent.

It was already dark when we pulled in the parking lot.  The car was bathed in red from the never ending stream of menu items on the restaurant sign.  It was a full house.  Everyone in line had the coupons too.  However, things moved quickly and Daniel and I found a seat near the door.

“Here’s the way it works,” I said.  “You can take whatever food you want, but you have to eat it.  I don’t want it to go to waste.”  Daniel nodded.  He took one of the big white plates and began scooping out mashed potatoes.

“You might want to look around a bit,” I said.

“I like mashed potatoes,” he said.

“I know, but you might like something else better,” I said.  “You might want to check out the other stations before you commit.”  Daniel put the spoon back in the tray reluctantly and walked around the other tables.  He stopped at the dessert station, but I didn’t even give him time to grin.

“But I like this better than mashed potatoes,” he said to no avail.  Mean Dad still shook his head no and made him turn back to the real food.

Besides the mashed potatoes, Daniel came back to the table with a slice of ham, what looked like sweet and sour chicken and a small hot dog.  He rolled the wiener around in the orange sauce and pronounced it delicious.

“I can make my own recipe with this,” he said.  “I’ll call it the hot, sweet and sour dog!”  I’m not sure what “old country” the buffet originated from, so I refrained from dismissing the idea completely out of hand.

Round two was salad: four pieces of iceberg lettuce and a tomato slice covered in enough bacon bits to reconstitute a pig.  And more mashed potatoes.  I have to admit that mixing the mashed potatoes with bacon bits looked pretty good to me.  I went back up and got a scoop myself.

“Daniel, I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” I said.  “You really don’t like anything more than mashed potatoes, do you?”  Daniel’s third plate had a little bit of corn, a little bit of green beans, a lot of mashed potatoes and a taco.

“I’ve never had tacos with mashed potatoes before,” he said.

I’m forty two years old.  I’ve never had mashed potatoes with a taco before either.  Daniel reported the taco shell worked quite well as a scoop and the drippings from the taco meat made a “Mexican Gravy” that was incomparable.

“You should try it,” he said, getting up for more.  I remained where I was, listening to the menacing creak of my belt struggling to hold in the two plates of cafeteria food I had consumed.  The buffet closes at eight thirty and it was almost nine.  Daniel’s fourth and final plate was color coordinated.

“I got all white food,” he explained.  “It matches the plate, see?”  He had some grilled fish, cauliflower and a biscuit.

“No mashed potatoes?” I asked.

“They ran out,” Daniel replied.

ESPN covers the hot dog eating contest on Coney Island every Fourth of July.  If they wanted to see some real competition, they should really follow a bunch of teenagers as they make their way through the buffet like locusts.  It was an amazing sight.  We closed down the restaurant and headed home with one final stop… for dessert.

Off to See the Wizard

It was “Movie Night” the other night.  Movie Night doesn’t fall on a specific date.  It just happens to be an evening where we’ve done all the work we need to do and eaten dinner at a decent hour.  There’s enough time left before bedtime to view some of the thousands of gigabytes we’ve recorded on the DVR.  It was my turn to pick something to watch.  Daniel looked a bit wary.

“We’re going to watch some old movie, aren’t we?” he said.  I nodded.  So much of our culture depends on references to old music and movies and television shows.  I felt it was my parental duty to educate my child so he knew what his parents’ snarky comments meant.  Not to mention, we don’t get channels with newer movies; they cost too much.

“I thought we would watch The Wizard of Oz,” I said.

Daniel snorted.  “Isn’t that a kids’ movie?”

“Aren’t you a kid?” I asked.

He didn’t have a good counter to that.

I’m worried my window of opportunity is closing with Daniel.  He’s growing up.  I think he will be able to appreciate older movies, maybe understand them from an intellectual standpoint and how amazing they were back in their day, but he won’t be able to appreciate them at a visceral level any more.  They’ll be good movies, but not his movies.  I hoped for the best.  We popped some kettle corn and took a couple of boxes of Dots down from the corner cabinet.  We made ourselves comfy on the family room couch, sharing the green throw on our feet.  We turned out the lights and started The Wizard of Oz.

Daniel got right into it.  He didn’t beg me to use the commercial skip when Dorothy started to sing.  There was concern on his face when she was trapped outside during the tornado.   Daniel brushed it off when I mentioned it.

“I knew she wouldn’t be killed in a Rated-G movie,” he said.  “Lucky for her it’s not an R.”

I pointed out how the film went to color when Dorothy arrived in Oz.  It turned out Daniel hadn’t noticed.  He just thought it was “the color of Kansas” before that.  He liked the Scarecrow and the Tin Man right away.  He thought the Lion was a jerk at first, but he grew on Daniel as the movie went on.

I got the first question when the group tried to cross the poppy fields.  “Do poppies make you pass out like that?” he asked.

“I think it’s a metaphor,” I said.

Daniel nodded.  “I get it.  It’s supposed to be heroin, but they couldn’t show heroin back then in the movies.”

“That’s true,” I managed weakly.  “Definitely no heroin allowed in The Wizard of Oz.”

I have to admit, I still think the flying monkeys are seriously creepy.  I must have looked distressed near the end of the movie because Daniel patted my arm.

“Don’t worry, Dad, Dorothy’s not going to die,” he said.  “All she has to do is keep turning over the hourglass and she’ll be fine.”  I’ve probably seen The Wizard of Oz ten times since I was a kid and I never thought of that.  It made me feel better about the whole thing.

Daniel felt the ending was kind of weak.  He didn’t like the “… and it was just a dream” malarkey.  I explained they needed the movie to have a happy ending.

“She goes back to Kansas where the neighbor is going to kill her dog and the house got hit by a tornado?” he asked.  “Some happy ending!”

Childhood Conspiracy Theory

Daniel and I were sitting in a booth at the local Grill and Chill, finishing up the “grill” portion of our meals.  We were surrounded by vintage pictures of Dairy Queen days gone by.  Daniel eyed one hanging over our booth from the 1960’s.  It featured a band called The Zonks.

“I wonder why all old pictures are in black and white,” he said.  I finished up my French fries.

“That was all they knew how to do a long time ago,” I said.  “They invented black and white film first and didn’t invent color film until much later.”  Daniel swallowed the last of his double cheeseburger, but seemed to have a hard time swallowing my explanation.

“That’s not right,” he said.  “That can’t be right.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.  Daniel paused for dramatic effect… and to test his Blizzard by turning it upside-down for a moment.

“Think about it,” he said.  “Color pictures must be easier to make because they just show the world like it is.  When you take a black and white picture, all the colors have to be changed.”

“Shades,” I corrected.  I couldn’t help myself.

“Shades?”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Black and white pictures have shades of gray, no colors.”  Daniel gave me a long look.

“Dad, are you obfuscating me?”

I almost choked on my malt.

He continued, “I can save color pictures on my computer and make them black and white after I take them.  My camera has a setting to make pictures look old fashioned, but it normally just takes color pictures.”

I asked, “Did you ever think maybe pictures were always in color, but the world was in black and white back in the old days?”

“Where did you hear that?” he asked.

“I read it somewhere,” I said.

“I think I read that too,” said Daniel.  I nodded.  We’re both fans of Calvin and Hobbes.  After a moment he shook his head.

“That’s not it,” he said.  “They still took pictures in black and white after color film was invented.  Why would they do that?”  I shrugged and sipped the last of my malt.

“Money,” I said.  “Color film cost more than black and white film when it first came out.”  Daniel almost leapt over the table.

“A-ha!” he exclaimed.  “That’s why they did it.  Money.  They wanted to save color film for later so they could make more money.”  Daniel sat back with the smug satisfaction of someone with all the bases covered.  I had to admit it made an odd sort of sense; it didn’t even occur to me ask who “they” were.

“Follow the money,” I said to myself.

“Where did you hear that?” Daniel asked.

“I read it somewhere,” I said.

“I think I read that too,” he answered.  I was surprised.  I didn’t think Woodward and Bernstein were required reading in the sixth grade.

“Congratulations.  You’ve uncovered your first conspiracy,” I said.  “So, what do you think?  Did man really land on the moon?”

“Sure,” said Daniel waving his hand dismissively.  “But don’t ask me why they only took black and white television pictures.  You don’t want to know.”

Dad Homework

I picked Daniel up Friday afternoon from cross country practice.  He plopped down in the passenger seat, bag in his lap, a smile threatening to take over his face.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.  Daniel grinned and shrugged.  I asked if he had a good day at school.  Another grin and shrug.  I asked if he wanted to stop at the corner gas station, get a bottle of orange Fanta before heading home.  Grin.  Shrug.  Finally I asked if he had any homework.  This was apparently the question he had been waiting for.

“No,” he said with a laugh,” but you do!”

One of his Language Arts teachers sent home a blue page addressed to parents.  “You know your children better than I do.  Please tell me in a million words or less about their passions and their strengths.  How do you think their story will be written in the future?”  Wow, I thought to myself, it’s been a long time since I had to write a theme for school.

“You really should sit down at the kitchen table and do this right away,” said Daniel.  “Otherwise you’ll be working on it at 3:00 in the morning before school on Monday.”  I took some comfort that – despite outward appearances – Daniel had actually been listening to me all these years about homework.  I sat down and thought for a few minutes while Daniel set up a game on the Wii.

“You don’t have to mention Oscer,” said Daniel suddenly from the family room.  Oscer is a stuffed blue dog.  He’s been Daniel’s sidekick since Kindergarten.  They used to go everywhere together.  Lately I’ve noticed Oscer is more of a recluse; he only plays with Daniel when they are alone together.

“Isn’t he your prized possession?” I asked innocently.

“Yes, but – you know – you don’t have to write about that,” said Daniel.  “And you don’t have to write about when I was a baby.”

“Aren’t you losing your game?” I asked.  Police had Daniel’s car surrounded.  He reset something and was off to the races again.  I put pen to paper.

“Daniel, how do you spell ‘goofy’?”

There was a screech of tires from the family room.

“Never mind,” I said.  “I’ll just get the dictionary.  I make you look up words before asking for help.  I should do the same.”  Daniel was clearly focused on his video game, not at all watching me from the corner of his eye as I looked up various words – ‘diaper’ and ‘naked’ – and jotted them down on a sheet of notebook paper.  I was leafing through the pages, looking up ‘booger’, when Daniel finally snapped.

“What on Earth are you writing about me?!” he demanded.  I handed him my paper.

Daniel is a good kid.  He has many strengths.  However, he falls for Dad’s practical jokes all the time.

Daniel tried his best to scowl, but he kept smiling instead.  Finally he laughed.  It was the last laugh, by the way, as I didn’t finish the actual theme until 3:00 Monday morning before school.

White Castle Word Problem

We were all heading home from the western suburbs. It was after eight and while we were hungry, we weren’t really hungry. White Castle and their “fun sized” hamburgers seemed like the perfect choice. Unlike most fast food places, White Castle burgers aren’t wrapped in waxed paper, but are housed in small open-ended cardboard boxes. To cash in on the fortune cookie trend, White Castle prints pithy sayings on the bottoms of the boxes. Some have wise sayings, others have amusing riddles. Daniel grabbed the box out of my hand as I slid my third hamburger onto my five inch paper plate.

“If you stacked all the White Castle hamburgers sold, they would stretch to the moon and back with plenty left over for lunch,” he read aloud. “Is that true?” Meka shook her head. I wiped the corner of my mouth off with a napkin and pulled out a pen to do some quick calculations. A White Castle hamburger (typically known as a “slider”) is a square patty about two inches wide. It’s wider than it is tall, so that’s why I used that measurement.

“Fudging your data?” said Meka, our resident scientist. “Your results are going to be suspect at best –” I bought her silence with a pair of jalapeno cheeseburgers and got to work. With my standard slider measurement, there were 6 sliders to a foot and it would take 31,680 sliders to stretch a mile. While that’s a lot of burgers, I worked at Burger King when I was in high school. We would typically sell a thousand Whoppers a day; thirty thousand sliders didn’t seem like all that many in the grand scheme of things.

But the moon is pretty far away. Even at the so-called “supermoon” approach back in March, it was still 221,565 miles from Earth. I started writing across the narrow edge of the napkin, but had to switch to the other side and redo my math across the long edge instead; the numbers got big pretty quickly. I came up with 14,038,358,400 sliders required to reach the moon and back.

“You forgot the ones for lunch,” said Daniel.

Oops. I came up with 14,038,358,404 sliders.
Fourteen billion is a lot of sliders, but was it an impossible number? According to the vintage poster hanging above the booth, White Castle sold 50 million hamburgers in 1941. At that rate, White Castle wouldn’t reach the moon until the summer of 2061.

“You’re just assuming one long string of hamburgers,” said Meka. “For something that tall, you’d need more of a pyramid structure in order to get the necessary strength –” I slid my box of fries across the table and she withdrew her protest.

Back in the olden days, White Castle’s motto was “Buy ‘em by the Sack”. Nowadays, you can pick up hamburgers by the case or even the crate. It took White Castle forty years to sell their first billion hamburgers, but only seven years to sell their second billion. If their sales stayed at 1968 levels, White Castle burgers would have reached the moon by now, but would have barely begun the journey back.

I felt it was a reasonable assumption their business has continued to grow since the sixties. The two White Castles I visit most frequently were built since I was born. And you don’t have to go to White Castle to get sliders anymore. Frozen White Castle hamburgers are available in the freezer section at Wal Mart (and if you stacked all the Wal Marts from here to the moon… well, that’s another story). I figured their sales had to average 96% better year-over-year since 1968 in order to get the slider trail all the way back to terra firma. White Castle is a privately owned company. I couldn’t find any hard data on their website. However, they did mention building a plant in 1992 that could make 200,000 hamburgers a day. That would have added 51% to their annual burger production capabilities, or more than 43,000 slider miles since the day it opened.

While my final numbers were incomplete, I felt I could say with some confidence to Daniel that – yes, if you stacked all the White Castle hamburgers sold, it was possible they would reach the moon and back.

“Nope, you’re wrong,” said Daniel.

“I’m wrong?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a trick question,” said Daniel with a laugh. “If you stacked all the hamburgers sold, it wouldn’t be a tall pile at all. They’ve all been eaten!”

“He has a point, you know,” said Meka. I gave her the last half of my shake before she could say “I told you so” and threw out my napkin in the trash.

Daniel Discovers the Moon

I could hear the theatrical sigh all the way upstairs in my office.  A moment later, Daniel knocked on my door.  I was surprised.  I wouldn’t have believed a knock could actually sound exasperated.

I was wrong.

“You won’t believe what we have to do for school,” he said.  “We have to look at the moon.”  He looked at me for reaction and seemed to be annoyed I wasn’t sharing his sense of outrage.  We have looked at the moon through our small telescope.  We’ve watched documentaries on television about the Apollo missions.  I thought it would be right up his alley.

“But we can’t use a telescope,” he said.  “We can’t look it up on the Internet or anything.  We’re supposed to just look.”  I got another sigh that belied the weight of the world on his fifth grade shoulders.  “How can I find out anything about the moon just by looking at it with my eyes?”

It occurred to me this was a case of too much information.  We’ve trained telescopes on the moon for four hundred years.  We’ve sent spacecraft past it.  A dozen men have walked on it.  When you can go to a museum and inspect a piece of the moon up close, what can you discover with a standard set of eyeballs from a quarter million miles away?

“Why don’t we try to forget everything we know about the moon and see what we can figure out for ourselves?” I said.  “I bet we can figure out ten things about the moon on our own.”

So far, we’ve determined the moon rises later every night as it goes from a crescent to a full moon.  It moves quite a lot compared to the stars.  The moon seems to move about ten moon-diameters east every day.  The stars have moved slightly in the past couple of weeks, but nowhere near as fast as the moon.  We figured that meant the stars were farther away than the moon.  We also figured out the clouds are closer than the moon.  A number of nights, clouds prevented us from seeing the moon.  However, we’ve never seen any clouds covered up by the moon.

“It’s funny we were able to think of something when we didn’t see it,” said Daniel.

We also figured out the moon always faces the same way towards us.  It was possible the moon was rotating once a day and we just happened to be catching it at the same time every night.  However, last Saturday we switched to Daylight Savings Time, so while we were still looking at the moon at 8:30 on Sunday night, it was like we were looking at it at 7:30 Saturday night.  And it looked the same every time.

Since the spots on the moon always looked the same to us, we determined they weren’t clouds.  Clouds on Earth move and change shape.  And since there are no clouds on the moon, there probably wasn’t any rain or snow either.  That meant the spots probably weren’t lakes or oceans.  Daniel thought they might be “bumps”.  He noticed the edge of the moon – where sunlight meets darkness – didn’t seem to be completely straight.  I couldn’t tell for sure, but gave Daniel the benefit of the doubt since his eyes are thirty years younger than mine.

I’m not sure if all this adds up to ten things about the moon or not.  We’ve only been at it for a couple of weeks.  In any case, none of our discoveries are – pardon the phrase – Earth shattering.  But it made us think about the people who looked and sat and thought about the moon when they didn’t have all the modern conveniences we have now.  And considering how much we could figure out just by looking at the moon for a few extra minutes every night, it makes me wonder how much more we might be able to see around us if only we look a little harder than normal.

Thoughts on the End of the Death Penalty in Illinois

I was in third grade when the news broke about John Wayne Gacy.  Every evening, my family would eat dinner in the kitchen as the black and white TV on the countertop announced yet another body had been found in his crawlspace or his yard or in the swimming pool filled in with cement under his garage.

One weekend in 1979, my dad drove us past his house.  It was being systematically disassembled by police and we couldn’t get very close.  What really struck me was the rest of the neighborhood.  It was so – normal.  The trees were taller and the styles of the houses were slightly different, otherwise it could have been my neighborhood.

That thought stuck with me for a long time.

I was 24 when he was executed, in the same age range as his victims.  I stayed up late to hear the news and was relieved when they reported after all these years, he was finally dead.  I wondered what had taken so long? My primary concern with the Death Penalty was if someone as obviously guilty as John Wayne Gacy had taken fourteen years to get through the system, how long would it take someone who had committed horrific yet less newsworthy crimes?  I wondered if an inmate on death row was more likely to die of old age rather than lethal injection.

I assumed the long delay was the result of safety precautions built into the system to prevent an innocent person from being killed in my name.  I thought that right up until a group of journalism students at Northwestern University proved someone on death row shouldn’t be there.  And then they did it again.

And again.

And again.

Actually the students worked very hard, sometimes for years, to disprove the cases against these men, but – at the time – all I could think was “how flimsy are these convictions that students are able to blow them wide open?”  It sure didn’t say much for the state of journalism in Illinois, or the state of justice for that matter.

I looked up the costs of death penalty cases and couldn’t believe how expensive they were.  Richard Speck – the man who killed eight nurses in Chicago in 1966 – had originally been sentenced to death.  His sentence later changed to a mere 1,200 years in prison.  Believe it or not, it would have actually been cheaper to keep Speck imprisoned until the year 3167 than kill him outright (and the fact he died in prison long before his term was up saved the state even more money – thanks, Dick).

That led me to ask the obvious question: “How does one get the death penalty in Illinois?”  I really didn’t know.  It wasn’t automatic for murder; there seemed to be all these “extenuating circumstances”.  I’m a relatively intelligent person.  I like to think I’m smarter than most criminals.  If I didn’t see any hard and fast way to get executed in Illinois, how could it be a deterrent?

In 2000, Governor George Ryan decided to put a moratorium on the death penalty.  The state legislature began looking at ways to “fix” the system and make it work better.  After ten years, they decided there was no way to really make it work any better than it did.  Last Wednesday, Governor Pat Quinn abolished the death penalty in Illinois, making us the sixteenth state in the nation to get rid of it.

I’m a Unitarian Universalist.  We have a set of seven principles that help us with questions of morality.  The death penalty bumps up against four of them at least.  Despite that, I do have a nagging suspicion there are certain acts that so violate societal norms that – yes, they should merit death.  But I can’t say – specifically – what they are.

Take Osama bin Laden… please.

Should he get the death penalty if caught?  No, he wants to die if caught; he wants to be a martyr to his cause.  I can think of no better punishment than not to kill him and instead have him tried, found guilty, sentenced to life in prison without parole and then have him tied up in civil court day after day, month after month, year after year as every individual who was affected by 9/11 has the ability to sue him for damages and mental suffering.  And if Osama f^&*ing bin Laden doesn’t merit the death penalty then maybe this is the right thing to do.  Maybe we can live without it as a society.  Let’s give it a try.

Satellite Déjà vu

The United States launched its first satellite in January 1958.  Explorer 1 carried several scientific instruments to measure the radiation and cosmic ray levels in orbit.  As it flew around and around, scientists noted the radiation varied based on altitude and location over the earth.  Dr. James Van Allen determined there was a “belt” of charged particles trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field.  While the original satellite burned up over the Pacific Ocean in 1970, a group of engineering students and scientists at Montana State University at Bozeman were inspired to build a new version of Explorer 1.

The new satellite – called Explorer 1 Prime – is not an exact replica, but contains a similar suite of instruments designed to do the same functions.  Both satellites gave their designers serious engineering challenges to overcome.  Explorer 1 was over six feet tall, but it was only six inches wide and the scientific payload could weigh no more than thirty pounds.  Dr. Van Allen relied on state-of-the-art transistor technology to reduce the size of his equipment.  Explorer 1 Prime is about the size of a softball and weighs 90 percent less than its forebear.  Luckily, engineers were able to employ 21^st century miniaturized electronics for the components and use solar cells instead of heavy batteries for power.

NASA picked Explorer 1 Prime as its first cubesat mission.  However, it has waited more than two years for the chance to “hitch a ride” on a rocket carrying a larger – dedicated – payload.  This week – if all goes well – it will roar into space from the Vanderberg Air Force Base in California, a guest of NASA’s Glory satellite.  Explorer 1 Prime will study the Van Allen belts like its namesake and have the chance to relive history thanks to a Geiger tube donated to the program by Dr. Van Allen himself.  And like its namesake, Explorer 1 prime relives history as it follows into orbit a miniature replica of Sputnik 1.

Loserwear

I was watching the Bears game a few months ago against the Minnesota Vikings.  The Vikings were reeling from quarterback debacles, coaching changes and their stadium roof collapsing.  By the second half, the game was not in question.

“The Bears won the NFC North Division!” said Daniel.  I thought a moment and realized that – yes –with a win against the Vikings; there was no way any other team could catch up with the Bears.  I was a little surprised Daniel had figured that out.  I asked him how he knew.

“Look,” he said, pointing to one of the players on the sidelines.  “He’s got it on his hat.”  By the grace of our HDTV I could make out the stitching of the baseball hats being worn by smiling Bears players: 2010 NFC North Division Champions.

Obviously the Bears had made up the hats in advance with the idea they might be needed that night in Minneapolis.  But it got me thinking; for every action there is a reaction.  For every team that wins, another team has to lose.  At some point in the season every team (with the possible exception of Detroit) did the math and figured they had a shot at something worthy of printing on a T-shirt.  But a lot of these items would become sadly unnecessary come January.  What happened to them?

It turns out the NFL has been working with charities like World Vision for almost twenty years, donating the clothes that aren’t needed once a team loses.  Short sleeve shirts go to poor people in far away tropical climes.  Cold weather gear heads to the needy in remote mountainous regions.  In fact, the remoter the better; the NFL works hard to make sure none of these “alternate reality” items ever makes it back to the United States or anywhere else that has access to eBay.

The Bears lost their bid to go back to the Super Bowl a couple of Sundays ago.  It hurts, but the knowledge that our loss helps someone in need does take a little of the sting out of it.  I take comfort in the notion the Bears aren’t just the 2010 NFC Champs in my dreams, but also in the steppes of Mongolia.