BEARDS: The measure of a man

Recently, I had a three day weekend to tackle my television memoirs. I woke up on my first day off, drank 12 ounces of water (one must be hydrated), jumped in the shower when an otherwise unimportant mental manifestation surfaced with the ferocity of a nuclear blast:

I didn't need to shave!

Forget the morning coffee or a homemade country breakfast to stimulate your groggy senses. The realization that you can display a days growth of facial hair without having the cataclysmic repercussions you would normally encounter at work is one of the most exhilarating epiphanies one can experience early in the morning on a day off.

Throughout the day, the scruffiness of my days growth became empowering. I felt like changing the oil on the car. I wanted to build an addition on my workbench along with finding random uses for my cordless drill. I felt like challenging people at the grocery store to feats of strength. My facial hair was even brainwashing me into thinking that I could hold up the front end of my car up with my bare hands WHILE changing the oil! In essence, my facial hair increased my adrenaline output and my level of stupidity. If it weren't for my wife strongly suggesting that I refrain from these activities or my day would revolve around cleaning our bathrooms, my adrenaline overdrive would have caused serious injury. This, keep in mind, is all due to facial hair.

Since my overzealous, adrenaline laced body was checked at the door by my lovely wife always looking out for my well-being, I never tackled the projects that I set out to do that day while on my facial hair high. But I did have a chance to reminisce about facial hair days gone by. One specific instance was back in 1995 during my last year of college.

Several friends along with myself were studying for a calculus test (how dorky is that) and--for reasons still unknown--the conversation shifted from integrals and complex equations to beards within a few minutes. Actually, it was more of a switch to topics that were only partially related to manly activities but within those minutes, the focus evolved to straight up, manly things. Eventually, as all manly conversations go, the topic drove headstrong right into beard territory. Once your there, you cannot back out. The friendly discussion morphed into a heated exchange and then to a challenge. We all agreed to grow beards for a period of weeks after which we would have an impartial party judge to see who has the best beard. Needless to say, I won!

After the two weeks elapsed and the contest was over, I realized that each man's beard was distinctly different not because of color but in thickness or density.
This, in my opinion, is directly correlated to his manliness. Since I won the contest, I figured I was more manly than the others ( I was biased) so it was up to me to explore this relationship further. After all, I owed my results to all manly men who won beard growing contests.

But first, I needed a scientific term.

Also, how could beard density be quantified?

Since my background is in meteorology, I took a weather-type term and changed a bit to describe what I needed. In weather, an isobar is a line of equal pressure. So, I thought, the lines showing equal beard density should be appropriately named: ISOBEARD

So I drew a picture of a face (circa 1995) illustrating where the beard is the thickest using these brandnew ISOBEARD lines.

Notice that the facial hair in this example is the thickness or the most dense around the chin and near the ear. The beard is the least dense in the mustache region and near the cheek bone. Also, NEGATIVE ZONES or areas where the beard doesn't occur (below the lower lip and to the left and right of the mouth) become very visible using this technique. While these negative zones make the beard look trim, it is a detriment to possess too many NEGATIVE ZONES as it dilutes ones manliness

What does this map tell us? Simple really. If a person's ISOBEARD MAP has lines that are far apart then, by definition, he is not as manly because he doesn't have a thick beard. If, however, a person's ISOBEARD MAP has lines that are concentrated throughout then his manliness is much greater because he has a thick beard.

Since then, I have created ISOBEARD MAPS for many people (with their permissiion) using this technique as a tool to determine the person's manliness. Of course, God created all of us to be unique in our own way. However, if God created us with the same level of manliness then I wouldn't be here determining a way to quantify it because we'd all be the same. Basically, some of us have more manly uniquenesses than others. That's what the ISOBEARD MAP TECHNIQUE shown in the picture above was designed to find out.

So draw an ISOBEARD MAP of your own beard using the picture above as a template and see where you come out. Don't give up if the outcome isn't what you hoped for. If at all possible over a few days off, try to let your beard go for a bit longer and see if the results get more precise.

If you think this technique is faulty, remember this: Does Clint Eastwood have a thick beard when he chooses to grow one? Does Arnold Schwarzenegger have a weak beard why he's sported facial hair? Does Chuck Norris have a beard that's spotty? Exactly.

Guess What? La Nina is Back!

Remember back in 1997 when everyone blamed EL NINO for everything weather-related? Well, its cousin--LA NINA-- is showing signs of returning albeit in a very weak capacity.

LA NINA STORY

Random Nathan pictures

Humor me, okay. If you don't have a child, you just won't get it. If you have a child or several children then you will completely understand the randomness of my posting of several picture of Nathan, my son, doing assorted activites.

Nathan enjoying a ride on Uncle Steve's homemade wooden horse

Nathan picking out kitchen appliances

Nathan riding on Dad's shoulders shortly before
ralphing on his head

Nathan paroozing through a catalog of
women's undergarments

Dig a Hole into the Earth

If you haven't checked out googlemaps your missing out on an excellent resource or a way to kill time at work.

A guy in Brazil with way too much time on his hands decided to create an application to be used with googlemaps. This application answers the question that every elementary school age kids asks at one point in time or another:

"If I did a hole in the earth, where do I come out?"

So you think you can forecast the weather?

Everyday, I hear it either via email, phonecall or on the street:

"I could do a better job at predicting the weather than those guys."

Or this one:

"If I was that wrong at my job, I'd get fired!"

Now is your chance to back up your tough talk or as they say--"weather smack"--with action.

The following are forecast weather maps for Monday morning, January 30th.


















Before you give me the typical "All-you-guys-look-at-are-colors-and-squiggly-lines", here is the technical explanation of what you are looking at.

Each map is the forecast result of a supercomputer cranking out what "it" thinks will happen on Monday, roughly 3 days from the time that I write this. The map on the left--called the EUROPEAN MODEL--is the solution from a different set of mathematical equations than the map on the left which is called the MRF MODEL. If you think you can assemble a 5 or 8 day forecast then you need to be able to accurately interpret maps like this. Can you tell any differences between both maps for northeastern Ohio? Can any of you even find northeastern Ohio?

The map on the left suggests that Monday morning, a low pressure over Michigan will usher in colder air with a changeover from rain to wet snow with temps near 30. The map on the right suggests the low will track through Indiana keeping temps in the mid 30s with primarily rain instead of snow.

If anyone other than another weather person can ascertain the same conclusion looking at those maps, you can have my job. In fact, I'm willing to bet that most of you had absolutely no clue...which is fine. There is nothing wrong with admitting defeat at the hands of the person that you mock whenever the atmosphere doesn't cooperate. I fully accept your white flag.

Seriously, I am not suggesting that being a meteorologist is the toughest job out there. All I ask as your friendly, neighborhood meteorologist is for a little love and understanding. Those maps you are looking at convey a message to you the viewer through us, the meteorologist. We do the best we can with the maps we have. Some are great, others are out of whack. Its up to the meteorologists to determine which one, if any, are more correct.

If you don't like it, learn how to read maps that show northeastern Ohio as a small spot roughly a quarter of an inch long. Once your through here, study some second order non-linear differential equations along with some cloud physics. Finally, assemble your findings in a concise presentation no longer than 3 minutes with a concentration on the differences in the short term forecast between Lorain, Ohio and Chardon, Ohio while someone is speaking to you in your ear piece telling you how much time you have left to finish your presentation. While the person is speaking to you, continue talking as if nothing is happening. Oh yes, your in front of a camera broadcasting your every word to more than one million people whose livelihoods depend on your expert analysis. Oh by the way, don't studder.

Yeah, the job of meteorologist isn't hard at all.

The Evolution of Ones Sweet Tooth

Its amazing how an infant reacts to different stimuli. Over the last several days, my wife and I have been experimenting with different baby foods to see how our son reacts to them. Naturally, we started with the less desirable foods first: VEGGIES!

Peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, beans, he ate them all except for the peas. Then on cue, the fail-safe mechanism that all kids involuntarily utilize to get out of eatting vegetables reared its ugly head. Yep, you've got it. Its the ever- opportunistic gag reflex that's present in all of us as kids whenever we're forced to eat a food--more often than not, vegetables--that we want no part of. I gagged on lima beans as a kid and still do! Now, my infant son has learned of its existence which could make the job of dinnertime parenting for my wife and I that much harder from here on out.

So the next day, we tried the peas again and sure enough, he gagged BIG-TIME! I believe at that exact moment, my son reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out the gag-reflex to use to his advantage. Only this time, it was preceeded by a look that spoke volumes on his vegetable displeasure. Yes, my 6 month old son is officially copping an attitude toward what mommy and daddy are preparing for him.

The next day, my wife decided to try out something that might appeal to him more than peas. So, we busted out the chicken and rice followed by some apple sauce for desert. He wasn't too excited about the chicken and rice probably because it was first time eatting it. But once we introduced him to the apple sauce, his eyes suddenly opened as if he was transported to some baby-food nirvana. The only action that he would allow to interrupt his deer-in-headlight daze was the entrance of more apple sauce into his system. And if you didn't shovel it in fast enough, he would let you know with the loudest grunt an infant is allowed to produce.

Once he was full of apple sauce, he was a happy baby once again and we put him to bed. Later on that night, my wife declared, "Our baby has a sweet tooth!"

Not wanting to believe this, I said, "Come on, that was just a fluke."

I needed more data to be convinced.

The data came over the next 3 days. More gagging on peas and more trips to his apple sauce utopia.

My wife was right. Its just unreal how a baby can develop a "taste" for food so fast. This brings me to my theory on sweet tooths. Here's a brief synopsis:

A person's sweet tooth intensity goes up exponentially when they're born and peaks when they are about 18 months old and stays at that peak until they are probably ten or eleven. There is a small decline in the early teen-age years but it still stays fairly high. In our late 20s to early 30s, we go through a sharp decline only to spike in times of stress mostly due to kids. (My wife added this one). The decline continues until your retirement years when there is a sudden spike, say around 65 or so where it continues to rise until death.

This graph isn't the same for everyone. But after years of exhausting research collecting data from thousands of people, its a pretty good representation.

The bottom line: This is only the beginning of what is to be an interesting first few years of introducing my son to new foods. Just like I did way back when, he'll want the tasty stuff before the food that's good for you. As a result, we'll have to act like the bad guys and force him to sit at the table and eat it.

As you can see, he wasn't too pleased with my photo timing. The blank stare...similar to the look that Clint Eastwood gives the bad guy before he meets his maker.

Spring Training Around the Corner

February 21st is the voluntary reporting date for all position Major League Baseball players; a sure sign that winter is approaching its demise. Very soon, I will rank the top 5 players as each position for the upcoming 2005 season using a highly mathematical, scientifically complex, purely esoteric top-shelf method that is yet to be topped in scouting circles. All I will say about this method is that the Quadratic Formula is utilized. Need I say more.

I might use this equation too. I haven't decided yet....

All this for information that 99.9% of the population could care less about...That's the beauty of it!

"The Fumble" revisited

Forget the Chicago Cubs and their trophy case vacant of any World Championships since before the Titanic sunk.

Forget the Cincinnati Bengals' post-season drought of more than fifteen years.

Forget the Seattle Seahawks no closer to playoff football than a trip from Los Angeles to New York.

Cleveland sports are, by far more cursed than any other professional sports franchise as indicated by an ESPN article from July 13, 2004 which validates my observation to a tee.

Cleveland is a football town. No question here. Even when the Indians were the powerhouse in the 1990s, the Browns--although defunct as a result of their 11th hour departure to baltimore----were still the talk of the town.

Which brings me to this entry's headline: The Fumble revisited. Today, January 17, 2006 is the 18th anniversary of the "Fumble". This was one of the moments in sports history in Cleveland when Cleveland sports fans had their collective hearts literally ripped out of our bodies right when the taste of a Superbowl trip was as close as the residual Cheedo cheese goo on my fingers that fateful Sunday afternoon.

The fumble is such a pungent memory in the minds of all sportsfans that its now an entry on Wikipedia.com, the free encyclopedia on the World Wide Web for all of the world to see.

I'll spare you the details of the fumble. You can read them yourself. But just remember this day as you get ready for playoff football this weekend.

"Talking Up" Your Child

"Talking Up" Your Child

If you’re recently married, then the proverbial inquiries from parents and other talkative relatives on when your going to procreate have, no doubt, become the focus of conversation at family gatherings especially around Christmas and Thanksgiving.

But it gets worse. Suddenly your friends, who have been married less time than you, are expecting their first child. From this point on, going out to dinner with the newly married couple--commonly referred to as "couples’s night out"--becomes an arduous chore. The conversations which used to revolve around careers or movies or other innocuous, everyday topics have undergone a metamorphosis unbeknownst to you and your wife. As you wait for your appetizer in the restaurant, your friends--the expecting couple-- blindside you with words like "baby" or babyesque phrases like "baby shopping" or "baby nursery" or "breastfeeding" or the mother of all pregnancy words: "epidural"!

You and your wife have no idea what sudden changes are occurring to the conversation until it’s too late. By the time both of your brains register what's going on, you both feel like the dreaded "third wheel" with nothing to add to the conversation. At this time, the clock begins to slow and you begin to trade eye contact with your husband or wife non-verbally signaling a rapid retreat. Unfortunately, a retreat out of social gatherings which are more intimate such as a dinner is out of the question due to its conspicuous nature. So you’re forced to sit and listen to their baby talk along with every possible tangential topic relating to it. Finally, after they have used all available energy in feeding their cooperative monologue, the evening finally ends.

Weeks later when the couple calls you to set another dinner date you reluctantly ablidge. Rather than looking forward to the Friday or Saturday night "get-together", the 24 hours leading up to it hovers over you like the horrific anticipation of a dentist appointment to fix a painful tooth.

After several incidents like this with either friends or neighbors, my wife and I pledged that when it was our turn to have kids, we wouldn't put the people we know in this awkward predicament. Ideally, that sounded great at the time. However, when it was our son who came into the world, our lives went through a similar metamorphosis to what we experienced at dinner with our expecting friends some years earlier. Suddenly, our vernacular went from one that’s professionally driven to a database filled with automotapia. The phrase "going goo-goo, gah-gah" wasn't something we heard on the network TLC anymore. It words were uttered from us!

We tried implementing our "pledge" when friends called and honestly, we stuck to it very well. But slowly, that pledge has been slow eroding away. And you know it feels kind of good

Now 6 months into parenthood, our son is showing so much personality that our pledge which we made shortly before his birth just doesn't seem right. Just yesterday, he rolled over for the first time. For the rest of the day when we placed him on his stomach, he just rolled right back over. He must have done this 25 times! To not talk about his developmental achievements wouldn't be doing my child justice.

If you would have told me, say a year ago, that your son or daughter rolled over for the first time, I wouldn't have cared much. But now that we've brought a child into the world, our perspective has done a complete "180". The topics that we considered passé are now mainstream. Sure, my wife and I are still aware of "over-hyping" our child but that's not our main focus. I guess finding that middle ground between expressing to other how proud you are of your kids and over-hyping their accomplishments is one of many evolutionary elements of parenthood that I never fully understood until now.

So, here's to my son rolling over multiple times and to him pulling the string to his truck and to him waving his fingers and to him smiling when we...

Look out! Earthquake in Northeast Ohio!

Earthquakes only happen on the west coast not in Ohio, right? Not so. In fact, Ohio sits on several faultlines and other deep structures that have the potential to cause seismic activity. Ohio is also on the periphery of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, an area in Missouri and surrounding states that was the site of the largest earthquake sequence to occur in historical times in the contnguous US. Many scientists say that its only a matter of time before a major earthquake occurs in the middle of the country!

On January 13, 2006, a small earthquake was reported in Eastlake, Ohio with a 2.4 magnitude. This is equivalent to 4.6 tons of TNT compare this with the 9.0 quake that caused the tsunami which was equivalent to 32 billion tons of TNT! While these quakes are no where near the severity of the west coast quakes, they are still felt and in some cases, can still do some damage. Over the last 2 months, 4 earthquakes have been reported in the snowbelt areas of Northeastern Ohio alone!

The Ohio Seismic Network is responsible for recording the state's earthquake activity. Since 1999, the 25 station network has recorded 31 events that most of us didn't even feel or hear about.

Maybe you remember the quake back in 1986. That earthquake registered a magnitude 5.0 or 1000 times more powerful than the quake on January 13th! Amazingly, 13 aftershocks occurred over the following 2 months. It ended up being the most studied quake in the history of Ohio quakes.

Therefore, if you feel a rumble sometime, it might be a truck driving by or thunder. But there is always the slim chance that it could be the earth quakes beneath you!