Merchandising, Merchandising . . . Priorities?

This post is a short thought that I’ve been trying to develop into a larger one for a while, but I was finally moved to just start typing based on a couple of things I saw the other day. One was a Daily News column questioning the amount of money that Philadelphia spends on overtime pay for police officers who are summoned to court to testify on days off or when they are working nights. The other was the number of Eagles stickers I saw on cars while walking home. Bear with me a minute.

It has long seemed to me that we underpay police officers, firefighters, and combat troops. There are ethical and practical reasons for this. On the one hand, you are asking people to possibly run into a burning building or get shot or otherwise put themselves in harm way to protect you. It is all well and good to say “Thank you, we value and honor your service and your sacrifice,” but when it comes time to put our money where our mouth is, as a society I think we collectively fall down. And from a practical standpoint, if people feel underpaid and underappreciated, that does bad things to morale and effectiveness and makes it harder to attract people who can do the job exceptionally well.

And as a point in comparison I often ask myself why someone can get paid $10 million to play first base when that job is so much less essential to our well-being. (If we had no professional sports teams, we could still have viable public safety units like the police and fire departments. If we had no police and fire departments, I doubt we’d be able to support professional sports teams for very long.) And the answer is that the sports team has the $10 million to give to the first baseman but the city or the federal government don’t have the money to give to police and firefighters and soldiers. (I grant you there are many more police officers than first basemen, but I’m not saying every officer needs $10 million either.)

But it’s not just that we are more willing to buy tickets to games than we are to pay the taxes that would fund higher salaries. Sports teams and entertainers get big bucks from the merchandise we buy to show our support, like those car decals or the Phillies t-shirts I buy or the half dozen movie posters behind me right now. I don’t have any police officer action figures or firefighter T-shirts. And maybe I should. I mean, I’m totally willing to buy into the pro-sports-as-city-unifier thing. I loved all the red T-shirts I saw as the Phillies won the World Series. I still smile when I see ’em. But let’s get real – those teams are full of part-time residents who represent our city for a while and them move on elsewhere. Police officers and firefighters (and other municipal employees whose job descriptions don’t involve lethal danger) are the city – they don’t just represent us, they make our existence as a city possible. Likewise with soldiers and other federal employees making our existence as a nation possible. And I can’t help but wonder why I don’t get the same thrill of showing loyalty and support to them as I do to a baseball team.

I’m Doomed

So my urban ed class tonight was full of presentations on various books/reports on what the heck is wrong with schools and kids these days. I actually have a number of thoughts/rants based on mine that I’ll try to roll out over the next couple of days. Two different classmates discussed a book that complains about how all this technology is making the Millennial generation more insulated, concerned with self-image, and unable to pursue and retain real knowledge. The subtitle of the book was Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30. So in a small act of rebellion I decided to update the Facebook profile that I have mostly left dormant, and so I accepted a few friend requests and made a few of my own. I admit I was a little taken aback by how much information I suddenly had about what was going on on my friends’ sites, so I can tell it’s gonna take a while for this whole social network thing to click with me. And, of course, I am now blogging about social networking, which is all hopelessly recursive and probably still a couple of years out of date. But to hell with it, I’m too wordy for Twitter.

Skip the Coke, Keep the Nap

If this study gets further verified, I’m bringing a pillow to my office. I often like to say that mentally I don’t feel like I’m older or see the world very differently than I did when I was 21. I know I am and I do, but it doesn’t feel that way, especially when I start singing along with my 90s playlists. But I think lack of sleep hits me earlier and harder than it ever did back then, and I really gotta train myself to accept that I just need to go to bed earlier. (Like, say, now, instead of blogging.) Now if the world would just agree to shut itself down for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, think of how much more we could get done.

Man of Iron, Women of No Substance?

I finally got around to watching Iron Man over the weekend, and I liked it a lot. Definitely the best superhero origin movie I can remember, and considering how much of the movie Robert Downey, Jr. has to spend talking to himself, that’s pretty impressive. But there has been something nagging at me since I finished the movie and started looking at some of the deleted scenes: there’s a really ugly attitude toward women present. I know Tony Stark has the whole playboy lifestyle, but we’re going beyond a guy who dates a lot of women to a guy who employs flight attendants whose job appears to be to double as strippers who are willing to sleep with Stark and anyone he’s flying on his jet. And almost every woman in the movie appears prepared to drop whatever they’re doing to hop into bed with Stark. Even the reporter who antagonizes Tony, confronts him with evidence of his company’s wrongdoing, and questions his cover story sleeps with him. And after she does, she gets catty with Pepper Potts – seemingly the only woman who has avoided sleeping with Tony – and Pepper returns the favor. My sense is that this is all supposed to be a joke – that Tony is an irresponsible hedonist ramped up to the nth degree and the movie wants to showcase that excess. But I can’t help but be a little worried about people who don’t pick up on the joke, or who think Tony has it right in the first place.

New Coat of Paint

I’ve changed the WordPress theme that Not News uses in order to use a theme that’s compatible with the upgraded version of WordPress. Other than adding the Amazon widget to the sidebar I haven’t tweaked it yet, but I’m going to be tinkering over the next month or so. So please excuse any dust.

Best. Week. Ever.

I would just like to take a moment to review a recent seven-day period:

Wednesday, October 29: The Philadelphia Phillies win the World Series at home, ending a 25-year drought for the city’s four major sports teams.

Friday, October 31: I take my daughter trick-or-treating. She has chosen to go out as Princess Leia. This occurs on the same day as the parade honoring the 2008 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies.

Sunday, November 2: My birthday. To celebrate, several members of my family come by to visit, including my two cousins from Georgia. (This site also celebrates its eighth anniversary.)

Tuesday, November 4: The country elects Barack Obama – who had previously announced that he would be cheering for the 2008 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies – as the next President of the United States.

Seriously – 1996 is the year Pattie and I started going out, and 2002 is the year my daughter was born. Those are the only two years I can think of that 2008 does not blow right out of the water on the basis of that week alone. Stephen Colbert joked that the Large Hadron Collider had thrown us into a parallel universe exactly like our own, except Obama was president and the Phillies are world champions. If so, I really need to buy those Collider folks a beer. I like it here.

And now that my brain is not overloaded with campaign stuff, and now that I harbor some hope that smart policies might actually have a chance to be implemented, I’m hoping to have some more brain space to devote to the site here.

It’s Outta Here!

My roommate from college called me a few hours ago. We met fifteen years ago, hanging out in a lounge in our dorm at Fordham. There were several baseball fans from Philadelphia and South Jersey, and we gathered to watch the Phillies beat the Braves in the NL Championship Series. I can remember watching the Blue Jays win that World Series.

As my roommate said tonight: “This is much better.”

I gave my wife my credit card, ’cause you could probably convince me to buy just about any old thing right now as long as it has “2008 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies” on it.

Some Days It’s the Little Things

Last night I was doing some searches for music – mostly because I was trying to psych myself up to buy The National’s album Boxer (I did) and because I wanted to see if Matthew Sweet’s new album was as disappointing as his last one (it’s not, but that doesn’t mean it rises to the level of “good,” unfortunately). But while I was at it, I decided to check if The Jayhawks’ Rainy Day Music was back in print – and lo and behold, it’s been reissued. One dollar later, “Save It for a Rainy Day” is in my iTunes library, and the sun is shining a little bit brighter, metaphorically speaking.

A Superstition Resolved: Obama in Mayfair

Sixteen years ago, on my seventeenth birthday, I stood outside the Mayfair Diner in Northeast Philadelphia at 5:30 in the morning to see the man I hoped would be the next president of the United States. Bill Clinton’s voice was long gone during that campaign marathon right before Election Day, but it was still quite a moment to be that close to a man running for the highest office in the land – especially since he won. Not that I thought I had anything to do with it, of course, but I never did make it to a Gore rally in 2000 or a Kerry rally in 2004. Four years ago I resolved that I wasn’t going to let myself feel like there was something else I could’ve done to support my preferred candidate, and come hell or high water that meant I was going to go to a rally in 2008.

See that little flash of maroon cap in the lower left hand corner? Mission accomplished. Saturday morning, I was outside the Mayfair Diner at 5:30 in the morning once again. This time, I was a volunteer for the campaign, assigned to ushering duties. This meant that I had the increasingly impossible job of asking a crowd of thousands to please not push forward to get closer to the stage. The upside is that by the time the crowd finished converging on me, I had a damn good spot close to the podium. You can see some of the pictures I was able to grab over on Flickr. At this point I can’t say Obama’s speech surprised me – I’ve seen versions of it so many times by now. But it felt good to be part of the energy of the crowd, to see all the people for whom this election is so important.