Pitch Clock: Why Stop at Baseball?

I am so thrilled that the porch clock has been introduced to Major League Baseball this season. In spring training, the games have been shortened by almost a half-hour.

 

Pitchers have 15 seconds to begin their wind-up if no one is on base. Batters have eight seconds to be ready for the next pitch.

 

This isn’t the 20^th century anymore. We don’t have as much time to waste as when we sat for hours watching two guys play catch. I mean, we now have more important things to fill up our time: streaming movies, English soccer and of course social media!

 

So to save time, why stop at baseball? Why not apply the “pitch clock” to other parts of our lives:

—10-minute wait limit for food to be delivered to your table. Wait staff will have a percentage of their tip reduced for every minute beyond this.

—60-second limit until the online help desk gives you a real person. If they are late, you get free shipping.

—15-minute limit in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Penalty: Your appendix removed for free!

—1-hour wait for your plane. Otherwise, you get a free trip to Hawaii.

—2-hour wait for your car repairs to be finished. Penalty: A free oil change.

— 5-minute wait for check-out at the grocery store. Every minute beyond that gets you a free Kit Kat candy bar.

—10 minutes past noon when the church service ends? An extra blessing for all.

—15-minute wait for golfers in front of you to finish up? One shot added to their scores

— 10-minute wait for the teacher to show up in class. Or you get an A on your paper.

—1-hour wait for teen-anger to get home after curfew. Grounded! (Already happens.)

—10-minute wait for spouse to get dressed for an evening out. Uh, Mike, don’t go there!

 

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Is it time for an e-bike?

 

My mom used to sing me a made-up song: “Mike the tyke will ride a bike, when he gets old enough.” I guess I was old enough when I became an avid cyclist at age 58, commuting six miles each way in Washington past famous monuments and riding 20 to 30 miles on weekends.

 

But at age 81, ten miles has become a stretch, even on flat roads. So I decided to move to the dark side: I bought an electric bike. I had always resisted the idea: “It’s cheating.” “It’s really a motorcycle.” 
“E-bikers are wimps!” I could remember an e-cyclist leading us on a group ride up a steep hill, leaving the rest of us gasping for breath.

 

Now a convert, I had my heart set on a Trek e-bike at a shop in Chapel Hill, when Pickett came across an article showing that a number of e-bikes have caught fire while being charged. Only the few batteries with certification by Underwriters Laboratories (UL) ere guaranteed safe. I am still skeptical, but what would I do if the battery exploded, the house burned down and our bed & breakfast was caput?  “Oops, my bad,” just doesn’t cut it!

 

So I listened to a couple of friends who got Veloctric e-bikes, a brand that does have UL approval. They assembled their own bikes, purchased online, but that didn’t appeal to me. First of all, I would want to test ride a bike. Second, I don’t assemble or fix anything. In Washington, if I got a flat tire, I would just call a taxi to take me to a bike store!

 

So I drove 100 miles to Winston-Salem, and bought one at Piedmont e-bikes for $1,500. The owner, Frank Guido,  even road alongside me as I tested it. Without electricity turned on, you can ride it like a normal bike, though its weight makes hill climbing almost impossible without turning on one of the three power levels.

 

I brought it home and tried it on our three miles of trails. So cool! The fat tires handled the tree roots and some swampy areas quite well. Climbing a hill was a real thrill. On the open road, the bike soars when you turn on the power, up to 20 mph. Of course, you are still exposed to dogs and cars, but somehow it seems safer because of its potential speed and its highly visible size and yellow color and lights. (I have to admit my knee hurt some anyway after riding too far—maybe you don’t apply much pressure, but you still spin the wheels. Another drawback: at low speeds the bike wanted to go faster.)

 

So now I hope to return to the cool places where I used to ride: the neighborhoods between River Road and Mountain Road, Melon Road near the Dan River, the Hyco Lake region and Bethel Hill Road into North Carolina.

 

Mike the tyke is old enough!

 

 

Anyone can be a star

 

When I was a magazine editor in the 1980s, I asked our video writer about that new karaoke craze.

 

“Aw, it may be popular in Japan, but it will never catch on here,” he said. Wrong!

 

Parties today often have karaoke events in which singers can pretend to be Celine Dion or Elvis Presley, not worried about making fools of themselves. You can find a karaoke version of almost everything on YouTube.

 

I was surprised to see a lot of older folks mimicking singers like Frank Sinatra or Dolly Parton at the daytime YMCA New Year’s party this year.

 

I tried karaoke for the first time 13 years ago at Cal-Neva Lodge in Reno, where the casino in my sister’s town had a karaoke night in front of dozens of people

 

As we waited for our turn, I had a nice friendly chat with the guy next to me. When I got up there, I couldn’t keep up with the words on the screen and stammered a lot. After my song, “What I Did for Love,” bombed, my new friend refused to talk to me. Well, what it happens in Reno, stays in Reno too, I guess.

 

My favorite karaoke place is the Cowboy-Up Bar in Virgilina, which I profiled in an article about 10 years ago. It’s a family-friendly place, and the owner, Alan Gatrell, is a former cop who won’t put up with any rowdiness. He has karaoke Fridays starting at 7 p.m.  Also offering karaoke are Badeaux’s in South Boston (7 p.m. Saturdays) and Pit Stop Pizza in Virgilina (7 p.m. Tuesdays).

 

I don’t have much of a repertoire in country music, Cowboy Up’s specialty. But my best song is “Singin’ The Blues” recorded as a country song in the 1950s by Marty Robbins and a pop song by Guy Mitchell.

 

One of the tricks of karaoke is to pick out songs in your key, which is usually provided in the range of the singer who made it famous. I love Michael McDonald’s hits and some songs by the Stylistics, but their notes are even above my high tenor notes. Tennessee Ernie Ford and Roger Miller were too low. I have heard more good singers screech on notes higher than they can manage in karaoke.

 

If I wanted to please the audience, I learned to forego one of my best songs, “What a Wonderful World” for faster moving pieces. On a ship cruise, I saw a very bad singer get a terrific response with “Sweet Caroline,” a karaoke crowd favorite (but not mine.)

 

Some karaoke hosts sing too much themselves or don’t really understand the music they offer. Once I wrote down “Summertime” and the host came up to me and said, “You can’t sing this!” “Why not?” I replied, wondering what they had against Broadway musicals.

 

“Because it is a duet,” he said. “It says here: From Porgy and Bess.” I sang it anyway.

 

 

 

Random Thoughts on Raisins, Rihanna and More

 

I can’t stand raisins. When I started eating  a cinnamon roll,  my dad joked that the raisins were flies. He apologized for it repeatedly in later years. 

 

Unbelievably, my college roommate was the son of a very large raisin farmer in California’s Central Valley. (Was this an eternal punishment for something I did?) He brought big boxes of little raisin packages to our room and stored them underneath our bunk.  I ate them anyway. What ya gonna do?

 

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A 12-year-old had a bouquet of flowers in the check-out line at Food Lion. He looked too young to have a girl friend—was it a Valentine gift for his Mom? It reminded me of the time I bought some flowers near my work and brought them home for Pickett. Women on the bus smiled at me as if to say, “I wish somebody would do that for me.” I loved it!

 

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Rihanna must not be afraid of heights. Her Super Bowl halftime show almost made me dizzy, as she sung from narrow raised platforms moving from 15 to 60 feet above ground. How could she possibly concentrate? (And she was pregnant too!)

 

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Does anybody ever get sued for violating the fine print on emails and websites? If I were a lawyer, my defense would be, “Nobody reads it.”

 

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“Cunk on the World” on Netflix is the funniest show I have seen in a very long time. The British interviewer

 asks scholars stupid questions about the history of the world. I can relate to that! (“Do the pyramids have a pointed top to keep the homeless from sleeping on them?”)

 

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DON’T see Banshees of Inisherin, even though it was nominated for Best Picture. Maybe the acting was good, but I would nominate it for the Most Depressing Picture I have ever seen.

 

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I love to sing at First Baptist Church. The people are so friendly!

 

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“Perfect,” the customer service rep says to me. If makes me feel good to be called perfect, but maybe it is an exaggeration? Making a doctor’s appointment for 11:00 instead of 10:30 is perfect? 

 

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I rarely kill insects. They are my brothers and sisters, living on this planet at the same time as I am. But I’ll make an exception for ticks and mosquitoes!

 

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Wind chill is absurd, fanned by the media and Weather Service to worry people. And why are storms given such horrible names all of a sudden? Bomb cyclone? It also bothers me when meteorologists say on TV, “Stay home.” Let me decide that.

 

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I just love the phone and ipad apps Seeing AI and Envision AI. You point the phone at a printed page in a document or at a book and they read it back to you. So cool!

 

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I really like the idea I heard recently that our lives are stories. “There are no throw-away lines in life,” said theologian Eugene Peterson. So watching two wasteful basketball games on a Saturday is part of my story? Everything I do is for a reason?  There are no do-overs. Let’s hope for a happy ending!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When to Hold'em, When to Fold'em

With a temporary casino opening in Danville this year, it’s reasonable to ask: Do I gamble? Well, yes, quite modestly.. How can I not, when:

 

—My mother dropped a nickel in a slot machine in Reno when I was about 10 years old. Bells rang as she suddenly won a $7.50 jackpot.

—I spent two years as the Associated Press correspondent in Las Vegas. I would gamble until I either won $10 or lost $10 and quit. I avoided the low-paying one-armed bandits in grocery stores and the airport.

—For several years I played low-stakes poker with other journalists in Washington. (My hands shook when I had a good hand.)

 

It’s hard to gamble, though, when you have a wife who abhors the thought of risking any of your income on the roll of the dice.So my gambling today is on the World Series of Poker app on my ipad, in which I can win or lose $5 million in pretend money and never bat an eye. I wouldn’t dream of betting real money

on sports with my phone. Scary!

 

I still like to play poker in Reno, where my sister lives, with fairly low stakes. I can participate a long time without winning or losing $50 by only betting when I have a great hand. The players

don’t know me. Secret: I never bluff.

 

But gambling certainly has a downside. My aunt in California loved to gamble, probably too much, either on firehouse bingo or at the slots at nearby Lake Tahoe. After she died, a major

casino opened right in her small town. It’s probably a good thing she didn’t get to see it.

 

I used to watch motorists from North Carolina stop in Cluster Springs, right near the border, and give up part of their hard-earned money for lottery tickets before their state started its own

lottery. The gas stations had the kind of betting windows you would see at a race track.

And when Maryland opened up casinos in the last 10 years, I went to a poker table and won $50 in five minutes. I could have lost $50 just as easily. The stakes were too high. I’m outta here

—I never came back.

 

Let’s hope the stakes aren't too high in Danville.

 

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Don’t Miss “Four Freshmen,” at the Halifax County High School auditorium Friday at 6 p.m. and Saturday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets will be sold at the door only. Performances last fall were sold out. The play by Pat Crews is about four young men who integrated a Greensboro lunch counter.

When I was all shook up

I was lying in a hammock outside our Cluster Springs home when I was awakened by a rare earthquake on Aug. 23, 2011. From all of my years in California, I knew right away what it was, but I asked myself, “What coast am I on anyway?”

 

The earthquake did not do a lot of damage here, but it brought back memories of my home state, where earthquakes, mudslides, fires, drought and just recently floods have become a way of life.

 

In 1958, an earthquake shook the third floor of my high school building while I was in class, and we all ducked under our desks. The teacher, though unharmed, was the last one to come out.

 

That same year, our hilly neighborhood, built on a filled-in creek, started sliding after heavy rainfall. Our patio and front walk were badly warped, but some of the nearby houses were destroyed, and we all had to move. We bought a house below a dam on a big earthquake fault, another risky location, but it remained intact, even after the big earthquake of 1989.

 

I remember being spellbound as I watched that earthquake on TV right during the Oakland-San Francisco World Series. It was weird occurring at the same time as perhaps the greatest sports event in the city’s history. A portion of the Bay Bridge collapsed with cars on it, the worst nightmare I could imagine.

 

As editor of the Kiplinger California Letter, I was prepared with pre-written copy in case “the Big One” occurred on my watch from 2000 to 2009. Fortunately, it never happened.

 

My friends sometimes ask, “How could anyone live in that state?” I point out that the Gulf and Atlantic coasts are prone to hurricanes, and we have occasional tornadoes here. Trees have fallen on our house twice during big storms.

 

“We’re pretty safe in Washington, D.C.” some up there have told me. There are no big earthquakes, tornadoes are unusual, and hurricanes become tropical storms by the time they reach there. 

 

“Well, you live right in the middle of ground zero in a nuclear attack,” I point out.

Nowhere is completely safe!

This Teacher Rocked!

 

In case you ever think music teachers aren’t influential, think of Susan Stark.

 

As my 7th grade music instructor, she was expected to teach us the 1800s classical works and such traditional songs as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “Oh Suzannah,”

 

Not Mrs. Stark. When she saw me with a copy of “Song Hits” magazine, she enlisted me to bring in all of my copies from home and help her come up with some pop songs for the class.

 

 This was 1954, when “Stranger in Paradise” and “Mr. Sandman” topped the charts. She wrote the lyrics on the blackboard, and the class eagerly sang along.

 

Next she encouraged me to play an unorthodox boogie woogie song I had learned, using her classroom piano at Portola Junior high School in El Cerrito, Calif. My music went over quite well in a talent show, and one of the greasers persuaded me to play it again.

 

A year later, she rounded up a bunch of us boys for an assembly show in which we sang “What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?” unknowingly preparing me for singing it as a senior adult with the Washington Men’s Camerata.

 

Do you think I am writing about her impact on me? Well, no.

 

Four years later, she coached another boy, the son of one of my mom’s friends. “You collect records. Why don’t you bring some of your favorites, and we’ll play them in class and you can talk all about what you like about them,” she told him. They weren’t Beethoven or Mozart.  They included “I’m Walkin’” by Fats Domino and “Boppin’ the Blues” by Carl Perkins.

 

Next, the boy played some blues music at the very same piano I used. He didn’t stop there. He came back and played that piano after class, drawing a small enthusiastic crowd, including a drummer who wanted to join him. They went to the drummer’s house and collected others to play.

 

The boy, John Fogerty, and Creedence Clearwater Revival were headed to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame.

 

“Mrs. Stark was a great inspiration,” he wrote in his book ”Fortunate Son.” “Rather than thwarting me when I went off to the piano to bang out some rock and roll–which I’m sure sounded pretty awful–she encouraged it and acted like it was the coolest thing in the world.”

 

Answering the Call

Every so often we hear a voice guiding us. Sometimes we listen and sometimes we don’t. I like to think it is from God, but some would say it is a voice in your head.

 

I had several jobs in which I heard “the call” to leave, to do something else. I thought, “No, it’s too hard to find another job. I don’t like what I am doing but I can get by here.” The boss sensed my frustration, and I was finished.

 

When I managed the Associated Press news desk for morning newspapers in Washington, the chief of the congressional staff asked me to join him. “Nah, I was brought from San Francisco to do this.” I had more influence on the news report where I was, though I was suffering from burnout after four years.

 

Later, my boss saw that and sent me unwillingly to cover Congress. It was a shock, but I absolutely LOVED it. Mixing with all of these famous people, and interesting young staff. I should have responded to the call several years earlier. It led to a stint as Treasury correspondent, where I developed a specialty in business and economics.

 

I got better at listening. After a music theory teacher heard me play a little on the piano a few years ago, he insisted, “You have to join a jazz band!” So I found one with a paid instructor and played in it for two years. Once we performed at one of Washington’s top jazz clubs.

 

Then there was the friend who told me, “Pickett Craddock is a single woman, Mike. You ought to get to know her.” Glad I didn’t ignore that!

 

Later, on a foreign trip, I told a stranger on our tour bus that I wrote news before retirement but that I was mostly interested in music now.  She looked me in the eye and declared, “You have got to keep writing!”

 

So I just did!

Special People in Our Lives

 Many of us have an “Uncle Fred” or an “Aunt Freida,” someone to look up to. As a toddler, I followed my Uncle Fred around the house, fascinated with this exuberant, talkative man. 

While I did love my parents, Uncle Fred was special, representing the vigorous outside world that my parents did not. He was a World War II veteran, one of the first soldiers to liberate Paris. Reading his diary is on my bucket list.

 

When I was maybe 10 years old, he took me in his car once on his insurance sales calls, describing the local history of every place we went in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was captivated by his account of the deadly accidental explosion at Port Chicago, Calif., in World War II.

 

When I began my cross-country trip to live in Washington in 1971, he told me, “Don’t go! You’ll be killed.” Well, he wasn’t always right.

 

Uncle Fred had aspired to be a journalist but never got the education. I guess I fulfilled some of his ambition. You could say we idolized each other. He would send me far too many newspaper clippings and write me long letters every few days, in the dot-dot-dot writing style of the ever-famous San Francisco columnist Herb Caen. He was almost as good.

 

Our only breaking point came when he sold my grandfather’s 1880 typewriter at a yard sale. I was devastated. The typewriter was so unique that you couldn’t see what you were writing on it–you had to pull a lever. It had separate keyboards for capital and small letters. It was one of the things that got me interested in writing.

 

Uncle Fred felt bad about selling it and went to the buyer and bought it back at a premium. But living 3,000 miles away, I don’t think I saw it afterward. After Uncle Fred died, my cousin shipped it to me as freight on a Greyhound bus.

 

I fixed it up some, but you could never get another typewriter ribbon like that. I took it to my office at the Kiplinger Letter to show it off in our old-fashioned headquarters, full of history and traditions.  It seemed like it belonged there. But I did risk upstaging the typewriter of the founder, Willard Kiplinger, whose writing device was a centerpiece in the museum below. My typewriter was 40 years older.

 

I was a little worried. My last boss was jealous of my grand piano, which was better than his. “I dreamed last night that I took a chain saw to your piano,” the boss told me once. 

 

So I didn’t really want Austin Kiplinger, Willard’s son, to see it. A colleague told this distinguished heir to the news operation about it, though, and Mr. Kiplinger came to my office. He said he was impressed, but he sure looked uncomfortable.

 

After I retired in 2009, I took it to our bed & breakfast, located in a house even older than the typewriter. It seemed to be a perfect place for it.

 

Thanks, again Uncle Fred, for buying the typewriter back!

 

I wonder if I will be someone’s Uncle Fred.

 

 

What I won't read--and will read

 

I read about four newspapers online religiously every day. But there are some stories I will not read. (Hope there aren’t any in today’s paper!)

 

–Any puffy Super Bowl feature article the two weeks before the big game.

 

–Sunday news analyses summarizing what happened during the week and trying to make it into a broader trend. (We used to call them “thumb-suckers”)

 

–Forecasts of any kind: economic, stock market, sports, politics or even weather more than three days out. I used to make forecasts myself. I know!

 

–Most anniversary articles, since nothing new has happened.

 

–Articles that start: “What you need to know.” Let me decide that!.

 

–Threatened lawsuits. (File it first.)

 

–Stories expressing “cautious optimism.” Meaningless words.

 

–Warnings of a government shutdown, which never happens.

 

–Retired politicians telling us what must be done (when they couldn’t get it done themselves).

 

–”These are difficult, uncertain times” stories. Well, all times are! Now, World War II and the Great Depression were difficult times.

 

What I will read:

–Happy, upbeat stories that reinforce the joys of living.

 

–Accounts of people surviving against all odds in disasters and other hopeless situations.

 

–Interviews with musicians, artists and other interesting people.

 

—“How to” stories, especially about technology. (Such as: how can I get my computer to save my password?)

 

–True crime stories.

 

–Big business disasters. Fat cats getting what they deserve.

 

–Scams and pyramid schemes. Glad I avoided them.

 

–Scathing reviews of really bad shows. They are so much fun! I would write them too if I wasn’t such a nice guy.