Insane asylum in Texas

The one-star state

My college roommate from years gone by had had a good run, but the glory days were definitely coming to an end. While I had detoured into a stint in state government before settling down to a comfy teaching job, he had taken his shiny new Ph.D. in mathematics into the Beltway bandit business back on the East Coast. His lucrative consulting work for the U.S. Navy eventually brought him back to California with a cushy position as CIO for the San Diego office of a major research firm.

I still remember the time he mentioned in a Christmas letter that his year-end bonus was more than half my entire year's teaching salary (and I do not consider myself underpaid). Ow!

Good thing he socked a lot of it away for a rainy day, because it's been raining heavily (figuratively speaking) for a few years now. In the natural course of events, his company was acquired by a rival organization. The consolidation of operations led to a significant reduction in staffing throughout the newly merged companies. When he saw the name of the vice president and chief information officer of their new overlords, my college roomie saw it as the writing on the wall. It was someone he had laid off for under-performance several years earlier. Apparently he had landed on his feet and now had the upper hand.

My friend accepted his buy-out package and walked out the door. He couldn't find an equivalent position anywhere (particularly if he didn't want to uproot his growing family), so he polished up his old secondary-school teaching credential and found employment as a high school calculus teacher. The pay was poor, but the job was more fun that he had had in several years. And there was that nest egg he had socked away to provide a nice mixed-metaphor cushion and safety net.

All was well, and his old college roommate didn't write to point out that our salary situations were now reversed. (In the aggregate, he's still way ahead, but we're not competitive about it. Oh, no!)

Then the California state economy splashed into the toilet. San Diego school districts started laying off the teachers with the least seniority. My buddy got pink-slipped.

What to do?

Smart guy that he is, my friend had stayed in touch with former colleagues throughout the government consulting business. He had picked up some independent consulting contracts. It wasn't as lush as the good old days, but it was substantial. Then, a breakthrough!

His wife found out from old friends that a number of teaching jobs were open in their urban school district in Houston, Texas. My friend dropped me a note:

The wife has a bean up her butt to move to Houston to be close to dear friends and much closer to her family. I’ve applied for some teaching jobs in their district. The situation in Texas appears to be much brighter than California in terms of funding for education and our friends’ district is really good. Pay is less but we can get a house comparable to ours for about 1/3 the price. We shall see.

I wrote him a semi-congratulatory response:

Sorry to hear that you have a pink slip in your future. Being a teacher in Texas sounds scary to me, but it's probably safer for math teachers. The nut cases on the Texas school board are too busy messing with science and history standards to worry much about math.

My old buddy was quick to reply:

I doubt Texas will happen. Had to apply to keep the wife happy. Don't know about math standards in the one-star state. Are Arabic numerals allowed?

Oh, God. If the Texas school board finds out that mathematicians promote Arabic numerals, they might want to round us all up as terrorists!

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How you say—?

Tongued pickles

I heard one of my colleagues tell a student during office hours that he was “spot on.” It made my antennas quiver. Later I caught him using the word “rubbish.” My suspicions grew. Then he mentioned his brother. That tore it.

According to my colleague, his brother was named “Harry,” but when he said it, it did not sound like “hairy.” No, when he said it, it came out this way: /ˈhær.i/

But true-blue Americans say it this way: /ˈher.i/

See the difference? (I guess I really mean “hear.”) You can listen to the corresponding sound clips at the on-line edition of the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary.

I braced my colleague in the faculty room and demanded to know which of his parents was the British one. He confessed. His father was a son of Albion and the source of the Britishisms that had crept into his American son's manner of speaking. I knew it! (It was either that, or my colleague was excessively fond of PBS rebroadcasts of British comedies.)

I was reminded of such peculiarities of spoken language when reading the comics page this morning. The Frank and Ernest strip gives us an example of three homonyms—or does it?

How say you? Does “Dalai Lama” come out as “Dolly Lama” when you say it? How about Salvador Dali's name? I think I say all of them differently.

But I'm kind of weird when it comes to language. As is that colleague of mine.

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G is for Grafton

Men of letters

Over breakfast in Turlock during spring break (hey, where else would you go for breakfast during spring break?), my old college buddy gave me some detailed feedback on the manuscript of my novel. He was kind enough to point out that the character based on me kept getting in the way of the main storyline. (Damn. He's right.)

In addition to talking about my attempt at becoming a writer, my friend and I talked about actual writers (you know, the published kind). It turned out that neither of us had read Sarah Palin's autobiography, although I had riffled through the pages at Mom and Dad's. (Wait a minute: I said “actual” writers. Going Rogue is ghostwritten.) I teased him about his university becoming the notorious venue for Palin's secretly expensive public speaking appearance, but he wasn't particularly embarrassed. The faculty at California State University, Stanislaus, are innocent bystanders when the activities of their institution's president are concerned.

Somehow we wandered onto a new topic. I'm not sure how or why. For whatever, reason, I wondered aloud what Sue Grafton would do when she ran out of letters for her “alphabet series.” (Right now she's on U is for Undertow.) My buddy pointed out that there was no reason for Grafton to abandon the series after penning Z is for Zebra (or whatever). Spreadsheets have taught us that the alphabet need not end, for column Z is succeeded by column AA.

“She could write AA is for Alcoholics,” my friend suggested.

I laughed and got into the spirit of things. I know that Excel says that AB should be next, but I chose a different route.

“BB is for Air Rifle,” I said.

“CC is for Dosage,” he replied, with a fine metric sense.

We disagreed about DD. Thinking Dungeons & Dragons, I suggested DD is for Nerds, but he riposted that it should be EE is for Nerds (and I imagine that most EE majors would agree). He offered the possibility that DD should stand for lingerie.

I think not.

Anyway, I'm sure that Grafton can make up her own mind. But what do you think?

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T is for Turlock

Or maybe “turkey”

The modest California town of Turlock in Stanislaus county currently boasts a population of 70,000 and a campus of the California State University. The university is the legacy of a sufficiently well-connected state senator who thought his hometown should snag one of the new campuses being planned during the 1960s expansion of the CSU system. It gave Turlock something else to brag about aside from the poultry farms that inspired the memorable radio jingle about “Turkeys from Turlock.” (This is assuredly the reason that California State University, Stanislaus, is fondly referred to by many as “Turkey Tech.”)

I recently had breakfast in Turlock with an old grad school buddy who is a professor at Stan State (that's the other nickname of CSU, Stanislaus). It was impossible, of course, to avoid twitting him about the selection of Alaska's former half-term governor as guest of honor for the “celebration of excellence” marking Stan State's fiftieth anniversary.

Perhaps Sarah Palin is not someone you automatically associate in your mind with “excellence.” Or “education.” The snarky among us might say the same thing about Stan State, but the truth is that CSU Stanislaus has gained a reputation as a good deal in public higher education. Away from the high-cost environments of the CSU's urban campuses, Stan State offers a low-rent alternative path to bachelor's and master's degrees. (We shouldn't hold it against Stan State that one of its professors is the wacky IDiot Richard Weikert.)

Besides, as my friend pointed out, the university's leadership is simply pandering to the local political environment—and taking advantage of it. California's Central Valley is the locus of blood-red politics and teabagging. The university's “independent” foundation doesn't have to admit how much money it's paying Palin to aw-shucks her way through a “Knowledge is good” speech. The foundation claims, however, that it will clear between $100,000 to $200,000 from her appearance, even after crossing Palin's palm.

So think about it. The right-wing residents of Stanislaus county are being drawn like moths to Palin's bright and shiny flame. In return, each will be relieved of at least $500. (The hardcore Palinistas can unload $50,000 for the honor of being called “platinum sponsors.”) All of that money will go into student scholarships and other educational programs.

And, as we all know, the result of a public higher education in the liberal arts is more liberals. Glenn Beck said so, and he's an “expert” (on everything!).

Yeah, let's take their money.

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Bandying words by the bay

Says You in San Francisco

Arnie Reisman was concerned. He called out to the moderator.

“Richard, we may have a problem with this word!”

Richard Sher strode over from the podium and huddled with Arnie and his two teammates.

“Two of us already know the word,” continued Reisman. ”If someone on the other team already knows it, that rather defeats the purpose.”

Sher turned to the other team. “Do any of you already know the word?”

The rejoinder was quick: “If we did, why would we tell you?”

Good question. Sher grinned and let the game continue. It if turned out to be a bust, the round could always end up on the cutting-room floor during editing.

The word was “strigil” and it was displayed in large letters in front of Benjamin Sher's scorekeeping station. The audience murmured while an octet on stage provided a musical interlude. In hushed voices audience members conferred over the word's possible meaning. My seatmate turned toward me and raised his eyebrows. I grinned back at him and nodded my head. Yes, I knew the word.

“Damon” and I were attending a San Francisco taping of Says You, the word game that is broadcast weekly on several National Public Radio stations. When I can, I routinely tune in to KQED on Sundays at 4:00 to get my fill of “words and whimsy.” Although based in Boston, Says You likes to travel about the country and record its shows in different venues. When I heard that taping sessions had been scheduled for San Francisco, I quickly snatched up a pair of tickets.

One of my math department colleagues is also a big Says You fan. We were both looking forward to the event when family obligations forced him to bow out. I was stuck with two tickets, but I was only one person. After a moment's thought, I took a shot in the dark and pinged an old college buddy. I hadn't seen him in ages.

To my surprise, Damon replied quickly to my e-mail with a phone call. No, he wasn't familiar with Says You, but he was curious. He quizzed me about the quiz program and decided it was worth the venture. He needed to be in San Francisco that weekend anyway to pick up his wife at the airport. My invitation had been serendipity. We arranged to rendezvous at the Little Star Pizza parlor in San Francisco and then attend the Says You taping at Presentation Theater on the University of San Francisco campus.

Back when we were graduate students, Damon and I used to see each other on a daily basis and hang out together. That, however, hasn't been true in more than thirty years. We've stayed in touch intermittently, but we live at least a hundred miles apart and we've been working at different schools for over twenty years. I tried to remember when I had last seen him in person, but I wasn't certain. Once again, though, we would break pizza together and bandy words.

Some friendships are resilient in the face of interruptions, while others simply fade away and are forgotten. As we noshed and chatted, it was clear that Damon and I had one of the resilient kind. How pleasant. We took turns bragging or complaining about our activities at our colleges, swapped family news, and generally did the kind of catching up that good friends do when they're on the same wavelength, as we indeed were.

Later, when Says You was under way and Arnie Reisman's team crafted bogus definitions of “strigil” with which to fool the other team, I scribbled in the notebook I had brought with me and showed Damon what I had written: “sweat scraper.” He frowned at me a bit skeptically, but kept his own counsel. Up on stage, Carolyn Faye Fox, Arnie Reisman, and Paula Lyons took turns explaining the meaning of strigil. (Lyons described it as a tool to “remove excess sweat from an athlete,” whereupon I grinned triumphantly at Damon. I had to be right!) The rival team tried to decide which of the proffered definitions was the true one, finding that they did not believe the one involving perspiration (“Excess sweat? What is excess sweat?), so they picked the wrong one. Sher polled the audience for its preference, and we noisily cheered for the sweat tool. Lyons then revealed that she had had the correct definition. (Arnie had bluffed by saying a strigil was used to separate nut meat from its enveloping shell. I forget what Carolyn Faye Fox chose for her bluff.)

In the pause between rounds, Damon asked me how I had known such an obscure word. I think he was humoring me, since he probably could tell I was bursting to explain anyway.

“Remember the movie Spartacus?” I asked. “In the Roman baths they used strigils to scrap off the sweat after soaking in the hot water.”

Damon gave me a slow smile, then said, ”Well, I guess I'm not as big a fan of gladiator movies as you are.”

I wrinkled my nose back at him.

My friends. They can be such bitches.

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I play the fool

Is it April 1 yet?

Something was jammed in my mail box in the university math department break room. I bent down to take a better look. A sorry-looking old football had been wedged into it. When I pulled it out, the ball plumped up a bit to an approximation of its normal inflated dimensions, but it was obviously not up to full pressure. I fished out a memo or two that were also in the mail box, tucked the errant football under my arm, and started down the hall to my office.

I was in a curious sort of academic limbo in those days. Although I was no longer a graduate student in the doctoral program, I had been hired by the department chair as an instructor. I was still hanging out with my friends in the grad program, but I was now quasi-faculty. It wasn't a bad job and I knew some people were hired year in and year out as lecturers, making it possible for the real faculty members to do as little teaching as possible. That kind of insecure year-to-year employment didn't appeal to me for the long run. I had other plans. In the fall I would be leaving for a job with the California legislature, a prospect I regarded with mixed emotions.

The first former classmate I met in the hallway said a cheery hello to me and remarked, “Great idea, Zee! Count me in!”

Huh?

I reached the door to the stairwell and started the ascent to the next floor. A grad student was pounding rapidly down the steps. He gave me an unwelcome but friendly punch on the shoulder.

“I'm on board, Zeno! Definitely!”

Weirder and weirder.

I exited the stairwell at the next landing and started down the corridor. This was TA territory and my office was on its periphery. The occupants of my former TA office whooped as I went by.

“Hup, two, three, four!” they cried.

Oh, right. I had a damned football under my arm.

I was not particularly amused. I stashed the football in a desk drawer in my office and put it out of my mind. Later that day I returned to the mail room. In those days before e-mail, it was possible for important things to show up in memos written on actual paper. Still, I was surprised to see several slips of paper in my box. They were the torn-off bottom halves of a mimeographed form that had been tucked into the grad student mail boxes early that morning. I tracked down the top half in the wastebasket. I instantly recognized the style of a former office partner, although he was pretending to be me:

Date: April 1, 1978
Subj: Math Dept Intramural Touch Football Team
From: Zeno Ferox, interim lecturer

Wouldn't it be a good idea for the math dept grad students to join the fun and form an intramural football team? I would be willing to serve as the manager and my former office partner, who has experience with high school JV teams, has volunteered to be the coach. If you're interested, tear off the form below and leave it in my mail box. See you on the gridiron!

---

To anyone who knew how little I cared for sports, it was an obvious over-the-top hoax. Of course, that was also its charm. And hadn't I been seeing walking the hallways with a football tucked under my arm?

The grad students cheerfully joined in the fun and pretended to believe that I had solicited them to join a campus football team. They filled out the forms and tucked them into my mail box. And here's what the form said:

Please indicate how you would like to participate in our new math dept intramural football team by filling in the appropriate information. Would you like to be

a linebacker?

Height: _____ Weight: _____

a cheerleader?

Measurements: _____-_____-_____

a tackling dummy?

IQ: ______



---

There were a couple of other items, too, but I forget. The prank itself, though, will never be forgotten.

And the old football? The friend responsible refused to own up and so never reclaimed his ball, which was evidently an artifact of his younger days. The ball sits today as an odd souvenir atop one of my many bookcases. On the rare occasion when someone spots it, the old story gets retold.

April Fool, Zeno! You're a football team manager now!

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The paper chase

Please sign here!

“Ellen wants to talk to you,” said Dr. Stone. “Hold on a sec.”

“Okay,” I said, but my former professor was already off the line. I heard some muttering in the background and some momentary fumbling.

“Zee? Hi! I've got news!”

It was Ellen's chirpy voice. My former classmate was still in grad school, but I had been out for a few years. She, of course, still had a shot at a degree, while I had decamped without one.

“Hi, Ellie. Good to hear from you. What's going on? Why are you hanging out with Josh?”

Dr. Joshua Stone had surprised me with his phone call from his beach cottage. He would escape to it between school terms to get out of the Central Valley heat. I hadn't spoken with him recently and his phone call was from out of the blue. Now I was talking with Ellen, one of his grad students.

“I got a job offer! The state university offered me a tenure-track position!”

“That's great, Ellie! Excellent! Congratulations!” My enthusiasm was entirely unforced. Ellen was a wonderful teacher and her arrival at a state university would automatically raise the level of its classroom instruction. As to whether she would raise the level of its research program—that was less clear. The moment I thought of that, I had to ask:

“Does that mean you graduated? You finished your research? You completed the requirements for your doctoral degree?”

I was on the verge of offering some additional effusive congratulations, but there was just a bit of hesitancy on the other end of the line that gave me pause.

“Um, yes. I'm just about all done. Um. Zee, I kind of wanted to talk to you about that.”

I waited for her to continue. I had no idea where this conversation was going.

“That's why I'm here with the Stones,” she said. “Josh and Judith have been putting me up in their guest room the last couple of days while Josh and I have been checking over the pages of my dissertation. He just signed off on it this morning and said it's ready to go.”

“Great, Ellie. That's good news. But why do you need to talk to me about it?”

“Well, you see, Zee, it's in manuscript. Really. Literally, manuscript—as in handwritten. It's almost two hundred pages of work that needs to be on high-quality bond paper with one-inch margins and ready to file at the graduate division office on Monday.“

“Ellie. It's Wednesday night. You have less than five days.”

“I know! And my faculty appointment is contingent on my having completed all my degree requirements before the start of fall semester. If I miss this filing deadline, my next opportunity will be too late to allow me to qualify for my university job. That's why I need you to help me.”

Now I had figured out what was coming next.

“So you see, Zee, I need someone who can read math and can turn a manuscript into a clean typescript. That's you!”

It was true. I had learned to use a scientific word processing program that ran on an IBM PC. It was a significant step up from the classic IBM Selectric typewriter with its interchangeable golf-ball typing elements. I had logged thousands of hours on the Selectric. I had several hundred hours on the word processor. I knew I was good. But ... two hundred pages in a single weekend?

Ellie would be back in town Friday morning. On Thursday I arranged with my supervisor at work to take Friday off. Ellie arrived at my house with her stack of dissertation manuscript. It was readable, although Dr. Stone's annotations were more difficult to decipher than Ellie's own handwriting. We sat down at my computer and the marathon began.

We worked late into Friday night and then broke for a few hours of recovery. Ellie returned the next morning with a friend in tow. He would provide an independent set of eyeballs to proofread the pages as they came out of my laser printer in batches. We'd squeeze out a bunch of pages, nosh on endless slices of pizza, and raid my refrigerator for caffeinated soft drinks. The stack of handwritten pages got thinner while the stack of laser-printed pages got taller.

Sunday was the big final push. I had put in a bunch of corrections on Saturday night after Ellie and her friend had left. When Ellie returned Sunday morning, she proofed the new pages and I slogged through the last dozen sheets of her manuscript. We were both goofy and disoriented, but by mid-afternoon on Sunday it appeared that the deed was done. We loaded up the laser printer with high-quality bond paper and generated the final copy.

Handwritten prose tends to become condensed into fewer pages when word-processed. Not so with math text. Ellie's symbols and equations caused her lines of exposition to take more room than plain words would. Her two hundred pages of manuscript had turned into almost the same number of finished pages. A pristine stack of gleaming white print-out sat on the desk before us.

It was time for the finishing touch. Ellie dug a manila folder out of her backpack. She extracted six sheets of high-quality bond paper from the folder. Each sheet was blank except for Joshua Stone's carefully written signature. Josh and Judith were planning to stay at the beach cottage for another few days and so he would not be available to sign Ellie's signature page in person. Instead he had laid each blank sheet of paper on top of a sample dissertation title page and signed it right where he saw the dissertation committee's chairman's name should go.

I carefully mocked up the obligatory signature page and printed it out. We put it behind one of Josh's signed pages and held it up to the light. Not quite in the right place. I tweaked the signature page and tried again. When we held it up to the light this time, Josh's signature appeared right on the line designated for the committee chair. With just a bit of trepidation, we printed it out again, carefully positioning the signed sheet of paper in the feeder tray, hoping we had it turned the right way.

“It worked!” squealed Ellie. It had worked indeed. The sheet in the laser printer's output tray looked as if Dr. Joshua Stone had signed it right on the line (instead of the line having been printed right on his signature). Ellie added the cover page to the pile of papers that was her dissertation and carefully bundled it up. Now she had to seek out the other two members of her dissertation committee. They fortunately were in town and had been notified to expect her.

“I can't thank you enough, Zee. What a great job! I owe you like crazy!”

“You're welcome, Ellie. The whole thing was crazy, of course, but it was fun to have pulled it off.”

Ellie grinned at me.

“That's what Josh said.”

“Beg pardon?”

Ellie's smile widened further.

“It's exactly what Josh said. When we were talking about how we could possibly make the filing deadline for my dissertation, Josh said I had to ask you. ‘Ask Zeno,’ he said. ‘He will want to do it just to prove that he can!’”

I stared blankly back at her and Ellie began to worry that she had said too much. I sighed.

“I have to give the devil his due, Ellie. Josh was right. I really did want to show that I could do it. And he knew that I would.”

We were silent for a few seconds. Then I picked up the sheaf of unused pages that Josh had signed with his name.

“Look at this, Ellie. Josh gave us a bunch of extras in case we goofed up. He should have had more faith in us.” I fanned them out. We had five sheets of otherwise blank paper that bore only his signature. “Want to have some fun, Ellie? We could dummy up a nice bill of sale for his beach cottage and put it in our names. We can have him sell it to us for one dollar. And I'm sure we can think of four other things we'd like to do with his signature.”

We smiled and imagined the possibilities.

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