Adding spice (ahem... juice) to pro baseball

Self-righteousness from Jason Giambi. Having already admitted to juicing himself up with steroids, the pro baseball player with the New York Yankees now decides to lay the blame elsewhere.

''What we should have done a long time ago was stand up -- players, ownership, everybody -- and said: 'We made a mistake.'

Players, yes. Obviously. The team owners, yes again. They openly support drug users and pay them grand salaries for cheating. But everybody? Granted, even Major League Baseball (MLB) played a role by not being strict about punishing the use of performance enhancing drugs. Then again, the players (through their union) are not very amenable to rigorous testing and stringent bans. The MLB has to negotiate with the union about test frequencies and punishment levels! Ever hear something similar about the Olympics?!

Giambi's agent made sure his contract with the Yankees had an interesting proviso: that he cannot be dropped even if he tested positive for drugs! If this isn't a statement of guilt, I'm the cliched monkey's uncle.

This is a great gambit by Giambi:

1. admit to steroid use in the past,
   
2. claim that it did not help him hit home runs (question: why use the stuff if it does not help you?!),
   
3. then continue to juice up and biff more home runs.
   

It is hilarious to see the likes of Giambi go hitless for extended periods of time just after another player (like Rafael Palmeiro) gets busted in a drugs test. The hitting prowess disgustingly and miraculously returns overnight, once the storm has passed from the media light.

Why not lay the blame squarely where it should be parked? The players who routinely cheat by using illegal substances to boost performance.

Only in America...

On April 28, Josh Hancock, a pitcher for the St. Luis Cardinals professional baseball team, died in an auto accident. He plowed into the back of a tow truck that was helping a stalled motorist, and died almost immediately. He was found to be very drunk, had marijuana in his car, was talking on his cell phone, speeding, and not wearing a seat belt.

Tragic accident. But five bad judgment calls grossly diminished any chance of survival. To the sane mind, it is clear that Josh was responsible for this accident.

Until you hear his father's latest salvo. Granted, the personal loss is great. To levy a lawsuit against the bar that served the drinks is a bit much, though. You cannot win in this country. If the bartender had refused to serve the drinks, Josh himself would have sued for infringing on his freedom to drink to the end of the world.

To quote the lawyer masterminding this latest frivolous lawsuit:

"It's understood that for the entire 3 1/2 hours that Josh Hancock was there that he was handed drinks," Keith Kantack, a lawyer for Dean Hancock, said. "It's our understanding that from the moment Josh Hancock entered Mike Shannon's that night that he was never without a drink."

Basic question: why do people frequent bars, if not to drink? Why stay there for 3.5 hours, if one had no intention of drinking away every minute of that time?

And it does not stop there. The lawsuit names the tow truck driver and his company as defendants! Apparently, 7 minutes (during which he was assisting the stalled vehicle) was "exorbitant" for clearing a vehicle off the roadway! Wow! Talk about high standards!

The madness actually continues: the stalled driver is also named as a defendant! The poor guy broke down on the highway, and is now being punished for somebody else's mistakes (in the plural).

It is time for some personal responsibility. But as they say, only in America...

A different kind of toll road

An aging elephant in the Indian state of Orissa is apparently imposing a toll on all passing motorists. The toll is in the form of food! People can drive past the elephant only if they roll down their window and exit the vehicle, allowing the pachyderm to sniff around inside for fruit and vegetables. Any such items found are gulped down, and the motorist waved through! Many drivers in the US adjust their trip departure times to beat out congestion. These Orissa drivers may have to tweak their schedules to match the elephant's meal times (at least if they want to ensure that their produce purchases make it onto their family's dining table!)

Here is a link to the full article.

Go Federer!

Roger Federer is quite unstoppable at the moment. He just won his 10th Grand Slam title, beating Chile's Fernando Gonzalez in straight sets after some rare tight spots in the opening set.

I am a huge Pete Sampras fan, and in my view, Federer has taken his game to even higher standards. The same grace and power. No ugly double-handed back-hands or grunts. Almost perfect all-round game, and an ice-cool exterior under any pressure.

Federer has three crucial qualities that nobody else seems to possess:

1. The ability to somehow return any serve.

2. The talent to know where the lines are and place the ball inches away from them without compromising on power.

3. A precise backhand overhead, that again catches the lines perfectly.

This guy is amazing! As one fan put it, "Federer is betterer." Couldn't have put it err... better! Ten Grand Slams now, and he should surely beat Sampras' 14 in two or three years. These two share the weakness on clay, though. If Federer can conquer that frontier, it will be the last piece of the puzzle.

The law of averages in Indian cricket

Sports reporters and commentators just love statistics. They probably like the certainty of numbers. A score of 100 is better than a score of 10. Black and white. No greys.

Of course, some sports are riddled with extreme statistics. Major Leage Baseball (MLB) in the US is a prime example. In no other sport have I come across the blatant abuse of statistics. Here is a an example, totally hypothetical, but highly representative of baseball commentary on television:

"The pitcher has a 0.25 ERA against switch-hitters batting left-handed at this particular ground during the month of July, when the temperature was so-and-so degrees and my mother baked her famous cookies."

What is the sample size on such an average? One? Two? Can we even call it a sample?!!

Back to cricket, the topic of this post. When people talk about strong teams such as Australia or South Africa, the law of averages is often thrown out as a desperate attempt at hope. Australia has been winning a lot of 5-day matches of late, so they are due for a loss. Ricky Ponting has scored enough runs for the year, so there is a good chance that he will fail soon. With the Indian team, the law of averages operates on a much shorter time frame: from day to day, within the same 5-day match!


How many times have we seen our team play extremely well on day 1, and then squander it all away the very next day? The current series against South Africa is a case in point. They won the first match comfortably, and were on an adrenaline high. They could so easily have drawn the next game and maintained their 1-0 lead, yet they decided to combust on the final couple of days and actually lost!

With the series at 1-1, and a fairly decent batting display on the first day of the third game, they lost 5 wickets for 19 runs so that a chance for a series win all but evaporated on day 2. And now, we fight day 3. But before we jump all over their backs, let us step back and think. It is not really the team's fault. It is just the law of averages at work.

A well-oiled (er... oil well) tax system

As gas-electric hybrid vehicles are increasingly embraced by a society getting sick of rising fuel costs and the US government's apathy towards the environment, oil companies and government agencies are already churning their murky minds to circumvent the resulting loss of revenues. More miles to the gallon means less fuel sold. The oil companies lose, unless hybrid owners start driving more than before. Improved fuel efficiency also implies less income from the gas tax. The government loses.

The likes of Exxon-Mobil and Shell can easily re-calibrate their bottom lines by jacking up fuel costs. This they have done (as expected): after several months of artificial price-setting kept the cost per gallon of regular gas under $2.20 in my neighborhood, the end of the Congressional elections has seen a nearly 27 cent increase in double-quick time. How predictable, on so many levels!

So what can the government do about declining gas tax incomes? Tennessee lawmakers are showing the way by proposing a road use tax. Instead of paying a per-gallon tax at the pump, you get to pay for the miles you drive! In a trial of this latest swindle, a fleet of cars will be equipped with GPS units that track your driving distance between gas station visits. The units will communicate with the gas pump, deduct the gas tax from your bill, and tack on the use tax instead. These law-makers, whose salaries probably allow them to keep driving gas-guzzling behemoths without a second thought, are finding ways to annul the technological advances generated by foreign auto makers!

Here is a potential traffic impact from such a bizarre taxation policy. Currently, people largely choose routes based on perceived travel times, delays and facility-specific tolls. Traffic thus gets spread across multiple road facilities based on many days of driving experience and trade-offs between monetary tolls and travel time savings. If the taxes begin to depend on distance, people could start targetting the shortest distance (and not the shortest time) options. Distance is a concrete measure: there are no grey areas related to individual perceptions, and it certainly does not change from day to day. Together with fuel cost increases from the oil industry, the road use tax could make traffic worse!

Or maybe it won't. But I am sure that the possible side effects have not even been considered by Tennessee's rich law-makers.

Drive safe: watch out for the lunatics!

I have been commuting to work for nearly six months now, and have seen enough to rant about Boston's drivers (at least those who drive around me as I stumble to work on the dreaded Mass Pike, I-90, every weekday).

There is at least one accident almost daily on the short 15-mile stretch of highway. One can only ascribe these routine collisions to careless and reckless driving way past the speed limit, too fast to be sustained by heavy weekday traffic levels. Besides the obvious risks of personal injury and vehicle damage, such driving is inconsiderate, to say the least. The smallest perturbations tend to throw I-90 into a downward spiral that can grind traffic to a standstill lasting hours. My 40-minute commute, for example, has often degenerated into a one to two hour drag.

One of my pet peeves (and I have many of these) is drivers who cannot stand seeing traffic move fractionally faster in another lane than theirs. They constantly weave left and right, as though they have a mandate to use all lanes equally. I see several such lunatics daily, cutting across lanes with impunity. They will often start crossing over to the next lane to take advantage of a 1-2 mph speed increase, only to find a slow-moving truck ahead in the target lane. Otherwise, the current lane might temporarily speed up a bit. The selfish driver then arrests her lane changing process mid-way (with two wheels in each lane) to return to the lane she just began evacuating. All of this, of course, will be executed without the use of turn indicators. Sometimes, these people will be half way to the next lane before their conscience directs them to blink their indicator for a fraction of a second, more like an afterthought!

I believe that such aggressive behavior is largely encouraged by the ridiculous blame system associated with fender-benders: the rear-ender is always at fault. Drivers therefore take their chances. They cut too close in front of others, knowing that the poor victim has all the incentive to watch out for this weirdo and slow down. Safe drivers are especially vulnerable, since the distance they maintain from the vehicle in front is enough invitation for aggressive types to cut in. Turn signals are used as rights of passage: "Hey! My indicator is on, so watch out!" In case of an accident, the cautious driver always loses. How convenient and safe!

The Swiss Alps

Let me start with a simple geography quiz.

Q: Which country does Geneva belong to?

A: Actually, it depends.

Now, I know this sounds completely wacky. Geography was one of my favorite subjects in high school. I liked looking at maps. I liked drawing/replicating map outlines, and I had no problems with studying for my geography exams. So why this sudden ambiguity about such a well-known city?

Personal experience taught me a bittter lesson. So here is a little geography tip that might be useful to first-time travelers to Geneva. Especially those who (a) plan on flying Air France to get there, and (b) do not have permission to visit France.

For, though Geneva belongs to Switzerland, France has taken a bite out of the city! In fact, a part of Geneva's airport is French territory!
It is as bizarre as it sounds. Here is a real-world account of what is in store for the unsuspecting traveler.

We recently booked tickets for a Boston-Geneva trip on Delta Airlines (through www.Travelocity.com), which conveniently tagged their flights as Air France through a code-sharing agreement. Our final destination: GVA (Geneva, Switzerland). As we were going to Switzerland, we applied for (and obtained) Swiss visas in advance, and were feeling pretty good about ourselves. We boarded our flight at Boston, landed in perennially messy Charles de Gaule airport in Paris, and even figured out the departure gate for the Paris-Geneva flight.

And then, the seemingly simple matter of an international transit turned into utter chaos. We were refused entry to the gate area! It turned out that Air France treated Paris-Geneva as a domestic flight, since they would be landing in the French sector of Geneva's airport. Essentially, we had to clear customs at Paris, for which we had no visa!

All that was required was a single line of warning on Travelocity's website: "Geneva airport is split in two; please ensure you have the required documents." Three agencies - Travelocity, Delta Airlines and Air France - failed to pass on this critical piece of information (freely available to them), and we paid the price. Literally, too, as we shall see in just a moment.

Air France personnel righted their second wrong (of letting us on the Boston flight without checking for Shengen visas) by re-routing us to Geneva on Swiss Air. Terribly nice of them. Until our checked bag got lost, and we had to join a long line of similarly disgruntled passengers at Geneva. Swiss Air, as the last carrier to get us to our final destination, was saddled with the burden of tracing and delivering our bag. They screamed in anguish (in a nice, calm, Swiss sort of way) about the incompetance of everyone involved. Apparently, the Paris fiasco was a regular occurrence!

We had to have Delta re-book our return tickets, which was done after we were forced to cut a day out of our trip and cough up an additional $440. Plus, Delta only flew out of Zurich! We ended up on Zurich-Atlanta-Boston return flights, which required another $220 in the form of train tickets (to get to Zurich). Delta maintains that they are not responsible for this ridiculous occurrence. Travelocity and Air France have ignored me so far. And I am left holding the bag.

Brilliant, all around. Kudos to the airline industry!

Let spellings bee!

Always remember: 'i' before 'e', except after 'c'.

The age-old maxim in English grammar instruction has now bitten the bullet. The language teems with words that blatantly flout this rule. I have relied on this rule almost all my life, but sometimes, the written word just feels wrong. Somehow.

I was typing out an e-mail last week, when I decided to use the word "liesurely". It just did not look correct, though it follows the 'c' rule to the 't'. So I checked a dictionary, and it indeed spelled trouble: in leisurely fashion.

What a truly weird language we have!

Pie in the sky

I have been flying around a lot of late (and no, my arms are not really that tired!) However, my stomach has had much to complain about.

Take-offs and landings are never good for me. Despite more than seven years of "experience", food always defies gravity and tries to rise up the easophagus. It does not help that airline food is generally pathetic. Particularly for a vegetarian.

I have always tried to guarantee something edible on my flights, by choosing the "Asian Vegetarian" meal preference. I recently came to question this approach, however, after seeing meal after meal of make-believe Indian food consisting of dessicated spinach, dry salads and stale, yellow rice.

Fatefully, during my last couple of trips, I missed the important meal specification while booking my tickets. I was relegated to choosing from the common menu. They say that fishermen are the biggest liars on the face of the planet, but airline menus are by far the worst. The "large sub stuffed with vegetables" concocted images of a foot-long sandwich (a la Subway), but it turned out to be a flattened wrap roughly 4 inches long and an inch and a half wide.

Nevertheless, the menu experience was not bad at all. Infact, the pasta was soft and fresh, the puris were edible, and the desserts were eclectic. Something vegetarian on every flight. Nothing gourmet, yet decent.

And then, with the last meal of the final leg, everthing broke down. Roasted veal for the appetizer. No choice on this item, and not very appetizing. Main course: chicken or salmon. Over and out! Lunch degenerated into crackers and cheese, a bun with butter, a bowl of fruit, a couple of squares of chocolate and a cup of OJ.

I guess it is back to Asian Vegetarian from now on.

The (w)art of reverse swing

In cricketing circles, reverse swing is an art. But only if you are able to produce it with a cricket ball, and you are not from the Indian subcontinent. If you happen to play for India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka, it is a wart: a pestilence that must be stamped out by accusing the teams of cheating and ball-tampering.

Sour grapes!

Pakistan's fast bowlers have historically been targetted as cheats (partly because nobody else could perform this magic, and largely because other teams were clueless against it). When England managed to wrap rings around Australia in the last Ashes series, reverese swing graduated to the level of "accepted tactics". As long as you are not from the Indian sub-continent.

Simon Jones now defends all of England with this fine statement reported by Cricinfo:

"People who say reverse swing is not possible without ball-tampering obviously know nothing about cricket," he told The Western Mail. "I know what I did was legal. I would never do anything outside the laws of the game."

Let us not get into an argument about Jones' honesty and integrity. If he indeed shaped/conditioned the ball "legally" to aid reverse swing, let us take his word for it. Maybe he should release a list of "legal" ways of achieving reverse swing. The biased ICC can then allow only these actions, while rejecting anything else that comes from... well, you know where.

Or perhaps, the ICC can just get a spine and mandate regular checks on the ball by the match refereee. And not just when a team from the sub-continent is bowling. It is time the ICC got its act together, instead of bickering about purely financial matters such as ambush marketing and bat logo sizes.

Our hybrid

Without much hesitation, we decided to buy a hybrid car. Though the options are rapidly multiplying, the real choice was between the Toyota Prius and the Honda (Civic, Accord). We plumped for the Civic: the Prius's futuristic looks did not appeal to us, and the Accord hybrid's mileage was not impressive enough (thanks to a heavy V6 engine, mostly).

The 2006 Civic looks more like a regular car than the Prius. However, it has been revamped for a sporty, aerodynamic design that definitely contributes to the high mileage ratings (49 mpg on arterials, 51 mpg on freeways). After 3000+ miles, we are consistently clocking 45+ mpg. My work commute of roughly 22 miles each way (on slightly hilly terrain) essentially translates to an empty tank every 9-10 days, which is fantastic on the wallet!

The 2006 Civic Hybrid has regenerative braking, which charges the battery by recovering power during deceleration. A nice little dashboard indicator tells you if the battery is assisting the gas engine, or is being re-charged. The dashboard layout also has a huge digital speed display, which is not hindered by the steering wheel.

The reduced trunk space in the 2006 Civic Hybrid has been perhaps its most bandied drawback. However, it quite easily accommodated two large Samsonite hard-plastic suitcases (of the size typically lugged to and from India) in addition to a tennis raquet and a 24-pack case of Gatorade. Not bad for a small trunk!

The driving experience has been great. The engine is smooth, and the switch between gas and electric engines is imperceptible. With Honda's legendary reliability, we expect to be very pleased with this purchase in the short and long runs.

Life in the FastLane

I got EZPass! This is an Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) program: you install a small transponder device under your windshield, and an automatic sensor communicates with it as you drive through a toll plaza at reduced speed. The required tolls are then deducted from your account. One does not even need to keep track of the current balance: money is added through a credit card charge when the balance falls below a certain threshold.

So far, my subscription to EZPass has worked wonders on my commute. Having spent many a trip crawling towards the toll plaza that had already been sighted quite a while ago, it is a huge relief to bypass the long lines of cash-handling drivers and zip through the (nearly) empty ETC-only lanes.

Some times, though, congestion is so bad that the queues in the manual toll lanes back up all the way; the ETC lanes may thus be free, yet access could be blocked by the "manual" vehicles. This can be frustrating. Thankfully, I have encountered this only a few times (all before I got EZPass!)

The resident ETC program for Massachusetts is FastLane, but EZPass, a New York-New Jersey program, works just as well on this network.

Giving Windows the (re)boot

Microsoft Windows is an energy-sapper. The world's (supposedly) most popular PC operating system is riddled with increasing ways of making you tear your hair out by the roots. I am constantly amazed by people who proclaim their love for this program because it "looks better" than other options. To these people, I can only recommend that they install Linux and see for themselves.

My pet Microsoft peeve, for the moment at least, is the need for constant reboots after installing the smallest utilities. After seven (and some) years of maintaining Linux machines, I find it highly irritating that Windows still has not found a way around this. There has to be a way of updating the registry, etc. without having to shut down everything else you are doing.

The reboot headache is not one that you encounter once in several months either. Thanks to the various auto-update routines floating around, one is required to start from a clean slate on numerous occassions. However, I would at least expect to be given the chance to decide when to reboot the machine after a software update.

But sorry. No dice! Instead, I get a constant stream of "reminders" every few minutes that it is time to reboot. I can either drop whatever I am doing and bow to my Microsoft masters, or endure a vexing time clicking "Cancel" or "Remind me Later". Why not add a simple option to "Remind me When the Sun Explodes"?!!

Here is a potential marketing gimmick for Microsoft to consider: ship extra memory with every new Windows release, so that the reboots become faster. This will help maintain productivity at current levels, to compensate for the time we spend twiddling our thumbs while Windows recharges its creaking Registry. At least, we will not be running backwards every time a bug-riddled piece of code is installed and frequently updated.

You hit, I mint!

The most lucrative business today must be the manufacture of baseballs. Watch the game for a while, and try to count the number of balls they use up before play ends. I have not tried this yet, but am convinced that the number will be quite staggering.

Let me attempt to list the more obvious sources of wastage. First, any ball that is hit once by the bat, has to be thrown away! There is no doubt about this. Pitcher hurls the ball, batter hits the ball cleanly, fielder pouches it in his bucket (that stupid glove they use. Come on now, be a man, and catch it bare-handed like in cricket!) Even if the ball never bounces into the dirt, the fielder chucks it into the crowd.

Let us now say that the pitcher loses his radar for a bit, and the ball bounces once before being held by the catcher (the guy who squats behind the batter). Does the ball get reused? It is not entirely clear, but it definitely does not enter the game immediately. Instead, the catcher passes it along to the umpire (who half-squats behind him). The umpire gives him a brand new ball to play with, while he either surreptitiously discards the old one, or inspects it with a microscope (also surreptitiously, since I have never seen him do this on television) to determine if it has not been spoiled in some way. Essentially, the bump ball is soiled until proven otherwise.

Only when the pitcher delivers the ball directly into the glove of the catcher, without being intercepted by anything solid on the way, does the ball come back into play immediately.

So, at a minimum, with 9 innings, 3 batters per inning and 3 pitches per batter (two fouls and a ball in play that gets an out), we are talking about 81 pitches. In reality, there are way more than 3 pitches per batter, so we must scale this number by at least 2. That yields 162 pitches. Now factor the other team in, and we double this estimate to 324.

A solitary Google hit, a web page from 2001, explains that a Major League game averages 250-300 pitches, and that the average life of a baseball is 6 pitches. That is 50-60 balls per game (according to my pitch calculation), without counting the possibility of endless extra innings (don't ask me... it is all too complicated. Maybe in another post). [Aside: extra-inning games are not that uncommon. They happen with sickening regularity, and they continue until a score difference is achieved.]

There are, of course, many assumptions in the above calculations. However, it does seem to be in the ballpark (hehe!).

On top of all the game balls, we need more of them for Spring training, game-day practice, warm-ups and for plain, old autographing. And all this for one game. Each team plays some 160 games a year, and some progress further and play a few more. There are 30 teams currently in the Major League fray. Of course, there are the lesser mortals too, who play in the Minor Leagues, in schools, playgrounds, ...

These are very, very good numbers indeed for the makers of baseballs!

Pinch the gas, not the wallet

The rising cost of oil has led to the expected spike in gas (petrol) prices all across the country. Stories abound of commuters switching to bicycles even for long distances, price-gouging by oil companies, and lawsuits against fuel re-sellers who are charging lower rates than their competitors in a bid to attract business (and also perhaps to put on a more driver-friendly image).

The best news story to date, though, was in today's online edition of the CNN news service. Drivers in California are resorting to a novel way of beating the clamp on their wallets: they simply allow their tanks to go dry, and stall up on the busy freeways and arterials of the state. Subsidized towing services ply the roads to rescue such victims, and greet the stranded vehicles with a free gallon of gas. That could be good for at least another 20-30 miles!

The frequency of such "requests" has apparently shot up in the past few days, and is expected to maintain an upward trend in the near future.

Ad-surfing

This is a brief rant about the amount of advertising on American television today. It is bad enough that nearly half the scheduled duration of a program is consumed by con-vertising: a deluge of inferior products (low on both concept and design), yet high on price, being sold as the best thing ever to happen to us. How did we (and our parents and grandparents) live without such nifty gadgets/diet supplements/electronics?

What is even more vexing is that the various broadcasting stations seem to have colluded to schedule their ads at exactly the same times! We no longer have the option of channel-surfing to escape these irritating bank-account-emptying schemes, as we encounter similar nonsense with every press of the button! The only way out seems to be to tune the TV out for the next five minutes. Go load the dishwasher, maybe. Or read a chapter of a novel, and still return to the TV show with plenty of time to spare.

Sometimes, the irritation is taken to the next level: almost every channel you visit is running the exact same ad! I wonder: do Bowflex and Magic Bullet make so much money swindling people, that they can afford to run so many paid ads on such a variety of channels?!

On a slight tangent, imagine several five-minute ad stretches within a half-hour program. The cast from the TV shows seems to be getting paid gobs of cash for "half-hour" episodes, when they essentially have to work only towards a fifteen-minute piece at best! Neat! Professional sport, here comes competition in the salary department!

Lights! Action! Now, cameras, please.

Exasperated with the duration of your commute to and from work each day? Had enough of waiting at numerous traffic lights each way? Well, help is on the way: just log on to eBay, and buy yourself an Opticon. Simply flash the device at red lights, and watch them turn green!

It is amazing that the technology directing traffic streams in busy cities and corridors has been left so exposed and unprotected. Imagine the possibilities...

So how did this "secret" product's existence come to light? An enterprising resident of Longmont, Colorado has finally been arrested for playing havoc with the traffic lights on his commute. The authorities had to resort to video surveillance, which paid off eventually: they noticed a white Ford pickup truck driving by the lights every time their timing went haywire. The owner of the truck, however, is gladly paying the $50 citation, content that the price he paid for the device has long been recovered in terms of precious minutes saved.

I have a few questions to pose, though. With the ease of video surveillance today, why did this guy use the same route every day? Maybe a little variety in terms of route selection could have prolonged his bliss! For that matter, even a less conspicuous vehicle may have slipped across the probing eyes for a little bit longer...

Working on the Fly

Laptops are ubiquitous in airport terminals these days. Every way you look, people are studiously focussed on their LCD screens and MacDonald's burgers (with fries, of course), seemingly oblivious to the world outside a 2-foot radius. Sometimes, you will even see them laugh out loud after finding something hilarious in their official documents. Or maybe in the solitaire game they just won.

I thought I'd join the race, and try to get some work done while stuck in Terminal C at Dallas/Fort Worth recently. It probably serves me right for thinking I could get away with it: there was not one place for me to plug my power cord! The only source of electricity was in the middle of a narrow corridor leading to the restrooms.

I trawled the adjoining gates to no avail, and eventually gave up. Deciding to conserve my limited battery strength for later, I headed for the food court. I could at least copy the other activity that was gripping my co-passengers!

The Perfect Car

We must soon purchase a car. My predisposition to public transit notwithstanding, a car is increasingly becoming a requirement in the US. The choices are endless, but the tricky decision is a long-term one. Almost every single make and model manufactured in the wide world seems to be an option here. So how do we make a good decision? Suggestions and experiences are gladly invited.

As a first step, I started renting out a variety of cars when forced to hit the road (mostly to places that cannot be reached through a nice bus-train combination). Rental companies in the US seem to be fixated on handing out American vehicles. The assignment has always been the Chevrolet (Chevy) Cobalt. Now, "cobalt" conjures up the color blue in my mind. Remember the "cobalt blue" from your watercolor set? On both occassions, however, we were given flashy cars: a deep red, and a glaring orange!! Arrrgh! We were literally lighting up the road as we blazed away on the freeway!

Hue preferences aside, the Cobalt is simply inefficient. In a time when gas prices are skyrocketing to unprecendented highs, this car guzzles black gold. Granted that I was driving a lot, but I had to make fueling stops every day! There were other nagging design defects in this model. Even slight turns of the steering wheel would completely block off the speedometer. Worse, blocking out the sun from your eyes would also block the rear-view mirror! Talk about driving blind!

I have driven far too many other cars by now, thanks to my Zipcar membership (see www.zipcar.com. Hey! A free advertisement for this nice company!) The list includes the Scion xA, Scion xB, Prius (hybrid) and the Volkswagen Jetta.

I wrote a piece on the Prius some time ago. Here is some raving on the Jetta, which has been the best experience to date: it has a solid car body with an equally comforting weight behind the steering mechanism (the xA and xB were so light that even minor bumps on the road would jerk the wheel around). Amazingly smooth acceleration from the Jetta, even from rest. Very good views of the vehicles around you (the Prius' slick, aerodynamic design causes even pedestrians on crosswalks to be hidden, while the xB is so boxy that there is little to be seen even by twisting your neck backwards).

The Jetta, however, is a fairly small car. Leg room (especially in the rear seats) is not great. This has not been an issue so far, since I am the one doing the driving!

The hunt for a nice family car thus continues. Updated experiences will be posted from time to time. I may even attempt to describe the pros and cons for each model in detail.