Divvy Diary: There's an app for that....

     Despite — or maybe because of — how it's slowly crushing journalism, I'm interested in observing technology's steamroller as it  inches forward. Such as this guy in his mid-20s who wrote an app for Divvy bikes just for the hell of it. What I didn't mention in this column is that my 47.5 miles on the Divvy bike puts me at No. 15 on the Leaderboard. And yes, I planned to ride Monday, just for the insanity factor, but Divvy closed the system down again, for the second time in a week. I want my 20 cents back! 

    Necessity is the mother of invention, and also can drive you to new apps — those small programs that live on your cellphone, for my readers who still subscribe to Life magazine, at least deep within the smithy of their souls.

     The app that tells you where the nearest Divvy bike station is, for instance, I downloaded while straddling a Divvy on May Street. It was a wetware problem — the phrase “May and Fulton,” where the station I sought actually was located, had somehow morphed into “May and Kinzie” in the faltering, moist organic circuitry of my brain. Loading the app was easy, took a minute or two, and I parked and headed to Jupiter Outpost for a sandwich — one advantage of Divvy, it expands the range of places to eat.

     Not necessity but vanity inspired me to load the DivvyBrags app, which lets members see the length of their bike trips. The app’s 25-year-old creator, Alex Soble, savvily tweeted me of its December rollout (a PR trick that can elude even seasoned pros: notice what someone in the media does and approach with matters of actual interest). Since he asked, I thought I’d check it out.
     As so often happens with new technology, there was a moment of shame. Since Sept. 3, I have been keeping a record of whenever I use the bikes, jotted on the inside cover of my red 2013 Brownline daily planner. It turns out that Divvy already does that for me, keeping a tally every time I remove a bike from a dock, and the app takes that information and generates distances. If you take a bike from station A and leave it at Station B, you've ridden X amount of miles.
     Soble improved Divvy's tabulations. Divvy's "Trips" page includes trips of three or eight seconds, which in my case means I inserted a bike in a dock that locked but did not wink its confirming green light. So I put my key in, yanked the bike back out and put it in the next open dock, because if I'm going to leave this $1,200 bike, I want to see a big green thumbs-up. DivvyBrags eliminates these microtrips of less than a minute, telling me that between Sept. 3 and Dec. 20, I took 46 trips, covering 47.5 miles in 7 hours, 49 minutes. (My flawed "Write-it-down" system only recorded 31 trips).
     What possessed Soble to create the app?
     "I make Web applications," he said. "It was an idea that took hold and I couldn't not make it. This was irresistible fun."
     Which is also why I write about Divvy.
     The app will graph your stats and let you download them. It also produces a "Leaderboard" ranking total distances, crediting one Jennifer Saito with 1,477 miles on a Divvy.
     It took a week for the South Loop resident to create, but there were snags along the way. When Soble first rolled the app out in September, it required Divvy users to share names and passwords. That was a no-no.
      "Divvy blocked the script and shut down the app," he said. "I wasn't going to do anything malicious. At first that seemed like that was the end of the story. But I went to talk with some Divvy nerds, and one said, 'You can still do it, you just have to be an extension. Something you plug in.' I went home and started working."
     For DivvyBrags 2.0, Soble sent his code to Divvy's parent company, Alta Bicycle Share.
     "I think I kind of took them by surprise the first time," said Soble, who met some Divvy reps for coffee. "It was a little tense at first. But I sent them the code, to say, 'hey, here's what I'm going to do.' " They signed off.
     "We like DivvyBrags a lot," said Elliot Greenberger, point man at Divvy. "It shows how passionate our riders are about Divvy. But it also lets riders view and compare their trip data in a fun way. Our only concern was making sure the program didn't violate our privacy policy, but Alex discovered a way to protect rider info using a Chrome extension. Our technology team reviewed it line by line to make sure it holds up."
     Some 200 people have loaded the app; to do so, go to divvybrags.com. Soble is fourth on the Leaderboard, with 504 miles.
     "I use it in the summer every day," he said. "Much less in winter as it got cold. The app itself is a little bit of a motivation. If I'm trying to decide, use the Orange line or, hey why not get a little more exercise in and log another couple miles?"
     Ah, competition.
     For readers who just don't get the appeal of Divvy bikes—and you know who you are— Soble explained the attraction.
     "The street can be a very tribal place, and Divvy is the newest creature on the block," he said. "Riding definitely makes you feel alive, feel your heart beat, feel the wind, the snow. I'm a fan of the experience. Of course, I haven't wiped out yet."
     Something for us both to look forward to.

  

A la recherchez du froid perdu

Just because it's cold, doesn't mean we can't have fun. My oldest son, Ross, had heard that, when it's this cold—16 below—a cup of boiling water tossed into the air will instantly become steam. QED, it appears to be true. 

     The other day I mentioned my affinity for weather stories, which sent me searching through the Nexis newspaper archive for the article I wrote containing a string of quotes from Chicagoans all describing the weather as "cold." I couldn't find that, but I found these two, both from a cold snap of exactly 20 years ago, in January, 1994.  The first revisits the city during previous deep freezes. The second does something I imagine most pedestrians itch to do on very cold days: ask that guy without a coat: "What the hell are you thinking?"

From the Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 18, 1994:

     One good thing about weather this cold is that it creates a kinship with Chicagoans of the past, all of whom lived in a city that is no stranger to below-freezing temperatures. Some cold days to remember:

Sunday, Jan. 20, 1985. Temperature: -27, a record low. Wind chill: -78.

Lake Michigan, 1/6/14, Photo courtesy of Bill Savage

     St. Agnes Eve, the coldest day of the year according to folklore, made believers of Chicagoans previously unfamiliar with the obscure Jan. 20 holiday. Ardie Rowe, a doorman at the Ambassador East hotel, had an especially bad day. Even the tips were bad. "The people are rude. Their cars won't start. They think it's your fault there are no cabs," he said.

Saturday, Dec. 24, 1983. Temperature: -25. Wind chill: -82.

     The day broke a Christmas Eve record that had stood for 111 years. CTA buses and trains were off schedule, with intervals between trains of up to 30 minutes. At Cook County Hospital, frostbite victims were showing up in the emergency room as often as every 10 minutes. "It's like the world is an ice slide and Cook County is at the bottom," said Dr. Larry Schmetterer.

Sunday, Jan. 10, 1982. Temperature: -26. Wind chill: -81.

      The Chicago Fire Department had one of its most difficult days ever, with frozen fire hydrants, high winds and icy conditions. More than 600 firefighters were ordered to start work at midnight Sunday instead of waiting for their regularly scheduled starting day, Tuesday. Fire Commissioner William Blair left town for a weeklong vacation in California.

Thursday, Feb. 9, 1933. Temperature: -19.

     A.M. Krahl, of the Pure Milk Association, reassured the city that "Chicago's milk supply was not endangered." Farmers had been appealed to by radio to "bring the milk through" and had responded nobly, he said. Movie stars Mary Pickford and Edward G. Robinson, who were passing through town on their way to the coast, met for the first time and had a snowball fight.

Thursday, Feb. 9, 1899. Temperature: -21.

     More than 1,000 homeless people sought shelter at Chicago police stations. With the 30 men working two miles offshore at the 68th Street crib running low on food, a dramatic relief effort was mounted. "Six stalwart men" dragged a sled piled with 400 pounds of food across the frozen lake, but were turned back by a break in the ice. The tug Morford made it the next day, but was crushed by ice floes after reaching the station and unloading supplies.

Monday, Jan. 25, 1897. Temperature: -20.

     On its front page the Chicago Record newspaper listed not the cold temperatures, but the philanthropy of Chicagoans. Mayor Swift appealed for donations: "The present severe weather must naturally excite the keen sympathy of every kindly disposed person for the worthy and suffering poor." Topping the list was Peoples Gas, which gave $ 1,000. Potter Palmer gave $ 200. The Northwestern Yeast Co. donated 100 loaves of bread.

From the Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 15, 1994:

     You always see him.

     On days like Friday, when the cold is like a draft from outer space; when fashion goes out the window and even the young and hip drag out their woolen long johns and Yukon mukluks, there he is: the guy walking down the street without a hat, without gloves, in a thin jacket that wouldn't be out of place in May.

     His name is Ron Holzapfel. He is 28 years old and an architect working downtown. He may not be the same guy everyone sees, but he will stand in, a sort of Everyunderdressedman.

     Of course he has an excuse.

     "I didn't think it would be this cold," explained a sheepish Holzapfel, walking west on Lake Street, his hands reddening, his head hatless in the minus 42-degree wind-chill.

     In his defense, Holzapfel pointed out that he was only walking two blocks. "I can deal with it for two blocks," he said.

     Sort of like liquid nitrogen -- you can put your finger in, so long as you pull it out real quick.

     While Holzapfel was hurrying to his office, some actually found enjoyment in the otherworldly temperature -- an official low of 8 below zero at 8 a.m. at O'Hare Airport.

     A full dozen people were on the ice rink downtown at Skate on State.

     "This is my first experience with cold weather," said Lisa Comeaux, who -- of her own free will -- left her home in New Orleans, where it was 62 degrees Friday, to visit her friend Mary Gay and the frozen world in which she lives.

     The two -- both nurses -- said the weather was not impeding their skating fun. "It's bearable," said Comeaux. "I thought about losing my toes to frostbite," said Gay.

     Another skater, Greg Hill, woke up Friday morning in Nashville, Tenn., where it was 35 degrees warmer. He then got on a plane and -- without being forced -- came to Chicago for vacation. "We said, 'Why let cold weather stop us?' " said Hill, 24, who skated for 20 full minutes with his wife, Shannon, before they decided they had had enough fun.

     Then there were those whose routines were not about to be interrupted by something as paltry as the city being plunged into an icy hellsbroth of mind-numbing cold, the likes of which has not been seen in nearly a decade.

     "I'm frozen," said Gerry Mayo, 62, pedaling his bicycle down the wind-whipped lakefront near Montrose. "(The weather) never stops me. I live on the bike."

     Mayo did admit that while on a summer day he may bicycle more than 50 miles, on Friday he expected to do about six miles.

     "This is not very bad," he said. "Just my toes."

     Jennifer Stern, 22, was one of the committed masochists who jogged along the lakefront near Fullerton, where Lake Michigan, thick-looking with the cold, surged and steamed.

    "Why?" asked Stern, not breaking stride. "Because I hate running on a treadmill."

Hot fun in the Fire Sudatorium

     When it's cold outside, why not go where it's really, really warm? Thus many cold-climate cultures embrace the idea of saunas, steam rooms and bathhouses.  The Scandinavians—Swedes, Finns and such, are especially big on it, as are Russians. The Greeks and Italians helped invent it, and the Japanese developed the practice into ritual and art. Native-Americans had their sweat lodges. The current crop of Americans...well, not so much. Which I suppose in one way speaks well of us — we're busy, making money. The descendants of Calvinists and Puritans, we spurn comfort, pleasure and relaxation. But in another sense, it suggests something bad, that we fail to pause and just savor life. Inspired by this crazy cold, I paused to do some savoring Friday in one of the warmest places around. My report:

     Americans are bad at lolling. Or maybe it’s just me; I don’t want to be one of those guys who project their own faults upon the world, one of the many men who, to quote Thoreau, “mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere.”

     We certainly are good at sprawling in front of the television. But lolling is different from sprawling. To loll is to idle away time “in a lazy, relaxed way.”

     I did that Friday, or tried to. It being so cold, with the promise of worse on the way, it made sense to head for King Spa.

     If you are not familiar, King Spa is a vast Korean establishment in Niles. At 34,000 square feet, it claims to be the largest Asian spa in the United States. The place is a strange mix of taste and kitsch, lovely Asian artifacts and huge cut amethysts with price tags slapped on them, granite counters and chairs upholstered in salmon Naugahyde and scrolled gilded woodwork that is half Louis XIV, half Lewis Carroll. If Kim Jong Un built a health club, it would look like this.

     You pay $30, men go one way, women the other. Stash your shoes in little lockers, your clothes in another. Off each gender’s locker room is a steam room and four pools, from quite hot to icy cold.
     I slid into the water at 10:55 a.m., thinking, "half an hour." That seemed the limit of sybaritic luxury. While the old Division Street Russian Baths, of which I was a member, could be deserted on a weekday, King Spa was hopping with a diverse mix, heavy on Asians and Russians, but with a cross section of Americans too—college kids, seniors. I closed my eyes, sank to my chin and listened to the murmur of languages.
     By 11:15 a.m. I was in the hottest pool, gazing at the clock, wondering why I am deficient in the idling-away-time, doing-nothing department. Can you even loll through force of will? That sort of wrecks it, doesn't it? As it was, I was on the clock, being paid and researching a column, so it didn't even count as true relaxation. Rest makes me antsy. Something to work on in the new year.
     I got out of the pool, dried off, put on a gray cotton uniform: shorts and a T-shirt (women wear pink, kids yellow).
     On the main floor, the spa has nine sauna rooms, heated to different temperatures (one is an Ice Room at just above freezing) and employing various supposedly healing and revitalizing materials: salt, charcoal, stone and such. Normally I'd sneer at the mystical pretensions of it all—"The pyramid-shaped sauna channels metaphysical energy coupled with the unique healing effects of 23 carat gold"—but that would lose the spirit of the place, like a visitor to Disney World observing that real elephants could never flap their ears and fly since the surface-area-to-weight ratio makes that impossible. Thanks professor.
     The hottest room is the "Fire Sudatorium," a beehive-shaped chamber where you sit, sweat and endure as long as you can—in my case about four minutes—before you bolt for the low entrance. It felt tribal.
     After 90 minutes my wife and I met at the restaurant and had a passable pitcher of some milky rice beverage, a spicy salad with walnuts and eight fried-vegetable pot stickers, all for just under $30.
     Walking to our table, I was slightly surprised to see, out the window, snow—Oh right!— and this is an indication of the relaxed mindset you fall into, between the uniforms, the burble of languages, the heat, the cold, the water, the chairs. By the time we left, 2 p.m., after three hours in the place, I felt rejuvenated; OK, maybe not rejuvenated, but not as crappy as I had felt going in.

Don't try this at home

      The media loves the weather. And why not? It's a big story, affects everybody, has its own inherent drama, yet isn't depressing or hard to report -- no need to put crews on planes and send them hurrying to distant lands. You just step outside. 
     But while the medium revels, the individual reporters themselves tend to view weather stories as dreary obligations, the lowest kind of journalism, something to fob off on interns, on cub reporters, anybody who will accept being kicked into the cold — or heat, or rain — to get a few quotes and come shivering, sweating, dripping back.
     For that very reason, I used to love weather stories, exactly because the they were scorned, because they were, in my mind, a challenge, to accept the unpopular and convey the mundane. To describe the National Weather Service details while still giving it a bit of a flair. I remember once writing a story that was entirely made up of the same quote, "It's cold" or "it's very cold," delivered by a variety of Chicagoans, with the interest being the specific circumstances of the person saying it.
     Coverage of Monday's pending deep freeze -- the high in Chicago is supposed to be 10 degrees below zero -- invariably mention the previous city low: 27 degrees below zero, on Jan. 27, 1985.
     I remember it well. Not so much because of the weather -- cold is cold at that point, and whether it feels like 20 below or 27 below is merely a matter of statistics -- but because I did something really stupid on that day, as a result of the cold, and few things are sweeter than to remember an act of frozen idiocy from the warm safety of years in the future.
     Hanukkah had passed and I, considerate boyfriend that I was, had gotten my future wife, an aspiring lawyer, what I thought she needed most: a lawyerly suit. Charcoal grey pinstriped skirt and jacket, the sort of thing women wore with a blouse with a big ruffle at the neck in the 1980s. I remember it cost a week's take-home pay, which I think was $150. And I remember it was ready to be picked up at whatever store I had bought it at, perhaps after taking it back to be altered.
     Coldest day of the year. My car, a crappy blue Chevy Citation that had belonged to my late grandmother, would not start. Frozen engine block. A sane man would have shrugged and not tried to drive anywhere. Pick up the girlfriend's outfit another day. But few men are fully sane at 24, particularly when love is involved. Plus the idea of braving the cold, of my plans dominating nature, possessed me. So I hatched a plan — I must have been at Edie's apartment, because I remember her roommates, or guys next door, or somebody, helping me come up with this. I don't believe I was daft enough to come up with it on my own. Besides, I didn't have the necessary supplies.
    I took an aluminum pan and filled it with charcoal briquettes. Then I squirted the charcoal with lighter fluid and got it going. When it turned white, I carried the pan outside — oven mitts were no doubt helpful here — and slid the hot coals under the oil pan of the car, parked on the street, and waited 15 minutes, then got in and turned the key.
     The car should have caught fire. The coals should have ignited oil on the engine and burned up my crappy Chevy. Heck, it should have exploded. But God smiles on idiots and 24-year-olds, sometimes. The engine turned over nicely. I drove to whatever department store or woman's fashion shop had my wife-to-be's first business suit. I still remember walking into the arctic breeze, riffling the dry-cleaning bag over my shoulder, a feeling of accomplishment, of having defied the odds, wafting over me along with the icy air. A happy memory, now, love triumphing over the killing cold. But also a cautionary tale — don't stick hot coals under your engine Monday — let it wait a day. Be smart, unlike myself at age 24. Or, I suppose, it could be an inspirational tale. If you really, really have to get somewhere Monday, and your car is frozen up consider a pan of hot coals. Worked for me. 
     No, seriously, don't. Although, in 30 years, you'll want to have something stupid to look back upon, to reassure yourself that you weren't a cautious sack of timidity all your life. An event that Jack London called "a purple passage," an act of youthful stupidity — in his case getting drunk and swimming off his schooner in Yokohama, his shipmates assuming he'd drown and dragging the harbor for him while he slept it off, something he viewed "20 years afterward with a secret glow of pride." On that scale, warming up a frozen engine with coals isn't much, but it's what I've got. Anyway, stay warm.

Falling temperatures and frequent gales of Rauner

     This column starts out at A and meanders to Q. That was the intention. My only overall goal was to write something funny, to mention snow, and to jab a sharp stick at Bruce Rauner. I accomplished all three, to my satisfaction. And no, I don't dislike the rich, only the contemptuous rich.

     I came to work Thursday. Yes, yes, I know, it’s the nostalgic newsman in me. I figured, you’ve got a job, you go, physically go to work, transporting your body to your place of employment. Old school. That I was making some kind of error in judgment only occurred to me at the Northbrook train station, which looked like a crowd scene from some unwritten Kafka short story: “The Train Station at Murmansk” or some such thing. Dark figures wrapped in thick coats and scarves, leaning into a blinding storm.

      The train was a half hour late. I got a seat, which wasn’t true for everybody. I tried to catch the eye of the lady standing next to me, ready to gallantly ask, “Madam, would you like a seat?” Then I realized that she was a decade younger than me, and, anyway, she never tore her eyes away from her cellphone, certainly not to glance in the direction of someone literally and figuratively below her. So I focused on my Sun-Times, occasionally gazing with mixed emotions at the diamond ring and assorted sub rings on her finger wrapped around the chrome handhold. The rings cost $25,000 if they cost a dime. Standing might be good for her.

     The less said about the trudge to the office the better. Soon I was thawing out on the 10th floor, getting my morning coffee, finding myself standing in front of a window with a co-worker. Both of us lost in thought until I spoke what was clearly on our minds.

     “Does snow ‘hurtle’?” I wondered aloud. “I’m trying to find the right verb to describe what I’m looking at. ‘Race?’ ‘Plummet?’ It looks like one of those bad 1940s Christmas movies where the stagehands are shaking big boxes of laundry detergent just above the view of the camera."
     He nodded. Snow snow snow snow . . .
     OK, enough of that.
     Do you have any New Year's resolutions? I do. I'm going to write about politics more. Looking back at the past year, I realized I stopped talking about Barack Obama, or commenting on the mayor, or the governor, and generally avoided everything involved with the vast creaking, clanking artifice of government. Why? I think it was simple revulsion. You've got the continual Punch & Judy show of party politics, with Punch Republican and Judy Democrat holding their little bats between their splayed, immobile hands and having at each other - "bap bap bap bap, bop bop bop bop." You've got career politicians, monsters of mendacity, who only say an honest word accidentally. Not looking is too easy. Must . . . force . . . myself.
     What changed? Honestly, it was Natasha Korecki and Rosalind Rossi's article a few days ago on Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner, he of the deep pockets, and the latest of what will be a blizzard of campaign advertising that makes our New Year's snowfall look like a slight dusting.
     "There's no excuse for failing schools. Zero. None. Period." Rauner says. Stop right there; "excuse" is the key word, one of those freighted buzzwords, like "agenda," that Republicans love to trot out to pretend the matter they're discussing is settled. If you substitute "reason" - "there's no reason for failing schools" - you start to grasp the lack of empathy that Rauner is bringing to the table. Of course there are reasons, plenty of 'em - from shattered families, poverty, crime, you name it. Schools feed all our social problems - and reflect them.
     But the sentence that got me rising to my feet with a late middle-age groan was when Rauner, asked about his pulling strings to grease his daughter into Walter Payton College Prep after she failed to get in on her own: "It's just minor stuff. It doesn't matter."
     Well . . . yessir, Mr. Rauner sir. I guess that sets it straight. I should probably say here that I have a personal bias against Bruce Rauner, having met him on two occasions last year. Both times I tried to talk to him. Both times I found myself tossed into the same bin with his pressuring principals to give his daughter a spot earned by someone else: I was just minor stuff; I didn't matter.
     You can't buy a personality, I thought ("You mean being an . . . " insert a seldom-seen body location here "doesn't count as a personality?" a colleague asked. Point taken).
     Reading that story gave me a glimmer of hope, that Gov. Pat Quinn, with his sensible, off-the-rack suits and his weary look of dolor, is not necessarily doomed when he goes up against Rauner's money machine. The thinly disguised contempt of rich people is like spit: it only takes a little to spoil the soup. As god-awful stupid as people are, in Illinois as everywhere, they might not be quite so stupid as to lap up the blizzard of paid BS Rauner is about to unleash upon us all. Which is an epiphany worth schlepping into work in a snowstorm to experience.

Snowfall

    Snow is not actually white. It's clear, like glass; look at an individual snowflake and you will see that. But being complicated, clear surfaces, snowflakes scatter light in all directions, and as anyone who has ever spun a multicolored wheel knows, the result looks white—or under some conditions blueish, since the snow tends to absorb red light more than blue.
    It's certainly lovely to behold. "I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift," wrote Victorian art critic John Ruskin. "Its curves are inconceivable perfection."
    Optics and aesthetics aside, there is something freeing about snow. Snow blankets our world, disguises it, interrupts our usual routines. The important appointments are scrapped, the airplanes stay on the ground. By interrupting society, snow liberates us. Snow almost begs you to go play in it. No less of a thinker than Ralph Waldo Emerson noted a connection between snow and our democracy, "wherever snow falls there is usually civil freedom," he wrote in 1870. 
     More or less correct. He probably wasn't thinking of Russia.
     Like freedom, snow is rarer than we think. Most places on earth don't get snow. It's something of a privilege really -- about 75 percent of the globe is almost always snowless, and Emerson has a point that the worst dictatorships—North Korean notwithstanding—tend to be sunny. Cairo had its first snowfall in over a century last month; it lasted about as long as the reforms that seemed possible in 2011 during the rebellion on Tahir Square. (Not only is snow rare, but so is atmospheric moisture. We live on a watery planet, true, but all the water in the air, condensed, would cover the surface of the earth to the thickness of an inch). 
     A little can seem like a lot, though. It didn't really snow that much over New Year's -- some eight inches, beginning Tuesday afternoon, as we were hurrying home to get ready for our New Year's Eve festivities, then steadily Wednesday, with an inch or two  to come Thursday. Not much compared to the epic snows of yesteryear -- 1967's 18.1 inches in one day. Because much of the city was shut down anyway, there was no need to worry much about getting around in the snow. So the snow could be simply enjoyed, even by us suburbanites who had to shovel it. I have a long driveway, but don't own a snowblower, since it seems stupid to belong to a gym and do aerobic exercise there, to lift weights and run, only to shuck actual productive effort when nature serves up a manageable physical task to be performed now and again. 
    The snow was pretty fluffy, the weather not too cold, and while I wouldn't describe shoveling as "fun," it wasn't so bad either. The dog was certainly delighted, crashing through drifts as tall as herself, bounding like a porpoise. It seemed for a while she wouldn't come in at all, but rocketed around the yard, chasing squirrels that weren't there, cutting a furrow through the perfect whiteness, raising clouds of fresh snow. I like to let her run, and worry less when there's snow, because I can always track her through neighbors' backyards, though toward the end we looked like a silent movie comedy act, Kitty threading the snow between the trees, me puffing through the frosty landscape after her, calling her name with decreasing good humor, scattering snowflakes uncounted.
     Looking at a flake of snow, by the way, is like looking at a giant molecule. The basic shape of a snowflake is six-sided because when oxygen bonds with hydrogen to create a water molecule, the molecule is a hexagon which, growing on all sides and crystallizing into a snowflake, maintains its shape. 
     I don't expect an argument over this. It is worth noting that religious sorts do not insist God creates each individual snowflake, despite their complexity, perfection. beauty and abundance, . Because the science behind snowflakes is so simple and clear, they don't waste their time challenging them, saving their energy for what they perceive as the shadows of science, where they expect more results, and indeed get them. A recent poll showed that about a 1/3 of Americans believe that evolution, a science as certain as the crystallography behind snowflakes, is a fiction, and instead that God Almighty created man fully-formed, and about 10,000 years ago yet. 
     Their religion teaches them this and they feel strongly enough to tell it to pollsters and insist it be taught in supposedly public schools, to children whose parents might not believe it at all. As to why they would not add, "God creates snowflakes too, designing each one with a No. 2 pencil" and oppose teaching of crystallography and chemistry, well, that is just one of those mysteries -- actually, it isn't. 
     The disappearance of human origins into time immemorial creates an opportunity, to the faithful, to impose their fanciful tale of divine will, and dismiss the careful proof plain in the fossil records. Dragging in snowflakes -- which they should do, if they sincerely believed God designed this world; in for a dime, in for a dollar -- would just be dumb. What they don't realize is that limiting your fantasizing to the creation of animal life and the Earth is also dumb -- well, "dumb" is a harsh word to apply to faiths not one's own. How about "presumptuous"? You may of course entertain yourself by playing with whatever ball of nonsense looks pretty to you. It's when you push your fairy tale upon the unwilling that it becomes dumb, since it insults others and distracts society from things that matter. So maybe "dumb" is apt — when you insult people, they get to insult you back.
    But we've drifted, blown a long way from snowflakes. The snow was very soft and quiet and wonderful Wednesday, and I hope you got out and enjoyed it. 

New Year's Day receptions at the White House

     "All is quiet on New Year's Day," to quote U2. But that wasn't always the case —  Jan. 1 was once a day of boisterous, ritual party-making across the country, as anyone with a home worth showing off set out refreshments and welcomed literally everyone who wanted to stop by, starting, for the first 142 years of this country's history, with the White House. That seems something worth remembering.

     One hundred and forty-two years is a long time, and you’d think that a cherished American tradition of that length, one that involved some 30 presidents, starting with George Washington and ending still within living human memory, would be at least faintly recalled on New Year’s Day, when it took place. But it isn’t.

      On every New Year’s Day from our first as a nation with a president, in 1790, to the last observed in the White House by Herbert Hoover, in 1932, the doors would be thrown open and any American could walk in and shake the president’s hand. Thousands did.

     Washington’s first New Year’s reception was in New York, where the nation's capital first was located, then Philadelphia. Several hundred people attended, some grudgingly.
     “Made the President the compliments of the season, had a hearty shake of the hand,” Pennsylvania’s first senator, William Maclay, noted in his diary on Jan. 1, 1791. “I was asked to partake of the punch and cakes, but declined. I sat down and we had some chat. But the diplomatic gentry and foreigners coming in, I embraced the first vacancy to make my bow and wish him a good morning.”
     That’s why you’ve got to love history, not the whitewashed, grade-school history, but history as lived by a senator keen to escape the clutches of the father of our country.
     John Adams began receptions in the current White House in 1801, and his successor, Thomas Jefferson, started the tradition of shaking everybody’s hand — a practice his successors would loathe. Martin Van Buren refused to serve refreshments, to keep the crowds down. William Howard Taft’s hand was so swollen the day after shaking 6,000 hands in 1910, it had to be bandaged.
     If you wonder why the president would even bother receiving people on New Year’s Day, the answer is easy: that’s what people did. In the days before telephones, nevermind the Internet, you visited. There was an elaborate ritual of leaving visiting cards, of etiquette, which of course was not always observed, particularly on New Year’s, when the tradition was to serve punch to guests.
    “It frequently happened that young men, after having made six or eight calls and stopping at six or eight punch bowls, became intoxicated, causing distress in the houses which they next visited,” wrote historian George William Douglas. “Bibulous young men, attracted by the prospect of free punch, would force their way into houses where they were not known.”
     As ugly as that must have been, the scene wasn’t much better at the White House. If you think it would be nice to have gone there for a New Year’s reception, think again.
     “The guests are often compelled to stand for hours in a line outside, exposed to the elements, whatever they may be, whether clear or stormy, warm or cold, windy or calm, the waiting line moving forward towards its goal a step at a time, with long intervals between each step,” Helen Hakcourt wrote in 1911. “Many reach the receiving party worn out with fatigue, and with their elaborate costumes all awry, if not actually torn to ribbons, and are shot through the door as though from a mortar by the relentless pressure behind, and in such a dazed and confused condition that they pass by the President to reach whom they have endured hours of almost danger without so much as seeing him.”
     The practice was ended by Herbert Hoover who, bitter at losing to Franklin D. Roosevelt, skipped out to Florida for New Year’s 1933. FDR never revived it “as his lameness made it difficult for him to stand in the receiving line for any length of time,” as one commentator wrote in 1937.
     Our current president, Barack Obama, has vanished to Hawaii, and as his sagging popularity is dissected, I can’t help but think of Pennsylvania Sen. Maclay. Not only was he hot to escape George Washington, but he hadn’t planned on going to the reception.
     “Just as a I pass’d the president’s house,” he wrote in his diary, an acquaintance bid him go in to the reception but, being in his “worst clothes,” he begged off. A few steps later, Maclay “had, however, passed him but a little way, when [Samuel] Osgood, Postmaster-general, attacked me warmly to go with him. I was pushed forward by him, bolted into his presence.” Of course, Maclay had served in the Continental Army under Washington, so maybe he already had his fill. He also belonged to the Anti-Administration faction that had opposed ratifying the Constitution — does that sound familiar?
     That could be our resolution for 2014: to see history, not as we wish it were, but as it actually was, and do the same for life today.
     Or heck, why expect anyone to start now?