I wonder how the bottoms of my dress shoes manage to get smoother with wear-and-tear? It would make more sense to me that they get coarser.

I guess that’s why, when I’m on the sidewalk, I try to walk around with slight scuffing motions, in an effort to gain more traction. This, despite knowing that it produces exactly the opposite effect. I attribute this irrational behavior to my being a hockey fan, and thus attempting to emulate the traditional goaltender prepping of the crease (known as the “goalie dance” or “building a nest”). Even this is the wrong approach on my part, since the goalie is using his skate blades to rough up the surface beneath him, and my intent is the opposite. Although the end result — a friction-based mooring — is our shared goal.

None of this would have anything to do with tomorrow’s opening night of the 2009-10 National Hockey League season. If anything, it just means I need a new pair of shoes. And maybe some pads.

Defying what seems like conventional political wisdom given the economic context, socialist and left-of-center coalitions in Europe just got trounced in several national elections.

A particular low point in organizational competence among traditional leftists on the Continent is presumed to be the reason for this failure to capitalize on the wake of the Great Recession. In addition, the term “conservative” has a decidedly different meaning over there:

Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda.

Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.

Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.” When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said.

Aside from this, I think history provides some guidance. During the Great Depression, Europeans didn’t react to the crisis in their livelihoods by ushering in socialist/communists governments. In fact, they embraced the opposite solutions: National Socialism in Germany, right-leaning governments in Britain, and so on. Granted, conditions were more radical on the eve on World War II; still, the reaction to economic uncertainty is, indeed, reactionary among the broader population. There’s no reason to think that people will change those habits now, even in the bosom of decades-old welfare states.

As for the Euro-lefties plan to regain relevance by hitching their cart to the Green movement: Shaky option. Again, despite traditional alignments (especially in the States), there’s no particular reason for the eco-politicos to stick with one end of the political spectrum in Europe; they could just as easily achieve their policy goals by working with the same conservative governments that have just received their electoral mandates. If that’s the best the socialists can come up with, then they really are bereft of ideas.

As I mentioned last week, I liked this rendering of “Robot, Fire!” by Sean Tubridy so much that I made it my computer screen’s desktop background.

In that week since, this orange-bathed retro-robot had managed to lumber from the notebook screen to my iTouch’s wallpaper, and then over to my cellphone’s two wallpapers. Full coverage of all the third screens in my life, basically. He hasn’t invaded my television screen — yet.

Actually, I think I’ll curtail his digital wandering myself, by removing him off the iTouch. As much as I’m charmed by this reddish menace, I don’t want to get sick of his image too quickly.

I strictly adhere to the correct notion that World Wrestling Federation Entertainment’s televised spectacles are not, despite surface appearances and trappings, sporting events. (Therefore, I’m not slotting this post under my Other Sports category.) Accordant with that acknowledgment comes a general disdain for WWE and all such related fake-sports spectacles — a disdain forged from years of enduring the rants from rasslin’ fans who insisted upon major metropolitan newspaper coverage in the Sports section (as if).

That said, I like the ring of WWE “Hell in a Cell”. Strictly for the wordplay. It’s a snappy brand, and nicely captures the malevolent melee spirit that it’s trying to sell (despite the staged phoniness of the whole thing).

What doesn’t help: That the latest edition of this cagefighting series is being sponsored by the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles videogame. Kinda takes the edge off, money aside. If they’re going to take that route, why not spin off a truly kid-friendly sidebar event, and call it “Heck in a Sec”? Might as well work all the angles.

I wasn’t a fan of the original “Little House on the Prairie”, despite it being a TV fixture for a good chunk of my childhood. Still, the show was a pervasive pop-cultural force during my formative years. So I appreciate the unique irony in Melissa Gilbert revisiting the familiar terrain of her “Half-Pint” character, but in a decidedly different, if equally familiar, role:

The star of TV’s long-running “Little House on the Prairie” — she played the young Laura Ingalls — is back on the prairie. Only now, at 45, she’s onstage, in a musical version at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, through Oct. 10.

This time, she’s playing Ma. That didn’t throw her, Gilbert says, but the singing did.

“My initial reaction was, ‘Are you crazy?’ ” she says. But after two years of extensive training, she now feels confident, especially since she’s doing it “with the safety net of material that is like home to me.”

So Gilbert graduates from frontier daughter to frontier mother, which provides the hook for this play. It probably won’t last, as Gilbert is already planning on coming back to Laura Ingalls, if not the “Half-Pint” part:

“I would like to play Laura again 20 to 25 years from now as a one-woman show, when Laura was at that age when the books were published. Kind of a Will Rogers-type thing,” Ms. Gilbert said. “I think that would be fun.”

I dunno, it’s still not fully resonating with me. I guess my emotionally-invested equivalent from TV-land would be a grown-up Malcolm-Jamal Warner starring as Heathcliff Huxtable in a stage version of “The Cosby Show”. Maybe in 15 years or so…

After years of litigiousness over unauthorized Web and mobile use of its information, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is finally warming up to the idea of third-party developers building navigational apps atop official maps and timetables.

The need for decriminalization in the first place amuses Jonathan Zittrain, an expert in Internet law and a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard:

“I love that the subversive act of the 21st century in the subway is not graffiti, but mapping out the stations so you can know where to exit the car,” he said with a laugh. “Twenty years ago they would have been tagging the cars. In both cases, the city is upset.”

Well. I doubt that the same creative impulse that prompts ornate spraypaint marking is now being channeled into precision step-by-step subway car exiting. But I suppose meta-tagging via digital downloads is another way to make a mark on the transit system.

It seems that a remnant of my childhood comic book collecting is the ability to effortlessly recall the long-accepted condition/grading system for back issues:

- Mint
- Near Mint
- Very Fine
- Fine
- Very Good
- Good
- Fair
- Poor

Following the lead from Mile High Comics, from where my brother and I would order old comics when we were kids, “Mint” and “Near Mint” would be merged for pricing purposes, since “Mint” is considered an impossibly pristine state for any book that leaves the printing plant. And “Very Fine” really seems like a gratuitous padding to this scale; I’m guessing there’s practically no difference between that and “Fine”. And “Poor” represents a practically unsellable pile of deteriorated pulp, not worth keeping unless it’s a particularly old/rare issue (talking 1950s or older).

Of course, these designations only matter in the collectibles realm, where you think that every limited edition No. 1 is going to mature into a thousand-dollar commodity after a couple of decades, much like the World War II era titles that debuted icons like Superman and Batman. This comics-as-investment rationale was used by many a kid collector as justification for blowing so much money on multiple copies of the same issue (because it certainly couldn’t be for the literary/entertainment value). Take away that faulty reasoning, and putting a grade on something as inane as a 20-year-old copy of some Green Arrow #0 is rather ridiculous — as much so as actually buying it.

As I’ve been watching the first couple of weeks of the National Football League season, along with the now-completing National Hockey League preseason, I’m wondering: Do the major-pro team sports know what they’re doing when prepping for the regular season?

I won’t pretend to know what goes into player evaluation. Personally, it’s a mystery how scouts and coaches can extrapolate real-game performance from an exhibition contest between third-stringers — what does 75 yards rushing, or a goal and two assists, really mean in that context? And the kicker is when such preseason output gets the player demoted or released anyway — again, how can you tell that those results won’t materialize when the games count?

Still, a couple of developments in early season NFL/late preseason NHL this year stand out, making me question the effectiveness of the current system:

- In football, Brett Favre’s late August signing with the Vikings, and instant installment as their starting QB, invalidates the fundamental purpose of preseason. Team cohesiveness and playbook preparation are supposed to be paramount goals before the regular season commences. How true is that when a team’s most pivotal position is reshuffled barely a week before games start to count? Even accounting for Favre’s experience and unique star power, Minnesota basically threw out their entire gameplan when they brought him in, demonstrating how disposable those weeks of preparation are.

On top of that example, the first two weeks of NFL action produced tons of penalties by both winning and losing teams. That’s a yearly occurrence, and it’s driven me crazy for as long as I can remember. You’d think players would be particularly sharp coming right out of preseason, especially after having survived roster cut-downs and everything else. And yet, in Week 1, you see enough offsides and other boneheaded fouls to make you wonder just how much intensity teams generate in August.

- In hockey, preseason’s seen a late-arriving roster insertion similar to Favre’s, in Brandon Dubinsky’s ended holdout with the New York Rangers. True, he’s returning to the same team he’s been with his whole career, so there was already familiarity. Still, he’s slated to be the team’s No. 1 center, so again, a prominent role is essentially handed over to a guy who’s experienced hardly any training camp and preseason conditioning.

On something of a flip-side, 41-year-old Theoren Fleury’s comeback attempt was snuffed by the Calgary Flames. Even with the odds against him — age and six years out of the NHL — he posted four points in the preseason, and certainly didn’t look out of place. Still, Flames brass deemed him not good enough to crack the team’s top six forwards. What more he’d have to do is undetermined.

Baseball and basketball function on similar levels. The only key differentiation is that baseball and hockey have professional minor league systems where they can hold second-level talent in reserve for future development; football and basketball don’t have that outlet, so personnel decisions are more final.

And maybe that’s the problem. Teams are trying to accomplish two things in preseason: Draw up winning gameplans with corresponding depth charts, and evaluating new talent. You’d think they two would go hand-in-hand, but I’m not sure they do.

How efficient is it to rotate different players, at different skill/experience levels, in and out of drills, scrimmages, and exhibition games? There’s a small window during which to judge how those players perform and that’s it. It’s a good high-pressure stress test, but not a realistic gauge of how he’d do in a more extensive audition. Meanwhile, coaches have to do this while simultaneously fine-tuning player formations, offensive/defensive schemes, batting lineups, etc. Both tasks are deserving of full-time attention, and don’t necessarily dovetail as they unfold.

So, I propose a formal division between these two preseason rituals. Some football or hockey team that’s down-in-the-dumps enough to try a radical new approach should de-couple the player-eval that is training camp from the team-building that is (or should be) preseason, and see if that doesn’t result in a regular-season performance that wins more games than expected.

Maybe I should start a consulting service that pitches this approach to pro teams. There’s gotta be some bright-idea general manager out there that’s looking for outside-the-box ideas.

Reminiscent of Nixon’s infamously paranoid enemies list, the Obama White House allegedly has a Presidential hit-list, according to the supermarket tabloids:

LIVID Barack Obama is determined to silence his critics and rivals, say political insiders who charge the President has drawn up a secret enemies list. In a blockbuster world exclusive, GLOBE bares 25 names — and sources tell you how and why the White House intends to shut them up. It’s must reading for every American!

I’m gonna go ahead and scoop Globe Magazine (I disdain the ALL CAPS they use to self-identify) with a further revelation: The President stores his naughty-not-nice list in the same file with his “real” Kenyan birth certificate.

It seems the IRS takes a dim view of donating your house for a fire department controlled-burn exercise, and then claiming the ashes as a mortgage-sized deduction:

Lured by the prospect of free demolition, homeowners around the country sometimes offer their houses to the local fire department for training purposes. The department burns down the house, clearing the way for the owner to build a bigger and better home. In court cases in Ohio and Wisconsin, the IRS is arguing that because such houses are already slated for demolition, donating them for fire training isn’t an act of charity.

Who knew that state-sanctioned arson could be so lucrative?

These days, the phrase “hard and fast” only comes up, to my knowledge, when referring to some rule or condition in place. Even then, it’s only used to qualify or negate the degree, such as declaring that “these are not hard-and-fast rules”.

The expression was originally a 19th-Century nautical term. I wonder what the code was for the opposite condition, i.e. a ship that was indeterminately adrift at sea. The opposite words do suggest themselves…

Therefore, to extrapolate back to the modern day: If rules are not so hard and fast, as we often attest — can they be said to be “soft and slow”? Like the rest of everyday existence?

One of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions in recent years has, thanks to the Great Recession, turned into a hollow victory: The 2005 ruling in favor of localities invoking eminent domain land claims for private development left New London, Connecticut with a few acres of weed-strewn emptiness.

[Susette] Kelo and six other homeowners fought for years, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2005, justices voted 5-4 against them, giving cities across the country the right to use eminent domain to take property for private development.

The decision was sharply criticized and created grassroots backlash. Forty states quickly passed new, protective rules and regulations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some protesters even tried to turn the tables on now-retired Justice David Souter, trying unsuccessfully in 2006 to take his New Hampshire home by eminent domain to build an inn…

Overall, proponents say about two-thirds of the 90-acre site is developed, in part because of a 16-acre, $25 million state park. The other third of the land remains without the promised residential housing, office buildings, shops and hotel/conference center facility.

“If there had been no litigation, which took years to work its way through (the court system), then a substantial portion of this project would be constructed by now,” said John Brooks, executive director of the New London Development Corp. “But we are victims of the economic cycle, and there is nothing we can do about that.”

Maybe New London can re-lease the land back to the former homeowners, so they can rebuild anew — and then get their replaced domiciles re-seized about 10 years later. Self-sustaining business plan, if nothing else.

The high demand for multi-lingual skills at the United Nations has brought forth a real-time interpreter-driven echo chamber:

U.N. interpreters don’t need to know every official language. Rather, the U.N. hires interpreters who can translate into their native language from at least two other languages. A Russian interpreter, for example, might also know English and French. But he might not know Chinese. In that case, if the speaker is Chinese, the interpreters will use what’s called a “relay system.” The interpreters in the Chinese booth will translate the original speech into English or French, and the rest of the interpreters will translate that version into their own languages. Under the relay system, the final interpretation is thus translated twice from the original speech. This method does lead to inaccuracies, which is why someone must review the interpretations afterward and correct them for the official record. It’s also why the United Nations allows only one intermediary language in the relay system—any more and there’s too much room for error.

It’s a dizzying progression of translation and transliteration. I say it’s time to streamline to Esperanto.

In light of the recent introduction of mood-setting perfume oils based on H.P. Lovecraft themes, now’s probably the right time for this public service announcement against Internet chats with primordial demi-gods:

The SEO-friendlier rendition:

Stacy Griffith, 15, liked frequenting chat rooms online. One day, she met a funny, goofy boy who was deep and intelligent. They talked all the time and eventually, they decided they were going to meet up at a mall in Stacy’s home town.

Only when they met, Stacy realized he was no boy.

It was a motherfucking Cthulhu. Holy fucking shit.

DON’T TRUST ANYONE YOU MEET ONLINE. YOU COULD REGRET IT.

5,000 American girls lose their sanity to Cthulhu each year. Stop online predation from Great Old Ones before it can start. Educate your children about Cthulhu today. [Ad Council]

Honestly, it had me at “a motherfucking Cthulhu” — like there’s, y’know, any other kind. Who knew the high priest of non-Euclidean madness could lay down the smooth-talking Web smack?

To the extent that I follow the workings of the world economy, I did think that Pittsburgh as a site for the latest meeting of the Group of 20 was an unconventional choice. It seems like a seat of national government — Paris, Berlin, London — is the usual suspect for these macroeconomic confabs.

Turns out the Steel City is a unique choice:

The pick was left to Obama’s discretion after the governors of the G-20 decided the event would be held in the U.S. Obama said he chose Pittsburgh to showcase the city’s reinvention from an aging industrial town into a tech-heavy, eco-friendly metropolis with a burgeoning alternative-energy sector. The success story isn’t all hype — Pittsburgh’s unemployment and foreclosure rates are lower than the national average, and the sagging steel industry is no longer the sole engine of the city’s economy. Pittsburgh is just the second noncapital city to hold the event, after Montreal in 2000.

So the Three Rivers metropole is to be a model for a global recovery? The post-recessionary world better pick up a Stanley Cup winner and Super Bowl champion along the way. Because we all know how much the President likes his sports.

On the way home today, I saw a man sitting in a train seat, finishing off a bag of popcorn. Once he was done, he reached into his backpack, took out a little bottle of Purell, and proceeded to bathe his hands with the alcohol-based sanitizer for several seconds. Once finished, he replaced the bottle into his backpack and placed his hands in his lap.

Looking at this, I thought: This idiot actually thinks he just accomplished something.

Because hand sanitizers don’t work like that. If you need to get rid of dirt, grease, grime, and other visible soiling, a germ-killing sanitizer doesn’t do squat — it doesn’t dissolve the gritty residue. The germs from said soiling might be dead, but you’re still carrying the crud, and smearing it onto anything that comes into contact with your hands. Bottom line, you’re basically just as dirty — and a bit of slob, to boot.

On a basic, common-sense level, you’d have to be kinda stupid to not understand the principle behind this. But I’m sure that germophobic paranoia being as irrational as it is, lots of people simply don’t make the connection. Like my fellow passenger, who probably marked everything from his pants to his face with popcorn grease with this “clean” hands — all because he’s too lazy/clueless to find some soap and water.

I’m currently working with a team to reform and reorganize the internal search engine of a prominent telecom website. It involves a lot of squinting at myriad keywords, custom responses, and rankings.

Yes, it is quickly devolving from a search optimization project to a search and destroy mission. Not necessarily in the military sense, but in the digital slashing-and-burning of content sense. There’s some satisfaction in the exercise, despite the drowning feeling.

This orange-and-red hued mechanical man looks even more retro-licious when enlarged and stretched out to cover a computer screen desktop background, which is what I just did. I usually go for a background image with blue/black and other dark colors, keeping in mind the visual legibility for the icons residing there. But I came across this piece, liked the look of it (decidedly Rock’em Sock’em Robots reminiscent), and decided I could use a different color spectrum to burn into my retinas for several hours per day.

The original artwork is called “Robot, Fire!” by Sean Tubridy. It’s at least four years old, according to the Flickr upload stamp. It’s aged well.

Strip away the hot-button talking points on one side, and the lyrical beats on the other, and the remaining rhetoric makes right-wing talk radio and gangsta rap look like separated-at-birth twins:

Even beyond simple matters of style, rap and conservative talk radio share some DNA. Once you subtract gangsta rap’s enthusiasm for lawlessness — a major subtraction, to be sure — rap is among the most conservative genres of pop music. It exalts capitalism and entrepreneurship with a brio that is typically considered Republican. (Admiring references to Bill Gates are common in hip-hop.)

Rappers tend to be fans of the Second Amendment, though they rarely frame their affection for guns in constitutional terms. And rap has an opinion about human nature that is deeply conservative — namely, that criminals cannot be reformed. The difference is that gangsta rappers often identify themselves as the criminals, and are proud of their unreformability.

Finally, rappers and conservative talkers both speak for a demographic that believes its interests and problems have been slighted and both offer stories that have allegedly been ignored.

The key ingredients to success in both camps are: Ego, Haters, Feuds, and (of course) Verbal Skills. The possessed proportions of each determine the specific flavor of a host’s, or rapper’s, cred. So in this cross-media analogy, Rush Limbaugh is to Jay-Z just as Michael Savage is to Eminem.

Intriguing as this distillation of media methodology is, it all goes a long way toward justifying my blanket avoidance of all forms of radio…

Because keyboards and keypads are so ubiquitous in everyday communication, schools are steadily abandoning penmanship lessons in cursive writing:

“We need to make sure they’ll be ready for what’s going to happen in 2020 or 2030,” said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting.

That’s nonsensical justification, of course. Modern curriculum doesn’t even begin to anticipate what students will need to know for 2030; there’s a good chance that computing devices by then won’t even remotely resemble the current keyboard-input beasts. It’s the same old story: Schools are test-prepping instead of actually educating, and eliminating anything that you can’t deliver via computer is the path of least resistance.

Not that I’m all hung up on preserving the art of cursive script. It would be nice if everyone were still versed in it, but if not, we’ll adapt. General handwriting styles evolve over decades and centuries; it’s not the first time that a mode of expression has died out.

It’s curious that this AP article doesn’t address one critical consequence of this trend, considering it opened with it as an illustrative example:

Charleston [West Virginia] resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader’s signature.

“I just assumed she knew how to do it, but I have a piece of paper with her signature on it and it looks like a little kid’s signature,” Davis said.

Her daughter was apologetic, but explained that she hadn’t been required to make the graceful loops and joined letters of cursive writing in years.

This implies that tons of young adults are incapable of signing a check, or any official document, with an adult-looking signature. No word on how this is supposed to be rectified in the short-term; longer-term, I assume such inked signatures will simply die out in favor of officially-sanctioned electronic/biometric signatures. Or the old hillbilly-illiterate “X”-mark will come back into vogue…

As New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg runs for re-election, his campaign is going absolutely granular in picking up endorsements:

No demographic is too small.

Latina lawyers? Bloomberg’s got Carmen Pacheco, founder of the first Hispanic female-owned law firm in New York City.

He has backing from a Dominican soccer club, the president of an African cab drivers group, the Korean Nail Salon Association and a biweekly newspaper serving Albanian-Americans with circulation in 46 states.

Also cheering on his bid for a third term — the founder of a nonprofit whose sole purpose is to raise money for a school in Callancas, Peru, along with Juan Rojas Campos, founder of a Mexican restaurant with two locations in Manhattan and one in New Jersey.

Indeed, the complete roll-call of endorsers serves as an extra-lengthy closing boilerplate for Bloomberg’s online press releases. The current version clocks in at 1,815 words, or two-and-a-half standard-sized printed pages.

There is method to this madness:

A new swath of untapped voters is identified — often in communities traditionally overlooked by city mayoral campaigns, like Russian or Korean — then an endorsement comes from a group meaning something to them, in a way that showcases the mayor.

For example, an endorsement from the president of the Korean Produce Association means delis and groceries all over the city get Bloomberg signs along with their daily deliveries of fruit and vegetables.

Campaign manager Bradley Tusk says the attention to niche endorsements is among the most important parts of the Bloomberg strategy.

“It’s a way to get out the message to people you otherwise couldn’t reach through a traditional approach,” he said. “The little stuff that people make fun of is sometimes the most valuable.”

Hey, all I know is that I haven’t been tapped by Bloomy’s spindoctors yet. I’m at least as influential to the electorate as, say, the already-courted Vice President of the United Malian Women’s Association.