Orel Family

Aaron with the winning car When I was 9, I joined Cub Scouts for a year. I don’t remember all that much about it. I started a coin collection as a suggested project. We went to a Yankees game at the old Yankee Stadium, and Bobby Murcer hit two home runs. The den leader showed us a tributary of the Rahway River that ran right through the basement of his house. The other thing I remember was the Pinewood Derby . I had no skill to make a car, and what I remember mostly was painting it. I put it on the kitchen table and spray painted it royal blue. Little dots of royal blue paint remained on the kitchen wall until the day the wallpaper was replaced many years later. But it wasn’t very stable, and my Pinewood Derby career was over after the first race. Aaron is in his 4th year in Scouts. He doesn’t pay much attention to the various achievements and patches, I think the patches have collected in a draw and the achievements have gone mostly unachieved and unattempted. Even the...

7pm this evening Spring finally arrived here last weekend. In March, we briefly considered skipping right by spring and on in to summer, then for most of April we skipped past spring the other way back to winter. The crocuses bloomed early and were eaten by a rabbit the next day. The cherry blossoms nearly bloomed two weeks early, and then nearly froze off the trees. The crocuses, the day before the rabbit ate them Finally, last Friday the temperatures eased over 50, and we were able to get the trees sprayed. This is important, as we prefer our cherries without the worms. Then, on Saturday, spring arrived. I had to be a spectator that first day, as somehow I ended up with some friends at the Corner Bar of the Townsend while very tall former basketball plaers came and went, and some very nice looking woman was telling me how she’d been at the Tigers game that day but they’d lost “in overtime.” So I knew spring had arrived: I was sure she was hitting on me. Sunday was t...

Note: This post originall appeared at http://hollerif.blogspot.com . Market research cited in an article in Monday's New York Times says that users of peer-to-peer downloading networks—BitTorrent, LimeWire, and the like—downloaded ten times more songs than users of "legit" download services like iTunes. More than 5 billion songs were downloaded from P2P source in 2006, as opposed to 509 million legal downloads, said NPD Group, a market research firm. Those numbers didn't ring true to me. Here's my response: I would guess that 10:1 is seriously understated—I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to 100:1. The article doesn't capture how these ratios work out when considering "officially released" content as opposed to "bootleg" content. For example, the torrent site Dimeadozen.org (capped at 100,000 free members) has a strict policy banning any material that is either in official release or likely to become officially released. ...