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Getting to Work Has Just Gotten Tougher

The Capital District Transportation Authority, the bus service for the Albany/Schenectady/Troy, NY area, has instituted a major revamping of its buses in Albany. It’s not just changing a few schedules, it’s dropping some buses and adding others.

For me, taking the bus to church has gotten easier when we have an early service; the first bus is now 8:04 rather than 8:52.

On the other hand, getting to work, starting tomorrow, has gotten a whole lot more difficult. I pretty much laid it out here. There might be one or two other options, but these involve the daughter leaving for school much earlier than has been her habit.

The other fact is that the bus to Corporate Woods won’t be going by my building, but rather I have to walk down this curvy road in the morning, and, worse, walk up this curvy road, where vehicles go terribly fast, at night, with no sidewalk; when it’s been snowing, that’s potentially dangerous, especially the way the Brinks trucks barrel down that road.

Something else: CDTA has gotten rid of some of the bus stops in order to increase fuel efficiency. One of them is about 20 feet from our front porch. I’ll miss it for nostalgic reasons. When I was taking the Daughter to preschool, we would often run to the stop just ahead of the bus a block away.

Unhappy Valley

It’s POWER, and the peculiar notion that “we can look the other way because of the rightness of our cause.”

As you may know, Joe Paterno, coach of the Penn State University football team for 46 years, was fired this week, along with the university president, Graham Spanier. Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky…has been indicted on charges of sexually abusing eight boys over 15 years… Paterno, who, reportedly, was specifically told of one terrible incident, and mentioned it to university authorities without any follow-up, had been revered on the campus. The football program had been a model of a “clean” program. If you have the stomach for it, check out the grand jury indictment against Sandusky [PDF], which, as the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office noted, “details a disturbing pattern of sexual assaults on young boys, all of whom Sandusky met through his involvement in the charitable organization known as The Second Mile – an organization that Sandusky himself founded.”

It was clear to me early on that Paterno had to go, preferably before this weekend’s home game; he is the face of PSU. It’s peculiar to me, though, how people who don’t follow sports are blaming the influence of sports in society for this debacle. It’s not just sports per se, or religion (see: the sex coverups THERE) or politics. It’s POWER, and the peculiar notion that “we can look the other way because of the rightness of our cause.” As this ESPN article notes: “Joe Paterno and Penn State officials were faced with a critical choice about damning information and chose to protect the program. This is what power has become. This is what power has always been.”

So the following morning, my wife tells me that the students are rioting because Paterno got fired. Surely she’s mistaken; maybe they were rioting as a result of the outrage over the stain to their community. Nope, she was right, although, in the light of day, some students have been wearing pins in support of the victims of the alleged crime.

For a greater understanding of the complexities of this case, I recommend the two articles cited here.

World Pneumonia Day – November 12, 2011

Save the Children received a grade of A in the December 2011 Charity Rating Guide & Watchdog Report.

I knew instinctively that childhood pneumonia deaths, once too common, are now very rare in the US. I’ve been told that they have decreased almost 99% since 1939, thanks to the discovery and availability of effective medications. But children from developing countries aren’t so lucky. Each year 1.4 million children under 5 die from pneumonia – more than any other cause. More than from AIDS, malaria, and measles combined!

Here’s a short Mission: Pneumonia Quiz. Better yet, go to the World Pneumonia Day page to watch a video and read a personal story of how pneumonia affected one family.

This event is sponsored by Save the Children, which, not so incidentally, received a grade of A in the December 2011 Charity Rating Guide & Watchdog Report from CharityWatch, formerly the American Institute of Philanthropy (AIP); I’m a member of CW, and I checked its database to verify that indeed STC’s cost to raise $100 is only $10, quite low as these things are calculated. Moreover, they have an “open book” policy when it comes to finances. The 2011 Save the Children Gift Catalog is now available.

Pneumonia is the world’s leading killer of children, but there are viable solutions. I recently read the Lancet study about how the administration of oral amoxicillin to the children aged 2–59 months in a Pakistan region by community health workers has provided “strong evidence” that the methodology used is likely to “contribute further to a reduction in the number of pneumonia deaths.” That is quite promising news, but it takes resources, money well spent in creating a solution.

Photo credit: In Pakistan’s Haripur district, Lady Health Worker Naseem bibi counts 1-year-old Usama’s breaths, before successfully treating him for pneumonia. A new Lancet study by Save the Children shows that children treated by community health workers at home were more likely to recover from severe pneumonia than those referred to a health facility, the current standard of care. Just ahead of World Pneumonia Day, the study offers new hope for treating the world’s leading child killer in communities where hospitals and doctors are out of reach. Credit: Save the Children

Military Losses

Here’s a weird thing. A friend of a friend of mine had a husband in the military. She (FoF) started making comments on her Facebook page that people should send pictures of her husband so that her children would have mementos by which they would be able to remember him. Oddly, she never actually wrote that he had died.

So I began searching. I discovered that the most comprehensive listing of those who were killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan I could find is provided by MilitaryTimes.com, “honoring those who fought and died in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.”

But, as it turned out, he didn’t die in battle. He was stateside and had committed suicide. Apparently, after a third tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, it was just too much.

From this ABC NEWS story:

The increase in suicide deaths is one of the most distressing issues facing military leaders who want to reduce the rates among active-duty service members. More than 2,000 of them have killed themselves in the past decade [PDF], including 295 last year compared with 153 in 2001.

Despite their best suicide-prevention efforts, reducing the number of military suicides has been a frustrating challenge, military leaders acknowledged [in September 2011] at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C. Recent efforts have included increasing at-risk service members’ access to mental health professionals, while reducing the stigma attached to mental health care. Internet outreach, including “video chats,” has also shown some promise.

The difficulty, however, is in identifying which initiatives work best and deciphering the multiple triggers that can lead to suicide within the armed services, which accounts for a small fraction of the total number of people who serve.

Despite my lack of understanding of the reasons for going to war, I feel real grief over the sheer despair these men and women must have been going through to take their own lives. Here’s hoping that the Telehealth programs now being used by the military can stem the tide of these horrible losses.

Repeating numbers

There will be other repeated phenomena, such as 2/2/22, 3/3/33, which will save us from a total desert of no repeated digits.

Tomorrow is 11/11/11. I’m as fascinated as anyone by this fact. A bunch of people are getting married on that date. Is it that they consider it particularly lucky, or is it that they just want to make sure they don’t forget their anniversaries? Or maybe it’s that it’s a peculiar phenomenon that takes place 12 times at the beginning of the century, then not at all for 88 years, that they wish to embrace.

The movie being released on that date with that name is being directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, Saw III, and Saw IV); to say that I’ll never see it is a gross underexaggeration.

The repeated number phenomenon is much more interesting to me than the sequential system – 09/10/11, e.g. It’s because the latter is not universal. In the United States, that’d be September 10, but in most of the rest of the world, it’s October 9.

Not that I wouldn’t use the sequential if it made sense. My officemate Amelia was pregnant and due on 8 October. So I picked 09 (day)/10 (month)/11 (year) at 12:13 pm. Charlie was born on 9 October 2011, at 12:51 p.m., and I won the office pool. Amelia’s happy because he was born on Jackson Browne’s birthday.

There will be other repeated phenomena, such as 2/2/22, 3/3/33, which will save us from a total desert of no repeated digits.

Let’s look back at the previous repeating digits this century:
01/01/01, a Monday – the beginning of the 21st century, and the third millennium as many needed to point out. We learn that many people cannot spell the word millennium, which has 2 Ns, not 1.
02/02/02, a Saturday – Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, heir to the Dutch throne, marries Máxima Zorreguieta Cerruti in Amsterdam.
03/03/03, a Monday – “third day of the third month of the third year of the third millennium. That’s an awful lot of threes,” as noted here.
04/04/04, a Sunday – According to the Hartford (CT) House of Prayer, “This date is strategic. God raises up prophets to point the direction.”
05/05/05, a Thursday – The Canadian House of Assembly celebrates “the victory that Canadian troops helped make in World War II.”
06/06/06, a Tuesday – A number of sites express concern over occult happenings. Also, If Your Child Is Born on 06-06-06; Christian Parenting Alert!
07/07/07, a Saturday – Conversely, the Magical Qualities of the Number 7 led to perhaps the biggest wedding day ever.
08/08/08, a Friday – The Beijing Summer Olympics began on this date because 8 is lucky in Chinese culture.
09/09/09, a Wednesday – The Beatles’ mono and stereo remasters are released as well as the Beatles on Rock Band.
10/10/10, a Sunday – Yet another significant day.
11/11/11 will be a Friday, of course, and 12/12/12 will be on a Wednesday.