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It has rained all day today, which is remarkable, really.  I would have to guess that we’ve had five inches of rain.  The winds this afternoon have been strong, though not especially steady.  Mostly it’s been rain blowing against the windows, but at about 5:30 this evening I was sitting on the couch and heard a snapping sound behind me.  I found that the wind had broken a small limb on one of my Eastern Red Cedars in the front yard, and knocked down the arbor beneath it.  There’s no serious damage, but my cedar trees are pretty shabby to begin with, so this doesn’t help.  I haven’t looked out back where there are eighteen oaks of assorted varieties, which will use any excuse to jettison limbs, so I might have some unpleasant surprises there.  Meanwhile, I got a text message from the University this afternoon–they have an automated system–saying campus was closed tomorrow.  I am not scheduled on Fridays anyway, but if I were I’d have to go: when you work for a public radio station it matters not if there is rain or snow or sleet or any of that jazz.

I hope everyone is keeping safe.

On my trip to South Carolina I got to listen to a lot of XM Satellite Radio, as the rented Hyundai Sonata had it installed.  It was initially exciting to scroll through over a hundred channels in good sound quality.  But, for me, the excitement quickly wore off and was replaced by disgust, when I realized what a ripoff XM is.

First and foremost, XM has commercials.  I don’t know if they are on every channel, but their talk channels certainly have commercials just like regular AM talk radio.  Second, XM uses annoying DJs like any FM station, who talk over the beginning and end of songs just like crappy FM radio.  I don’t know if it was just the receiver installed in the Hyundai, but the names of songs and artist appeared only briefly at the beginning of each track, and quickly disappeared to make way for the name of the channel.  You could press an “info” button to find the song name again, but that was annoying to do for each song which you didn’t catch the name of in the first three seconds.  The classical channels (of which there were only three) would give the title of a piece and its composer–”Haydn: Sym No. 42″, for instance–but didn’t display the name of the performers, which makes the whole enterprise useless for me.  There are channels devoted to music of the 1950s and 1960s, but both operate like the crappy oldies channels you know and hate, with an extra annoying DJ and that stupid choir that sings something like “good time, great oldies…”.  Plus, the ’50s channel played “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva, which is not a 1950s song at all.  Nor is “Raindrops” by Dee Clark, which they played right after.

This all may seem like small beans, but if I were paying for this service, and found it to be no better than terrestrial radio, I’d be enraged.

So, it occurs to me that I didn’t give a detailed account of the trip to South Carolina since I returned last week, so, here goes.

The Westin hotel at Hilton Head Island is nice enough.  The room was pleasant, with a large, comfortable bed, and a couch near a sliding glass door that opened to a balcony overlooking a courtyard with oak trees and a small pond with a fountain.  To the left was a small circular pool, and slightly obscured by shrubbery was a hot tub.  Beyond still more trees was the main pool, which was constantly in use by the children of guests.  There was a cabana with yellow towels to the right, which guests used both at the pool, and at the beach which was to the left of our room, beyond the dunes.  The beach access was via a boardwalk, and the sand at the end was white and deep, and at the shore a bit grittier, with bits of crushed shells.

We took a long walk the first evening, down the strand to where it curved out of sight to the west.  North of the hotel were private homes, many of which had their own boardwalks over the dunes of sea oats to the beach.  I was surprised by how wooded the beach was, with tall pine trees in several places coming right up to the sand.  I have watched for years as Atlantic hurricanes head invariably toward the Carolina coast.  It would seem, however, that this particular stretch of shore has been spared.  The large beachfront homes had, in many cases, enormous unprotected windows.  I wondered how expensive it would be to ensure these structures.

At a point far to the northeast of the hotel (visible at the bottom left of this satellite image), the shore curves sharply to the north by northwest, and marks the end of the island, and the opening of a channel into the inter-coastal water way.  It was just past that point, at some wooden pilings driven into the sand, that we turned around and headed back to the hotel.

That evening we went to a local shopping center to pick up some supplies to get us through our stay.  I bought Hawaiian Punch, which I love.  That night, and each night thereafter I watched the Olympics on TV, though I was surprised and disappointed by the small low-def television in our room.

The next morning I attempted to begin reading Robinson Crusoe on the deck down by the pool, but the shouting and cavorting of children made it so that I couldn’t concentrate.  The weather in the morning was overcast, and surprisingly cool, so that it felt and looked like Florida in the winter.  Miriam had the afternoon off, so we went exploring the island, stopping first to have lunch at a barbecue place, which was tasty.  Miriam had picked up a map from the concierge desk, and she had an idea to check out an area on the southwest part of the island which supposedly had a lighthouse.  It was terribly disappointing, however, as we found that this was all merely stagecraft.  The “lighthouse” was not a real lighthouse, but just a three or four story round structure built for show above some lame gift shops selling garbage nobody could possibly need.  There were some large yachts in the marina there, and some smaller vessels for hire to wealthy vacationers wanting to fish for sharks.  I say wealthy, because the fees were in the several hundreds of dollars per trip.  Seeing how every structure on the island (except the fake lighthouse) was painted in one of only about three or four drab colors, and how entirely void of culture and imagination this whole place seemed to be, we went back to our hotel bitterly disappointed.  It could not escape my notice that the whole Hilton Head enterprise seemed to rely on a type of caste system, in which every person I saw at leisure was white, and, almost without exception, every servant and laborer was black or Mexican.  Some of the personnel at the front desk of the hotel were white, as was an employee of a bookstore I went to.  But every person doing actual work was a minority, and it depressed me to realize how society there depended upon this social stratification.  That isn’t to say that Oprah or Tiger Woods wouldn’t have been welcomed with open arms.  Rather, what was so depressing to me was the observation that, for many scores of children living in Hilton Head, or visiting regularly, this hierarchy might reinforce the notion that it is the privilege of rich people to have endless leisure, while people of color exist to serve.  I have traveled around the country, and to other parts of the world, even, but never had I seen such a degree of what was referred to in Samuel Johnson’s time as social “subordination”.  As someone who lives in a diverse community, I found this to be shocking, and dispiriting.  Vacation is obviously something that requires a certain amount of disposable income, and for many working poor, there is far less income to be alotted to liesure these days.  But, in spite of its total lack of culture, inspiration and imagination, Hilton Head, South Carolina attracts a far less varied spectrum of society than Walt Disney World.

So, finding there to be only one worthwhile attraction (the beach), and finding the next two days of our stay spoiled by rain, I spent all the remainder of my time either in my room reading, or in the lobby watching the Olympics and drinking delicious lemonade.  I am sorry to say that free lemonade was the best thing about Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Now that HDTV is almost everywhere, standard-definition TV can be seen for what it is: horrible.  Many people, of course, still have standard sets at home, but by now everyone has seen an HDTV in action, and it’s hard not to be impressed.  The Bits blog today discusses how the last four years have really seen the format rise to prominence.  Eric Taub cites the number of hours of HD coverage at the Beijing games versus those held in Athens, and it’s clear that high-def is now standard.

I watched tons of coverage of the Athens games, but I doubt a second of it was in high-def, since I didn’t know anyone at the time with an HD set.  Apparently, in Athens, NBC’s high-def coverage was entirely separate from their network coverage, with different camera angles and announcers.  This year, every second of the games is being broadcast in HD, and the quality is really outstanding if you can see it.  While in South Carolina last week I didn’t have access to an HDTV (which is surprising considering that the much less expensive Hyatt Park Place near O’Hare had a gigantic plasma screen, and this fancy-pants Westin in Hilton Head didn’t), so I had to make do.  But knowing what I was missing made it less enjoyable.

Of course, at the moment, my two year old HDTV is dying a painful death, and is basically unwatchable.  It was the first high-def set I saw for under $500, and since it looked so much better than the standard-def sets that were still the most commonly available at Best Buy at the time, the “Insignia” was what we bought.  But what remorse!  The top third of the picture is about half again as bright as the bottom two thirds, and above a very distracting line across the screen the picture is extraordinarily distorted, so that a round shape (like, say, a human head) is stretched into a long oval, and parallel lines curve inward toward some unseen horizon.  It’s enraging.

So we clearly need a new television, and, obviously, HD is the only way to go.  On one hand, prices for televisions seem astonishingly high compared to a decade ago.  But that may be because in 1998 most people only had a TV of thirty inches or less.  I remember when a thousand dollar TV was automatically a gigantic appliance that took up about ten square feet of floor space.  Now that same thousand dollars will buy you a pretty large flat screen HDTV that may even mount on the wall.  So, while the average American household now probably spends twice what they did a decade ago on their TV sets, they get something much better.

Olympic sports can be divided into two categories: ones which I could not conceive of doing myself (gymnastics, platform diving, etc.), and ones which are more relatable, even though I know I’d never have the skill (archery, rowing, cycling, etc.).  Running is of the latter variety, insofar as I know what it is to run, and even race against another person.  The difference, naturally, lies in the level of talent.  I cannot run a hundred meters in ten seconds.  That is simply incredible.  Olympic track events are, to me, the essence of athleticism.  The footrace is sport in its purest form.  And since I know what it feels like to run, and since I know I couldn’t run a 26 mile marathon in two days–much less two hours–I am in awe of these athletes.