Call It What You Want...

Mark went today to play with his good friends Anna, Elijah and Noah. Despite his having talked all morning about going to go see "AHN-na", his visit didn't start well when he was scared by Anna's teensy dog's excited greeting. (Dexter's a Maltese and was happy to see someone to play with. Mark has a long-standing love-hate relationship with Dexter. Today it was hate. Except that later, he did pet the dog. So there.)

We played outside for a while and Mark destroyed his friends' Mommy's pretty flowers she planted, put dirt into the kiddos' swing, and, yes, chased a few soap bubbles too. But we did get a picture at the end of the visit. Mark was not the only tired one. But it looks to me like Anna might just be almost as smitten with him as he is with her.

We're sitting down in the restaurant for dinner, and our small boy is already turned around in his seat, staring at the girl in the booth behind us, smiling at her and trying to get her attention.

Grandma observes his attention and says, "Looks like Brian's already seen the girl."

Only the boy isn't Brian, it's his nephew Mark.

Predictions? Foreshadowing? Slip of the tongue? Who can tell? (But Grandma was a little chagrined.)

In an effort to battle the pervasive Vinson-phone-phobia, Mark had some time on the telephone today. However, instead of just holding it up to his ear and listening with a big smile on his face (feel free to talk at length if you're "on the phone" with him), this time was different.

This time, he was talking to his best buddy, cousin Jonathan. And he talked. And talked. All right, so most of it was saying "La la la la," with Jonathan answering with "La la la" (even though both boys have words now, and Jonathan has full sentences that actually mean something). Mark held the phone up to his ear and babbled with glee. (I had the speaker on so I could hear too.)

When Brian was young, there was a rule that when he and his friend Darrell started making stupid noises on the phone, it was time to hang up. "La la la" was not necessarily high on the comprehensible list for either boy. But they were communicating with each other. And they were happy.

Confuse them.

In a recent piece on NPR's All Things Considered (which I heard on my way home today), I learned of something even might interest the Dunce.

A paper presented at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America is offering a solution to the apparent growing problem of soccer fans chanting racist and anti-Semetic chants at European soccer games (this is an issue with World Cup beginning this week, thank you very much).

In it, the presenter offers his ingenius solution: confuse the chanters by creating an echo effect with the speakers. Record and play back the chants milliseconds, even a half a second, "off" the crowd's chants using recording and speaker systems in the stadium. He likens it to standing next to two people who are chanting at different speeds, and says that it tends to confuse one who is trying to keep up with the crowd by making it hard to tell what the crowd is actually doing.

"What we're doing is using loudspeakers to simulate out-of-synch chanters, people with no sense of rhythm," says the Dutch researcher, Sander van Weingarden (excuse the spelling, kids, I'm transcribing from radio) of the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research.

The best part is the actual solution -- while you suppress the offensive chant, you also try to start a new chant, something less offensive which is also "quite catchy" -- "Implanting a nice chant into the crowd while you're disrupting the offensive ones."

I'm interested to know how it works. Perhaps while the Noblesvillian is basking in European culture in upcoming days he can let me know.

Want to hear the piece? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5450744. It's just the first part of the segment.