Smooth Jazz, Safety Patrol, Social Media

Smooth Jazz
I was getting ready to turn in for the evening when I recognized a familiar tune, dc Talk’s “In the Light” (without vocals), playing on The Weather Channel’s televised “Local On The 8s” forecast. In the process of searching online to confirm what I had heard, I scored a small personal victory.

For quite awhile, I have associated smooth jazz with The Weather Channel, but I had nothing solid to substantiate my claims that the two were inextricably linked. When I searched online to confirm that I’d heard dc Talk, I discovered that The Weather Channel changes the background music for local forecasts monthly...so I was sort of wrong about smooth jazz always being paired with the local forecast. However, I also discovered that The Weather Channel sells their local forecast music, and two of the four albums are smooth jazz!

I felt validated.

Safety Patrol
When I was in sixth grade I was on safety patrol. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I was Captain of the Safety Patrol, which was quite a coup at my elementary school, considering I’d only joined the Patrol in sixth grade, and the powers-that-were promoted me over some of my upstanding classmates who’d served since fifth grade. As I recall, “Good Ol’ Captain Dave” was not a term of respect, but a form of Safety Patrol slur. Perhaps the sweet, early taste of power and the bitter aftertaste of disillusionment prevented me from thinking circumspectly about the ridiculousness of certain facets of the job...until this morning, when I saw the 2010 Safety Patrol at work.

My duties – when I wasn’t supervising the duties of others – entailed: standing on a street corner near my elementary school; wearing a reflective, bright orange seat belt and a similarly-colored helmet; and reading the “Walk” or “Don’t Walk” sign to my elementary underclassmen. Looking back, I have some reservations about the entire operation:

1. In 2010, gone are the orange seatbelts, replaced by sensible, fluorescent yellow reflective vests. Brilliant. Drivers and elementary underclassmen can now see the Safety Patrol. This is important, because fifth grade is the new sixth grade, and some of these fine young people are rather short. I’m left with the uneasy feeling that, back in the day, Safety Patrol used me as free advertising for the seat belt industry.
2. The helmets we wore in the early 1990s have been replaced by fluorescent yellow hats in 2010. At first blush, this almost seems like a step backward. Cloth hats almost certainly offer less protection than the plastic helmets we wore. Then again, what were they thinking by making us wear helmets? Certainly these were not protective devices. In a head-on collision between a car and a Safety Patrol member, the car wins every time. No, as I think about it, the helmets were functional in two ways: they reinforced our image as nerds, without affording us the dignity of pocket protectors; and they gave our apparently less-than-fully-literate elementary school peers something to knock on as they waited for us to read them the “Walk” or “Don’t Walk” sign...
3. ...which leads me to my next point. Were there really so few elementary scholars hooked on phonics in the early 1990s? Was our sign-reading service truly that vital? It’s been awhile, so I can’t remember for certain, but I think the pictures of walking and standing people, typically in different colors, existed back then.

The 2010 Safety Patrol looked sharp, and I didn’t notice anyone knocking on their fluorescent yellow hats. Here’s to brighter times for the Safety Patrol.

Social Media
Although I could do without the helmets and orange seat belts, part of me wants to go “old school.” News of a study on social media came out yesterday, and the results were fairly sobering. Case Western Reserve School of Medicine’s study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, surveyed 4,257 high school students from an urban county in the Midwest. The findings showed linkage between excessive use of cell phones and social networking among teens, and addictive behaviors.

I once pointed out that I didn’t own a cell phone until I moved to Africa. I joined Facebook in Africa. In Africa, I used these sparingly, and I wrote more. At some point I started thinking in sound bite status updates, and I lost my voice.

The times, they are a-changin’.