An Evening with Garrison Keillor

It's an unfortunate thing when a celebrity performer whom you have come to enjoy fails to meet expectations. Sometimes, it's a bad day. Other times, it's a signal that retirement may be looming.

Garrison Keillor, whose "Prairie Home Companion" NPR radio show delights its listeners and live audiences with humor, music, acting, poetry, and insightful commentaries, came to Hartford's Bushnell Theater last week. I thought it would be a good idea to see him.

What I was expecting, I suppose, was a Prairie Home-type performance.

But it was just Garrison Keillor - no band, no actors, no one to accompany him.

It was sort of like Jerry Seinfeld with no supporting cast.

Keillor was on stage alone, just him and a microphone and a stool.

He sang frequently, and as anyone who has heard him knows, he pretty much can't sing. Audiences tolerate his singing because his shows usually consist of much more. He told stories, which he is very good at. But on this night, he was forgetful - a warning sign that, maybe, just maybe, his age (67) and health condition (he suffered a mild stroke in the fall) are catching up with him.

At one point, he referred to a poem by ee cummings but forgot its name. ("You know the one" he told the audience) Another time, he forgot a word (which I have since forgotten, too) during a story, and then remembered it minutes later.

So it was disappointing to see a subpar performance from a performer who is consistently smart and smooth. I got the sense that "An Evening with Garrison Keillor" is just too much. Being on a stage for 90 minutes with no intermission and no supporting cast is not Keillor's strength. His strengths are the skits he does such as "Guy Noir" Private Eye, The News from Lake Wobegon, and the many other features he has developed into his weekly show.

The audience at the Bushnell, also, was a bit different from his Prairie Home shows at Tanglewood, where we see him each year. Tanglewood is a diverse mix of people, young and old. Kids frolic on the lawn while their parents drink beer. Teenagers find themselves wandering on the Tanglewood grounds, experimenting with certain illegal behavior. Older folks there tend to be hip.

At the Bushnell, the audience was clearly AARP-eligible. The heads around me were mostly gray or bald, and although some gray hairs have emerged on my head, and there isn't as much on my top as there used to be, I felt like I was not a part of the advertised demographic. I felt like I was rushing things, being there at the Bushnell where the mean age of the audience members was probably 20 years older than me. I felt like maybe I needed to find a performance more my age.

A comforting thing did occur today, though, when, on the way home, I tuned into my car radio and listened this week's Prairie Home Companion, and it was good. Garrison Keillor's usual skits and familiar delivery were unsurprising but warm and comfortable, sort of like a meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Normally, I'm not a fan of such bland diner food, but after listening to Keillor's monologue today, I felt encouraged that he still had his A game for the Prairie Home program.

Thinking Snow Day

Unlike some other educators (who are lying), I will not deny that snow days are a fringe benefit to teaching that I enjoy a lot. Teachers don't get company stock options; we don't get company cars; we don't have expense accounts. But we do have the occasional thrill in the winter of getting a day off because of snowy or icy weather.

Tomorrow is one such day - the first possible weather problem during a school day this year. As a teacher, when winter arrives, you start to watch the weather in advance. Suddenly, the 8-day forecast matters (even though predicting weather that far in advance is ludicrous). I listen to "traffic and weather together" on AM radio, which has generally reliable forecasts. I check it online. I look at the radar. Where's the green? Where's the white? I tune into the Weather Channel for a national perspective. Maybe the "Winter Weather Expert", the bald guy with the doctorate, will be on.

Valid question: What does the winter weather expert do during the other three seasons?

Snow days mean days are added to the end of the school year, but June days, especially at the end of the month, tend to be irrelevant. An unexpected day off in December, January or February is a welcome surprise, sort of like getting a card in the mail with cash in it for no reason. (Note: This rarely has ever happened to me.)

Tomorrow's weather is not looking that horrible; there's probably a better chance that school will be delayed 90 minutes. The weatherguys are calling for 1-3 inches of snow, with all precipitation changing to rain in mid-morning. Still, the roads could be difficult to travel on. The snow/sleet mix is falling at precisely the right time - 3 to 7 a.m. Either way, delay or cancellation, what other job exists that has snow days built in as a possible benefit? On snow days, I get to shovel the driveway before anyone else, play in the snow with the kids, go sledding, and hang around the house NOT WORKING. It's a beautiful thing.

As I prepare to watch the final weather forecast of the night, I hear the weatherman talking about a "messy weather day" tomorrow. When he finishes, I need to decide: Do I listen to another forecast, the 11 p.m. one, to see if anything different/better gets reported? This does sometimes happen. You listen/watch to who tells you what you want to hear.

This is also a good strategy for choosing friends, now that I think about it.

Right now, this guy's saying the morning commutte is not looking very good. That's when buses are on the road. Sounds good to me. Don't think I need to listen to another forecast tonight.

Out of touch with the American Music Awards

In yet another sign that my age is not the primary target demographic of advertisers, popular culture, and now music, I watched the American Music Awards tonight and failed to recognize three of the four award-winners featured in a half-hour time frame.

The ones that I did recognize were: Whitney Houston, who received the International Music Award, for her lifelong impact on the music industry. It was pointed out that she has had 7 number one hits and has sold 170 million records. Many of these were from the 1980s, when she sang such hits as "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" and "How Will I Know?" She is now old enough to receive a lifetime achievement-type award, and, although she may have have "work" done to not appear as if she's aging, she has gotta be in her early 40s. She is no spring chicken.

Jennifer Lopez was the other singer I recognized. She was introduced by the "Let's Get Ready to Rumble" boxing announcer and then she pranced down an aisle to a makeshift stage wearing a boxing robe. She sang a song that had something to do with this boxing theme, but I can't remember its name. It was pretty bad, and I felt strange for knowing who she was, but not being able to name a song she sings. I'm making her connection mostly through Ben Affleck.

I could not recognize most other nominees and performers. One woman, who was dressed oddly in a panty hose-like outfit (even covering her eyes)took a microphone stand, simulated breaking glass and then played a piano that was partly on fire. She performed and then was nominated for the Best Artist award. I would be really concerned if she won.

Special effects seemed to be loom large on this night, as other performers, including J Lo, featured explosives on stage. The audience seemed to like it. I wonder if the TV audience did.

I don't remember, really, specifics about the American Music Awards when I was a kid, but I think Kenny Rogers and Neil Diamond may have won some awards. A few years ago, James Taylor won an award, I think, for being old. I recall John Mayer winning an award several years ago, too, for "Your Body is a Wonderland." (Almost typed "Wonderful," there.)

It's weird, though. I listen to top 40 radio pretty often and know bands' names, yet the bands featured tonight were... I don't know... not from top 40. Maybe they're from the rap/dance station genre. Not into that anymore. Stations I listen to which say they're oldies now play 80s music, which is old, but not that old. This is discouraging.

Kings of Leon - who I have heard of and like - was up for Artist of the Year, along with the psycho-looking woman performer. But, again, three of the four nominees were unknown to me. Not like I matter, anyway. I'm 36, nearly 37, and getting to the almost middle age part of life. Advertisements, like for iPhones and TMobile, the sponsor of tonight's event, aren't meant for me. People in my age bracket are just not that influential.

Now, when I watch the Nightly News, and the ads for cholesterol medications come on... now that's closer to my reality. Sadly.

Leaf-blowing blows

The leaves, except for just a few stubborn ones, have fallen, now. They have fallen across the back and front yards, blanketing most of my property. Since we own over an acre and live on a heavily wooded lot, last year we decided that it was time to stop raking and get a leaf blower. This was, mostly, a good idea.

But leaf blowing still sucks.

It has consumed large fragments of my time for the last three weeks. An hour after work, 45 minutes on a Saturday morning, an hour and a half on a Sunday. This weekend, I probably spent about three hours in all blowing leaves into the woods, and I'm still not done.

I will admit that blowing the leaves is definitely easier than raking them. We have just too many to rake. A few weeks ago, though, when I was trying to start the leaf blower, I pulled the starter string too vigorously, I guess, and the string wouldn't recoil. Thus, I ended up raking the front yard. Now, after a $45 repair, the leaf blower is back in action.

We probably have another half day to clean the leaves up. Then, I get to mow the lawn one last time, vacuuming the remnants of autumn, before winter drops its own coating upon the lawn and the driveway.

What do I think of snowblowing, you ask? I will not get into that right now, but you can read an older post here.

Public radio fundraising and touchless paper towel dispensers

Two things that irritate me.

First, public radio fundraising drives. It's not that I wouldn't possibly give money to NPR or Connecticut Public Radio or public television. It's the approach that the broadcasters have during these annoying "pledge campaigns." - especially on TV, but on radio, too. They try to make you feel guilty if you don't give. Like you are actually stealing the content.

If public radio/TV wants to raise more money, they need to stop this approach. It's actually a negative campaign. Public radio, like all of radio, has advertising, but in the form of sponsors, grants, foundation support, and corporate donations. I have read recently that public media is doing well financially, although they claim to rely on money from private individuals to run their operations. If they want more people to consider giving, mail them some information. That's the only way I'd consider it. I'm not going to call in a pledge.

One trick that makes me feel better about this is when I know NPR is looking for money, I quickly switch the station just as the announcer comes on, cutting him off in mid-sentence. It is strangely satisfying.

Second thing: Touchless paper towel dispensers, now commonplace in restaurant bathrooms. In an effort to save paper (and money), these dispensers only give about 6inches of paper towel. Then you have to wave your hand in front of it to get more. This practice may actually be more annoying than public broadcasting fundraisers.

I don't know how much money this saves businesses, but I hate being restricted about how many paper towels I use. (I do tend to take a lot.) So, now, because I feel the restaurant is unnecessarily controlling me, I just hold my hand in front of the dispenser and take far more than I truly need.

When there are two dispensers side by side, I hold my hand in front of both of them. I suggest that you also do this, just to be a pain.

Sometimes, you need these little passive-aggressive behaviors to help you to cope with daily annoyances.

Pedro pitching still a spectacle

Now-Phillies pitcher Pedro Martinez, once a Cy Young-award winning pitcher for the Red Sox who struck out more than 300 batters twice in his career, took the loss last night, pitching against the Yankees in the World Series.

His line was: 6 innings pitched, 6 hits, 3 earned runs, 2 walks, 8 strikeouts.

Not bad for a 38-year-old who is about 8 years past his prime.

The Phillies lost 3-1 last night in Game 2 of the World Series, evening the series, 1to 1. It would have been sweet to see Pedro lead his team to a 2-0 series lead, but the Yankees had a bit too much power. The Phillies, meanwhile, could not hit AJ Burnett.

But Pedro still pitched really well. He gave up two home runs, but he had good command of his pitches, striking out 8 while walking 2.

One thing that's changed about Pedro over the years is his velocity. Last night, he topped out at 89 mph, from what I saw. In his heyday, Pedro routinely hit 93-95 mph. The speed decrease is a big difference because it affects his offspeed pitches. Pedro's changeups used to be 85 mph. Now, they're about 75 mph. Even Derek Jeter, who NEVER pulls the ball, last night smacked a double to left field. He was way out in front of the pitch, which is rare.

Pedro's pitches still have good movement, and because he's such a smart pitcher, he can accumulate strikeouts. He knows what to pitch when.

When he pitched for the Red Sox, he was magical. Dominant. Hitters could not successfully guess what he was throwing. They could not keep up with his fastball. And even if they could hit his fastball, it had such movement that it didn't seem fair. His placement of the ball, on the outside corner of the plate, was unbelievably accurate. For a period of years, he was in the zone. And the Red Sox were the lucky beneficiary of his superior performance.

Watching him last night brought back some memories from his mid-90s form. He fooled a bunch of batters throughout the night. He was in control. It was almost the Pedro of old. He hit the outside corner of the plate, granted at velocity in the uper 80s, regularly.

It was a shame that Pedro had to lose, but it was also a testament to the strength of the Yankees. The Phillies needed to get run support. And it didn't happen. I wonder if Pedro will get another chance this postseason.

Hope for a White-Collar Criminal

After a great hike today at Mt. Tom in Litchfield, we were famished and needed to eat. Since all we had were Twizzlers and kid fruit snacks, we stopped in the village and ate at a very good, very unpretentious little Italian joint, DiFranco's, on West Street.

(I do have to admit that I salivated while passing by the West Street Grill, one of Connecticut's finest and most critically acclaimed restaurants. I've had some of my best meals - although worst service - there.)

So we're set to leave, get the kids packed in the car and I notice a guy who looks familiar. Dressed in a blue Polo sweater, wearing sunglasses, the man had a recognizable profile. I turned to my wife and said, "Look, John Rowland."

He was going into the West Street Grill, for a late lunch.

He looked sharp. Well groomed. Cool as the days when he was governor.

Rowland resigned from office in 2004 in the midst of a corruption investigation and he later served 10 months in federal prison.

He has, however, returned to the public arena. In 2008, he was hired by Waterbury's mayor as the city's economic development coordinator. The position pays him $95,000.

I don't think about criminals much, and white-collar criminals obviously are different than violent criminals. They are more suave and savvy, more connected, and better educated. They're also generally nonviolent.

So it shouldn't have surprised me to see Rowland in Litchfield center, in front of a posh restaurant (while I was at the cheap place down the street!). But to see the man who had been through the ringer, prison time, and an intense media storm, resurface and succeed is pretty remarkable.

I mean, he served his time, and he's allegedly trying to counsel others and speak publicly of his failures in order to help others. There has been a mild uproar about the fact that he's a public employee again, and earning a generous salary, too.

But as much as I wanted to say, "Hey! This isn't right! Rowland's a criminal!", he doesn't deserve that. Although he was definitely shady in the way he conducted business as governor, awarding state contracts to friends, receiving free home improvements, including the infamous hot tub on Bantam Lake, which is in Litchfield, he's human. He seems to have realized and learned from his mistakes.

I would imagine that Rowland will one day rise up through the ranks again, and he at some point will earn more than $95,000. He will one day be bigger than Waterbury's economic development director.

But in the meantime, he seemed pretty content eating lunch on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Litchfield, earning a decent living, and perhaps pondering his next step.

Marathon Deaths

Officials claim it was a fluke that three people (a 26-year-old half-marathon runner, and a 36-year-old and 65-year-old) running in yesterday's Detroit Marathon died. All three people, all men, were reportedly experienced runners.

What doesn't seem to be in question is that running a marathon puts the heart in extreme stress and that research shows this can be the equivalent of having a mild heart attack.

Statistically, according to www.livescience.com, somewhere between 1-in-50,000 and 1-in-75,000 people who finish a marathon will die from it. So three deaths at an event with 19,000 registered runners is higher than normal but not considered off the charts.

But the event has spawned questions about how running such a long distance can affect the heart.

Running a marathon can trigger heart attacks because the increased exertion raises a person's heart rate, which boosts the heart's blood demand, according to livescience.com. If there is any blockage to the arteries, they can't accommodate this increase in blood flow, and the heart can't get enough blood, causing a heart attack.

Officials question whether those who die running a marathon may have an underlying heart condition.

The New York Times recently examined the subject of marathon running and its connection to an elevated heart risk. A number of studies showed that after running a marathon, blood markers of heart damage were elevated. In one study, runners who finished a marathon had blood profiles "similar to those in a very mild heart attack.”

It was noted that those who train properly for marathon running are less likely to have a heart problem, although one study contradicted that finding.

The idea, perhaps, is to use common sense.

"In the long run it's more dangerous to be sedentary than it is to be regularly physically active," a University of Minnesota doctor said. "It's people who don’t do anything except walk to the refrigerator who are the ones that are at the most risk [of heart disease]."

If you read message boards and blog posts, "health running" stops at 8 to 10k. After that, it's about "heart" and "ego", according to one blogger.

On the need for older actors

Once upon a time, older actors could get a job on television, and they played key roles in notable shows.

I'm thinking back to the 80s and 70s here, but shows such as "Newhart", featuring Bob Newhart, "All in the Family" (featuring Carroll O'Connor), "Sanford and Son", (Redd Foxx), and "St. Elsewhere" (a number of older actors, including Ed Flanders) are a few examples of shows that included actors older than 50, or in some cases, 60. "Coach" on "Cheers" was a senior citizen, the landlords on "Three's Company" (Mr. Roper and Furley) were both old men.

Even older women actresses were once almost en vogue. Consider "Maude", "The Golden Girls." I'm not saying either of these programs were very good, but at one time older actresses had a possibility of landing a job on a big network show.

Older actors don't seem to have as good as shot anymore. Many of today's primetime actors are not even actors - they're on reality shows, so they're amateurs. But even the real actors are mostly young. There are a few older actors on "The Office", which I like, but you would be hard-pressed to find actors over 50 on most shows. I think this is because the coveted demographics are young - from 25 to 44 years old. Trends, they say, start with the young. And young people are not thought to like watching older people. They want to watch people like themselves.

And when developing programs, it is all about ratings and advertising revenue. Not the quality of the writing, the actors, or the show itself.

Older actors can add an element of maturity and credibility, I believe. The world is not just young. Many older people, like my parents for instance, watch A LOT of TV, much more than me. It is often difficult to find a younger person who comes off as someone who you can learn something from. It is different with older actors. They've been around.

Older actors can also be funny, as in Ray Romano's parents in "Everybody Loves Raymond." I didn't like that show when it was on, I especially didn't like Ray Romano, but his parents were very funny. "Seinfeld", a great show regardless, also featured Jerry's and George's parents, which added a funny intergenerational dynamic.

Hospital shows, in particular, need older actors. In "House", though, House, the doctor is not old enough. I don't recall seeing a seasoned older doctor in Grey's Anatomy, or any of the new hospital dramas. In these hospitals, it seems, the only doctors are young, attractive, and struggling with self-identity. An exception was "Scrubs", which featured a few older docs, including Ken Jenkins who played Doctor Kelso hilariously.

With a lot of television programming in the toilet, network executives need to consider older actors. Plenty are out there, waiting for work. Older actors will make for better programming and add a much-needed ingredient to a program's plot, something that is sorely missing from most contemporary shows today.

Eating a real dinner

When you have kids who are four and two, you can try to eat what you once did, meals that are good and full of taste, food that you want to eat yourself and is not processed, but sometimes you fail.

Last night was one example. We picked up a sirloin steak and made broccoli rabe and stuffed clams, sort of like a surf and turf and vegetable. (And red wine.) A decent meal. I was personally looking forward to it, and so was Claudine. I seasoned the steak, grilled it, and everything came together quite well.

I cut the steak into tiny kid pieces, even chopped up the broccoli rabe so it wasn't too large. The stuffed clams, I thought, would go over well with the kids because it was mostly stuffing.

But they were having none of it. We ended up breaking out bread and butter and yogurt (always good to have on hand). We were nearly prepared to pour them a bowl of Froot Loops.

Feeding kids is a funny thing. You want them to eat what you're serving and not have to be a short order cook for them. But this was one case when the food that we thought was good was evidently not good in their minds.

Of course, after they picked at the dinner, ate bread and butter and yogurt, they still wanted dessert. We balked at that request until they ate more steak. Ten minutes after everyone had finished, our son returned to the table, asking for spicy mustard and barbeque sauce in which to dip his steak. He wanted brownies.

Tonight, interestingly, we had a crappy dinner. Claudine went out, so I threw together random foods from the freezer, cabinet, and refrigerator. We had: green beans (Whole Foods, organic, loaded with butter and salt), Stove Top stuffing, Crinkle Cut French Fries, and Boar's Hoad deli rosemary ham. It was edible, but not steak with broccoli rabe.

The kids' verdict on tonight's dinner? They cleared their plates.

WalMart Nation

Although the town in which I live is small and relatively rural, there are 11 WalMarts located within 20 miles from my house, according to the company's website. This is not counting Sam's Club, which is owned by WalMart.

The proliferation of WalMarts is what I consider to be one of the fundamental problems with America - a megacorporation that, although it provides jobs, the jobs it provides are low-paying positions that famously do not always feature affordable health care benefits. True, store prices are low, but this of course is due to the massive inventories in each store and the ease with which each store sells its products. Why? Because everything is cheap.

It is also at the expense of better, customer-friendly, locally owned stores that once existed along the main streets of America, places where someone could find home and garden goods, clothes, or electronic products and you could actually get an accurate answer about the product from an employee. Sadly, this is rarely the case at WalMart, where, unfortunately, many people who work there are doing so to survive. If you check the website featured on the link above, it shows that many WalMart employees collect welfare.

A story in the New York Times today echoed WalMart's influence on our country. Those who responded to a poll said that WalMart is the "best corporate symbol of America."

This is a sad statement about our country. Although some planning and zoning boards get downright giddy to approve a WalMart in their town, mostly for the sake of collecting property taxes, it's unfortunate that communities cannot create better ways for owners of smaller, local businesses, which would sell the same things as WalMart, to open and thrive.

At least there is this hope to hold on to: At one point, Caldor's, Bradlees, KMarts, Zayre's and Ames were department stores that dominated the landscape. WalMarts, too, one day will crash and die, like the rest.

On the need for a padded room

Just about each day, someone in our house - one of our kids, specifically - hits his/her head, usually on the floor, a wall, or a piece of furniture. This is typical for little kids, I know, and it's amazing, actually, how quickly they usually recover. I know if it were my head getting smashed against the floor, I'd be hurting and miserable. The kids usually cry for about three minutes, although it seems longer, and then they're seemingly fine.

Having a 4 and 2 year-old means we're not out of the woods yet. Thus, the padded room idea. I don't think it would be difficult to create - we'd just need to clear the existing furniture out of a room, get some huge pads like the kind you find in gyms and bolt them into the wall. I think I could market this. How many parents of little kids would love to be able to not worry about their kids hurting each other, or getting hurt, by, for example, the corner of a wooden piece of furniture, for at least a little while? These padded rooms would have nothing in them, except, perhaps, Nerf balls and balloons. In other words, things that kids can't hurt themselves with.

When you're a parent of a preschooler and/or toddler, a lot of time is spent trying to help your children avert a disaster of some sort. Just today, my wife and I held onto our kids so they wouldn't fall out of a trailer, pulled by a tractor, at a local apple orchard. Then, when we went back to the orchard "store", we practically had to threaten our kids and coerce them to hold our hands so they wouldn't run out in front of cars in the parking lot. On the way home, we stop at a playground and pray our kids won't fall off a high platform with an open side. We get home, and they jump on the couch, then later on their beds. They also have taken an interest lately in playing on the stairs.

This is the way it is with young kids, I guess. Sometimes, I force myself to just let them be. I can't prevent every fall. The falls they have that seem terrible mostly end up uneventful. The minor ones leave lasting bruises. We're still trying to figure out when to step in and hold their hands and when to let them remain on their own.

Although we probably won't figure this out anytime soon, a padded room sure would help.

How We're Influenced By Others

Really excellent article in the New York Times Magazine tomorrow about the impacts of, essentially, hanging around with certain people. It affects peoples' health, happiness, and other things. Social contagion, this thing is called.

September 13, 2009
Is Happiness Catching?

By CLIVE THOMPSON

EILEEN BELLOLI KEEPS very good track of her friends. Belloli, who is 74, was born in Framingham, Mass., which is where she met her future husband, Joseph, when they were both toddlers. (“I tripped her and made her cry,” recalls Joseph, a laconic and beanpole-tall 76-year-old.) The Bellolis never left Framingham, a comfortable, middle-class town 25 miles west of Boston — he became a carpenter and, later, a state industrial-safety official; and after raising four children, she taught biology at a middle school. Many of her friends from grade school never left Framingham, either, so after 60 years, she still sees a half dozen of them every six weeks.

I visited the Bellolis at their home in Framingham last month, and when I asked Eileen about her old friends, she jumped up from her rose-colored rocking chair, ran to her cabinet and pulled down a binder filled with class photos and pictures from her school reunions. Every five years, she told me, she helps organize a reunion, and each time they manage to collect a group of about 30 students she has known since elementary and junior high school. She opened the binder and flipped through the pictures, each one carefully laminated, with a label on the back listing each classmate’s name. “I’m a Type A personality,” she said.

As I leafed through the binder, I could see that the Bellolis and their friends stayed in very good health over the years. As they aged, they mostly remained trim, even as many other Framingham residents succumbed to obesity. The fattening of America annoys Eileen — “people are becoming more and more accustomed to not taking responsibility for their actions,” she said — and she particularly prides herself on remaining active. Almost every day she does a three-mile circuit inside the local mall with her husband and a cluster of friends, though she speed walks so rapidly that some gripe about her breakneck pace. Her one vice used to be smoking, usually right after her teaching day ended. “I would take myself to Friendly’s with a book, and I would sit there and have two cups of coffee and two cigarettes,” she said. At the time, her cigarette habit didn’t seem like a problem; most of her friends also smoked socially. But in the late 1980s, a few of them began to quit, and pretty soon Eileen felt awkward holding a cigarette off to one side when out at a restaurant. She quit, too, and within a few years nobody she knew smoked anymore.

In the reunion photos, there is only one person who visibly degrades in health as the years pass: a boyish-faced man sporting mutton-chop sideburns. When he was younger, he looked as healthy as the rest of the crowd. But each time he showed up for the reunion, he had grown steadily heavier, until the 2003 photograph, when he looked straightforwardly obese, the only one of his size in the entire picture. Almost uniquely among the crowd, he did not remain friends with his old classmates. His only point of contact was the reunions, which he kept attending until he didn’t show up last year. It turned out he’d died.

The man’s story struck me as particularly relevant because Eileen and Joseph are part of a scientific study that might actually help explain his fate. The Bellolis are participants in the Framingham Heart Study, the nation’s most ambitious project to understand the roots of heart disease. Founded in 1948 by the National Heart Institute, the study has followed more than 15,000 Framingham residents and their descendants, bringing them in to a doctor’s office every four years, on average, for a comprehensive physical. Each time the Bellolis are examined, every aspect of their health is quantified and collected: heart rate, weight, blood levels and more. Over the decades, the Framingham study has yielded a gold mine of information about risk factors for heart disease; it was instrumental, for instance, in identifying the positive role of “good” cholesterol.

But two years ago, a pair of social scientists named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler used the information collected over the years about Joseph and Eileen and several thousand of their neighbors to make an entirely different kind of discovery. By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people. By keeping in close, regular contact with other healthy friends for decades, Eileen and Joseph had quite possibly kept themselves alive and thriving. And by doing precisely the opposite, the lone obese man hadn’t.

FOR DECADES, SOCIOLOGISTS and philosophers have suspected that behaviors can be “contagious.” In the 1930s, the Austrian sociologist Jacob Moreno began to draw sociograms, little maps of who knew whom in friendship or workplace circles, and he discovered that the shape of social connection varied widely from person to person. Some were sociometric “stars,” picked by many others as a friend, while others were “isolates,” virtually friendless. In the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists began to analyze how the shape of a social network could affect people’s behavior; others examined the way information, gossip and opinion flowed through that network. One pioneer was Paul Lazarsfeld, a sociologist at Columbia University, who analyzed how a commercial product became popular; he argued it was a two-step process, in which highly connected people first absorbed the mass-media ads for a product and then mentioned the product to their many friends. (This concept later bloomed in the 1990s and in this decade with the rage for “buzz marketing” — the attempt to identify thought-leaders who would spread the word about a new product virally.) Lazarsfeld also studied how political opinions flowed through friendship circles; he would ask a group of friends to identify the most influential members of their group, then map out how a political view or support for a candidate spread through and around those individuals.

By the 1980s and 1990s, alarmed by the dangers of smoking among young Americans, health care workers began to do the same work on groupings of teenagers to discover exactly how each individual was influenced to pick up the habit. The language of contagion is part of pop culture today, thanks in part to the influence of Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book “The Tipping Point.” It’s now common to speak of social changes as epidemics (like the “obesity epidemic”) and to talk about “superconnectors” who are so promiscuously well linked that they exert an outsize influence in society, ushering trends into existence almost single-handedly.

Yet the truth is, scientists have never successfully demonstrated that this is really how the world works. None of the case studies directly observed the contagion process in action. They were reverse-engineered later, with sociologists or marketers conducting interviews to try to reconstruct who told whom about what — which meant that people were potentially misrecalling how they were influenced or whom they influenced. And these studies focused on small groups of people, a few dozen or a few hundred at most, which meant they didn’t necessarily indicate much about how a contagious notion spread — if indeed it did — among the broad public. Were superconnectors truly important? How many times did someone need to be exposed to a trend or behavior before they “caught” it? Certainly, scientists knew that a person could influence an immediate peer — but could that influence spread further? Despite our pop-cultural faith in social contagion, no one really knew how it worked.

Sociologists began hunting for ongoing, real-life situations in which better data could be found. A 2000 study of dorm mates at Dartmouth College by the economist Bruce Sacerdote found that they appeared to infect each other with good and bad study habits — such that a roommate with a high grade-point average would drag upward the G.P.A. of his lower-scoring roommate, and vice versa. A 2006 Princeton study found that having babies appeared to be contagious: if your sibling has a child, you’re 15 percent more likely to have one yourself in the next two years. These were tantalizing findings, but again, each was too narrow to really indicate whether and how the effect worked in the mass public. What was needed was something more ambitious, some way of mapping out the links between thousands of real-life people for years — decades, even — to see whether, and how, behaviors spread.

NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS BEGAN taking a new look at this question in 2000 after an experience visiting terminally ill patients in the working-class neighborhoods of Chicago. Christakis is a medical doctor and sociologist at Harvard; back then, he was posted at the University of Chicago and, at the age of 38, he had made a name for himself studying the “widowhood effect,” the well-known propensity of spouses to die soon after their partners’ deaths. One of his patients was a terminally ill elderly woman with dementia who lived with her daughter as her main caregiver. The daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother for months; the daughter’s husband, in turn, was becoming ill from coping with his wife’s extreme stress. One night after visiting the dying mother, Christakis arrived back at his office and got a phone call from a friend of the husband, asking for help, explaining that he, too, was feeling overwhelmed by the situation. The mother’s sickness had, in effect, spread outward “across three degrees of separation,” Christakis told me. “This illness affects the daughter, who spreads to the husband, who spreads to the friend, the guy who calls me up,” he added. He began talking to colleagues, wondering how he could further study the phenomenon.

In 2002, a common friend introduced him to James Fowler, at the time a Harvard political-science graduate student. Fowler was researching the question of whether the decision to vote in elections could spread virally from one person to another. Christakis and Fowler agreed that social contagion was an important area of inquiry and decided the only way to settle the many unanswered questions surrounding it was to find or compile a huge data set, one that tracked thousands of people. At first, they figured they would mount their own survey. They asked for $25 million from the National Institutes of Health to track 31,000 adults for six years, but the N.I.H. said they had to find some preliminary evidence first. So they went on the hunt for an existing collection of data. They weren’t optimistic. While several large surveys of adult health exist, medical researchers have no tradition of thinking about social networks, so they rarely bother to collect data on who knows whom — which means there’s no way to track whether behaviors are spreading from person to person. Christakis and Fowler examined study after study, discarding each one.

Christakis knew about the Framingham Heart Study and arranged a visit to the town to learn more. The study seemed promising: he knew it had been underway for more than 50 years and had followed more than 15,000 people, spanning three generations, so in theory, at least, it could offer a crucial moving picture. But how to track social connections? During his visit, Christakis asked one of the coordinators of the study how she and her colleagues were able to stay in contact with so many people for so long. What happened if a family moved away? The woman reached under her desk and pulled out a green sheet. It was a form that staff members used to collect information from every participant each time they came in to be examined — and it asked them to list all their family and at least one of their friends. “They asked you, ‘Who is your spouse, who are your children, who are your parents, who are your siblings, where do they live, who is your doctor, where do you work, where do you live, who is a close friend who would know where to find you in four years if we can’t find you?” Christakis said. “And they were writing all this stuff down.” He felt a jolt of excitement: he and Fowler could use these thousands of green forms to manually reconstruct the social ties of Framingham — who knew whom, going back decades.

Over the next few years, Christakis and Fowler managed a team that painstakingly sifted through the records. When they were done, they had a map of how 5,124 subjects were connected, tracing a web of 53,228 ties between friends and family and work colleagues. Next they analyzed the data, beginning with tracking patterns of how and when Framingham residents became obese. Soon they had created an animated diagram of the entire social network, with each resident represented on their computer screens as a dot that grew bigger or smaller as he or she gained or lost weight over 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. When they ran the animation, they could see that obesity broke out in clusters. People weren’t just getting fatter randomly. Groups of people would become obese together, while other groupings would remain slender or even lose weight.

And the social effect appeared to be quite powerful. When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.

“People are connected, and so their health is connected,” Christakis and Fowler concluded when they summarized their findings in a July 2007 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, the first time the prestigious journal published a study of how social networks affect health. Or as Christakis and Fowler put it in “Connected,” their coming book on their findings: “You may not know him personally, but your friend’s husband’s co-worker can make you fat. And your sister’s friend’s boyfriend can make you thin.”

Obesity was only the beginning. Over the next year, the sociologist and the political scientist continued to analyze the Framingham data, finding more and more examples of contagious behavior. Smoking, they discovered, also appeared to spread socially — in fact, a friend taking up smoking increased your chance of lighting up by 36 percent, and if you had a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you were 11 percent more likely to do the same. Drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. They termed this the “three degrees of influence” rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know.

WHEN I FIRST MET Christakis and Fowler last spring, at a downtown Manhattan cafe, they seemed like a living example of their theory: even their conversational style appeared to be contagious, each of them bursting in in the middle of a sentence to complete the other’s thought. Christakis, an intense and jovial man with bristling eyebrows and a booming voice, wore a suit with no tie and sipped a coffee. Fowler, who is 39, looked like a boyish wunderkind, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and a constant broad smile. In the two years since they published their first work, they had become relatively famous and highly controversial. People — and late-night comics — were drawn to a theory that seemed to offer a scientific basis for some exquisitely calculating behavior, like avoiding your friends if they get fat. (Or avoiding your friends merely because some of their friends’ friends gained a couple of pounds.) Newspapers splashed Christakis and Fowler’s obesity findings across front pages, and the study penetrated into corners of the popular culture generally untouched by social-science research. “My favorite was the ‘Cathy’ cartoon,” Fowler told me; in it, Cathy and two friends sit in a restaurant, chatting about the obesity paper; when the waiter comes, each woman points to another and says, “She’ll have a small dry salad and a cup of water.”

Fowler told me their work had inspired him to lose five pounds and to listen to upbeat music before he arrives home from work so he will be in a good mood when he greets his family. “I try to get myself in a mental space where I’ll be happy,” he says. “Because I know that I’m not just having an impact on my son, I’m potentially having an impact on my son’s best friend’s mother.”

But how, exactly, could obesity or happiness spread through so many links? Between one immediate peer and another, some contagious behaviors — like smoking — seem pretty commonsensical. If lots of people around you are smoking, there’s going to be peer pressure for you to start, whereas if nobody’s smoking, you’ll be more likely to stop. But the simple peer-pressure explanation doesn’t work as well with happiness or obesity: we don’t often urge people around us to eat more or implore them to be happier. (In any case, simply telling someone to be happier or unhappier isn’t likely to work.) Instead, Christakis and Fowler hypothesize that these behaviors spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. Scientists have been documenting this phenomenon; for example, experiments have shown that if a person is seated next to someone who’s eating more, he will eat more, too, unwittingly calibrating his sense of what constitutes a normal meal. Christakis and Fowler suspect that as friends around us become heavier, we gradually change our mental picture of what “obese” looks like and give ourselves tacit permission to add pounds. With happiness, the two argue that the contagion may be even more deeply subconscious: the spread of good or bad feelings, they say, might be driven partly by “mirror neurons” in the brain that automatically mimic what we see in the faces of those around us — which is why looking at photographs of smiling people can itself often lift your mood.

“In some sense we can begin to understand human emotions like happiness the way we might study the stampeding of buffalo,” Christakis said. “You don’t ask an individual buffalo, ‘Why are you running to the left?’ The answer is that the whole herd is running to the left. Similarly, you can see pockets of unhappy and happy people clustered in the network. They don’t even know each other necessarily,” but their moods rise and fall together.

The subconscious nature of emotional mirroring might explain one of the more curious findings in their research: If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends. Historically, we have often thought that having a small cluster of tight, long-term friends is crucial to being happy. But Christakis and Fowler found that the happiest people in Framingham were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones.

The reason these people were the happiest, the duo theorize, is that happiness doesn’t come only from having deep, heart-to-heart talks. It also comes from having daily exposure to many small moments of contagious happiness. When you frequently see other people smile — at home, in the street, at your local bar — your spirits are repeatedly affected by your mirroring of their emotional state. Of course, the danger of being highly connected to lots of people is that you’re at risk of encountering many people when they are in bad moods. But Christakis and Fowler say their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness. According to their statistical analysis, each additional happy friend boosts your good cheer by 9 percent, while each additional unhappy friend drags you down by only 7 percent. So by this logic, adding more links to your network should — mathematically — add to your store of happiness. “If you’re at the center of a network, you are going to be more susceptible to anything that spreads through it,” Fowler said. “And if happiness is spreading more reliably, then on average you’re going to be catching happy waves more often than you catch sad waves.”

The Framingham findings also suggest that different contagious behaviors spread in different ways. For example, co-workers did not seem to transmit happiness to one another, while personal friends did. But co-workers did transmit smoking habits; if a person at a small firm stopped smoking, his or her colleagues had a 34 percent better chance of quitting themselves. The difference is based in the nature of workplace relationships, Fowler contends. Smokers at work tend to cluster together outside the building; if one of them stops smoking, it reduces the conviviality of the experience. (If you’re the last smoker outside on a freezing afternoon, your behavior can seem completely ridiculous even to yourself.) But when it comes to happiness, Fowler said, “people are both cooperative and competitive at work. So when one person gets a raise, it might make him happy, but it’ll make other people jealous.”

Obesity had its own quirk: Spouses didn’t appear to have as big an effect on each other as friends. If a male Framingham subject had a male friend who became fat, his risk doubled, but if his wife became obese, his risk was increased by only 37 percent. This, Christakis and Fowler say, is because when it comes to body image, we compare ourselves primarily to people of the same sex (and in the Framingham study, all spouses were of the opposite sex). In fact, different-sexed friends didn’t transmit any obesity to one another at all. If a man became fat, his female friends were completely unaffected, and vice versa. Similarly, siblings of the same sex had a bigger impact on one another’s weight than siblings of the opposite sex.

When it came to drinking, Christakis and Fowler found a different kind of gender effect. Framingham women were considerably more influential than Framingham men. A woman who began drinking heavily increased the heavy-drinking risk of those around her, whereas heavy-drinking men had less effect on other people. Why? In the age of frat-party binge drinking, you might imagine that hard-partying men are the most risky people to be around. But Fowler says he suspects women are more influential precisely because they tend to drink less. When a woman starts drinking heavily, he says, it sends a strong signal to those around her that it’s O.K. to start boozing too.

Christakis and Fowler’s strangest finding is the idea that a behavior can skip links — spreading to a friend of a friend without affecting the person who connects them. If the people in the middle of a chain are somehow passing along a social contagion, it doesn’t make sense, on the face of it, that they wouldn’t be affected, too. The two researchers say they don’t know for sure how the link-jumping works. But they theorize that people may be able to pass along a social signal without themselves acting on it. If your friends at work become obese, even if you don’t gain weight yourself, you might become more accepting of obesity as a normal state — and unconsciously transmit that signal to your family members, who would then feel a sort of permission to gain weight themselves, knowing they wouldn’t face any sort of censure from you.

Christakis and Fowler postulate that our ability to affect people three degrees away from us may have evolutionary roots — and so may the very shape of human social networks. Tribal groups that were tightly connected were likely more able to pass along positive behaviors than those that weren’t. Christakis and Fowler say social contagion could even help explain the existence of altruism: if we can pass on altruism to distant points in a network, it would help explain why altruistic people aren’t simply constantly taken advantage of by other members of their community. Last year, to test this theory, they conducted a laboratory experiment in which participants played a “cooperation game.” Each participant was asked to share a sum of money with a small group and could choose to be either generous or selfish. Christakis and Fowler found that if someone was on the receiving end of a generous exchange, that person would become more generous to the next set of partners — until the entire larger group was infected, as it were, with altruistic behavior, which meant the altruist would benefit indirectly.

CHRISTAKIS AND FOWLER’S work has produced a variety of reactions from other scientists. Many health care experts are thrilled. After years of observing patients, they suspected that behaviors spread socially; now there was data that appeared to prove it. “It was an aha! moment,” James O. Hill, a pioneering obesity researcher at the University of Colorado, Denver, said about the time in 2007 when he read the researchers’ first obesity paper. Tom Valente, the director of the master’s of public health program at the University of Southern California and an early investigator of the role of social networks in smoking behavior, was similarly excited. “The Christakis and Fowler work is fantastic,” he told me. Among public-health practitioners, he said, their theories have “had amazing acceptance.”

But many of those who study networks are more cautious in their reactions. Unlike medical experts, these scientists specialize in the study of networks themselves — anything ranging from neighborhoods linked via the power grid to teenagers linked on Facebook — and they are familiar with the difficulty of ascertaining cause and effect in such complex constructs. As they point out, the Framingham study has found intriguing correlations in people’s behavior. Christakis and Fowler can show what appear to be waves of obesity or smoking moving across the map. But that doesn’t prove social contagion is causing the spread.

There are at least two other possible explanations. One is “homophily,” the tendency of people to gravitate toward others who are like them. People who are gaining weight might well prefer to hang out with others who are also gaining weight, just as people who are happy might seek out others who are happy. The other possible explanation is that the shared environment — and not social contagion — might be causing the people of Framingham to change in groups. If a McDonald’s opens up in a Framingham neighborhood, it could cause a cluster of people living nearby to gain weight or become slightly happier (or sadder, depending on what they think about McDonald’s). The cluster of people would appear as though they are sharing a contagious form of behavior, but it would be an illusion.

Because of the confounding factors, as they are called, of homophily and the environment, many social scientists find themselves caught in an emotional bind when it comes to Christakis and Fowler’s work. As Alex Pentland, former academic head of the M.I.T. Media Lab and an expert in unconscious social signals, told me, “You couldn’t prove what they say, but I happen to believe it.” I heard precisely the same thing from many of Pentland’s peers. They have all long suspected that human behavior is widely contagious; they just don’t think Christakis and Fowler have proved their case.

One of Christakis and Fowler’s most prominent critics is Jason Fletcher, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University. Last year, he and an economist named Ethan Cohen-Cole published two papers arguing that Christakis and Fowler had not successfully stripped out all possible homophily effects from their calculations. Fletcher initially wanted to replicate Christakis and Fowler’s analysis of the data, but he didn’t have access to their source; Christakis and Fowler have not published their network data, arguing that doing so would violate the privacy rights of the participants in the Framingham Heart Study. Faced with that obstacle, Fletcher and his colleague decided instead to test Christakis and Fowler’s mathematical techniques on a different set of data: the Add Health study, a federal-government project that tracked the health of 90,118 students at 144 high schools and middle schools between 1994 and 2002. Among the questionnaires the researchers distributed was one that asked students to list up to 10 of their friends. This allowed Fletcher to build maps of how the friends at each school were linked, school by school, giving them a set of small social networks upon which to test Christakis and Fowler’s math. (Before they stumbled upon the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler themselves had considered using the Add Health surveys to look for social contagion. But they decided the data sets were too limited — each of the schools had only several hundred students interlinked — to produce results in which they could have confidence. They also wanted to study adults, figuring that the peer effects among teenagers are qualitatively different.)

When Fletcher analyzed the student cliques using statistical tools that he says are similar to those used by Christakis and Fowler, he found that social contagion indeed existed. But the behaviors and conditions that were apparently contagious were entirely implausible: they included acne, height and headaches. How could you become taller by hanging around with taller people? This, Fletcher concluded, called into doubt whether Christakis and Fowler’s statistical techniques really removed homophily or environmental effects — and he says this means the Framingham results are just as dubious. When I spoke to Fletcher, he said that he, too, believes social-contagion effects are real. “We are on board with the idea that they exist and they’re important,” he added. But he simply isn’t impressed by Christakis and Fowler’s evidence.

Other scientists have pointed out another important limitation in Christakis and Fowler’s work, which is that their map showing connections between the people of Framingham is necessarily incomplete. When the Framingham participants checked in every four years, they were asked to list all their family members — but only one person they considered a close friend. This could arguably mean that those eerie three-degree effects might be an illusion. For example, if John lists Allison as his friend, and Allison lists Robert as her friend, and Robert lists Samantha as his friend, then Christakis and Fowler could conclude that John is three links away from Samantha. But what if John and Samantha actually know each other from church, but didn’t have a way to indicate this on the Framingham forms? Then if John and Samantha both become slightly fatter, it might look like a social contagion is spreading through three social ties, via Allison and Robert, when in fact it’s only spreading through one link, via church.

When I raised this concern with Christakis and Fowler, they agreed that their map of friendships isn’t perfect. “This is a general problem with our study and with any similar study,” Christakis said. But he said he believes their map of the Framingham connections has far fewer holes than critics charge. When he and Fowler tallied up the green sheets, they often were able to deduce relationships between two people who didn’t explicitly list each other as acquaintances — reducing the number of false three-degree links. (One helpful fact was that many participants listed more than one friend, despite the instructions on the green sheets.) “We are not overreaching our data,” Christakis insisted.

He and Fowler also acknowledged that it is impossible to completely remove the problems of homophily and environmental effects. This doesn’t mean they agree with Fletcher; in fact, they point out that in his height-and-acne paper, he used a somewhat looser mathematical model, one that makes it easier to produce spurious correlations between people — which is why, they say, Fletcher found that acne and height were contagious. When they ran their own statistical technique on the Add Health data, they found that obesity followed precisely the same three-degree pattern of contagion as they found in Framingham.

And Christakis and Fowler point to two other findings to bolster their case for social contagion over environmental effects. One is that in the Framingham study, obesity seemed to be able to jump from friend to friend even over great distances. When people moved away, their weight gain still appeared to influence friends back in Massachusetts. In such cases, the local environment couldn’t be making both gain weight, Christakis and Fowler say.

Their other finding is more intriguing and arguably more significant: They discovered that behaviors appear to spread differently depending on the type of friendship that exists between two people. In the Framingham study, people were asked to name a close friend. But the friendships weren’t always symmetrical. Though Steven might designate Peter as his friend, Peter might not think of Steven the same way; he might never designate Steven as a friend. Christakis and Fowler found that this “directionality” mattered greatly. According to their data, if Steven becomes obese, it has no effect on Peter at all, because he doesn’t think of Steven as a close friend. In contrast, if Peter gains weight, then Steven’s risk of obesity rises by almost 100 percent. And if the two men regard each other as mutual friends, the effect is huge — either one gaining weight almost triples the other’s risk. In Framingham, Christakis and Fowler found this directionality effect even among people who lived and worked very close to each other. And that, they argue, means it can’t be the environment that is making people in Framingham fatter, since the environment ought to affect each of these friends equally.

“If a McDonald’s opens up nearby, it should make both of us gain weight simultaneously,” Christakis adds. “It shouldn’t matter whether I nominate you as a friend or you nominate me.” In fact, though, the directionality effect seems to matter very much, and that fact, in turn, buttresses the case for social contagion.

Duncan Watts, a social-network pioneer and a researcher for Yahoo, has reservations about some of Christakis and Fowler’s findings — for example, he thinks the fact that most of the Framingham participants listed only one friend “really casts some doubt” on the three-degrees theory. But he told me that the directionality effect is one finding that none of Christakis and Fowler’s critics have been able to rebut. It is, for him, the strongest evidence that the Framingham results aren’t just caused by the environment or by people flocking to others like them. “I don’t see how that can be explained any other way,” he said.

IF YOU LOOK AT A CHART showing the change in smoking rates in the United States since the 1970s, it is a picture of early public-health success that soon tails off. In 1970, the smoking rate for adults was 37 percent. It fell to 33 percent by 1980 and then fell even more precipitously between 1980 and 1990. But after that, the rate at which people quit smoking began to slow. Between 2004 and 2005, in fact, the smoking rate stayed steady; on balance, nobody quit smoking those years. Antismoking forces successfully pushed the number of smokers down to one in five people, but they now seem stuck. Smoking-cessation experts have debated why it has become so hard to get the final holdouts to quit. Perhaps, some said, it was because the average cost of a pack of cigarettes remains largely unchanged nationally since 2002.

But there might be another, hidden reason: the shape of a smoker’s social ties. When Christakis and Fowler mapped out the way Framingham people quit smoking during roughly the same period — 1971 to 2003 — they found that the decline was not evenly distributed across the town. Instead, clusters of friends all quit smoking at the same time, in a group. It was like a ballroom emptying out one table at a time. But this meant that by 2003, the remaining smokers were also not evenly distributed: instead, they existed in isolated, tightly knit clusters of like-minded nicotine fiends. Worse, those clusters had migrated to the edges of the social network, where they were less interlinked with the mass of Framingham participants. In their everyday social lives, Christakis and Fowler say, the town’s remaining smokers are thus mostly surrounded by people who still smoke, and they rarely have strong connections with nonsmokers. Nonsmoking may be contagious, but the smokers don’t appear to be close to anyone from whom they could catch the behavior.

The federal government has officially set a goal of reducing the number of smokers in the country to 12 percent of the population by 2010. But the very shape of our social networks is working against that goal, Fowler says, and this poses a potential public-health challenge. Meanwhile, public-health strategists who want to counteract obesity face the opposite problem. Since the country is gradually becoming more and more obese, when individual people do lose weight, they are more likely to be surrounded by people who are still heavy. If it’s true that obesity can affect people even three links away, that may be one reason that people have such trouble keeping weight off. Even if they form a weight-loss group to lose weight with their close friends, they will still be influenced by obese people two or three links away — people they barely know. “We know that people are wildly successful in losing weight and wildly unsuccessful in keeping it off,” Hill, the obesity researcher, says; he believes Framingham offers an important explanation of why this is.

In essence, Christakis and Fowler’s work suggests a new way to think about public health. If they’re right, public-health initiatives that merely address the affected individuals are doomed to failure. To really grapple with bad behaviors that spread, you have to simultaneously focus on individuals who are so distant they don’t even realize they’re affecting one another. Hill says this is possible with obesity. Last year, he collaborated with David Bahr, a physicist at Regis University in Denver, to construct a computer model of society that replicates the way obesity spreads. They created a simulation of hundreds of thousands of individuals, each programmed to influence one another in precisely the same way that Christakis and Fowler documented in Framingham. To test whether their model accurately mimicked reality, they seeded it with a few obese people and set it running. The virtual society slowly became obese in the same pattern and at the same rate as Framingham. If they could accurately copy the way Framingham became obese, they figured, they could then use the model to test different ways that the spread might be halted. They began trying different experiments — like focusing on specific individuals and seeing whether or not they could use them to create a counterepidemic of skinniness.

One solution jumped out at them. In theory, the best way to fight obesity, the model predicted, isn’t to urge people to diet with a cluster of close friends. It is to encourage them to skip a link and to diet with friends of friends. That way, in your immediate social network, everyone would be surrounded on at least one side by people who are actively losing weight, and this would in turn influence those other links to begin losing weight themselves. When Hill and Bahr ran the simulation with this sort of staggered dieting, it worked: the virtual society began slimming down, and the obesity epidemic reversed itself. “It’s like you have bridging dams to try and stop the flow,” Bahr told me. (Bahr also found that the obesity epidemic could be reversed quickly, with only 1 percent of the entire population losing weight, so long as the dieters were placed in precisely the right spots. “You don’t need a lot of people, but you do need the right ones,” he said.)

In reality, of course, this sort of intervention would be quite difficult to pull off. You would have to figure out some way to persuade friends of friends to form dieting groups together. But other scientists have used Christakis and Fowler’s work to inspire more potentially practical public-health projects, some of which are now being implemented. Nathan Cobb, a smoking-cessation expert and researcher at the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies, is designing an application that Facebook users can install on their pages when they’re trying to quit smoking. The application will publicly display how long they’ve gone without cigarettes, whether they are using a nicotine patch and how much money they have saved by not smoking. The idea, Cobb says, is to take your invisible, internal battle to quit smoking and make it visible so that it can influence your friends (and friends of friends) who are still puffing away.

IT’S TEMPTING TO think, confronted by Christakis and Fowler’s work, that the best way to improve your life is to simply cut your ties to people with bad behavior. And obviously this is possible; people change their friends often, sometimes abruptly. But reshaping your social network may be more challenging than altering your behavior. There’s also compelling evidence in their research that we do not have as much control as we might think we do over the way we’re linked to other people: our location in a social network, say, or how many of our friends know each other. These patterns in our life are relatively stable, and they might, weirdly, be partly innate.

Christakis and Fowler first noticed this effect when they examined their happiness data. They discovered that people who were deeply enmeshed in friendship circles were usually much happier than “isolates,” those with few ties. But if an isolate did manage to find happiness, she did not suddenly develop more ties and migrate to a position where she was more tightly connected to others. The reverse was also true: if a well-connected person became unhappy, he didn’t lose his ties and become an isolate. Your level of connectedness appears to be more persistent than even your overall temperament. “If you picked up someone who’s well connected and dropped them into another network, they’d migrate toward the center,” Christakis said. Your place in the network affects your happiness, in other words, but your happiness doesn’t affect your place in the network.

Christakis and Fowler began to wonder if a person’s connectedness is to some degree fated from birth — a product, at least in part, of DNA. To test the idea, they conducted a study of twins. Using the Add Health school data, they located more than 500 sets of twins and analyzed where they were located in their friendship clusters. Employing statistical techniques traditionally used to parse out how much of twins’ lifestyles are attributable to their genes as opposed to their environment, they found that almost half — 46 percent — of the difference between two twins’ levels of connectedness could be explained by DNA. “On average,” they wrote, “a person with five friends has different genes than a person with one friend.” More oddly still, twins also tended to have the same “transitivity”: their friendship groupings had a strikingly similar degree of interlinking, which is the number of friends who knew one another. By and large, the people who were most tightly clustered in Framingham tended to be better off — healthier, happier and even wealthier. (Several other economic studies have also found that better-connected people make more money.) But if half the reason these people were so well positioned is related to the accident of DNA, then you could consider connectedness a new form of inequality: lucky and unlucky cards, dealt out at birth.

Social-network science ultimately offers a new perspective on an age-old question: to what extent are we autonomous individuals? “If someone does a good thing merely because they’re copying others, or they do something bad merely because they’re copying others, what credit do they deserve, or what blame do they deserve?” Christakis asks. “If I quit smoking because everyone around me quits smoking, what credit do I get” for demonstrating self-control? If you’re one of the people who are partly driven by his DNA to hang out on the periphery of society, well, that’s also where the smokers are, which means you are also more likely to pick up their habit.

To look at society as a social network — instead of a collection of individuals — can lead to some thorny conclusions. In a column published last fall in The British Medical Journal, Christakis wrote that a strictly utilitarian point of view would suggest we should give better medical care to well-connected individuals, because they’re the ones more likely to pass on the benefits contagiously to others. “This conclusion,” Christakis wrote, “makes me uneasy.”

Yet there is also, the two scientists argue, something empowering about the idea that we are so entwined. “Even as we are being influenced by others, we can influence others,” Christakis told me when we first met. “And therefore the importance of taking actions that are beneficial to others is heightened. So this network thing can cut both ways, subverting our ability to have free will, but increasing, if you will, the importance of us having free will.”

As Fowler pointed out, if you want to improve the world with your good behavior, math is on your side. For most of us, within three degrees we are connected to more than 1,000 people — all of whom we can theoretically help make healthier, fitter and happier just by our contagious example. “If someone tells you that you can influence 1,000 people,” Fowler said, “it changes your way of seeing the world.”

Clive Thompson, a contributing writer for the magazine, writes frequently about technology and science.

The Fall of Foxwoods

Pretty good story in today's Boston Globe about the financial problems at Foxwoods casino. Of course, you wouldn't see this kind of story in the Hartford Courant, the paper that should have run this story because Foxwoods is in Connecticut and the Courant is the largest paper in Connecticut, but that's because the Courant sucks.


The wonder, and the fall
A source of pride, plenty for Pequots in boom times, struggling Foxwoods now a looming threat to tribe

By Jenn Abelson, Globe Staff | September 13, 2009

LEDYARD, Conn. - When the doors at Foxwoods first swung open in 1992, more than poker fanatics and bingo mavens began trekking to the sparkling new casino nestled in the thick forests of the Mashantucket Pequot reservation.

Dozens of Pequots traveled from as far away as California and Hawaii to their native lands in southeastern Connecticut. Many came for the promise of a steady job, and to reconnect with a tribe that had come close to extinction. But Foxwoods did not just help revive the Pequot nation; it made it fabulously wealthy. Within a few years, Foxwoods was the world’s largest and most successful casino resort, an entertainment mecca that racked up more than $1 billion annually.

The fortune yielded nice homes, fancy cars, college degrees, community centers for tribal members, and a massive museum of native history. With the money came fame, as Foxwoods’ significance stretched beyond the tribe’s well-being. The Pequots had paved the way for more than 230 tribes across the country to launch their own gaming enterprises and finally become self-sufficient communities - and thus preserve their native unity.

But now Foxwoods faces financial problems that threaten to tear the tribe apart. Crushed by more than $2 billion in debt from exorbitant expansion, the resort is fighting an uphill battle against sliding revenues because of the economy and increased competition from newer venues. More than 700 layoffs in the last year, or about 6 percent of the workforce, failed to stem the bleeding as slot revenues at the casino continued to drop, plunging 13 percent in July to $63.2 million compared with a year ago.

Foxwoods - once the symbol of the Pequots’ greatest achievement - has become the subject of nationwide speculation that the largest Native American casino could fail.

“The casino helped bring this tribe together. People were so proud,’’ said Debbie Frankovitch, 55, a Pequot who has lived on the reservation her entire life and used to work as a tribal clerk. “Now, the casino is a big embarrassment. It’s just a lot of greed. People wanted more and more. It’s like a nightmare. It’s a shame it’s come to this.’’

The Pequots council chairman, an elected leader who serves at the head of tribal government and the casino, was placed on leave on Aug. 31 after he warned of Foxwoods’ “dire financial straits’’ and reportedly promised to preserve payouts for tribal members before paying off lenders. That set off jitters among creditors, and the fallout has already spread to other tribes. Their bonds are trading at lower prices following the Foxwoods debacle, sparking worries that native casinos such as Mohegan Sun will find it more expensive to borrow money. The tumult threatens to unravel years of unfettered success and tribal security, and dampen efforts to expand native gaming to other states, including Massachusetts.

Pequot leaders declined interviews about the crisis they face. In a statement, the council said: “We remain in compliance with our covenants and are current with regard to our debt obligations. As we continue through this process, the Tribe will be pursuing a mutually beneficial resolution with its banks and bondholders.’’

Like so many other industries, casinos rode the wave of easy credit to success in the years leading up to the recession, and Foxwoods was no exception. The Pequots, who had to go to Malaysia to fund the initial $60 million casino because no one else would lend to them, soon had banks lining up with loan offers as Foxwoods raked in customers - and their cash. The tribe quickly expanded the resort, adding hotels, restaurants, and shops to the complex, which now stands at 4.7 million square feet, nearly 20 times its original size. The Pequots also spent big to acquire nearby businesses and invest in other industries, such as shipbuilding -an expensive effort that later flopped. The casino operation was also a major boon to Connecticut under an arrangement that provides 25 percent of gross slot revenues to the state or a minimum of $100 million annually.

“My job was to build as much as we could as quickly as we could, and make as much money for the tribe as we could,’’ said Mickey Brown, president of Foxwoods from 1993 to 1997.

Brown, a veteran gaming executive, said the debt the resort took on in the early years was sustainable given the huge revenues coming in from the casino. But many Pequots wanted an increasing share of the profits, and individual payments to tribal members, known as incentives or distributions, became part of the operation. At one time, the payments exceeded $120,000 annually for members. Brown said these kinds of distributions didn’t begin until near the end of his employment, but he declined to comment further.

“Over time, the tribe developed some different thoughts and philosophies on how to do things, and it was not a facility I could continue to work for, and they didn’t want me to continue to work,’’ Brown said.

As competition intensified from nearby casinos, such as Mohegan Sun in Uncasville and Twin River in Rhode Island, Foxwoods embarked on a $700 million project to create MGM Grand at Foxwoods, a partnership with one of the premier Las Vegas operators that was intended to redefine Foxwoods’ reputation as a destination for high-end rollers and star talent. As part of a deal announced in 2006, MGM Mirage promised to provide up to $200 million in loans to fund joint casino expansions in new cities, and had scoured for locations in Kansas and Massachusetts.

But by the time the MGM Grand at Foxwoods debuted in May 2008, the recession was well underway, and gambling receipts were dipping sharply nationwide. Plans to export the Pequots’ success to other states were scrapped, and the millions of dollars that Foxwoods expected from new ventures with MGM never materialized as the Las Vegas giant also began to teeter under the recession. Now, the shimmering tower stands as a symbol of excess, with unbooked rooms, empty stores, and a sparsely populated gaming floor. One measure of the slide: Even with the new slot machines at MGM Grand, Foxwoods’ annual contributions to the state have dropped 14 percent since the high of $205 million in 2005.

“Yes, we spent too much money. Of course we made mistakes. We made the same mistakes that everyone else has made across the country,’’ said Roland Fahnbulleh Jr., 33, a tribal member who moved from Boston to the Pequot reservation more than a decade ago. “Why would people expect to hold us to a higher standard? We know we have to buckle down. More than anything, we have to come back together as a tribe.’’

The future of Foxwoods and the Pequots, which have swelled to 832 tribal members from 250 in 1992, has Fahnbulleh worried. The casino employs his wife as a special events coordinator and has helped him start his own multimedia business. Foxwoods is where they held a baby shower, meet up for family dinners, and watch shows. But it’s not just personal income and amusement. Revenues from Foxwoods support the entire community, funding a child-development center Fahnbulleh’s 7-month-old attends, a police force, a post office, and other services for tribal members. Already, the Pequots have seen their distributions slashed by about 30 percent, and many have lost jobs at the casino and are in danger of losing homes.

“The casino is not just equity. They don’t just own it,’’ said an adviser to the tribal council who is not authorized to speak publicly. “They are it.’’

So, dealing with the financial troubles at Foxwoods isn’t just about solving a business problem at a casino. It’s about finding a way to salvage the economic engine that sustains the Pequot nation. And if the Pequots - as one tribal leader suggested - decide to pay members before paying their bills, it could create serious problems for lenders. Because the casino is on reservation land that is considered, under federal law, part of a sovereign nation, lenders cannot turn to the typical remedies in the event of a default, such as foreclosing on Foxwoods and taking ownership. The Pequots have hired a financial firm to try to restructure their debt by cutting interest rates, extending due dates, and exploring whether a bankruptcy is even possible, according to the adviser.

Clyde Barrow, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said Foxwoods has been beset by various problems, and said he believes the casino’s lenders were not fully aware of the magnitude of debt that Foxwoods was accumulating. Other casinos, such as Mohegan Sun, have fared better because they suspended expansion plans when the economy crumbled.

Gaming analysts and casino operators say the ongoing struggles at Foxwoods and the threat of default could have a chilling effect on the entire industry.

“Everyone is reeling a bit from the Foxwoods issues. It has not made things easy,’’ said Leo Chupaska, chief financial officer for the Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority. “What occurred at Foxwoods is a negative for the entire Native American gaming sector.’’

Across Foxwoods and the surrounding reservation, the anxiety and frustration are palpable. Nervous employees try to untangle rumors and express worries about job security. And some tribal members have talked of clashes within their own families over the right course of action. On almost every street corner, Tony Beltrane, who is running for tribal council in November, has stuck white signs emblazoned with the question: “Haven’t we had enough yet?’’

Charles Rogers, a Pequot who now lives in Groton, said the tribe looked at Foxwoods as a bottomless pit of money and it poisoned a community of people who suddenly achieved a lifestyle they had never imagined.

“The casino allowed people to come forward and admit who they are, and it offered a sense of pride and stability. But then it evolved into a sense of entitlement,’’ Rogers said. “This entitlement and one-upmanship and ego is really what’s ruining this tribe and ruining the casino. How much money is enough? At what point do you ask yourself that question? For some people, there’s never enough.’’

Jenn Abelson can be reached at abelson@globe.com.



© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Michael Jordan, now a Hall of Famer

The Sox had a rain delay tonight, but, lucky for me I changed the channel and caught Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame induction speech in Springfield.

Jordan, arguably the best basketball player ever, spoke well, used humor, and complemented his teammates, opponents, coaches (especially the ones who wouldn't start him), for "putting logs" onto his competitive fire. It is clear that Jordan still has drive, and he said he wouldn't rule out returning to play in the NBA when he's 50. He's 46, now.

So I went onto ESPN's site and they had lots of content dedicated to Jordan, including the top 23 (Jordan's uniform number)highlights of his career. Included were many game-winning shots, the 63-point (losing) performance against the Celtics in 1986, which I think I watched as a 13-year-old, monstrous dunks, including one when he drove the baseline and dunked over 7-foot-tall Patrick Ewing, and the layup he made when he switched hands in midair even though he didn't have to.

It is difficult to compare players. For a long time, Jordan didn't play for competitive teams. The Bulls sucked for the first few years he played. But then Jordan learned, thanks to the astute coaching of Phil Jackson, to involve his teammates and make them better. This launched the careers of Scottie Pippen, John Paxton, and even Will Perdue. Jordan ended up making everyone on his team better.

Was Jordan, though, better than Magic? Or Larry Bird? How would he fare in a one-on-one game against LeBron James? One-on-one ball may not be an appropriate measure of one's ability on the basketball court, but I'd have to believe Jordan would take these guys. True, there were better passers, rebounders, and long-range shooters. But, man, Jordan was clutch. Watch the ESPN videos and you'll (if you watched hoops back in the 80s and 90s) remember.

Jordan was the perfect combination of grace and power. This, coupled with his skills, led to his dominance. Few could guard him well. It was hard even to keep up with him and foul him. After many of his best plays, opponents were left shaking their hands and walking away from the play. He was that good.

Watching Jordan, I began to realize, although it was a bit late in his career, was a spectacle worth doing. You he wasn't going to play forever, and that what he was doing was special. I felt the same way when Pedro Martinez was in his prime while pitching for the Red Sox. The way he dominated, with power and location and deceptive speed changes, was amazing to watch.

Jordan, whose name now graces steakhouses and obviously the Nike brand even in retirement, talked in his speech about hard work. When you watch him, though, it seems effortless. But he lost often, has said he was frustrated when he played because of these losses, and ultimately it made him more determined. He could have been an Allen Iverson, a player with outstanding skill but unwilling to make sacrifices and do what it took to win. Jordan changed his game over the course of his career, and the improvements he made - learning to make assists consistently, rebound, and make his teammates better - turned him into an improved player.

Years ago, after Jordan's retirement, or one of them, I saw a Jordan poster that was so good I had to buy it. It's posted in my classroom, and has a quote on it that says:

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Clearly, Jordan was in control of his emotions during his playing days. One point he drove home tonight was his absolute desire to win and how that motivated him. Tonight, he closed his speech, speaking about his own confidence and commenting that, for him, "losing, like fear, is an illusion."

Land of Confusion

While traveling toward Hartford on Route 2 last week, I looked over to my right and saw an interesting - if confusing - sight. A white SUV was moving in the right lane -nothing unusual about that. It was a Pratt and Whitney security officer driving the truck. Again, Pratt, the jet-engine maker, is in East Hartford, so one might expect to see a Pratt vehicle on the highway.

What was odd, though, was the make of the car - a Toyota.

With American companies constantly concerned about foreign "outsourcing", I was surprised to see that Pratt and Whitney, owned by United Technologies, based in Hartford, purchased a Japanese car for its security fleet. I would have thought that they would buy American.

But perhaps Toyota had the lowest bid. Still, you would think that a large American company would purchase a Ford or a GM vehicle, or some other American vehicle. Maybe Toyota or some cousin company in Japan purchases Pratt products, I don't know. But I found this peculiar.

Another thing I found peculiar was a short blurb I read recently in a magazine that reported students who were home-schooled performed better than non home-schooled students on standardized tests. This was baffling, since a major reason why parents home-school their children is to avoid standardized testing.

I'm not sure about the validity of this study. How many students who were home-schooled and then switched to public schools were included?

While I support public education - I am a public school teacher, after all - I understand when parents choose to home school their kids. I didn't used to. But school districts, even the supposed "better ones", are increasingly under pressure to meet state and national standards, and it's getting more difficult even for the independent educational mavericks to ignore ridiculous federal and state policies. Independent schools, I think, are a good way to go, since home schooled kids tend to lack some important socialization experiences. But independent schools are expensive, and they can be elitist.

These two examples are but a small illustration of how we live in a "Land of Confusion," a place that doesn't always make sense. Perhaps we need to think a bit more about what we do before we do it. To quote the Genesis song of the same name:

This is the world we live in
And these are the hands we're given
Use them and let's start trying
To make it a place worth living in.

Which side of the bed do you sleep on?

As I'm sitting here, on the left side of the bed, I wondered if there was any actual research on this subject by gender or sorted out another way, and if there was, what the findings say about people who sleep on the left or right side.

I've historically been a left side of the bed sleeper, pretty much since I was a kid - although when I was in elementary school, right before I fell asleep, I used to be on the right side, against the wall, with my face pointed down in the gap between the mattress and the wall. I claimed (to myself) that the air there was cooler to breathe. But then I'd turn over and fall asleep in the middle of my bed, if I remember right.

But for the last 20 years or so, I've slept on the left, sometimes very near the edge of the bed.

According to the limited information I found by doing a Google search on the subject, men tend to sleep on the left side of the bed more than women. Men also sleep on the side facing the door, presumably to protect his wife. Although one website listed women sleeping toward the door so that she could wake up and get the kids. Both genders justify sleeping facing the door so that they can have a direct route to the bathroom.

I was looking more for something that described what sleeping on the right side and left side means. What's the symbolism and significance of sleeping on the right or left sides? Is one side more "powerful" than the other? Is one side the "submissive" side? It would be interesting to know.

Perhaps a surveymonkey survey is in order here.

OK, it's down below. Take a minute and fill it out! Send it to your friends! Maybe we'll learn something.

Click Here to take survey

Here's the link for non-blogspot(Facebook)sites - paste it in your browser:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=cQZoHXSKGsHvXmALiBevOg_3d_3d

James Taylor talks about Tanglewood, the Berkshires

JT plays four shows starting tomorrow at Tanglewood. Here's a pretty good Q and A style interview with the musician.

And the story has good news! JT is playing the 4th of July at Tanglewood next year.

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/ci_13204217?source=most_viewed

Obama struggles with bipolar disorder

Don't take it from me. See for yourself.

Follow this link if the shortcut doesn't work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9k_nAbsNfI

Wrestling with the $%^&#!* carseat

This summer, I've surpassed every around-the-house self-expectation concerning yard, house and car maintenace - except for one thing.

I've replaced a rear tail light in my car, the rear windshield wiper on my wife's car. I've even replaced the flapper thing in the tank behind the toilet upstairs.

These may seem to be normal, simple things to take care of, but for someone who truly despises, and has no talent for, mechanical things, they took sincere effort. The only thing that kept me from paying someone else to do them was that I'd be laughed at when doing it.

Recently, though, we got a new car seat for me to install, a feat which brought me to the breaking point. Again.

I hate installing these things. The companies do not make it easy. The process makes me sweat intensely and swear to myself. This time I got rug burns on my knees from trying to use my body weight to push the seat down.

This is the fifth or sixth one I've put in (even though we have only two kids). But they tend to get nasty after a certain time (the carseats, not the kids) - about one year - since kids eat and drink and spill and vomit in them. Kids also grow fast in a year, outgrowing them pretty quickly.

And then there's the latest safety regulations that seem to change every three or six months. The car seats that we have now, for instance, make the ones we first bought five years ago, look like they belonged to the Flintstones, or some similar time period.

The old seat that I ripped out was supposed to be "the best one" and it cost more than $200. But it didn't hold up very well for a one-year-old; our daughter Alison pretty much destroyed it.

I lost the instructions for the new one, a Graco, but wasn't worried since the prodeure is more or less the same. Our car has LATCH clips which are supposed to make it easier. However, it is difficult to get the belts tight enough. This led to the scabs on my left knee as I pounced on the car seat with all my weight.

The thing with car seats is you're not supposed to put them in half-ass, like I usually do things. You've got to really secure them; they're not supposed to move at all.

Once, when we went to a police station a few years ago to get ours checked, the cop asked, "Who installed this seat? as it wobbled around like a loose tooth. "Um, I think it was my brother-in-law," I said. (We'll see if my brother-in-law really reads this now.)

After spending an hour in the driveway putting in the latest car seat, even taking it out and starting over because of a folded-over belt (ugh!), I felt relatively satisfied. It shook a little, but seemed generally safe. No, it's definitely safe. It barely shakes.

But if anyone knows how to get them to remain completely still, I won't resist the help.