Kirby visits the Orange Show

The late Jeff McKissacks's fascinating architectural homage to his favorite fruit is located only about a mile and a half from my house. It truly is one of Houston's most unique attractions.

Last weekend I took Kirby there for the first time.
The Orange Show is currently undergoing renovations and was only open for self-guided tours when Kirby and I went. Which was fine, as Kirby easily guided himself though the labyrinthine folk-art monument.




We'll come back again once renovations are complete and all the exhibits have been restored.

University of Houston announces 2011 football schedule

The University of Houston has released its 2011 football schedule, as follows:

Sep. 03: UCLA
Sep. 10: at North Texas
Sep. 17: at Louisiana Tech
Sep. 24: Georgia State
Oct. 01: at Texas - El Paso (UPDATE: now Thursday 9/29)
Oct. 08: East Carolina
Oct. 15: off
Oct. 22: Marshall
Oct. 29: Rice (UPDATE: now Thursday 10/27)
Nov. 05: at Alabama-Birmingham
Nov. 12: at Tulane (UPDATE: now Thursday 11/10)
Nov. 19: SMU
Nov. 26: at Tulsa

As of right now, these are all Saturday games. It remains to be seen if the networks make any changes to it (e.g. moving some games to weeknights) as the season gets closer. After the schedule came out, three games were moved from Saturday to Thursday and the schedule has been updated accordingly.

At first glance, I think it's a good schedule. Yes, it is a bit weak on the out-of-conference side, with UCLA being the only "marquee" matchup, but since the Cougars are coming off a 5-7 season and with a defense that is still one of the nation's worst until it proves itself otherwise, this might not be a bad thing. The conference schedule is also set up nicely, although road dates against C-USA Western Division opponents UTEP (we all know what happened last time the Cougars went to El Paso) and Tulsa are not going to be gimmes. November isn't going to be particularly easy as well, with three games on the road.

Ryan Monceaux points out things he likes in the schedule: no three-game roadtrips this season, a bye week right in the middle of the season, and a three-game homestand in October. He worries that Tulane might be a "trap" game, coming right before what will be a crucial late-season matchup against divisional rival SMU, but generally thinks that this is the schedule that the Cougars need as they try to rebound from last year's disappointment:

In total, this is a schedule where you could make a run. There are no obvious holes and there are no season-killing teams on this schedule. Coach Sumlin has to like his chances in this schedule a lot more than the first three he was dealt.

I mostly agree with Ryan, although I think the North Texas game has "trap" written on it as well. No, the Mean Green have not been particularly good lately, but that doesn't mean they should be considered an automatic win. New head coach Dan McCarney took an Iowa State team that was absymsal thoughout the 80s and early 90s to five bowl appreances while he was there, so he knows how to turn bad programs into decent ones. More importantly, Houston's game in Denton is North Texas' first at their new stadium. The Mean Green will be amped up to play the Cougars in their brand-new home. The Cougars, meanwhile, will be coming off an emotional "revenge" game over their highest-profile opponent, UCLA, and depending on what happens in that game might have trouble "getting up" for North Texas.

That being said, if the goal for the Cougars this season is to put last season behind them and compete for a conference championship this season, this is a favorable schedule for them. I plan to be at all the home games and also make road trips to Denton and New Orleans. I can hardly wait!

Ice Day

When I woke up this morning and saw that that the "one to three inches of snow" on the ground that the television forecasters had breathlessly been predicting over the last few days hadn't materialized, I was a bit disappointed. (And I wasn't the only one; my son was pretty bummed, too.)

But I wasn't exactly surprised. I was in fact beginning to have my doubts about the possibility of snow over the course of the day Thursday as I continued to check the hour-by-hour forecasts on The Weather Channel. At first the wintry precipitation was expected to begin at 3 pm. Then it was pushed back to 5 pm. Then 9 pm. Then 11 pm. Then 1 am. You get the point.

As it turned out, we did start getting precipitation in the form of freezing rain late Thursday night. But the transition from freezing rain to sleet and then to snow that we had been told to expect never occurred. Thus, no snow with which to build snowmen or have snowball fights.

As Channel 13's Tim Heller and the Chronicle's Eric Berger explain, temperatures in the atmosphere over Houston simply did not become cold enough at all levels for any snowflakes that might have formed in the upper elevations to remain in that state before they reached the ground.

The fact is, in spite of all of the advances our civilization has made in terms of monitoring (e.g. satellites and Doppler radar), modeling, and forecasting technology, we still cannot predict with absolute certainty something as complex and variable as weather. That's why when we speak of weather we speak in probabilities - a "60 percent" chance of rain, a "partly-cloudy to mostly-cloudy" sky, high temperatures "in the mid-60s," a "cone of uncertainty" for hurricane landfalls. Perhaps we should begin referring to meteorologists as "weather-guessers," because that's essentially what they do: they make educated guesses as to future weather events based on the past history, the current information and the forecasting methods of weather that are currently available. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're not.

Thar being said, meteorologists were absolutely correct in their prediction of icy precipitation this morning. As such, the decision to close the schools, shut down government services and tell people to take the day off or work from home was a good one. Driving conditions this morning were especially treacherous, as the freezing rain caused bridges and overpasses to ice over. Houstonians (myself included) are simply not accustomed to driving in these kinds of conditions, which is why there were an estimated 800 automobile accidents in the city between late last night and late morning today.

The simple fact is that snow is exceedingly rare in Houston because of the city's geographic location. Conditions have to be absolutely right for it to happen. Therefore, I've learned not to believe weather reports predicting snow until I actually see the flakes falling.

Signing Day and recruiting rankings

Last Wednesday was National Signing Day, the day high school seniors sign national letters of intent to play scholarship football at their college of choice. It's obviously a big deal in the college football world; as any coach will tell you, recruiting is the "lifeblood" of any college football program.

The University of Houston Cougars signed a total of 22 players: twelve on defense, eight on offense and two athletes that could play on either side of the ball. Included in this group were six junior college transfers, including two defensive backs, two linebackers and one defensive lineman who should be able to provide immediate help to an anemic Cougar defense that needs all the help it can get as quickly as it can get it.

So how did the Cougars do overall? Rivals ranks Houston's incoming class sixth best in Conference USA, which is curious considering that they came in third in "average stars." Scout agrees with Rivals' assessment regarding Houston's place in C-USA and ranks Houston's class 72nd nationally. ESPN, meanwhile, ranks Houston's class among the top eight classes signed by non-BCS automatically-qualifying teams.

While some UH faithful on various message boards are wringing their hands over the Rivals and Scout assessments of the Cougars' Signing Day haul, I personally don't put too much stock in recruiting rankings (or follow the recruiting process in detail) for two reasons.

First, getting these kids signed (verbal commitments before Signing Day mean absolutely nothing, as the Cougars learned this year when several early commits later "defected" to other programs) is just the first step. These players then need to become academically qualified, they need to enroll in school, they need to remain in school and, most importantly, they need to perform on the field. There's always some attrition involved; some kids don't make the grades to get into school, other kids leave the program for whatever reason, and some just don't pan out athletically. Accurate assessments of an incoming class can only be made several years afterward, when it can be determined how many of these signees actually made major contributions with the team.

Second, the methods used to rank incoming classes and individual players are opaque and biased. Houston Coach Kevin Smlin put it best when referring to one signee, Lamar High School quarterback Bram Kohlhausen:

“Bram is a guy we targeted early,” Sumlin said. “At the time, he was the No. 16-rated quarterback in the country. It’s amazing. When he committed to us, he became No. 30. At the place I used to work at (Oklahoma), they used to go from 30 to 16.”

This is because the "recruiting gurus" who automatically assign ratings to athletes do so based not so much on their talent as much as where they sign. If a kid commits to and signs with lowly Houston, for example, rather than a big-time program from a BCS automatically-qualifying conference, then he's deemed to be a lesser player.

The so-called "recruiting experts" who run sites like Rivals and Scout are in it for the money. They know that they can sell more magazines and "insider" internet subscriptions if they say favorable things about, and assign more "stars" to, recruits committing to big-time schools with large fanbases. This comes at the expense of players who commit to lower-profile schools with smaller fanbases that aren't as likely to buy as many subscriptions. Additionally, some of these "experts" also have loyalties, for example to their own alma mater and/or their alma mater's conference, that cloud their objectivity.

There's also the fact that, even if these "recruting gurus" endeavor to see as many players at high school games during the fall as they can, even if they spend all their waking hours watching game films, and even if they collect reports from a network of "scouts" following high school football around the county, there's simply no way they can make an accurate assessment of the talent and abilities of each of the thousands of high school football players around the country that appear to have collegiate potential. So they're left to make assumptions of a kid's athletic worth by considering secondary factors such as what colleges a player had offers from - the more scholarship offers from "big-time" BCS-AQ schools, the better that player is perceived to be.

Compare this process to the one the NFL undertakes for players with professional potential to prior to the league's draft. At pre-draft combines coaches and scouts from various teams get to measure these young men from head to toe and put them through a variety of physical and mental tests. And even these highly-paid, highly-skilled NFL experts can't get it right all the time. Highly-touted first-round draft picks wash out of the NFL. Undrafted free agents go to the Pro Bowl.

With that in mind, are we really supposed to believe that a bunch of college recruiting "experts," who have much less direct contact which a much larger pool of players, are supposed to provide authoritarian analysis about, and an objective ranking of, kids coming out of high school?

Whatever.

This isn't to say that recruiting isn't important: bringing in good talent is crucial to a football program's success. But the recruiting rating and rankings process is cynical and inaccurate and is not worth the attention it receives. Here's a "Case" in point: the recruiting "experts" said this guy was a lowly two-star player coming out of high school.

Dustin provides his assessment of Houston's incoming recruiting class. Travis Stewart of texasfootball.com also writes a thorough analysis of the Cougar's Signing Day haul, reminding his readers to "consume recruiting info with caution."

Speaking of recruiting: by now a lot of people are familiar with the story of C. J. Johnson, a top Mississippi high school football player, who quit Facebook after receiving a lot of hateful messages* on the social networking site after changing his commitment from Mississippi State to Ole Miss.

Adult college football fans who "friend" high school players on Facebook are really creepy and are also probably violating NCAA rules regarding contacting recruits. But these teenagers should also know better. Adjust your privacy settings, don't accept friend requests from strangers and don't use your Facebook page for glory-seeking purposes, lest you get the same nasty results C. J. Johnson got.

(* Best part of the article: "I realize all the good Facebook has done for the world. Thanks to you, I know exactly which of the girls who ignored me in high school grew up to marry dumpy losers." So very true...)

Two minutes of calm

This website challenges you to do nothing but "relax and listen to the waves" for two full minutes. If you touch your mouse or keyboard, you fail.

Can you go the full two minutes without doing anything? Remember: no using your mobile or doing any other activity during this time, either. It might be harder than it seems!

(Hat tip: Zoe Pollock.)

Did you feel really depressed yesterday?

If you felt especially down yesterday, there might just be a reason for that. According to a British psychologist who in 2005 devised an equation comprising variables such as weather, debt, the time passed since Christmas, failed New Year's resolutions and other factors, Blue Monday, the last Monday in January, is the most depressing day of the year.

Okay, so the methodology used in deriving this date is dubious, and the purpose behind it - it was promoted by a British travel agency to encourage people to take a January vacation - is clearly suspect.

That being said, I think there is truth to the idea that the first few weeks of the new year are especially dreary and gloomy (I personally feel that January along with August are the two most depressing months of the year). Coming off the excitement and festiveness of a holiday season that begins building up well before Thanksgiving, culminates at Christmas, coasts through a week to New Year's Eve and then fades away, it's only natural that people experience an emotional letdown as they put away their Christmas decorations and return to the tedium of daily life.

(In that regard, perhaps it's unfortunate that, aside from Louisiana where it marks the beginning of Mardi Gras season, Twelfth Night/Epiphany is not celebrated in American culture outside of some churches. This event could have psychological value as a means of formally saying "goodbye" to the holiday season, but that's the topic of a whole other post.)

Add to that the prospect that a few more months of winter remain ahead (Seasonal Affective Disorder is a real phenomenon), as well as the fact that, yes, those credit card bills from Christmas shopping also come due, and it's easy to see why January could be considered an emotionally depressing month.

I've always wondered if a secondary reason why Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday was made a national holiday was to address this lingering gloominess. The obvious purpose of this holiday, of course, is to honor a great American. But perhaps an unspoken, lesser motivation behind this observance was to brighten people's spirits by giving them a three-day weekend during an otherwise dull and dispirited time of the year.

Keenum granted sixth year

Since I honestly did not expect this to happen, I am very pleasantly surprised right now:

The NCAA has granted a sixth year of eligibility to Houston quarterback Case Keenum, who missed the final nine games of the 2010 season with a torn knee ligament.

The NCAA's decision was first reported by KRIV-TV. The school announced it on Friday.

Keenum was nearing several NCAA career records when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee while attempting a tackle in a 31-13 loss at UCLA on Sept. 18. That came a week after a mild concussion in a win over UTEP.

Coming off a disappointing season, this was really (outside of news regarding construction of a new stadium or realignment into a BCS automatically-qualifying conference) the best news a suffering Houston fan could want to hear. It completely changes the dynamic of the coming season; what once looked like something of a rebuilding year now looks like a it could be a great one, i.e. it now makes 2011 look like the year 2010 should have been for Cougar football. As the Chronicle's Richard Justice notes, "[Keenum's] return doesn't accomplish everything UH would like to accomplish this year, but it was a terrific start. Do you believe in omens?"

There were three main reasons why Houston's 5-7 2010 campaign ended in such a disappointing fashion. The first was the departure of offensive coordinator Dana Holgerson to Oklahoma State (he is now on his way to West Virginia). His replacements, Jason Phillips and Kliff Klingsbury, simply were not of the same caliber when it came to playcalling capabilities. The second was the lack of a significantly improved defense over the previous season (going from #111 in the nation in total defense in 2009 to #103 in total defense is definitely not significant improvement).

But the biggest reason for last fall's collapse was the loss of Case Keenum himself, because he could largely cover for both of those aforementioned shortcomings. He knew the offense well enough to essentially be his own offensive coordinator, thereby taking pressure off of Phillips and Klingsbury as they grew into their roles. He could also lead the offense to quick and frequent scores, thereby matching the opposing team score-for-score in situations where the struggling UH defense simply couldn't do their part. Case, for all practical purposes, was the team. As he went, so did the team's leader and its greatest weapon.

My hope for Keenum is three-fold: first, that his recovery continues and that he regains his old form in time for the fall season (and it goes without saying that he also avoid injury this fall.) My second hope is that head coach Kevin Sumlin and his staff do something - anything - over the coming months to give Keenum and his offense the defensive help that they so desperately need. 96th in the nation in scoring defense, 114th in rushing offense and 117th in third-down conversion defense just aren't going to cut it.

My third hope - and I mean this sincerely, without cynicism - is that the University of Houston Althetics Department refrain from launching a "Keenum for Heisman" campaign like they did last fall. First of all, it's futile: Heisman voters simply aren't going to give the award to a player from a non-AQ conference, especially when the media is already hyping up players from AQ conferences, like Stanford's Andrew Luck, as 2011 frontrunners. Second, such as campaign puts unnecessary pressure and distraction on Keenum. That's not fair to him or the rest of the team. Just let him go out there and perform, without the hype.

The season begins on September 3, 2011 against the same UCLA team that ended Keenum's aspirations last fall. That game cannot come soon enough.

A call for civility in politics

I hope that even those who do not like President Obama or agree with his policies would at least appreciate and take to heart these words he spoke at Wednesday night's memorial service in Tucson, Arizona:

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let's make sure it's worthy of those we have lost. Let's make sure it's not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives - to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud. It should be because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other's ideas without questioning each other's love of country, and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American dream to future generations.

I believe we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here - they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.

In the days since the massacre in Tucson that claimed the life of six people, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl, and wounded several others, including US Representative Gabrielle Giffords, there's been a lot of discussion about the current nature of political discourse in the United States. And, while it now seems clear that the gunman, Jared Loughner, was simply a psychotic nutjob who was not influenced by any violent rhetoric aimed at his apparent target, Rep. Giffords, now is nevertheless as good a time as any for we as a nation to examine our words and actions as they relate to politics and to tone it down a few notches.

Sure, exaggeration, misrepresentation, name-calling and mudlsinging will always be a part of discussion about politics and policy within the United States. That's standard political rhetoric. But when our nation's political dialogue morphs into polarizing, demonizing bile laced with violent imagery and metaphor - and over the past few years it clearly has - it simply goes too far. It divides. It foments anger, hatred and fear. It makes us, in a word, uncivil.

I've said before, and I'll say again, that our nation is being pulled downward into a swamp of cynical, toxic, hyper-partisan and mean-spirited political shouting matches. It does not solve the problems this nation faces; it only makes them worse.

It needs to end. Now.

Wrapping up the college football season

Some belated thoughts on the end of the 2010 college football season:

1. As much as I hate the Bowl Championship Series, I think it got things right. At least, as far as crowning a legitimate national champion is concerned. Auburn went undefeated in the SEC, which is clearly the best conference in the nation, and defeated an excellent Oregon team in the BCS National Championship. No controversy or second-guessing here. The Tigers earned their title, and the SEC continues its dominance of the college football landscape.

That being said, I honestly don't think we've heard the last about the controversy surrounding Cam Newton. We'll just have to wait and see how that plays out, if it does at all. For now, congratulations are in order for the Auburn Tigers, the 2010 Football Bowl Subdivision national champions.

(As an aside, congrats also go to the Eastern Washington Eagles, who earned the Football Championship Subdivision title with a win over Delaware last Friday. Funny how the players in every other division or subdivision of college football can handle a playoff without a problem, yet we're told by the BCS shills that the kids at the FBS level, i.e. the best players in the sport, somehow can't.)

2. TCU is a great team and deserves its #2 postseason ranking. In a perfect world, we'd still have one football game remaining and TCU would get to prove themselves against Auburn (for the record, I think Auburn would win). But TCU has plenty to be proud of what they've accomplished. A Rose Bowl victory over Big Ten champion Wisconsin and a #2 ranking to end the season is nothing to be upset about, and, indeed, the Horned Frogs seem pretty happy right now.

Of course, I can't mention TCU's success without going back to Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee and his stupid "little sisters of the poor" comment regarding the Horned Frogs' schedule. To Gee's credit, he admitted the need to keep his mouth shut in the wake of the uproar surrounding his statement last November, and, after watching TCU beat the same Wisconsin team that handed his Ohio State Buckeyes their only loss of the season, he agreed to "eat some crow." TCU boosters, meanwhile, are having some fun of their own by putting up billboards in Columbus, where Gee's school is located, congratulating TCU's Rose Bowl victory on behalf of those same "little sisters of the poor."

3. With regard to some of the other marquee games, the best argument against the BCS continues to be the BCS itself. Granted, the Rose Bowl was a great game, and the Sugar Bowl between Ohio State and Arkansas was highly entertaining as well. But the two other BCS games - the Orange Bowl matchup between Stanford and Virginia Tech and the Fiesta Bowl featuring Oklahoma and Connecticut - were snooze-inducing blowouts.

UConn was 7-4 and unranked going into the postseason; they were assured a BCS berth because they were the champions of the automatic-qualifying Big East conference. Virginia Tech was ranked #12 going into the bowls (in spite of a pretty serious blemish on their record in the form of a loss to an FCS school) and got to play in a BCS bowl because they were champions of the automatically-qualifying Atlantic Coast Conference. But both schools' lopsided defeats - UConn was trounced by Oklahoma, 20-48, and Virginia Tech was trashed by Stanford, 12-40 - suggested that they probably didn't belong in these games. Meanwhile, several one-loss teams, such as Boise State were left on the outside of the BCS party looking in.

This is just another example of the cynical and unjust arrangement of the BCS cartel that deems some schools to be more deserving of their highly-lucrative bowls than others based simply on their conference affiliation. Yet the BCS shills want us to continue to believe that this system is supposedly superior to a playoff, even as bowl ratings decline, fewer fans purchase tickets and bowl executives command outrageous salaries while cash-strapped schools struggle to sell their required ticket allotments (at face value, even though fans can get much cheaper tickets through sources like stubhub).

The system got the Auburn-Oregon matchup right. But it's still broken.

4. Non-AQs represent! The only way the non-AQ "have-nots" can continue to prove that the BCS system is a farce is to continue to do well in the postseason, and in that regard they did pretty well. In addition to going 4-2 in bowl games against teams from automatically-qualifying conferences, for the second year in a row the non-automatically-qualifying conferences have put five teams in the final AP poll (including two from Conference USA, a first for the conference). It's interesting to note that the automatically-qualifying Big East does not have any teams ranked in either the final AP or Coaches' poll. Which goes back to my previous point.

5. Did bowl season really need to be this long? It used to be that college football season would end on New Year's Day with an orgy of bowl games, a champion would be crowned (and/or controversy would ensue), and that would be that. That's not the way it works anymore, as the bowl season continues to get strung out longer and longer into January. This year, the season didn't end until the title game was played on January 10th.

Now, I can't say I'm particularly outraged that college football season is a few days longer than it used to be. But is it occurring to the detriment of the on-field performance of the players? Both Oregon and Auburn had to wait well over a month between their final regular-season games and the BCS National Championship Game, and it was pretty evident that both teams were trying to shake off the rust, particularly on offense, over much of the title game's first half.

6. I suck at prognostication. At the beginning of the season I had Alabama beating Nebraska in the national title game. I specifically stated that Oregon would not get a shot at the title. Auburn wasn't even on my radar screen. Oops.

But if I suck at preseason predictions, so does everyone else. In my preseason post I created a table of the consensus top 15 teams based on eight different preseason ranking systems. Alabama was first and Ohio State was second. Oregon was number nine. Auburn was nowhere to be found. Apparently, nobody else was really taking the Tigers seriously, either.

7. On to the offseason. Bummer. Sure, there will be plenty of activity over the offseason. Signing day is less than a month away, and spring practices will whet the appetites of the die-hard fans. Conference realignment is an issue that may reappear as well. But the games themselves are seven-and-a-half long months away. Alas...

ESPN's Ivan Maisel chronicles Auburn's long-awaited moment of glory, while his colleague Ted Miller examines what went wrong for the Ducks. Recaps of the other 34 bowl games are here. CollegeFootballNews.com provides a season-ending ranking for all 120 teams, while Sports Illustrated's Stewart Mandel lists the ten biggest stories of the football season that just passed.

Testing my new toy

In the five years that I've owned it, my Olympus C-770 has served me well. However, a chipped lens as well as the fact that I felt it was just time for an upgrade meant that I was in the market for a newer digital camera. I was originally thinking about going all-out and getting a high-end DSLR. However, its cost (as well as the fact that, two years of photography class in middle school aside, I do not consider myself that serious of a photographer) deterred me from doing so.

So, with some much-appreciated assistance from my parents and my brother, I purchased a Christmas present for myself: a Nikon Coolpix P100. The cnet.com review for this camera was mostly favorable but noted that it didn't provide the best picture quality, especially in regards to sharpness and noise at full resolution. That's okay for me, because I rarely take pictures for use at their full resolution anyway; I generally use my pictures for prints and for posting on the web (i.e. on this blog or Facebook), which requires that the photographs be scaled down from their full resolution and which therefore makes such issues with picture quality less apparent.

A couple of weekends ago I walked around the neighborhood with my new camera to see what it could do. Click any of the pictures for a larger view.
This tree was in the process of changing color, and the camera captures its colors well. Needless to say, the clear sky and bright sun made for excellent photography conditions as I walked around the block.
True accuracy of color is not going to be perfect for any digital camera outside of the best and most expensive DSLRs, but I think this camera did pretty well in capturing the hues of this rose bloom. (Roses in the dead of winter - another reason why I love Houston!)
The Coolpix P100 does a reasonable job at macro photography. I was about an inch away from this lantana bloom when I took this picture, and all but the closest florets remain in focus.
As I walked around I noticed a vapor trail high above me and decided to see if the 26x zoom would be good enough for me to identify the type of aircraft responsible. This appeared to be a Boeing 767. Sure enough, according to FlightAware, this is Air Canada flight 1858, a 767 passing over Houston at 37,000 feet on its way from Vancouver to Cancun.
The 26x zoom also works well on subjects that are a bit closer, like these two doves in a tree. The automatic focus does its job even in full zoom conditions; some of the branches are out of focus, but the birds themselves are perfectly clear.

All in all, I am happy with my purchase and I plan to get a lot of use out of it over the next several years. Maybe by then I'll have the urge as well as the financial wherewithal to get an actual DSLR.