I Am NOT Eating This Chicken! (of the Woods?) or Will I?

This morning, while walking the dog, I encountered this weird brain-like fungus-- and I am proud to say that Lola did NOT eat this thing-- even though I later learned that this fleshy bracket fungus, Laetiporus, is also commonly known as "Chicken of the Woods" because-- if cooked properly-- it tastes like chicken? or chicken brains?-- not sure if that's true and I'm not going to cook this mess and find out . . . I noticed this mound yesterday in an incipient stage, and I hope that by tomorrow morning, it will disintegrate (or that it turns into some sort of "Last of Us" style humanoid creature-- THEN I will kill it and eat it because that means that the shit is going down and I'm going to have to learn to eat and survivie in a fungified world.

I Am Not Mechanical

After my son failed to execute the repair, I watched several videos on how to replace a broken sun visor on a 2012 Honda Accord and then I really tried to follow the instructions-- Ian helped me on the first attempt-- and we failed-- and then I watched more videos and went back out there on my own-- and failed-- and then I gave up, as I am wont to do . . . and then I went back again and twisted and pushed the tab and spun the contraption and wedged it in there and--finally!-- the replacement visor locked in place . . . and I still don't know how I did it.

I'm One in a Million, Baby (and less racist than Axl Rose, I hope)

When our civilization goes belly-up and the world is a hot, flooded, energy-depleted wasteland, I am quite sure one of the reasons for this will be all the massive amounts of power used by cloud storage data farms, which require massive and constant power consumption to run all the IT and AI equipment, and to prevent servers from overheating-- and when some future civilization examines just what data was housed in the cloud, they will find the bulk of it is the stupid text strand I have with my friends where we share how we did on various puzzles-- the NYT mini crossword, Pips, Connections, Wordle, Quordle, Bracket City, Framed, etcetera-- this text strand is decadent and wasteful and treats the incredible technology we have at our disposal cavalierly, and yet I get great joy from from this absurd strand, especially when the NYT Connections bot pronounced me truly distinctive in my Connections style and I have a place to send this incredibly interesting digital information.

Disney Chooses The Easy Way (Which Might Make Things Hard for the Rest of Us)

A few words on the Charlie Kirk shooting and the ensuing political consequences:

1. your thoughts and beliefs are your own and you are free to THINK whatever you want about the Charlie Kirk shooting-- you can be happy about it or sad about it or angry about it or any complex mix of these basic emotions . . . you could think it's a tragedy on par with the J.F.K assassination or you could think he had it coming-- or you could be like me . . . when someone informed me of the shooting, I said, "Huh? Who is that?" and no amount of explaining was going to make me care about him any more than any other victim of gun violence in our great and violent nation (and it's not like Kirk was an elected official who died in office, e.g. Melissa Hortman, the leader of the Minnesota state House Democratic caucus, who was killed alongside her husband, on the same day that a state senator, John Hoffman, and his wife were shot and injured . . . those are actual political assassinations) and I'm not going to pretend that lots of people didn't have lots of awful thoughts when Kirk was killed, but that is within their rights-- just as it is within my rights to root for the Jets only in certain circumstances-- because my friends are Jets fans-- and I will root wholeheartedly for them if the Giants are winning their game, but then if the Giants start losing, in my heart of heart, I hope the Jets lose too . . . because misery loves company-- this is awful and juvenile, but thoughts and beliefs are private and totally protected by the First Amendment, so you can root for whatever outcomes you like in your mind . . . and also realize that your thinking about them does not change anything in the physical world;

2. you are legally allowed to express your thoughts and beliefs abstractly-- in the proper place, at the proper time-- in order to try to change reality . . . now you can't drive around with a bullhorn in a quiet neighborhood at 3 AM and scream your political thoughts, that's not protected by the First Amendment, nor can you specifically call for violence-- you CAN'T say "in retribution for Kirk's death, I am going to release a horde of killer bees upon Jimmy Kimmel next Thursday at 4:00 PM . . . be there!"

3. while you can legally express your thoughts and beliefs and you will not be jailed for them-- with many caveats: as long as you are not slandering or libelling someone or revealing government secrets (nuclear codes, etcetera) or blackmailing or threatening an individual or corporation or soliciting someone to commit a crime or propagating child pornography or engaging in extreme obscenity-- BUT even if you are not doing one of these things that is not protected by the First Amendment, you could still suffer real world consequences for your opinions-- and this is what the MAGA crew is pushing-- cancel anyone who says or does anything defamatory about Kirk and his legacy;

4. the government is not allowed to control the content of the media, nor is blackmail protected by the First Amendment, so when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said, about cancelling Kimmel, "We can either do this the easy way or the hard way," this was illegal and unconstitutional and, honestly, quite frightening-- and, the fact that Disney caved to this threat is even more frightening (but not as frightening as the fact that Amazon paid 40 million for a Melania Trump vanity doc) and hopefully this will be parsed out in a court of law and Samuel Alito-- as he always does-- will side with Freedom of Speech and realize that sometimes it protects "thought that we hate"

5. the right believes that this autocratic backlash from the Trump administration is a comeuppance for the left, who limited free speech about vaccines during COVID and whose "woke" ideology got people like Dave Chapelle, Kevin Hart, and J.K. Rowling in hot water-- and the threat by the Trump administration to take away tax-exempt status from left-leaning organizations (because they support radical leftist terrorism) is revenge for when the Obama administration used the IRS to target organizations afffiliated with the Tea Party;

6. this bullshit is totally typical . . . when a party is NOT in power and they are the underdog, they usually want unlimited free speech so they can criticize the powers that be-- but once a party takes power, then they squelch free speech and expression and want everyone to tow the party line-- and the Trump administration is going beyond the pale in how they execute this-- more transactional than any recent administration, more bullying, more use of leverage, more blatant blackmail and unconstitional rhetoric . . . it's shameful to use Kirk's death like this, but it's also perfectly normal in politics to "never let a good crisis go to waste."

Harvest Moon: Making Fairly Shitty Beer for Nearly Thirty Years

For the first time in a long time, I went to Harvest Moon last night for a few beers with the guys, and I was duly impressed: the Firehouse Red tasted bland and fuzzy; the Fuller Moon IPA left something to be desired in the way of hoppiness, crispness, and flavor; and the Dunluce Castle Stout, while drinkable and not as disappointing as the other beers, was not notable in any particular way . . . it's fairly amazing-- this microbrewery, which has been operating in New Brunswick since 1996, has consistently made lame and lousy tasting beer for three decades, yet they keep plugging along, while more interesting pubs have withered and died-- but you'd think they'd figure out how to make better beer by now.

That Would Be in the Ass, Jalen

You may remember The Newlywed Game moment when Bob Eubanks asked this question: "Where is the strangest place you've ever made whoopee?" and a woman answered, "That would be in the butt, Bob" but that's not how it went down-- the truth is much more succinct, she said, "in the ass" and the moment never aired (but was featured on a clip show) and, tangentially related to this topic-- I'm trying to be an Eagles fan this season but I really hate the term "tush push"-- it kind of grosses me out-- and I'm also not a big fan of puns, so while "brotherly shove" was funny once, I've had it with phrase as well-- I think the announcers need to have some standards and consistency and call this play an "assisted sneak" . . . or perhaps "The Jalen Hurts," because when those guys are shoving you in the ass, it's got to hurt.

Bald-Faced Hornet = Elephant

It's my 31st year teaching high school and my lessons just keep getting better and smarter and funnier and more relevant and more brilliant-- case in point, yesterday I'm teaching the Orwell masterpiece "Shooting an Elephant" and the main thrust of the story is that Orwell does NOT want to shoot this elephant, but the crowd expects him to shoot the elephant-- he's the colonialist MP with the gun and while the Burmese despise him, he is the authority figure and the elephant, while in heat, did kill a man-- but then the elephants calms down and Orwell does not want to shoot a large, valuable intelligent working beast of burden-- but, as Orwell describes it, the expectation that the elephant was to be shot "was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides, they wanted the meat"-- so Orwell has to live up to their expectations of the imperaliast despot and shoot the elephant-- and it is tragic and horrible . . . and while the students were in groups figuring this out, a girl came up to me and said, unironically, "There's a bee, can you kill it?" and I went over to their group, and there was indeed a bee on the wall (actually a yellowjacket, which is a wasp) and I said to the group-- which was very distracted by the wasp-- "I don't really want to kill this animal, I'm not allergic-- but I guess I'm going to have to kill it so you people can concentrate" and then I killed the wasp and I asked the class how this incident was like the story and they were able to make the connection and then I told them that sometimes-- especially if you have read lots of literature like myself and are very very smart and know how the world works-- you can resist the pressure of the crowd and the pressure to live up to the generic expectations of an authority figure and transcend commonplace thought and so I told them the story of the bald-faced hornet nest above my driveway and how, at first, at the urging of my family and friends, I felt like I had to attack and destroy the nest-- and the hornet's nest is the elephant in this analogy-- and my son and I even made one attempt to destroy the nest but the hornets were unruffled by our attack (see the above video, which my class enjoyed) and then I told them about how my friends continued to pressure me to annihilate this nest, suggesting wilder and wilder methods-- dousing the nest with gasoline and incinerating it; attacking it with a drone; getting up on a ladder and sawing the branch off with a chainsaw and dropping the nest into a garbage pail; etcetera-- they wanted to see more videos, they wanted a bit of fun, just like the Burmese-- and while I thought about doing something radical and violent to the nest, I then realized I was being pressured into something that did NOT need to occur-- something I did NOT want to do: bald-faced hornets eat mosquitoes and flies, and-- even though Ian and I attacked them-- the hornets forgave us and did not seek vengeance, so instead of destroying the nest, I learned to live with it-- it's been up in the tree for months now-- and I think this is a better path, to try to live in some kind of peaceable detente with dangerous creatures, just as we might need to learn to live with (and occasionally suffer attacks from) megafauna, if we actually value animals such as elephants and tigers and bears-- if we truly value all the creatures great and small on this earth, then we're going to have to learn to live with them-- even though we might occasionally suffer a sting or a trampling-- because we've invaded every nook and cranny of their habitats. 

Tail-gating?

Yesterday afternoon, I was walking our dog back from the dog park, and just before I reached my block, I noticed that a dude was walking a white poodle up ahead of me, maybe twenty yards in front of me-- and my block only has sidewalk on one side of the road, so I was forced to trail behind him but I figured as long as he kept up the pace, it wouldn't be a problem-- I keep an appropriate distance behind him until I got to my house . . . but his dog sensed my dog and turned and looked at her, and then the guy just stopped and stared at me, all pissed off and he yelled at me for "coming up behind him" and told me that wasn't cool and so I said, "this is my block, my house is right up there . . . I have to go this way" and he was all distraught and hot and bothered and so I attempted to walk around him-- but I wasn't taking my dog all the way out on the road becuase I never take her out on the road because I don't want her to think that's ever an option and-- of course, because regular dogs hate poodles-- the two dogs growled and barked at each other while I passed him and the guy, all vindicated, yelled "SEE!" and at that point I wanted to beat the fuck out of him but I was the bigger person and said nothing and just kept on walking, listening to him yell "INCONSIDERATE!" at the back of me-- and my wife said I should have made more of an effort to go around him and that I ought to have taken Lola into the street, but fuck that, this is Jersey and if you can't deal with a little tail-gating, then keep up your speed and if you want everyone to remain fifty-paces away from you then move to Wyoming, don't walk down a road with only one sidewalk in the most densely populated state in the union-- don't stop all miffed and block traffic . . . hopefully this douche will never walk his magisterial white poodle on our block again.

Put the Cell in the Cell

My high school has finally cracked down on cell phones-- for a while I felt like I was the lone lunatic preaching on the mountaintop that perhaps it's not a good idea to give kids a palm-sized video-gaming system/shopping spree enabler/social media network/video player/music player/day trading platform and expect them to learn AP Chem-- and so far so good, I think the kids feel the post-COVID lack-of-learning hangover and realize that maybe playing Subway Surfers, Clash of Clans and Snake all day, with Tik-Tok breaks, isn't the best way to get into college . . . BUT I still had to confiscate a phone today and take it down to phone jail (the admin office) but I will say that I was actually surprised by the blatant phone usage because things have been so much better so far-- hopefully this incident was an outlier and I won't have to spend so much energy policing this absurdity.

That's Entertainment?

The Giants/Dallas game certainly kept me glued to the TV . . . 17 points in the final 52 seconds, and-- despite the penalties-- the Giants (and especially Russell Wilson) played well . . . but the Dallas kicker (Brandon Aubrey) has a bionic leg and the ending was frustrating, lights out and a kick in the balls . . . but that's entertainment.

You Sure That's Bob Dylan?

Although it was something of a haul to the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden yesterday, we had a great time once we got there: Katie Crutchfield and her band (Waxahtachee) killed it and Sheryl Crow put on quite a show-- Crow is 63 years old and she can still really sing . . . and she's in great shape!-- the only song I felt she couldn't quite pull off is my favorite Crow song-- "Leaving Las Vegas"-- and maybe that's because the recording is perfect-- anyway, then the lights dimmed and Bob Dylan took the stage . . . and we literally could not find him . . . he was hiding behind a grand piano, surrounded by a halo of bright lights directed away from him and pointed at the audience, so you literally couldn't look in his direction-- he was like the unplayed guitar with the price tag on it in Spinal Tap . . . don't even look at it! . . . at the start of his set, he sounded like an ancient bluesman, growling indecipherable lyrics while his band played improvisational twelve bar compositions-- then he played a gritty version of "All Along the Watchtower" and a bunch of jazzy stuff, weird and chaotic, but his band was great-- and, finally, Willie Nelson took the stage . . . people really love Willie Nelson (my mom was quite emotional because he was one of my dad's favorites) and Nelson opened with "Whiskey River" and he played all the old favorites-- "On the Road Again" and "You Were Always on My Mind" and he also covered a Mac Davis song that was perfectly appropriate: "Lord It's Hard to Be Humble, When You're Perfect in Every Way" and Nelson finished up with "Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die"-- and while Nelson sat on a stool the entire show and occasionally received back-up vocals and guitar help from Waylon Payne-- Willie still played all his own fills and plenty of instrumentals on his classical nylon stringed Martin guitar, Trigger-- and he can still play that thing-- very inspirational to see a 92-year-old up there doing his thing and doing it well . . . I hope he keeps it up until he hits the century mark.

Even More Revision of the Eternally Entertaining Willie Nelson Joke

My wife and I are taking my mom to see Willie Nelson tonight-- yes, he is still alive! he is 92 years young-- and if you combine his age with his opening act, Bob Dylan, then you've got 176 years of gritty and nasal vocal expertise . . . Catherine and I are more excited for the artists going on a bit earlier-- Sheryl Crow and Waxahatchee-- but I was also excited to tell the infamous "Willie Nelson joke"-- which I told several times today (what's the last thing you want to hear when you're giving Willie Nelson a blow-job? that's not Willie Nelson!) but I think there might be a better, more cerebral punch-line . . . "are you sure that's Willie Nelson?"

Confusing Possibly Drug Addled Mindfuckery

Seth Harp, in his book The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, mentions four Army wives who were murdered in 2002 by their husbands in Fayetteville and how these deaths were first attributed to the drug Lariam (or mefloquine) because all the soldiers took this anti-malarial medicine while in Afghanistan and the possible side-effects of the medicine are hallucinations, psychosis, aggression, anxiety, and paranoia but Seth Harp believes that this attribution to Lariam is a cover-up and that these soldiers were experiencing PTSD and they were also doing all kinds of other (illegal) drugs such as cocaine, meth, molly and bath salts . . . but to make this more confusing, Lariam was pronounced very dangerous by the FDA in 2013-- the issued a "Black Box" warning and notified users that they could experience permanent neurological damage, suicidal thoughts and psychosis from the drug-- and to make this even MORE confusing, your narrator himself might be compromised and unable to write this sentence-- because my wife and I took Lariam in 1999 when we went to the Cuyabeno jungle basin in Ecuador-- a well-meaning doctor in Metuchen prescribed it to us and once we started taking it, we experienced paranoia, technicolor dreams of giant spiders, and lots of anxiety-- but when stopped taking it, at the advice of some Germans out in the jungle with us-- when I asked them what they were taking for malaria, they said, "vee take nothink"-- so once we stopped taking the pills, these chaotic feelings subsided and we had a much better time (except when my wife went to the outhouse, put her flashlight down, sat to pee, and something shot out of the darkness and attached itself to her chest-- she shrieked, flung the creature, and ran out of the outhouse with her pants at her ankles-- and  upon inspection, we found that a giant tree frog, maybe a foot long, had suction cupped itself to her shirt . . . good times) and so now I don't know what to think about this drug and the murders but I still believe it fucked us up mentally and possibly could have done the same to these soldiers.

Malcolm Fucking Gladwell

There's nothing like the ephemeral and fleeting promise of a Malcolm Gladwell book: at the start, you truly believe when you are finished, you will understand how the world works; twenty-five years ago The Tipping Point explained how ideas moved through the society with mavens, connectors, and salesmen-- and how these people operated within the boundaries of The Law of the Few, The Law of Context, and The Stickiness Factor-- good fun and while in retrospect, these ideas only explain a few specific anecdotal incidents, reading Gladwell is still a blast-- you just have to take things with a grain of salt, check his facts, and try to apply his broad theory to some other events to see if it's true-- his new one, Revenge of the Tipping Point, is equally compelling-- Gladwell is an excellent and concise story-teller . . . this time he's explaining how epidemics happen-- how superspreaders can enlarge small area variation and how media events can change the narrative, or "overstory" as he calls it-- and while you might sometimes forget how this is all supposed to hang together, he weaves wonderful narratives about a rash of L.A. bank robberies, COVID, the opioid crisis, the Magic Third, racial redlining, Harvard admissions and obscure sports, and TV events about the Holocaust and gay marriage and they all add up to some idea about something profound which may or may not apply to the rest of the overstories of our time and culture.

Busy Half Day (Off)

Grueling day: online traffic court with my son Ian for his hydroplaning incident-- the case was adjourned because he still has a probationary license . . . he never updated it and to plead down a ticket, you need ot have a full license-- so back to the DMV before we can do Zoom Court all over again; then we went and picked up Ian's new (used) car in East Brunswick-- a 2012 Honda Accord that seems to house no roaches or spiders; then over to New Brunswick to pick up Alex-- it's a zoo over there right now because of all the returning students-- and then a sushi lunch with the boys at Pi's in Highland Park and now it's time for a nap.

Lo & Behold! David Playeth Around the Pole!

In the Book of Acts, God instructs Ananias to meet Saul on "the street that is called Straight" in Damascus-- Mark Twain calls this the only joke in the Bible-- because Straight Street is a actually a winding road, so though it is called Straight, it is actually serpentine-- hysterical in the context of that book-- and sometimes, whence the street is not straight then you must wind how you may . . . such as when David smote the pickleball that was travelling very wide and thus David smoteth the ball around the net-pole and into the field of play, making David victorious both in the eyes of God and the eyes of men.

Car Shopping with Ian, Carmine, One Roach, and Several Spiders

We are currently car shopping for a piece-of-shit-that-baresly-accelerates for my son Ian-- who recently hydroplaned and consequently totaled my wife's lovely and quite nimble Mazda CX-5-- and so we've been looking at reliable cars in the 4K range, which seem to be 2007 and 2008 Honda Accords-- yesterday we went to Keyport, to a little auto dealer on the side of Route 35-- near the strip bars-- and test drove a 2008 Accord . . . and aside from the roach on the ceiling (which Ian brushed onto my head, causing me to leap out of the car) and the spiders in the trunk (and the cracked shift box case and the floppy sun visor) the car was in decent shape-- and Ian, Carmine, and I took it on a test drive-- Carmine is the son of Mel (as is Mel Jr.) and a sister is working there as well-- I didn't catch her name-- but it's a family affair, and they're all working in an office half the size of my living room (and I don't have a big living room) and so on our test drive Carmine asked if we could run an errand? and I said "sure!" and we headed over to Mavis Tires (which involved a convoluted sequence of turns and a U-turn) and the Carmine said-- in his Long Island accent-- "If I'm gone for more than a minute, you can drive away" and I told him "no rush, I'm not planning on stealing this car" then he proceeded to have a spirited convo with a Mavis employee in the parking lot about the price of some tire sensors and then he got back in and he said, "they try to whack ya for deez sensas . . . I can only buy wholesale but ya gotta I need them right now" and then we drove a bit more and we couldn't get the radio to work and Carmine promised he would get the radio to work-- he said he's "put it in writing" and then we got down to brass tacks with his dad, Mel, about the price-- Mel Sr. had certainly smoked cigarettes for five or six decades (he had a pack of Marlboro Reds on his desk) and he had the voice to prove it-- and Mel said Carmine was nuts, that he couldn't fix that radio but maybe the mechanic could on Monday and then Mel proceeded to Google some of the broken parts on eBay and show us how cheap they were-- a new plastic gearbox cover for 18 dollars, a working sun visor for 12 bucks, and he even showed us some options for replacing the stereo and then he started telling us the story about how he got a ticket and got the charge reduced in traffic court but they STILL put points on his license-- they fucked him and then his car insurance fucked him over-- and then the sister was telling us about a traffic ticket she got and then they were talking about Carmine's ticket and I managed to bring the negotiation to an end and told them we'd call on Monday and see if they got the stereo working and go from there . . . car shopping is a grueling experience.

Y'all Ready For This? Probably Not

My new episode of We Defy Augury, "Y'all Ready For This?" is (loosely) inspired by S.A. Cosby's Southern noir novel The King of Ashes and Tana French's wild tale of undercover infiltration The Likeness-- I explore the idea that reading (and perhaps acting, according to Val Kilmer) might train your mind-- in the comfort of your own home-- to tackle life's most wild and weird and disturbing situations . . .particularly 1

1) going undercover and assuming someone else's identity;

2) violent warfare to protect one's family.

Teamwork and Lots of Experience

I made it to 6:30 AM basketball this morning, despite a hip flexor strain- and I shot fairly well from VERY deep but couldn't make space to take any reasonable shots-- but the most exciting moment was when Frank Noppenberger-- the venerable AD from many years ago-- and I combined to rebound a ball under the basket . . . that rebound was gathered by a combined 126 years of decaying athleticism.

Giving Zero Fucks, In a Good Way (Educationally)

Today was my thirty-first "first day of school" as a teacher-- I told them the rules, summarized the course sequence, learned some names, and did a fun icebreaker activity . . . and I am pleased to announce that I've reached the stage in my career where I had exactly zero first-day jitters, nervousness, or anxiety.