2/21/2009

I'm trying something new, I'm starting this sentence with absolutely no idea, no topic, not a thought in my head, and I'm just going to roll with it and see where it goes, and hope some kernel of a thought, some nugget of consciousness, some crackle in my synapses sends a concrete subject to my mind which will then flows effortlessly into my fingers, to be typed for your entertainment and pleasure-- but if in the end, when all is said and done, the sentence says nothing at all, then still, there is this question: was this a waste of time for everyone involved, or something more significant?

Why Whisper When you Can Holler?

Last night, our next door neighbors went out for the evening and in the mad rush (they have five kids) they left their dog out and he was barking incessantly while Catherine and the kids were trying to fall asleep, so I opened the window and yelled "Colby, stop it!" and, unlike my children, he actually listened . . . so I'm thinking I could star in a TV show called The Dog Hollerer (and in addition, an hour later, when he started to yelp again, I opened our bathroom window to use my hollering skills once more, but he shut up at the sound of the window opening so I've definitely got some kind of special power here).

2/19/2009

My microwave oven was taking so long to melt the cheese on my tortilla chips (like 35 seconds!) that I had a snack while I was waiting for my snack: I was able to open a container of cashews and down a handful before my nachos were fully nuked.

I Think You'll Understand . . . I want to Read Your Sca-aaaan

A funny sentence from Daniel Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music-- a book that has as much technical neuroscience as it does music theory, Levitin was a session musician and record producer but now he runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University: "The research on the development of the first MRI scanners was performed by the British company EMI, financed in a large part from their profits on Beatles records . . . I Want to Hold Your Hand might well have been titled I Want to Scan Your Brain."

2/17/2009

Random recollection from the surreal time before children: Catherine left my alone for the day, but when she came home I was in the same spot as when she left nine hours earlier, but with greasier hair (I had hair then) because I discovered speed chess on the internet.

2/16/2009

I gave up reading Netherland, a subtle novel about cricket and divorce in post 9-11 New York-- it was too subtle for me, perhaps someone can explain what it was all about and why it got such great reviews; instead I read two easy books with very long titles, both of which I highly recommend for people who want something less subtle: 1) Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . . Understanding Philosophy through Jokes, which delivers what it promises-- it's a great review of both the classic joke structures and the classic debates in philosophy (A sadist is a masochist who follows the Golden Rule) and 2) The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston, imagine a darker, gorier and less romanticized version of the world of Winston Wolf in Pulp Fiction, in fact, substitute a giant fat Asian for Harvey Keitel and set it in the sleazy side of Los Angeles, in a world where you actually have to use cleaning supplies to get rid of splattered brains, throw in a teacher with a past who is way out of his depth, and you're getting to close.

2/15/2009

I recommend Transiberian if you want to watch a fast-paced thriller set in an exotic locale, plus it has one of those hysterical movie conventions where the hero suddenly and fortuitously uses what you thought was a random skill mentioned earlier in the story-- I won't ruin it, but it reminds me of when Benjamin Braddock (The Graduate) runs out of gas on the way to the wedding and has to hoof it to prevent the marriage of Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine to the med school guy-- but luckily, as was mentioned in the beginning of the movie-- he's a track star!

2/14/2009

My son Alex said that his friend's nanny died, and so I asked him if he told his friend he was sorry; Alex looked at me and said, "Why? I didn't do it."

2/13/2009

It made me happy that I put the drawer slides upside-down in our new TV stand, because I was forced to reach into the drawer recess and unscrew them, which gave me an opportunity to use the tiny flashlight at the end of my power screw-driver, something I just discovered (though we've had it for ten years) the other day by accident . . . and when the tiny light popped on because I hit the little switch I had never noticed before, I wondered: "When the hell am I ever going to need a tiny flash light at the end of my battery powered screwdriver?" and now I have answered my own question.

I Unwittingly Give A Pregnant Student Anxiety

You would think that after yesterday's debacle, I'd have learned my lesson, but today in Creative Writing class I was demonstrating some point about sensory detail and-- spurred by a line in the instructive essay we were reading that portrayed birth as a wonderful, joyous event . . . I decided to provide a counter-example-- and so I launched into a graphic description of my son Alex's birth, which was pretty hairy: the umbilical cord was wrapped several times around his neck and the staff had to toss Catherine back and forth like a sack of potatoes to try to loosen it so he wouldn't suffocate, and then the doctor said, "You've got three pushes to get this baby out or we're going to have to do an emergency C-section!" and somewhere in the middle of this visceral tale I looked down and noticed that one of my new students, a chubby girl, was turning green and looked like she was going to pass out, and then I noticed why . . . she wasn't chubby, she was very very pregnant, but it was too late, I was already deep into the story and so I had to finish it (and I talked to her later and told her I was sorry and that I didn't meant to scare her and she said the story wasn't as horrific as she first thought it was going to be) but the real question is who am I going to target tomorrow?

There May Be Something Wrong With Me

Warning: if your opinion of Dave is already low, this sentence may make it subterranean, so proceed at your own risk . . . yesterday was the second day of my new Creative Writing Class (we switch at the semester) and one of the students wasn't quite in his seat when the bell rang, so I yelled in what i thought was a playful but slightly admonitory tone, "If you're not in your seat when the bell rings you're late!" and the student limped to his seat-- and I thought hmmm, looks like he has a limp and then got on with the class; later in the period we went on a "field trip" to the cafeteria, and the same late, limping student was the last one out of the classroom-- so I had to wait for him before I locked the door-- and I noticed that he had a brace on his hand, so I asked him, "Hey, how did you get injured?" and he quietly said to me "It happened when I was born" and then, in a humiliating rush of cognition, it all came together in my very stupid little brain-- he wasn't limping from a skate-park injury, he was crippled, and that wasn't a brace because he jammed his thumb playing hoops, his elbow joints were inverted-- and so I apologized to him about how I managed to put my (left) foot in my mouth not once but twice in a manner of minutes-- and though I said I was sorry, this kid must still wonder how he drew such an insensitive and cruel teacher for an elective  (unless perhaps-- and I'm rationalizing like a madman here-- perhaps the disabled student liked the fact that I didn't notice his disability and was just as callous with him as I am with everyone else) and the class, which is composed almost completely of sweet girls, must think I'm a complete lout, and so, to remedy these faults in my personality: I swear here in this Official Sentence of Dave (TM) to START PAYING MORE ATTENTION TO MY SURROUNDINGS AND TO THINK MORE CAREFULLY BEFORE I SPEAK.

Dave is Transitioning . . . Slowly

After interviewing many friends, students, and co-workers, I have decided to switch to a Mac; I told my students it feels like I'm getting ready for a sex change but they said it isn't that severe-- so now I'm ready to switch teams (or switch back, as I once had an Apple IIe) and now all I need to get this transition going is for some charitable soul to buy me an iMac.

2/9/2009

Building your own custom bookshelves is easy . . . you just saw the wood, sand it, and then screw it together . . . it's so easy it makes me laugh-- HA HA HA HA HA HA-- it's so easy you should buy the cheap grade of lumber, because you can just push real hard and then it will fit together squarely, everything snaps together just like Legos, pardon me I have to laugh more because I had so much fun building my own book shelves--- HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAH!

2/8/2009

Whenever it's under fifteen degrees, the driver side door of my 1994 Jeep Cherokee Sport freezes, and everyone in the school parking lot is treated to the sight of me sliding my butt onto the glove compartment, spinning my torso, and then ejecting myself out the passenger side door.

We're Number One! (In Middlesex County)

Good news for my property values: New Jersey Monthly just came out with it's top one hundred high schools in New Jersey, and Highland Park is number 31 in the state and number 1 in Middlesex County; only the gods know how they frakkin' determined this, they claim to have used some kind of complex algorithm, but who cares?

My Apologies

Yesterday, I got some kind of virus on my computer-- it did something weird to the blog and it made it impossible to surf the internet (every time I tried to navigate to a page it would take me to a used car site or something equally as ridiculous) and I spent five hours following some directions I found on a tech site, editing the registry, deleting random files, uninstalling things, etc. but the only option is reformatting; I think I'm going to get an iMac.

2/6/2009

One of the benefits of playing soccer is that it keeps you vigilant about your toe-nail maintenance.

Rule #1: Do Not Read War and Peace in Public

I defeated the premise of sociologist Dalton Conley's new book Elsewhere USA: how we got from the company man, family dinners, and the affluent society to the home office, blackberry moms, and economic anxiety, he illustrates the economic "red shift" in America, how for the first time in our history (and maybe the history of the world) people who make more money also work more hours, and how they are usually married to someone else who makes more money and works more hours, thus the divide between rich and poor is growing quicker than ever, and if you are in the "top half" than though you are doing materially better than anyone at any time in history, it still appears as if the other people in the top half are moving away from you in economic class, because now we have the ability to work all the time (home office, Blackberry, cell phone, outsourcing around the clock, etc.) and those of us who are making money realize that all our time is billable and valuable, and so we become fragmented, and we pass this "weisure" ethic on to our kids, and the result is we can rarely focus ourselves for a long enough time away from work, technology, social networking, etc. to read an entire book in one day unless you are a teacher and it is exam period, which I love, because you get a duty where you are sentenced to guard a hall for several hours, and then you have to sit in a room and proctor an exam, and then the school day is over-- so it's an excellent time for total reading focus, in fact, several years ago this is how I got deep into War and Peace . . . but the only problem was that when people walked by me in the hall, and saw the giant book I was reading, they jokingly asked, "What are you reading? War and Peace?" and I would have to say, very apologetically "uh, yes, it's really good, actually" and show them the cover . . . but they would still look at me like I was a big asshole, because who goes around reading War and Peace when you can update your Ebay and your Facebook and your stock portfolio and your tutoring schedule and your kid's activities from a cell-phone or an I-touch, unless you're some kind of deviant miscreant up to no good?

2/4/2009

So I'm at gymnastics, and Alex's class has begun, but Ian's class doesn't start for another ten minutes and so he's playing on the mat and the balance beam and this other little kid (who is going to have an Earnest Hemingway complex, he wears long braided blond hair and Ian always calls him a girl) spits a big loogey onto the mat and his mom, a butch Rutgers psychology professor who was busy grading her blue books, tells him that it's rude and she would prefer him not to spit, but she doesn't wipe it up-- and it's right on the mat where everybody walks, not in the corner or something, and it's not like this is a kid's play gym or something, there's college and high school gymnasts walking around as well-- and I'm sitting there hating the fact that I care about these things now, but I'm also thinking that if my barefoot kid steps in your kid's spit, I'm going to punch you in the face-- and if I had any balls I would have went to the bathroom and got a paper towel and wiped it up but instead when Ian said, "That kid spit there" I said, "Yeah, that's gross-- don't step in it" and I'm wondering if I'm going insane now that I'm a parent, but isn't it common courtesy to wipe up any bodily fluids your kid produces?

2/3/2009

Yesterday I wrote a lame sentence, and this is what Eric commented: "I usually wait until they make a movie about the Nobel or Pulitzer winner, then, if the actor playing the role the Pulitzer or Nobel winner is worthy of acclaim, and only then, do I consider them noteworthy, and commit them to memory, like when Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford won the Pulitzer," which I think is really funny (and also saves me from having to write my own original sentence today, which is important to me-- not to do any good work on the day after the Super Bowl, because I want to contribute to the country-wide post-Super Bowl malaise in hopes that someday the NFL, in the interest of national productivity and for the good of the economy, will move the damn thing to Saturday.)

2/2/2009

An irony of illusion and reality: nearly everyone can reel off the movies and actors that collected an Academy Award, but who can recall the winners of the year's Nobel and Pulitzer prizes?

Anti-social Notworking

What Facebook needs (I'm not sure why I am prescribing this, since I don't have an account) is a list of enemies to complement the list of "friends"-- otherwise, the term "friend" has no meaning, plus, you really know someone when you know they people they hate, and, more significantly, the people that hate them; perhaps someone has already thought of this . . . is there a social networking forum that shows both sides of the coin?

A Sentence Wherein I Poorly Imitate Lester Bangs

Hey kids, hipsters, dudes, etcetera, I've been dosing on the loopy speculations and  discursive postulations of Lester Bangs-- the collection is called Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and it consists of rock'n'roll reviews and opinions on the rest of the universe, and though I don't always recognize the bands he's talking about (The Fugs?) I certainly grok his groove, if only because he digs Iggy Pop and tears Jethro Tull a new one . . . he's all about seeing how many pop culture allusions, meta-cognitive delusions, and political anti-solutions he can juggle at once, he's the Philip K. Dick of pop music, the Jack Kerouac of Creem, and he's a kindred soul of mine, as he's not afraid of the incoherent run-on sentence.

Snakehead = Coyote?

Bad Traffic, the new crime novel by Simon Lewis, is supposedly the only UK book ever to receive a cover blurb by Elmore Leonard-- who calls it a "honey: suspense that never loses its grip" and I certainly don't disagree, the book is exciting enough to incite a stomach-ache, and-- like every good crime novel-- you learn a new term from the underworld . . . "snakehead."

1/29/2009

After reading this, you'll either have the urge to call DYFUS or the Patent Office: the other night we made the mistake of allowing our three year old to eat Cheezits on the couch; of course by the time he was through he had gotten Cheezit Brand crumbs all over his pajamas and the cushions, but I had one of those epiphanies that only happens in a Joyce novel: I ran to the kitchen, grabbed the dustbuster, ordered Ian to lie flat and then vacuumed not the couch, but vacuumed him . . . and he loved it!

1/28/2009

You know you're living the high life when you buy the shredded cheese instead of grating it yourself.

1/27/2009

I just read a conspiracy theory that claims that George Bush Jr. was actually a Manchurian Candidate type patsy placed in office by the DEMOCRATS, so that when the Democrats inevitably took office after him, they would have an easy time taking the moral high-ground, and then, of course, the country would be receptive to their policies-- think about how easy it is to galvanize the support and spirit of the country and the rest of the world when you get to abolish TORTURE during your first week in office . . . (actually I didn't read that conspiracy theory, I made it up).

This Makes Sense to a Three Year Old

It was Sunday afternoon, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why my three-year-old son kept asking, "What about the moving rocks? Can we see the moving rocks?" -- but my wife explained it: a few minutes earlier, I had asked him if he wanted to watch The Rolling Stones play some music . . . I was going to check out Scorsese's Shine a Light . . . but then I got occupied by another task, and I wish I had a brain scanner, so I could see what geologically psychedelic movie was playing in Ian's head while he waited for me to play this DVD of rocks that could rock.

A Better Ending For "I Am Legend"

The word on the street is accurate about I Am Legend-- it's scary and apocalyptic, but the ending is abrupt and kind of lame-- but (spoiler alert!) I have a much better ending for the film, and if you like, you can forget the old ending and imagine my new ending in place of it: instead of tossing the grenade, Will Smith allows the Dark Seekers to EAT him, and when they ingest his blood (which is naturally immune to the virus) it acts as a vaccine and cures immediately them, but it's very embarrassing when they turn from Dark Seekers back to regular citizens, because they look down and realize they've just feasted upon the flesh and blood of a prominent African American actor who once sang innocuous rap songs, so they all kind of shuffle away, mumbling things like "Let's not ever mention this again" and "Please don't tell my wife that I ate his nards" and once they wander out of the lab, then THEY are eaten by Dark Seekers, who are cured, and this goes on and on in a chain reaction until everyone is cured (and pretty much everyone is dead).

Left Tackle Appreciation Day

One of the marks of a good book is how stupid it makes you feel, and The Blind Side: Evolution of A Game (by Michael Lewis, who also write Moneyball) did just that; I usually don't deign to read books about sports, but Malcolm Gladwell listed this as one of his ten favorite books and now I know why: all these years I had considered myself a football fan, but how could I have been a fan when I didn't understand how coveted, rare, highly paid, and important the left tackle is to the modern passing offense-- do you choose a left tackle (or even an offensive line?) in Fantasy Football?-- and not only does the book trace the rise of the left tackle (it all started with L.T.) but it also tells the fantastic story of a poor black kid from the west side of Memphis, who through extraordinary circumstances, escapes the derelict projects of Hurt Village.

1/23/2009

It was freezing in my house, and so I asked my four year old son if he was cold and suggested he put some socks on-- but I guess my job as a parent is close to complete, because he said to me, "Why are you asking me that? If I'm cold, I'll tell you I am cold . . . If I don't tell you anything, then I'm not cold."

1/22/2009

A first over the weekend, we made a trip to the Museum of Natural History without our kid-carrying backpacks-- Alex and Ian had to pull their own weight, although coming home, when we got to Penn Station our train was boarding, so we did carry them while we raced through the insanely crowded station, but it was worth it because we made the train and got to sit on top of a double-decker car; here are the three highlights of the trip 1) the butterfly conservatory . . . a particularly fleshy giant moth landed on Alex's face, scaring him, and he swatted it away and it fell to the ground, apparently dead, so Alex started crying, because he didn't mean to kill it, and the museum lady consoled him, but then the moth recovered and flew back into the shrubbery; 2) Alex and Ian riding the subway, they refused to sit and instead clung to the pole like midget commuters 3) at the IMAX we sat in front of the most annoying kid in the world, who never shut up, kept slamming into my seat, bopped Alex on the head, gave random saliva-filled raspberries, and could not be controlled by his weak-assed father and mother and generally gave me a stomach-ache and pissed me off, but this was a highlight because it reminded me how my kids are usually NOT annoying and made me thankful for that.

How Many Hours In Are You?

Finished the new Malcolm Gladwell book the other day-- and apparently, if someone asks you what you're reading and you reply in an enthusiastic voice, "the new Malcolm Gladwell book!" -- then you are a big asshole; it's called Outliers: The Story of Success and, as usual, it's well-written and will also change the way you think about a lot of things: you will learn why being born in January is important to Canadian hockey players, the magic of 10,000 hours (although some people didn't want to hear about this magic-- they wanted actual magic, we got into an argument in the English office because Gladwell claims the Beatles became the Beatles not because of some perfect chemistry, but because they put in 270 five to eight hour shows at a strip club in Hamburg) the ethnic theory of plane crashes, why Asians excel at math (not why you think) and a cool fact about mathematical ability, you can figure out how well someone will do on a math test by how many questions they answer on a 120 question poll that accompanies the test-- tolerance for tedious, time-consuming work and skill in math exactly correlate-- and, the worst thing of all, but perfectly logical when you look at the numbers, why, if we care about educating the poor, we should not have summer vacation.

1/20/2009

While I was making coffee Monday morning, I remembered the classic bit in Airplane! when Jim surprises his wife because he asks for a second cup of coffee, and she thinks (in voice over, of course) "Jim never asks for a second cup of coffee at home," and then later, after some turbulence, when Jim barfs into a bag, she thinks, "Jim never vomits at home"-- this was a great gag based on an old Folgers commercial, but now that the media is so fragmented (the loooooong tail), and you can't rely on the fact that everyone has seen the same commercial or watched the same television show or heard the same music or shared any particular media experience, does comedy have to be broader to avoid being obscure?

1/19/2009

There are brief moments in Redbelt where the movie is so Mamet it might be a parody of Mamet-- does he have to direct his actors to speak in that repetitious and robotic tone, or do they just know to do it because they are in a Mamet movie?-- but aside from that the movie is elegant and excellent: a chivalrous jujitsu instructor has to move through the usual well-plotted Mametian house of mirrors . . . and all the Mamet regulars are present, plus a few fun cameos (Randy Couture and Tim Allen, to name two).

1/18/2009

Since my students read two essays that were essentially about lying, I though it appropriate that I fabricate a quotation in their writing prompt; I told them they had to connect both essays to a line Samuel Jackson delivered in The Negotiator: "People don't lie because they need to, they lie because they want to" but, oddly, when I pointed out the quotation on the white board, one girl nodded her head like "yeah, I remember that" and even when I revealed to them that I made the line up, she insisted that it was in the movie-- and that she was going to bring in the scene (which is more flattering than what another student said when I revealed the truth: "I knew Samuel Jackson wouldn't say anything that stupid!)

1/17/2009

Just as when Proust's narrator (barely a narrator) eats the madeleine cake in Rembrance of Things Past, and it starts him down memory lane, when I ate a kiwi this morning it made me laugh: I was remembering a friend's story from college: he had just begun his freshman year and he was a member of ROTC, the Sergeant told him to make sure his boots were black for the first meeting, and to use some Kiwi on them . . . and so he went to the store and purchased several kiwis and attempted to polish his boots with them, smashing them into the boots until he made a juicy, citrus mess, which made th boots no blacker; unfortunately his girlfriend had to break the news to him that Kiwi was a brand of shoe polish.

1/16/2009

Alex, Ian and I were rocking out to Neil Young's "Down by the River" in the car, until the lyrics got too disturbing and Alex asked, "Why did he shoot his baby? Would someone shoot a baby? Is he a mean guy?" and then Ian chimed in with "that guy shot a baby, he killed a baby" and I had to explain to them that the term baby didn't have to refer to a very young human, it could also be used to describe a chick or a babe or piece or a slice or a hottie or a foxy mama-- but then I still had no good answer as to why he shot her, because the lyrics are pretty obtuse, but I did some research and his "baby" may have been heroin and so then shooting his baby is a metaphor for breaking his addiction . . . so it's like he shot the monkey on his back . . . but there's no way I'm explaining that to the kids . . . maybe I should stick with Laurie Berkner.

1/15/2009

I'm starting to worry that I'll write about the same thing I've written about in a previous sentence; I've produced more content than I can keep track of-- the theme and possibly even the words, structure and syntax are bound to repeat . . . but can you plagiarize yourself?

1/14/2009

I've been blogging long enough that the content of my sentences have exceeded the span my memory, and I'm worried I might repeat myself-- use an idea that I've already used-- can you plagiarize yourself?

1/13/2009

Although there was much naysaying and the intelligence of my source was doubted, it turned out that my information was good-- when I plugged our house's old aerial antenna wire into our brand new HDTV, I was rewarded with more channels than usual (four NBC channels, etc.) and many in HD with better clarity and less compression than HD through cable.

Adults Say The Darndest Things

I've been playing basketball on Sunday mornings at seven AM (it's the interim between outdoor and indoor soccer) and, while I waited to sub in, I chatted with an Italian looking guy in his forties about sports (very difficult for me now, as I only watch the Giants and can't remember the names of any other players, but I certainly wasn't going to mention what I'm currently reading-- Rapture for the Geeks, a breezy book about the possible coming of the technological singularity-- that's just not appropriate at a pick-up game) and he expressed his confidence that the Giants would beat the Eagles, and I concurred and then he said to me, "Plus, it's so hard to win anything with a black quarterback . . . you know, it's only been done once" so I looked down to see if I had the words Fellow Racist written on my t-shirt, and then, luckily, after a very long and awkward pause, I was able to remember that Doug Williams was the black QB with the Superbowl Ring, so I said his name and ended a very weird moment for me-- but who says that to someone they barely know? . . . and now that the Giants are out, I'm kind of rooting for the Eagles just so I can hear how this guy explains it-- maybe he'll tell me Donovan McNabb is an octoroon or something.

1/11/2009

Joseph Campbell said, "Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy," which I found to be true when I actually bought some music on the computer (a download of the new Franco retrospective, Francophonic, which is awesome) and Rhapsody charged my credit card but the music didn't download, but now we find mercy when we call Heaven, which happens to be Bangalore, where merciful folks man the phones and forgive our technological sins (my temporary internet files were full of cookies and other data, thus blocking the download.)

1/10/2009

Next Alumni Day, I'm going to remember to wear a William and Mary shirt; this year I was walking punch-line, as I forgot to wear college apparel and was wearing a fleece that has OLD NAVY emblazoned across the chest-- every wannabee wag said, "What? Did you go to 'Old Navy'?"

1/9/2008

Sometimes, when I'm looking stuff up on the Internet (names of actors, how to bend warped lumber, DLP vs. plasma vs. LCD vs. 1080p vs. 1080i vs. 720 p, facts about Newark politicians, movie reviews) I get the feeling that I'm no smarter than the Internet, and that the Internet isn't very smart.

1/8/2009

We entered a new realm last night, a realm where me, my wife, and my three year old son can consume an entire large pizza (Alex didn't want any)-- but far scarier is that my child has become my rival, as I was shutting the pizza box, Ian spied that there was one piece left and he "called" it-- he said, "Don't eat that last piece, I want it," which is my role in the family, to finish off all the extra food, but obviously those days are gone so if I'm looking skinny, you'll know why.

1/7/2009

I highly recommend Hurry Down Sunshine, a memoir by Michael Greenberg: he recounts when his fifteen year old daughter Sally suddenly became completely insane (manic depressive and bipolar)-- it is gripping, scary, and disturbing, but also has a large cast of New York characters to lighten it up, plus he adds some historical parallels (I never knew James Joyce's daughter Lucia was insane) but I'm not sure if I can recommend the highly lauded posthumous novel 2666 by the Chilean Robert Bolano: I'm only a quarter of the way through the thousand pages, and it is Pynchonesque in size and form, and Borgesian in theme . . . Hurry Down Sunshine is a compelling portrait of insanity, 2666 is actually making me insane.

1/6/2009

Yesterday was certainly the Monday to end all Mondays, but here's a fact to get you through: by the end of the month, the sun will be rising thirteen minutes earlier than it did yesterday (7:08 instead of 7:21) and it will be setting twenty nine minutes later-- 5:15 instead of 4:46 . . . so there are bright times in all of our futures.

1/5/2009

If it wasn't for playing Rock Band on the Wii, I would have never known that Mick Jagger sings "war children" during "Give Me Shelter"-- I thought he said "whooooah."

1/4/2009

It's worth reading The Northern Clemency just to hear the British slang term "hairy bucket" used in context (the picture has no relevance, it popped up when I Googled the phrase).

1/3/2009

During our trip to Vermont, Ian (three years old) slept in the same room as Catherine and I; one night he woke us with the exclamation My Monkey is Dead! . . . and after he said it he immediately fell back to sleep, but it took me longer, I just couldn't stop thinking about it.

1/2/2009

A friend got an iTouch for Christmas, and now, like Marion Barry was on crack, she is on the internet-- you can't say two words to her before she's Google-ing something you said-- so my 2009 prediction is that this information super-highway will turn humanity down a bad road; it will be used for pornography, gambling, identity theft, mindless frivolity (such as a video of a dude playing Europe's "The Final Countdown" on a kaz00keylele-- you've got to check it out) and worse, far far worse.

How Big Is Your Set?

My New Year's Resolution is 1080p, yes my set is bigger than Notorious B.I.G-- I'll plagiarize his rap because his words don't miss . . . "when I was dead broke, man, I couldn't picture this/ 50 inch screen, money green leather sofa/ got two rides, limousine with a chauffeur/ phone bill's about two G's flat/ no need to worry, my accountant handles that"-- so thanks to DLP technology and the miracle of deflationary tech-pricing, I'm living like a dead rap star.

So True

In the middle of the night, nothing tastes better than a glass of cold tap water.

The Top Two Movie Lines of 2008!

I know you've all been waiting with bated breath, and it's finally finished . . . Dave's Top Two Movie Lines of 2008 (one of the movies isn't even from 2008, but I saw it in 2008 and that's what is important) and so, here they are, in no particular order:

1) I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!  (from There Will Be Blood, delivered by Daniel Day Lewis)
  
2) Isn't it beautiful? Even though it's where everyone died (from Battle Royale, said by the girl that survived a three day organized slaughter-fest on a deserted island, she delivered it as they drove away on a speedboat-- it's one of those movies you have to see to believe: totally compelling, though the premise is ridiculous, and it's directed by a really famous Japanese director, Kinji Fukasaka, who you'd think is too old for that sort of thing-- he's 71-- but he's good at seamlessly and effortlessly mixing genres, like Bong Joon-ho does in that South Korean movie The Host, which I also really liked).

Double Parallel Movie Madness

Two recommendations with parallels: Slumdog Millionaire is like City of God, but in Mumbai instead of Rio de Janeiro-- I give it sixteen million blinded child beggars out of a possible eighteen million; and Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency is like a Richard Russo novel-- omnipotent, sprawling, and generous-- set in the suburbs of England-- I give it nine moors out of a possible ten.

Three Firsts

Three firsts yesterday:

1) Alex's first brazen and convincing lie . . . it was six A.M. and we were building the new Lego table and Alex and Ian were helping me, and Alex had already told Ian that it was "no time for talking" and then when Ian said something while Alex was busy holding the side of the table, he turned to him and clearly said, "Shut up, Ian" and when I confronted him he said, bawling "I said 'sun up!' because the sun is coming up!" and he pointed outside and, of course, the sun was coming up, but I know what he said and it wasn't "sun up" and who the hell says that anyway-- he claims he "forgot" to say the other words (the, is, coming) 

2) Alex's first use of sarcasm . . . we were building a huge rain forest puzzle and it was hard and I said, "Who got us this puzzle, it's hard" and Alex said, "Santa" and I said,"Santa must have heard you were smart" and Alex said, "I guess he didn't hear that you weren't smart" 

3) the first time a giant hawk smashed into our new bay window and sat stunned in the little pine tree in our yard for a while and then flew away.

Clever Incompetence

Catherine decided to make chicken scarpariello for our giant Christmas Eve party-- it's chicken and sausage, with bell peppers, sweet and hot cherry peppers, onions, all in a wine sauce, but you have to cut thighs and whole breasts into parts, and cut through bone, which is more difficult than it looks on television-- and she was having trouble with our knife, so I told her she should be using a cleaver (which is where the word "clever" is derived from, but she didn't want to hear this) and that if she was clever enough to use the proper tool, she wouldn't be having so much trouble, and I even offered to go buy her one-- but instead she wanted me to chop a few pieces, though she knows I'm a bit squeamish when it comes to cutting chicken (and this wasn't a chicken breast out of the package, this was skin and bones and gristle) and so she was sarcastic and emasculating about my ginger cutting style (I really don't like touching raw chicken, it's slimy and gross) and so I took a good chop at it and broke the cutting board in two (a big chop just like I see the chefs do on TV-- and Catherine said to me, "Do you see any cameras?") and then she relieved me of cutting duty, but she wasn't very happy with me . . . so, against my better judgment, despite the fact that I knew I might lose a digit, I got her a cleaver for Christmas.

All the Cute Girls Live in Canada

I've been telling this story to whoever will listen: a teacher who will remain nameless was walking around his class with a spur on his shoe (it had something to do with teaching True Grit) which the class found weird, but one of the girls simply said, "he's a single guy, he can do what he wants" and the teacher-- who is dating another teacher in the department-- said, "Actually, I'm not single--I have a girlfriend," and the girl looked and him and just laughed and laughed, sincere laughter, the laughter of someone who's heard a clever and surprising and completely absurd punch-line, and he said, "No, really, I do" and she said, "Well then, what's her name?" and he was about to say it but then realized they might recognize it was a fellow teacher, and he didn't want to spill that information, so-- and this is my favorite part-- he genuinely stuttered (you can't fake that unless you're a trained actor) and this teacher is NOT a good liar, so after some hemming and hawing, he finally said, "Uh, I can't say" which made everyone laugh even more, and finally he retreated to the classic response when cornered about a girl . . . "uh . . . she lives in Canada."

Low Rider on the High Ground

Just finished reading Thomas Friedman's new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution-- and How It Can Renew America . . . and so Merry Christmas carbon-producing, wrapping paper using, dirty fuel abusing (and so terrorist funding) American materialist pigs-- and I say this with greatest affection as I'm in the club as well . . . until I build my enclosed electric recumbent commuter tricycle, because then I will have the moral high ground.

Denetia? Internesia? Netheimers?

I started to type "can you get HDTV with rabbit ears" into Google, but when I got as far as "can you get," Google listed suggestions, such as "can you get pregnant on the pill" and "can you get pregnant from pre-cum" and "can you get pregnant right after your period" and "can you get pregnant on your period" and "can you get pregnant right before your period" and one non pregnancy-related topic: "can you get mono twice"-- and this distracted me so much that I forgot what I was going to search for in the first place (there needs to be a sniglet for when you go on the internet and get distracted and never get to and/or forget what you initially went on-line to do in the first place . . . internesia?)

Shoeless Muntazer

The best thing George Bush has ever done, and I mean ever, is dodge those shoes-- but if I threw them, one of them would have found its target, and I'll tell you why: Muntazer al Zaidi missed because there's very little snow in Iraq, and so it stands to reason that Muntazer had very little snowball fighting experience, because if he had, he would have perfected the time honored high/low tactic, and he would have lobbed his first shoe, thrown it weak and high like a wounded bird, and while Bush watched it (thinking to himself: that's hardly a throw . . . because A-rabs don't play good old fashioned throwing sports like baseball and football, they just kick things around . . . forgetting that at Andover, he himself was cut from the baseball team and had to become a cheerleader) and while W. was lost in thought, staring up at the shoe floating in the air, that's when I would have whipped the other shoe at him.

The Laugh Track is Wack

A student with good taste in television (The Office, Madmen, Curb Your Enthusiasm) convinced me to watch The Big Bang Theory; I turned it on and the physicists had built a time machine in their apartment, and were racing forwards and backwards in time . . . and it might have been a funny bit, but I couldn't enjoy it because there was a laugh track-- and it made me realize that I can no longer watch any new show with a laugh track (but I can watch an old show with a laugh track, like Seinfeld or Joanie Loves Chachi . . . why is that?)

A Good Retreat Is Better Than a Bad Stand

It started funny but by the middle I just didn't get it, and so-- despite glowing reviews by James Joyce, Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene-- I have given up on Flann O'brien's cult classic At Swim Two Birds; although I did learn what a Menippean parody is (and that anyone who knows what a Menippean parody is and is also a fan of this book, might also be an elitist wanker) and judging by the tone of the reviews for the book, I am wondering if anyone really gets it-- or if it's so bizarre and baffling, but also so highly regarded in learned circles, that no one wants to be the first to say that it's rather tedious and borders on nonsensical (or perhaps I wasn't reading carefully enough, but I'm way happier now-- I'm reading the Amazon.com pick of the year: The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher . . . so maybe I'm just middlebrow all the way).

To 1080p or Not to 1080p?

1080p or not 1080p, that is the question . . . and though it is far less profound than Hamlet's meditation on self-slaughter (but who would want to commit suicide anyway now that there's Blu-Ray?) this technological dilemma is far more pressing than thinking about what dreams may come when I shuffle off this mortal coil-- and those dreams probably won't be in HD.

Special Cake

So my friend took this screwed up cake that his girlfriend was going to toss in the trash, and he decided to decorate it with whatever candy was around her apartment-- and he ended up creating an "animal parade" complete with marshmallow observers, a street paved with jimmies, borders done with candy canes and gum drops, dead marshmallow people that had fallen off the cake, pretzel gates, etc. etc. and though that sounds pretty elaborate, I cannot stress how tacky and awful and downright retarded this cake looked, and when I walked into the office, I had not heard the story of the cake yet . . . all I heard was the very sweet, very nice, very motherly Special Ed. teacher talking to my friend like he was some kind of special needs student, and the more I insulted the cake, the more she complimented him for his "imagination" and cleverness, and really, the whole thing was so cloying that it made me sick (both the cake and the compliments).

Nerding It Up

Here's an example of the nerdy humor in my Shakespeare class-- and to get an idea of the kind of kids in this class, imagine this: once, during a discussion of Taming of the Shrew, I mentioned Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, and Bach, and two students were so excited by this reference to their favorite author of meta-philosophical conundrums that they actually high-fived each other; and so we are discussing Act IV of The Winter's Tale and the incorrigible rogue Autolycus is describing some of the ballads he can sing, and they are uniformly bizarre, but our favorite was the sad tale of a singing fish: previously, when the aforementioned fish was a lovely maid, she would not "exchange flesh" with the one who loved her and so as punishment for her prudery she was "turned into a cold fish"-- so I said the title of the ballad should be "To His Coy Fish-tress" but then a student thought of an even better pun: "To his Koi Mistress" . . . and perhaps you had to be there . . . or perhaps you had to be there, and be a real nerd.

Legos . . . They Are a Trap

I'll bet there's a negative correlation between time spent playing with Legos and "handiness"-- as a kid, I loved playing with Legos: they snapped together so easily, they could be built into durable and intricate structures without any other medium to hold them together, and you could start building without any structural plan and end up with a masterpiece, and my sons love them as well-- but, of course, real world materials don't behave anything like Legos-- it takes time, patience, forethought, and an understanding of how substances bond, stretch, crack, break, expand contract, and react to make anything lasting and aesthetic around the house or in the yard . . . something I don't have the patience for; and I'm afraid that my sons are traveling down the same path, as they blithely snap together spaceships, schooners, and castles with the greatest of ease.

Unnatural Action

Two animal encounters: over the weekend:

1) while I was running along the Raritan, I saw a blue heron acting in a deranged manner, listing from side to side and then finally collapsing into a heap, where it eyed my warily like some miniature feathered reptile-- and so when I got home I called several numbers until I reached Ranger Headquarters, and I told them the situation, and the next day the heron was gone, but I want to know what happened . . . I should have told the dispatcher to call me back once she had a full report of the incident so I could have some closure . . . can a heron get West Nile disease?

2) last night, our contractor went into the crawl space to retrieve some of his tools and he found a big fat raccoon in there, so he flushed him out, and after the raccoon went down the red and yellow plastic kiddie slide in our yard he climbed over the fence and into the neighbor's yard-- but not until one of the workers tossed a soccer ball at him.

Science!

Last night I learned that the best free thing ever (besides sex, which is never really free, but that's another sentence) is the annual Michael Faraday Physics Demonstration at Rutgers: they must have done fifty experiments in an hour and a half, to a packed lecture hall; it was entertaining enough to keep Alex and Ian's attention for long past their bedtime: imploding chemical drums, flaming balloons, floating magnets, the Bernoulli effect, the physics of lying on a bed of nails, a professor in an old time football helmet on roller skates propelling himself with a fire extinguisher, and, of course, everyone's favorite . . . liquid nitrogen.

Xmas Anxiety Reprieve and Return

While Catherine was away on her fifth grade camping trip last week, I felt like a Hindu or a Muslim or a Jew-- no Christmas anxiety; the kids and I never spoke of Santa or presents or lights or decorations or a tree, and I certainly didn't think about shopping or the forty people that are coming to our house on Christmas Eve . . . but on Friday Catherine returned, and so did reality-- I wanted to put my feet up and rest (I was a single dad for a couple days!) but she was all about making a list and checking it twice and getting down to brass tacks with all the Xmas bullshit (and I know I shouldn't complain, since I don't do much, but I think that makes the anxiety worse).

Reading Time!

We sold our TV last night-- and the kids were pretty good about it, considering they were right in the middle of "The Black Cauldron" when the guys came to take it away.

Who Is That Dancing Bald Man?

Tropic Thunder is best viewed without knowing the cast: it took me half the movie to recognize a couple of the actors (and, despite Ben Stiller, the movie is quite funny).

Plants/Birds/Rocks/Things/Heat/Hot

I was feeling pretty bad about the quality and content of yesterday's sentence, until I turned on the radio and heard the second worst song in rock and roll history-- the worst is Jethro Tull's "Aqualung," of course-- but the two chord classic "Horse with No Name" by America is a close runner-up; hearing their infamously vague lyric "there were plants and birds and and rocks and things" made me feel so much better about my own writing-- as did the phrase "the heat was hot" . . . but what can you expect by a band named after a geographic location, as they fall in with such ilk as Asia, Boston, Chicago, Alabama, Kansas, Europe, The Georgia Satellites and Styx.

I Go Out On A Limb . . . A Nerdy Limb

I know it's controversial, but I told my students anyway because I'm that kind of guy-- if I have an opinion, I speak it and let the chips fall where they may: my definition of science fiction is when the setting-- whether it's based on technology, set in the future, or simply a logical alternative to our own history-- is the main character of the novel or movie-- so that excludes and Star Wars and Godzilla, but does include Soylent Green and The Matrix.

Talking With Himself

I assumed once the addition was done and we were able to use the new dining room, our children would start saying things like "Mother, could you pass the treacle pudding" and "Father, this aspic is divine" but it wasn't that way at all; instead of talking to us, Alex had a forty-five minute conversation (if you call lunatic ramblings, Jim Carrey-esque facial contortions, and out of control giggling "conversation") with his reflection in the bay window and Ian shrieked with laughter at his witty brother.

Peeing Etiquette and a Peeing Paradox

A woman in our department (Kristyna) is pregnant with her first child-- and it's a boy-- and she's definitely the feminine type, so I was giving her some tips on how to raise boys (always be developing their reflexes, constantly challenge them to physical contests, emphasize competition, compliment them on feats of flatulence and gluttony, stress the importance of athletics over intelligence, etc.) but the one thing she said her boy would never do is "pee on a tree"-- because it seems my boys, if they are more than seven yards from a bathroom, find it completely appropriate to drop their pants and water whatever flora is available; this led to a debate about when to and who can pee on a tree, someone claimed that if you let your kids pee on trees once they are over the age of eleven, then you are a degenerate, but I pointed out that if you drive over to Metuchen Country Club and wander onto the golf course, then you'll find well-to-do men over the age of eleven peeing all over the trees.

The Evolution of Beer Pong

Catherine and I played beer pong for the first time on Friday night (or the new version of the game, I remember a game we played with cups of beer on a ping-pong table in college, but we used paddles and if you lost you had to take your shirt off and the other team got to whack you with the ping-pong ball, which didn't hurt much, but it did leave a little welt that lasted for a few days . . . I think we called the game "pong-ping") and Catherine was good.

Bow Down to the Master Dave

Once again, I bow to the master: David Sedaris is the King of the Sentence; though I must admit that at the start of his new book, When You are Engulfed in Flames, I wondered if he had run out of good stories to tell, but that's certainly not the case-- I could read Sedaris-brand sentences about a boil, or a cab ride, or the details of his relationship with his boyfriend Hugh, and they would still make me laugh (and, of course, they did).

You Just Opened Your Gift!

It's the holiday season again, and normally I am wracked by guilt because I know I need to get people gifts and I never do (my wife takes care of it) and also because I have charitable thoughts that never really come to fruition, but this year I am in the clear because I have been giving the gift of entertainment in the form of this blog-- and so as long as poor people have a friend with a computer and an internet connection, they can enjoy my thoughts and sentences the whole year round!

Hey Joe

At school, a small middle-aged man with glasses has been saying "Good morning Dave" to me for several years now, and this has been embarrassing for me because I didn't know his name and whenever I described him (hey, there's this little guy, with glasses, maybe he's fifty or so, wears a shirt with a tie sometimes, do you know his name?) no one could ever give me a definitive answer and then I would forget all about it until the next time I ran into him and he rudely flaunted his knowledge of my name again, but yesterday near the mail boxes, another teacher (I don't know her name either) said hello to him and she also said his name and his name is Joe (but am I really going to start calling him by name now?)

No Cake For Me

There was chocolate cake in the fridge last night and I thought about eating it, but-- get this-- I did not eat it . . . amazing, but true-- instead of eating cake I took three ibuprofen and went to bed at 8:30 because my back hurt because I'm trying to learn this soccer juggling trick called "Around the World" which involves this really violent leg motion after you flip the ball in the air-- you have to whip your foot all the way around the ball and then flip it back up, and although I'm getting closer to achieving this, I may have to quit trying to avoid serious injury.

What's the Only Thing Better Than One Fox?

While walking back from A&P yesterday, a bright red fox walked across my path (I followed him across the soccer fields just to confirm this-- just to make sure he wasn't a big squirrel or a cat or something, but, of course, it was a fox-- they are unmistakable in their color and gait . . . and a fox's tail sticks out straight and rigid from their body) and the reason I note this is that this is the second bright red fox I've seen in a week; while we were hiking with the boys on Friday one ran right by my feet . . . and if this seems far-fetched . . . if perhaps, you think I'm fabricating this, then think of what an ingenious fabrication it is-- because most people would fabricate one fox so they could have some daily content on their blog, but they would never think to fabricate two foxes-- not that I'm fabricating this-- or maybe I am . . . because that's exactly what someone who was fabricating a story would say.

Mumbai Multitasking

It's official: the Giants are so good they're boring; I yearn for the days of Butch Woolfolk (that was exciting football, in 1983 Woolfolk set the record for rushing attempts in a game-- 43), but I am getting a lot of reading done during the games . . . yesterday I finished Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger-- a first person tale of corruption, entrepeneurship, amorality and perserverance in the jungle of the modern Indian dream: and I give it nine rickshaws out of ten.