7/8/10
A Sentence Where The Title of the Sentence is Longer than the Sentence Itself (But Not as Long a Title as a "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening")
Last night, I dreamed I came face to face with a mountain lion.
7/6/10
7/5/10 The World Cup Causes Me Trouble: A One Sentence Memoir
Though I had an extremely long day of World Cup Imbibing (10 AM to Midnight) the day before Ian's kiddie birthday party, I thought I recovered nicely-- I got up early from Stacey and Ed's place in South Amboy and drove Stacey's stick shift car (not my forte) to Helmetta so I could get my car, and I was still home before 7 AM, and I immediately starting doing whatever my wife asked me to do-- I picked up the cake and balloons and juice boxes and other ingredients, I cleaned the kiddie pool, I straightened the back yard, and I attempted to fill water balloons-- but by the time the party rolled around I was dragging a bit, and I guess I wasn't as involved as I should have been, and mainly I talked to my friend Dom about a new book he was reading that sounded interesting (Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced the Working People) but any time Catherine asked for help I helped her and then later in the day when we were at the pool I jokingly mentioned to a friend that I had "failed" at Ian's kiddie party and she said, "Let me guess what happened . . . one of the parents there was a friend of yours that you hadn't talked to in a while and instead of helping your wife, who was running around like a madwoman, you sat and talked to your friend and had to be reminded by your wife to help out," and I said, "That's remarkably accurate, how did you know?" and she said, "Because my husband did the same thing and I said to him, 'Look asshole, if you want to talk to your fucking friend, then you call him up like an adult and you go meet him in a god-damned bar like a grown-up but right now you're going to help me with this party'" and I should mention that this is a friend who rarely uses profanity.
7/4/10
So we put our digital camera on a tripod the other day and made a stop motion Lego movie . . . the plot was very simple: two cars drove at each other and then crashed, resulting in a pile of Legos, but we were able to screw up every aspect of the film; there are fingers in several shots, it's choppy, the crash looks awful, the lighting switches because we used the flash on some pictures and not on others, and we were too far away for it to look very good . . . so when you go on YouTube and watch a decent Lego movie, understand that it took A LOT of skill.
7/3/10
A Really LONG Sentence About a Really BIG SHORT
I just finished the new Michael Lewis book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, and I've probably got a three day window to explain what a "synthetic sub-prime mortgage bond-backed C.D.O." is-- but I guarantee no one will ask me this (thus the purpose of the blog) and I can also explain tranches (both senior and mezzanine) and credit default swaps and the corruption in the AAA ratings of these bonds and lots of other good stuff . . . I had to read many paragraphs two or three times, but Lewis intersperses financial analysis with the story of a group of investors that were "in the know" and it's these characters that propel the plot of the book: caustic and gritty insider Steve Eisman-- who was on a mission to get back at all the people who foisted the terrible no-doc sub-prime mortgages on the working poor--and the one eyed medical doctor with Asperger's, Dr. Steve Burry, who became obsessed with sub-prime mortgage bonds and CDO's and actually read the prospectuses and realized that the whole trillion dollar house of cards was bound to collapse, even if the housing market didn't fall, even if it just stopped rising as quickly as it did in the years past, and then there's the "garage band" hedge fund started by Jamie Mai and Charles Hedley to short the housing bond market, and that helps explain just how difficult it is for regular people to invest in the same markets that the big brokerages firms are controlling; I've read a few good books on this theme, including House of Cards and The Black Swan (and also Michael Lewis's last collection of essays Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity) but this new book really explains the exponential nature of this dilemma . . . we all know some wacky mortgages were issued (and some with good intentions, the initial reason for a greater variety of mortgage types was to allow people with weaker credit to purchase homes, in the hopes that they would then be able to save money in the form of real estate) and I think everyone knows now that the bonds that were based on slices of these mortgages failed, but Lewis really gets into how CDO's multiplied these loans exponentially into more and more nested products which only contained more of themselves, and how the ratings agencies saw this as "diversification" even though many of these funds contained pieces of each other and even though they were ALL based on the price of housing (unlike earlier derivatives, which were based on a wide variety of weird loans: credit cards, airplane leases, etc.) and he explained just how opaque this market was, and how "inside" and how difficult it was to even obtain the shorts (the credit default swaps) on these products, and how even after housing prices started to fall and everyone was defaulting on their mortgages, the insurance on these CDO's still didn't sky-rocket in price because the funds were being propped up even though the reality beneath them was caving in-- and it makes you feel really out of the loop as a regular person, even rich people didn't have access to these markets (but we all had access to the information!) and the ending is sad in a way, because everyone involved in the crash walked away with money, even the investors who went long with the sub-prime loans, everyone got paid and the government bailed out the banks and brokerages (except Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers) and though we, the people, couldn't get in on the party, we will pay for the clean-up (at least with the oil spill, though we are paying for the clean-up, we've been in on the party, driving around like lunatics all our life).
Portugal vs. Spain: A Riotously Good Time in Newark
A single sentence can't do our soccer pilgrimage to Newark justice, so head over to Gheorghe:The Blog to read my photo essay about our trip: I promise you drama, tension, a celebrity sighting, crack, riots, technology, and a flaming sausage.
6/29/10
Though I doubted their skinny bodies could remain buoyant for a full length of the Rutgers pool, both my boys proved me wrong and passed their deep water tests last week-- so now they have complete freedom in the pool and are allowed to jump off the diving board-- which Ian did seventy or eighty times in a row, including a few "360's" . . . a term which he learned from another boy while in line, so it's going to be a more pleasant summer than the last one, when the boys could swim, but not so well, so they always looked like they were on the verge of drowning, which makes it really hard to look away from them and at the page of whatever book you are reading (and I have banned them from the kiddie pool, which they like to fool around in when they get cold in the big pool, because they are now big enough to be considered the annoying kids who the parents of actual toddlers hate because they fear for their toddlers lives when the big kids invade the kiddie pool, and this is nice as well, because now I don't have to look for them in two bodies of water, only one).
Hose of Plenty
It has been pointed out that perhaps Americans have TOO much of everything; that there is such a thing as too much "plenty" in the "land of plenty," and that all this choice and plenty doesn't necessarily lead to happiness-- we never make the top ten in any of the "happiest countries" surveys, though impoverished places like Guatemala and Nigeria are always high on the list, and even Mexico-- while in the midst of a violent drug cartel war-- was ranked as the second happiest place in the world in a University of Michigan study-- and nowhere is this paradox of plenty leading to misery more evident than on the nozzle of my garden hose, as there are NINE settings, count them: 1) fan 2) cone 3) shower 4) center 5) jet 6) mist 7) soaker 8) flat 9) angle . . . and no matter which one I use my shorts always get soaked and there is no difference between angle and cone and fan . . . and "soaker" should just be called "leaking" and I am sure that in El Salvador (another happy country) they just put their thumb over the end of the hose to control the spray.
Likeable But Forgettable
Rock Which Town? And When?
I was listening a rockabilly program on Princeton college radio (WPRB) and the DJ was playing classic stuff by Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran and Bill Haley, but then he played "Rock This Town" by The Stray Cats-- which is in some ways indiscernible from the other, older music-- though it is from 1982 . . . and my post-modern dilemma is this: "Rock This Town," which I consider somehow disingenuous and satirical because it is from my youth, a period of punk-rock, synth-pop, and Men Without Hats-- and though The Stray Cats made great music, there was an element of parody in their dress, their musical style and their lyrics . . . but they sounded like they were from the '50's, and now the song is so old (and regarded as one of the 500 most important songs of all time by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) that it has become classic, so "classic" that the DJ didn't point out the difference between "Rock this Town" and the other "authentic" songs he was playing, and I know this shouldn't bother me and maybe it's because it makes me feel old, that I can make the distinction between an eighties band and real rockabilly and it's so far in the past that no one else seems to know or care . . . but it is scary that the eighties are the same amount of years from the fifties as they are from the present.
Keeping It Yogi
Here's a real quotation said by a real administrator at our end of the year meeting, I think it does Yogi Berra proud: In order for things to happen, a lot of things have to get done (and this is so much better than my bogus Yogi Berra quotation but not nearly as good as my sincere apology for my phony Yogi Berra quotation).
Free Thesis
6/22/10 Wish Me Luck . . . or Hope I Bomb: It's Your Choice.
6/21/10 It's a Girl!!
6/20/10
I simultaneously read Steve Martin's Born Standing Up and Hampton Sides' Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin and though they both focus on America in the late sixties, you wouldn't know it was the same country; Steve Martin lived an odd life you couldn't invent, getting his start at Disneyland doing patter in the magic shops and slowly evolving his act towards the avant-garde while he drifted through the Flower Power era . . . meanwhile, Dr. King was organizing a general revolution among the poor, hoping to bring them all to Washington to camp out and make the rest of the country understand their plight, and he was being stalked by both J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, as well as a shifty man that went by various names, including Eric Galt and James Earl Ray, who-- after assassinating King, led the FBI on a wild hunt that required detective work across the South, in Mexico, Canada, and, finally, London, where he was captured by Scotland Yard's finest (which annoyed J. Edgar Hoover).
6/19/10 The Thousandth Post! $$^%&^ You!
6/18/10
So I finally executed this stupid gag at school-- it's rather Andy Kaufmanesque: we started reading an essay on Modernism and then I asked the kids if it would help if they could see a video clip about this topic before they wrote their essay and they said yes (of course) and I agreed with them that sometimes it helps to see what we're reading about, especially if it is about art, and so then I played a video of me reading the exact essay on Modernism that we just read and then I asked them if that helped . . . being able to see it, and they laughed, but next year I want to do this gag once a month, so that just when they think I'd never do it again, I do it again (and I show enough actual video clips that they would forget) so I've got a lot of filming to do . . . I feel like it will work especially well for Hamlet . . . would you like to see this scene? It's a great one to actually see . . . and then I'll play a film of me reading it in a horrible British accent . . . and then I'll use the same accent for A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, because, oddly, my British and Irish accents are identical and they are also very high-pitched, I think the students enjoy my bad accents more than if I could actually do a convincing accent . . . and if you're wondering about the relevance of this tangent, I think it fits into the category of comedy that is also Kaufmanesque.
6/17/10
6/16/10 It's Number Day!
Somebody Better Write This Quickly (Before We Forget About The Gulf Oil Spill and Start Worrying About Some Other Disaster))
I hereby donate this bad science-fiction plot to whomever would like to develop it into a full length novel or movie: the US Government develops a petroleum eating bacteria in order to clean up an oil spill, but the bacteria mutates into an airborne strain and slowly expands around the globe, eating the fuel at filling stations and in individual gas tanks, essentially paralyzing world transportation-- and the bacteria creates propane as a waste product, which is highly flammable, so there are LOTS of explosions and lots of chaos, but one man-- in his home made electric car, with his battery powered fan, and his electric razor, and his electric chair-- will save the earth from complete pandemonium . . . admittedly, it sounds pretty dumb, but it's a better plot than The Human Centipede.
We Don't Know How to Relax
6/13/10
6/11/10
6/11/10 It's Phallus Rubicundus Day Again!
Like a Splinter in Your Eye
6/9/10
Ouch
European Crime
I'm still on a foreign crime kick: if you want a Scottish crime novel that's reminiscent of Fargo, try Denise Mina's Still Midnight; and we just watched the Kenneth Branagh version of Henning Mankell's novel Sidetracked-- Branagh plays tortured Swedish detective Kurt Wallander and the start of the show is stunning-- you'd never believe something called "rapeseed" could be so beautiful.
6/6/10
I Think Dane Cook Is Funny
A Case of Premeditated Plumbing
I'm not Mother Theresa, but I am proud to say that last night I did not beat, strangle, or kill my youngest child, and you might say, "That's nothing to be proud of!" but let me tell you the whole story: yesterday morning, our kitchen ceiling started dripping and I discovered that the "S" pipe in our upstairs bathroom was leaking, so we mopped up the water (and Ian helped!) and considered ourselves lucky that the leak was in plain view and then we instructed the kids not to use that sink-- and it's not even the main upstairs bathroom, it's the bedroom bathroom, so they don't use that sink anyway, and Catherine wisely put a towel over it to remind us not to use it-- now flash to yesterday evening, we're getting ready to go to the school carnival and Alex is drawing on the computer quietly and Ian is roaming around and suddenly the ceiling starts dripping lots of water, way more water than in the morning and I get very upset-- where could it be from?-- but I go upstairs and our bedroom door is open and the bathroom door is open-- and it is a difficult door to open-- and the towel is pulled aside and THE TAP IS RUNNING! . . . because Ian, bored and annoyed because Alex was playing quietly on his own, went upstairs, went into our room, removed the towel, and turned the water on and then came downstairs, didn't say a thing, and just waited to see what would happen . . . and by this time Catherine had left for the carnival (she was a volunteer) and so I had to deal with this alone and I was having serious rage issues and Ian admitted that it was premeditated, that he knew what the result would be and that he was in serious trouble, and-- after I told him that he had "betrayed the family," he was sent to his room and missed the carnival and lost all of his reward marbles and got a stern talking to and I may have kicked a chair, but like I said, there was no beating or strangling of the child, and I'm pretty proud of that, considering he nearly ruined our kitchen ceiling ON PURPOSE . . . just to see what would happen, and I'm getting angry all over again as I write this sentence . . . deep breaths, deep breaths.
6/3/10 (That's Right, Dave Has Been Married for TEN Years!)
Secret Lives of Your Children, Part II: I ran into Ian's pre-K teacher, Mrs. Z, at the grocery store-- she is the sweetest, greatest teacher, and so patient with my stubborn grouch of a son, and she has the kids doing all kinds of hands on projects having to do with science and gardening and cooking, and this is what she said to me about Ian, you can insert the subtext: "You know, Ian is so smart . . . not book smart, and he's compassionate too."
6/2/10
The Form of This Sentence Reflects Its Function
A Wired article called "Chaos Theory" summarizes Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows, which argues that the riot of hyper-linked information on the Internet actually rewires our brain so that we comprehend less, and read in a cursory manner.
My Kids Refuse To Be Cute On Demand
Two Completely Impossible Trivia Questions
Two trivia questions that have entertained people recently: 1) name the top three international best selling music albums of all time (according to Wikipedia) 2) what is the primary ingredient of Worcestershire Sauce?
Copulation > Assassination
A great moment on Madmen: ad-man Duck Phillips is meeting an ad-woman Peggy Olsen in a hotel for a "nooner," and Duck is watching TV while he waits for Peggy at their trysting place and he sees a news flash that President Kennedy has been shot and injured, but he knows his Peggy is just about to show up, and there's no way he's going to let a little thing like this ruin the romantic moment, and so he unplugs the television, and when she walks in moments later she is none the wiser, and then once they are post-coital, smoking cigarettes in bed, he says, "Do you mind if I turn on the TV . . . there's this news story that's bothering me," and then they learn that J.F.K has been killed . . . and I certainly can't blame Duck-- you can't let a national tragedy get in the way of copulation.
BONUS Post at Gheorghe:The Blog
Terry and I made a pilgrimage to the new Red Bulls Arena in Harrison . . . read all about it at Gheorghe: The Blog.
We Were at (the educational Trenton version of) Woodstock!
Last Saturday, Terry, Stacey, Mike and I attended the educational version of Woodstock-- the NJEA rally in Trenton-- and we are assuming that in the future, everyone and their brother will claim that they were there, but we were there and Stacey has the pictures to prove it; we took the train because we didn't want to be beholden to the NJEA bus schedule (and so we could drink-- we were hungry but elected to purchase beers instead of food for the train ride-- we assumed all the teachers on the train would be partying, but we were wrong, in fact, to our knowledge, we were the only teachers at the event to smuggle in alcohol-- beer for the train, and wine and Sprite in water bottles-- we were in Trenton, after all) and the event was packed with teachers, cops, and firemen . . . attendance estimates ranged from 30,000 to 35,000-- despite the crowds, the event was very well organized and there were plenty of Port-a-Johns and tons of great food . . . gyros and sausage-and-pepper sandwiches and crab cakes and grilled burgers and dogs, which made my rash culinary decision even more ridiculous, I was waiting in line to get a chicken gyro, which looked delicious, and I saw a lonely stand that was advertising "Pork Roll Sandwiches" and-- after feeling a sudden burst of Jersey pride-- I said, "This is New Jersey-- I'm getting pork roll" and then I regretted my choice for the rest of the day, but maybe not as much as Terry regretted his conversation with some cab drivers: "Hey, are you guys African? No? Oh, Haitian . . . well you're better off here than there," and when he was asked to explain that comment, he claimed he just wanted to "talk some World Cup" with them, but then he got thrown off when they said they were from Haiti . . . and Terry wondered: what do you say to someone when they say thay are from Haiti?
Young at Heart/ Old at Heart
Once again I got mixed up in assessing people's mental age (a concept my friend Whitney invented, where you assign someone an abstract age, which they usually remain for the bulk of their life . . . he says he will always be 19, partying and trying to drink under-age, like it's getting away with something, and I will always be 90, seen it all, crotchety, going to bed early, don't really care how I dress or what people think of me) and first I was doing it in class, because it is great to do for characters in fiction, but of course the students wanted me to assess them, so I would assign them arbitrary ages (two silly girls: I say: "You're three," and "You're four," one asks, "Can I be five?" and I say "Sure," and the other says, "Then I want to be five too, if she gets to be five!" and I say, "No, you really are three") and some of them get upset ("Do I have to be twelve?" "Yes you do," "I want to be twenty one!" "That's just what a twelve year old would say") and I got borderline insulting, calling Liz a bit "snotty" and Laura "passive aggressive" and then assigning them random ages, such as 24, 114, 55, 62, 13, but the funny thing is, everyone listens to you very intently when you do this, because you are talking exclusively about them, and we love it when someone talks about us exclusively, even if the opinions are unfounded and stupid.
5/26/10
You may have tried some of the awareness tests that are available on-line, and hopefully, like me, you failed them miserably-- that's what FUN about them-- but I had my wife do a few of them (and I have read more books than my wife, so you'd think I would be smarter than her) but she kept passing the tests, which is no fun at all . . . she'd start watching and then she'd yell out the fun thing they reveal at the end of the test that normal people have to replay the video to see . . . and she guesses the end of movies too.
5/25/10
I'm working my way through Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, by conservative British historian Paul Johnson (who lost his footing on the moral high ground when Gloria Stewart, the writer with whom he had an eleven year affair, revealed that he enjoyed erotic spankings) and despite the fact that I don't agree with some of his political stances, he is a vivid and entertaining writer . . . if only my history textbooks from high school had prose like this: "The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary phase in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German body politic; the German state was huge creature with a small and limited brain."
5/24/10
So my boss asked me if I knew what "febrile" meant and I said, "feverish" and he said,"no, it means weak" and then a colleague agreed-- she said, "yeah, like feeble" and I took their word for it, although my one skill in life is that I can define nearly any word-- if I say a definition it's usually correct, and if I don't know the word then I know I don't know the word, but this was a clear example of Solomon Asch's experiments in social pressure-- all it took was two people agreeing to make me question my brain, but luckily, I had to look up the word "exiguous"-- which means diminutive-- and I remembered about "febrile" and so I looked it up and then I got to say the best three words in the English language: I WAS RIGHT!
5/23/10
Alex lost his sticker again at school, and he said it was "just for giving Leukey a high-five," and I said, "Just for that?" and he said, "Yeah, it was nonsense."
Five Circus Facts
We took the kids to Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus last week, and here are some things to remember: 1) the music is really LOUD, and in the genre of New Age Yanni, and so you should bring ear-plugs 2) you can fit seven racing motorcycles in a steel ball 3) they have updated the clowns so that they are not sad, weird, and spooky 4) go to the pre-show where you get to walk out on the floor and get close to the jugglers, men on stilts, elephants, and hat throwers 5) circus chicks are really hot and when you get bored during the trampoline act you can fantasize about running away with the circus and fornicating with all the super fit and sexy circus chicks, because the guys in the circus are kind of goofy, so you can convince yourself without too much work, that you actually might have a shot with these incredibly flexible, athletic, and lovely women from far flung portions of the globe, even though they would laugh at you because you can't even do two flips on the trapeze.
5/21/10
I bought a kid's electric guitar for Ian at a garage sale, and put two coated strings on it-- my theory being, when you teach kids chess you just use a couple pieces at a time, and when you teach kids soccer, you start small sided-- so I would start slow with the guitar, and I put a strap on it and gave him a guitar stand so that it is his guitar, up in his room, and I showed him how to alternate pick and told him if he practiced for a month, I would get him a little amplifier (which is a terrible idea, considering he's going to be five in a month and still doesn't know how to tell time, so he'll be waking us up at 5:15 with it) and he put it on and practiced several times, which was impressive, and then we put them to bed and watched an episode of Madmen and when we went upstairs, Catherine called me into his room-- he was sleeping with his guitar.
One Way to Earn a Buck
Last Saturday after my work-out at the gym I went to pick up my kids from the Kids Klub supervised play area, and the girl-- a new girl-- said that my kids "earned a dollar" and she really wanted me to take this dollar and split it between Alex and Ian but I refused, of course . . . but she insisted that they deserved it for some game they were playing and I just wanted to get out of there so I said fine, I'd make change in the car, but as we were walking across the parking lot Alex told me the whole story: he was drawing on the computer and Ian was pestering him so much that he punched Ian in the eye and they got into some kind of hysterical fight and she essentially paid them to be good, so I made them march back in and tell the lady that they didn't deserve the dollar and then give the dollar back, which they did (while crying hysterically) and this truly makes me wonder just what the fuck is going on with my kids when I'm not watching.
5/19/10
So at my work-place it has become something of an honor to appear in a Sentence of Dave, when someone says or does something interesting or unusual, occasionally they turn to me and say, "That should be in a sentence," and I always say, "Yes it should!" because what they don't realize it that when you write a sentence every single day, you are often short on material . . . so when Stacey said to Audrey, "You're still using that pen?" and she said, "Yes, it won't dry up-- I told my class it was like the miracle of Hanukkah, you know, when the oil that was only supposed to light the flame in the menorah for one night lit the temple for eight nights . . ." and then she turned to me and said, "Now that should be in a sentence," and now it is.
More World Cup Analysis at Gheorghe!
If you didn't get enough World Cup analysis in my first post, then you can read Part II today over at Gheorghe: The Blog-- it's even longer and equally as absurd as my first effort.
5/18/10
At work the other day Stacey was not looking so good and I said, "hey, you don't look so good" and she said, "yeah, I feel terrible, I'm sick" and then-- before my filter kicked in-- I said, "Well don't get me sick!" but then I apologized and told her that was rude and said I hoped she felt better soon.
Campbell's Law and The Death and Life of the Great American School System
Diane Ravitch's book The Death and Life of the Great American School System asserts two ideas, and supports them with comprehensive detail: 1) a market system is fine if you want to create consumers, but it does not work for public schools-- as they are one of the last places where community, democracy, and local citizens can have an influence-- and 2) using testing as a measure of accountability for teachers and schools is illogical (she cites Campbell's law-- "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor") because it is essentially putting the cart before the horse; Ravitch speaks from a position of great perspective, she worked in the administrations of George Bush Sr., Clinton, and George W. and she is one of the most credible educational historians in America; book is something of a reflection on how she fell for some of these fads before she fully analyzed the evidence, and her change of heart is in notable opposition to President Obama's continuation of Bush's war on our education system . . . a must read if you have kids: ten charter schools out of a possible ten.
Shouldn't Canadian Geese Live in Canada?
I thought I was going for a relaxing bike ride on the towpath, and in some respects it was-- I saw lots of wildlife: a muskrat, a scarlet tanager, several goldfinches, a heron, and some turtles-- but also had a run in with several Canadian geese, their chicks have just hatched and their nests are right on the side of the path, so the adults-- in order to protect their young-- would block the path when I approached, and so I had to whip stones at them and shove my bike at them and hit them with sticks in order to get them out of the way . . . I saw one jogger do an about face and head back the way she came, her pleasant run truncated by an ornery bird.
You Are Special!
David Shenk's new book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong gives an overview of the newest research on nature, nurture and talent-- he is covering some of the same ground as Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers and Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code-- but he has new examples and goes more in depth about genetics, which is far more plastic than what was once though (even Lamarckian at times . . . the section on epigenetics is really interesting) and in the end the lesson is this: if you want to do something, don't worry about if you have an innate talent for it, just start practicing, but make sure you practice, often, obsessively, and under the best tutelage you can . . . and if this happens, you don't have to worry too much about genes . . . if you want to read more, especially on the sporting aspects of the book, head to here to my post at Gheorghe: The Blog.
5/14/10
So if you're a fan of this blog, you know that I invented the word "entertaintment" a few weeks ago, although I simply coined the word, I didn't actually use it-- but my dream came true, while we were talking about "sexting" and how it's not for guys, especially with the kind of angle you'd get on a cell phone held down low and Stacy blurted out my new word . . . she said, "That's entertaintment!" and I was so pleased.
5/13/10
Yesterday, WRSU played "Living After Midnight" by Judas Priest . . . the lyrics are so much better now that I know Rob Halford is gay.
5/12/10
My work is over at Gheorghe today; I finally completed my completely biased, totally definitive, and not so comprehensive 2010 World Cup Preview . . . you might find it enlightening, even if you don't like soccer.
5/11/10
Alex and Ian invented a game called "Hear the Car" and it is a great example of the power of your senses: one player closes their eyes and the other one chucks the Matchbox car as far as he can (they were playing on the playground) and then the player opens his eyes and runs and finds the car . . . and you can do it every time, even if it doesn't hit metal, even if it just rustles in the grass-- our ears are remarkable (I played a few rounds.)
Jamming Econo
The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner, is in a class of its own; it is a history of economic thought from medieval times through Keynes and Schumpeter and it includes all the greats-- Adam Smith , Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill and the Utopians (which is a great name for a band) David Ricardo, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx and crew-- and Heilbroner has done all the reading, so for each man, he presents you with an overview, a few entertaining and telling anecdotes, some pithy quotations, and a logical summary of their theory and how accurate it was . . . and his conclusion is that all these men were prescient and discovered something new about the economic workings of their own world and were able to predict into the near future, but as times and technology changed, their theories fell by the wayside (David Ricardo and globalization) and Heilbroner wonders if it will ever be possible to make such predictions again, as he sees the world now as a combination of economics and politics that is well near impossible to unravel.
Some People LIKE to Drive
Daniel H. Pink's book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us certainly explains this blog and Gheorghe and Greasetruck; it summarizes the counter-intuitive evidence that we are not motivated by greater extrinsic rewards (these kinds of rewards are addictive, counter-productive, and are essentially a dead end) but instead we are driven by the intrinsic value of what we are doing . . . and he cites numerous examples of how people will work harder on something they choose over something they are paid to do . . . it's easy enough to see this through the passion people have for their hobbies-- runners don't consider running "work," people do crossword puzzles for fun, and I don't consider writing this blog a job (it took me a year to realize the pun on "sentence of dave") so then the book tackles the tougher problem of how to make work and school more like an avocation than a vocation: Steve Martin, in Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner says, "It's fine when your hobbies get in the way of work, but when they get in the way of each other, that's a problem."
5/8/10
Once in a while I get focused and read an entire book in one day, but it's got to be an easy read with a nice font and some pictures, and Nancy G. Heller's slender book Why a Painting is Like a Pizza: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art fit the bill-- it sheds some light on Mondrian and those ridiculous white canvasses and weird installations and Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) and though I don't buy everything she says, it's a nice tour through post-modernism: one urinal out of a possible fish.
If It's So Stupid, Then Why Did I Have A Nightmare?
Paranormal Activity is very Blair Witch and I will say this: it is scary-- it even made me a have a nightmare, but as a movie it's kind of repetitive and the characters are even more illogical than most archetypal horror movie characters (typical thought process: Hey! I heard something growling upstairs . . . let's go check it out! without any sort of weapon . . . while holding this camera) and the movie ends predictably and rather lamely (unlike the The Blair Witch Project, which has one of the best endings in cinema history) so if you're in the mood to sit tensely, it's fine, but it's not going to leave you with much to think about: four Ouija boards out of five (I used Ouija Boards because I wanted to see if I could spell "Ouija" correctly and I did!)
5/6/10
Someone brought in a bunch of cheesecake on Friday, and I didn't want to each a bunch of cheesecake and Stacy didn't want to eat a bunch of cheesecake . . . so Stacy gave me twenty dollars to hold, and if she ate any cheesecake, then I wouldn't return it, and I gave her twenty dollars and the deal was the same, but then we thought we'd better involve an unbiased third party . . . so we gave the money to Liz to hold in escrow, and it worked like a charm-- neither of us caved-- and it appears to be a brilliant strategy for eating healthy . . . unless, of course, you do break down and eat a slice of cheesecake, because then you're not going to pay twenty dollars for one slice, so to cut your losses you'll probably go berserk and eat five slices of cheesecake so that they only cost you four dollars per slice.
I Cave to Peer Pressure
I could never imagine that people would be so rabid about something as mundane as sinus irrigation, but when I was suffering some sinus problems last week, I had a wide variety of people-- teachers, students, old, young, male female-- recommend the Neti Pot, which is a little magical lamp that you fill with water mixed with a packet of salt and other magical stuff, and then you insert the bulb of the lamp into your nostril, lean over the sink, and pour . . . and like magic, water pours out your other nostril, after circulating through your brain and cleaning out your synapses-- and it worked, it actually worked!
The #1 Benefit to Growing Old
One of the few nice things about growing old is that my feet don't smell as bad as they did when I was a kid . . . but maybe that's because my sense of smell is deteriorating.
5/3/10
A good day skim-boarding at the beach for young and old on Saturday: Alex had his first real success, he's now strong enough to chuck the board and brave enough to jump on it with both feet-- he was "in the zone" for over an hour until the tide got to low-- and my recently rehabilitated knee (the knee cap popped out of the groove while playing soccer) held up as well, and a high school kid with a much cooler skim-board than me and a wet-suit gave me some pointers and told me I needed a much larger board (he did not add "because you are fat" . . . he was very polite).
The Netflix Team Tackles A Difficult Project
I'm slightly embarrassed that this was the movie that I had the "Netflix team" working their damnedest on so that I could receive it in a timely manner . . . perhaps if it was an obscure Jean-Luc Godard film I wouldn't feel so bad . . . but I am trying to develop an appreciation of our neighbors to the North, so I need access to the great works of Canadian culture:
"Dear David,
Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day was not available from your local shipping center; fortunately, it was available from a shipping center in another part of the country; it's on its way and should arrive within 3 to 5 days; you'll notice we also sent the next available DVD from your Queue to enjoy while Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day makes its way to you--
The Netflix Team."
5/1/10
Somalian extremist dilemma: do the pros of banning the bra outweigh the cons of banning music?
Ask Mom . . . Cinema Edition
I recently saw two relatively difficult kids' movies: Oceans, which is a visual treat (especially the blanket octopus and the night- time feeding scenes) but contains no real story or theme . . . and my kids have obviously taken after their father in the theater-- they feel everyone around them is entitled to their thoughts (that is definitely a lobster, definitely . . . that fish is poisonous, I know it is . . . that's a great white shark . . . that's a black tip shark . . . that's a hammerhead shark . . . that's a lantern fish . . . etc.) and we also saw Where the Wild Things Are, which is quite symbolic and way over my head, but I did recognize that the movie had something to do with emotions (and the monsters' faces are especially expressive) and if you need more explanation, you can ask my wife, who actually got everything . . . but Alex, Ian and I were a little lost.
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