Irony, Hypocrisy, Christie

While the extensive media coverage of Governor Christie's use of the State Helicopter to go to his son's baseball game is bi-partisan politics at its worst-- we have far more important things to debate in New Jersey-- there is still a delicious irony to the fact that Christie actually said this on the record:  "People in New Jersey now feel as if there have become two classes of people in New Jersey: public employees who receive rich benefits, and those who pay for them," and, of course, if you call for a "shared sacrifice" to balance the State Budget, then you'd better be prepared to be called a hypocrite if you're not "walking the walk"-- but, considering his plump figure and the fact that he was driven in a limo the hundred yards from the helicopter to the ball field-- it is doubtful that Christie walks anywhere.

No Virginia . . . You Are An Idiot (Spoiler Alert!)

I overheard a conversation between my two sons while we were driving to Grounds for Sculpture; Ian-- who is six-- emphatically professed his disbelief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, and Alex-- who is seven-- agreed that they were all manifestations of "mommy and daddy," and I know that I am supposed to regret this moment and think: It's so sad that they've lost their innocence, their belief in make-believe and magic-- but what I actually thought was: Phew! Thank God my kids aren't idiots!

A Cinema Question

Are you supposed to cheer when Raymond Shaw shoots his Communist Red Queen mother at the end of The Manchurian Candidate?

Wonderful Images Day Two: Sperm Cake!

Nearly twenty year's ago at my friend Jason's first wedding, I ended my rambling, extemporaneous, and generally incoherent best-man's toast with a sperm joke-- my peroration was: As long as those little guys can swim!-- and the remark was received by the genteel Southern crowd as you might expect, and so I waited a decade for everyone to lighten up, and then tried a similar speech at Jason's second wedding-- but met with similar results-- but, finally-- no pun intended-- my time has come: Saturday evening at Liz and Eric's wedding, each table received a small wedding cake and a bag of frosting and we were told that we were in a "cake decorating contest," and that the winning cake would be the one cut and eaten by the bride and groom . . . and in my opinion, this is what every wedding needs, because after all the romantic stuff everyone is dying for a little friendly competition; it took my table a few moments to get on board with my plan, but once I took matters into my own hands and drew a giant red wriggling sperm on the pristine white icing, they had no choice but to follow suit-- and once they were in, they were all in . . . Audrey made wee mini-sperms for the sides of the cake, Laura drew a lovely smiley face on the featured sperm, Brady got blue Tic-Tacs from Rob so we could make the egg look more like an actual haploid reproductive cell, Jack and Terry wrote the caption "Life Begins" with crumbled chocolate cookies underneath the sperm and egg . . . and we eagerly pointed out the double meaning of the phrase to the bride and groom when we "campaigned" for our cake . . . and though there were some beautiful cakes, many with exquisite dragonflies on them-- the motif of the wedding-- the bride's mother (an art teacher) put in a good word for us and we we were announced the winners and took great pride in the fact that Liz and Soder cut our cake . . . and though I must be honest and report that there may have been some gloating over the fact that we won . . . perhaps we did not display the best "sportsmanship" after our victory, but, on the other hand, how often do you get to say: "I just won a cake decorating contest!"

A Wonderful Image Trumps An Annoying Event

Aside from this incident-- which doesn't count because it happened while I was running a high fever-- I hadn't received a traffic ticket in twenty years (this is partly because my father worked in corrections and so I could always drop his name and partly because I'm a fairly safe driver) but last week I received a letter from the East Brunswick Municipal Court and it had photographs proving that I "Failed to Observe a Traffic Signal," when I made a right onto Tices Lane off Route 18, but the fact of the matter is (I watched the video) that the light turned from yellow to red just as I was about to make the right, and though I should have come to a complete stop before I made the turn, I've never seen anyone actually do that, and no cop in their right mind would have pulled me over for this, but you can't talk to an automated camera . . . although maybe it would have been worth a try-- I could have waved my PBA card at it and said things like: "MAYBE YOU KNOW MY DAD? HE RAN ALL THE JAILS? HE TEACHES CRIMINAL LAW NOW? MAYBE YOU HAD HIM AS A TEACHER? PLEASE?" and when I explained to my five year old son Ian how the computerized traffic signal gave me a ticket because I didn't stop at a red light, he asked, "How did you get the ticket? Did it come twirling down?" and that image, of a computerized camera spitting out tickets from high above, so that they "twirl down" to the traffic offenders, is worth the 85 dollars I had to pay for my violation.

Bonus! An Important Topic That Requires Your Immediate Consideration

Bonus post today over at G:TB . . . you may feel secure in the fact that you've got your living will, your living trust, and your life insurance policies in order, but you still might not have considered this possibility . . .

Upset Victory

The last thing my friend Mario said to me as we stepped onto the field for our adult league soccer game last Wednesday was, "We will be slaughtered" and I agreed with him-- the team we were playing was comprised of fit, fast twenty-five year old kids, while our team is comprised of slow old men . . . and, to stack the deck against us more, we were missing several of our youngest, strongest, and fastest players, and so we only had one substitute . . . AND it was 95 degrees and humid-- but the soccer gods smiled on us, and our strategy of packing it back on defense and playing for the counter-attack worked and we ended up upsetting the youngsters 4-3 and I would tell you who scored the game winning goal, but my friend Terry says my sentences have gotten too long, so I'll end this one here.

Europe in the Air

It sucks when your seven year old son gets the joke and you don't: Alex told me he wished we could go back to Busch Gardens because he liked the ride Europe in the Air, and then he reminded me that it was "Europe-- the continent-- in the air," and not "Your up in the air," as he first thought-- and that he liked that the name meant both things . . . and I told him that I liked the joke as well, but what I didn't tell him was that, truth be told, I didn't realize the pun when we were at at Busch Gardens . . . and only got it long after the fact, with the help of a first grader.

Paradoxical Refuse

The bottom of one of our garbage cans has rotted out, which raises an interesting question: how do you dispose of a trash receptacle? (I have asked several people this puzzler, and no one has a solution . . . one person said she has actually spray-painted a message on one of her broken bins-- to alert the garbage men that she wanted to throw it away-- yet they still didn't remove it . . . but here are a few techniques that may work: my favorite is the recommendation to "disguise the trash can," by placing it inside a trash bag).

Another Use For Your Closet

Lately, my seven year old son Alex is on a roll . . . at dinner Tuesday night, he asked to be excused after eating only a couple bites of his ice cream (he had just earned back dessert status) which was strange because he has a sweet tooth and always finishes treats-- and after Alex left the table, Ian, a model of discretion for his five years, said to us, "You know what was weird? Alex had a handful of green beans," and I was impressed that he didn't outright squeal on his brother, instead he alerted us with some subtlety and sophistication, but it was enough of a hint for Catherine to chase Alex upstairs-- he said he was going to write his friend a birthday card-- and when she asked him about the green beans, he claimed that "he ate them," but upon further interrogation it turns out that he threw them in the back of his closet-- the second time in a week he's made an absurd choice for hiding contraband-- so Catherine made him fish them out and she told them that as punishment he had to eat them, but he claimed that they were "dusty," and so I washed them off with some cold water and once again . . . he's lost dessert for a week.

I'm Not A Professional Actor

So it must hard for my seven year old son Alex when his younger brother churns out super-cool looking drawings on a daily basis . . . when Alex draws something we try to encourage him, but I'm sure he can tell the difference between our feigned enthusiasm for his mundane scribbles and our unabashed adulation for Ian's boldly drawn creations . . . and so-- as a person who experienced growing up with someone talented (my brother was a piano prodigy)-- Alex might be better off if he quit drawing altogether and focused on some other skill.

I Was Thinking (That You Were Thinking)

I Was Thinking (That You Were Thinking) by The Density

A new song by The Density . . . this one explores the most awkward of moments: when you put yourself out there and admit to someone that you think they are groovy and special . . . they they reject you . . . you can read the lyrics over at G:TB, but the lyrics don't do the song justice . . . the real content is provided by Whitney, my colleagues at work, Jim Carrey, The Farrelly Brothers, The Coen Brothers, Lauren Holly, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Frances McDormand, and Steve Park and so I'd like to thank them for letting me splice, dice, and mangle their words . . . I appreciate it.

Busted!

My son Alex has had quite a week: first he confessed this lie, and then-- when he was on the way out the door for school on Thursday, my wife noticed a bulge in his sock, and when she asked him about it, he said it was "just bunched up," but upon further interrogation and a search, she found that he was attempting to smuggle "Now and Later" candies to school . . . and if he wasn't wearing shorts he might have gotten away with it (or if he would simply put them in his pocket, but he obviously knew he was doing something illicit and you don't put illicit stuff in your pockets, you put it in your socks).

Words Of Advice

Apparently, when your wife says, "I'm drawing a blank on what to get you for our anniversary," the proper response is not "We're getting each other gifts?" followed by "Do you want anything?"

Some Like It Hot (But They Are Idiots)

So the way I get my students to stop complaining about the heat (our classrooms are NOT air-conditioned, and they are poorly ventilated) is by complaining about it even more than they do . . . because I've stolen their gripe and added an unnecessary amount of hyperbole to it, their only recourse is to take the reverse position and so they eventually start encouraging me, they try to motivate me to finish class . . .they say things like:  there's only twenty minutes left-- you can make it . . . and I reply with statements like: THIS IS THE HOTTEST PLACE ON EARTH! MY ENTIRE BODY IS SOAKED WITH SWEAT! LET'S GO OUT IN THE COURTYARD, IT'S HOT BUT AT LEAST WE'LL BE OUTSIDE! I THINK I'M GOING TO PASS OUT! and the sight of a grown man behaving so childishly usually inspires them behave more maturely . . . and I just bought a wall thermometer at Home Depot, so now I'll be able to add a quantitative element to my complaints: IT'S 91 DEGREES IN HERE! THERE MUST BE A LAW THAT PROHIBITS THIS! WE NEED TO CALL OUR CONGRESSMAN! WE NEED TO ALERT THE AUTHORITIES ABOUT THIS! THIS IS A HEALTH HAZARD!

A Good Thriller You Probably Haven't Seen

For once, my wife gave me a task that was in my wheelhouse . . . . a task which I not only completed, but also enjoyed (unlike the time she assigned me the Christmas mission of buying her some sexy lingerie and I went to Victoria's Secret in the mall and saw the word "panties" and started blushing and then a cute girl asked if I needed help and I got nervous and ran out of the store and then got my friend Celine to go to the mall and pick out some things that Catherine would like and on Christmas when Catherine saw what Celine picked out, she was happy and amazed by my good taste and I told her Celine "helped me," but didn't tell her the truth: that I didn't even go on the mission . . . and I would have gotten away with it if another teacher hadn't spilled the beans and told my wife the whole sordid tale-- that Celine picked out the lingerie and showed it to all the women in the English department, so Catherine made me return the lingerie-- except for one item she couldn't part with-- and then she made me go buy lingerie all by myself as punishment . . . even though I thought it was pretty clever of me to complete the task in the fashion I did) because this task-- to use the internet to find a good movie-- was right up my alley . . . she said, "Find us a good movie to stream on Netflix," and so I went on-line and found some spectacular reviews for a thriller from 1991 called One False Move, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a violent drug dealer from Los Angeles and Bill Paxton as the small town Arkansas sheriff that collides with him and his violent companions . . . it's tense, graphic, ambiguous, and well-acted-- and you never know which direction it's going to take . . . is Dale "Hurricane" Dixon a heroic small town cop like Marge Gunderson in Fargo . . . or is he an inept yokel like Marshall Link Appleyard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . . . I'm still not sure of the answer, but I do know this: the film may be worth watching just for Billy Bob Thornton's hair: ten mullet pony-tails out of ten.

That Was Close

Alex came home with a bloody nose the other day and he told us that a certain wild kid punched him in the nose and that this wild kid was sent to the principal's office and that Alex was sent to the nurse, and Alex has talked about having altercations with this kid before, and so I sat him down and had a man-to-man talk with him about bullies and how he might have to punch this kid back-- right in the nose-- to make him stop bullying-- and then my father told Alex about how I beat up the neighborhood bully at the bus stop one morning (it was a scene right out of A Christmas Story) and Catherine was concerned that the school didn't contact us about the incident and questioned Alex about it and Alex said he reported it to the teacher who was watching the playground and he asked us not to write a note and that he would handle it himself-- which I could understand because you never want to be the kid that squeals to his mom-- but we were discussing it a couple of days later and Catherine told me she still wanted to alert Alex's teacher to the situation and Alex overheard us talking and started crying and said, "I have to tell you something," and then he told us: apparently, he made the whole story up . . . he had been picking his nose and it started bleeding and he didn't want to get in trouble for picking his nose so he made up the whole punch-in-the-nose-tale so he wouldn't get in trouble for picking his nose but then when he heard that Catherine was going to write a note to the teacher, he figured out that he was eventually going to get caught in his lie, so he came clean, and hopefully he learned a valuable lesson (he's got a week with no dessert as his punishment, but his punishment would have been worse if my wife wrote that note because then we would have been embarrassed for falsely accusing some kid of punching our son in the nose and that kind of thing can get real ugly).

Peacock Tail = 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Tail Fin

During an alcohol-fueled discussion on the evolution of the automobile with my friend Roman (who is also willing to discuss whether the ratio of pi is the same in base seven) we got stuck determining what parallels are accurate between a technological process and natural selection-- and whether perhaps a technological process exhibits Lamarckism-- and in the midst of this I stumbled on a super-excellent corollary to the analogy: outrageous tailfins-- which add no "survival" value to an automobile-- tailfins are not a product of typical technological selection of the automobile, where more efficient parts and better performing models are selected and the Edsel becomes extinct, but tailfins are instead a product of sexual selection . . . like the peacock's tail, they don't enable the organism to survive, but actually are detrimental to efficiency and exist solely for attractiveness, and this attractiveness requires more strength and metal and chrome and horsepower to lug the sexually selected trait around, so perhaps the organism with the largest trait is exceptionally fit, just because it can carry the trait around . . . and, similar to the peacock's tail, the evolution of the tailfin took on a life of its own and the tailfin got far larger than necessary, unless you're talking about attracting a mate, and then your traits can never be too big . . . and, of course, there's something aesthetically similar about the peacock's tail and the tailfin which makes me far more pleased than I should be about the fact that as far as the internet is concerned, no one else has ever come up with this analogy (so maybe the parallel doesn't hold water at all and I am insane, but I think this may be in the running for my best idea ever).

F- Tacos

The boys and I went to the delicious Mexican place in Princeton on Friday and I was going to get a taco to increase my 2011 Taco Count, but I didn't want a taco, I wanted a chorizo burrito and a chicken tamale-- smothered in mole sauce-- but I felt sort of guilty that I was squandering a chance to up the taco count, but then I got angry because the taco count was my own invention and why should I let something that I invented seep into my consciousness and affect my decisions . . . why should I be beholden to something that I jokingly created . . . especially since it was about satirizing New Year's resolutions . . . and if I wanted a tamale and a burrito then I was going to get a tamale and a burrito, especially since I was rarely in Princeton and I deserved a tamale and a chorizo burrito because I just did a scavenger hunt in the Princeton Art Museum with my children-- which was both fun and educational-- and so I deserved to order what I wanted because I was a good dad and there was no way I was going to let my life be controlled by tacos and some stupid number posted on my third rate blog . . . and so I said to myself, "I am not a number! I am more than a number (of tacos)!" and I ordered the tamale and the burrito and they were delicious.

A Brief But Inconclusive Tale of a Tail

So Connell, Roman, and I are walking back from the Park Pub late Thursday night and we pass by the laundromat next to the dollar store on Main Street and we glance into the laundromat and we all start laughing, as there is a brown-skinned man in very tight jockey briefs floating in the air and doing something to the ceiling . . . all we see is this white ass high above the dryers . . . and we were laughing so hard that we never debriefed each other on what we thought the guy was doing . . . I made up a little story in my head that went like this: the laundromat handy-man somehow got his clothes dirty and decided to wash them, but then while they were in the wash he realized that he had to fix something on the ceiling-- maybe a light or some gadget above the dryers-- and it was really late and he wanted to get home and so he clambered up there in his briefs . . . but when I told the story to my wife, she laughed and said, "He was standing on a table and painting-- he didn't want to get his clothes dirty," and when I asked her how she knew this, she said that Roman had gone to visit her mother in the hospital and told her the story and so she had heard it third-hand from my mother-in-law and yet she still understood more about it than me-- but of course I was in no state to make any logical deductions as it was 2 AM when I saw it-- and so I tried to confirm the painting hypothesis with Connell so I could give you, my faithful audience that demands and deserves veracity in all my prose, an accurate story but Connell does not remember any paintbrush or paint, although he does think the man-in-briefs was standing on a table (and not levitating, as I saw it) and so the reason why the man was up there in his briefs will forever remain a mystery, but one thing is for sure, if you pass by Lakewash Laundromat at the right time of night, you might see something that you don't fully understand, but it is something that you will never, ever forget.

Wild, Wild Life

So this is as wild as it gets for an aging 41 year old athlete: a 10 PM adult league soccer game (congratulations to Terry for his hat trick) followed by a night of drinking at the North Brunswick Pub . . . which was surprisingly crowded for late on a Wednesday night . . . or it was surprising to me, as I am in bed by 8:30 on most week nights.

A Stupid Use For Time Travel

Everyone has a favorite t-shirt that has succumbed to the ravages of time, but what if you could travel back to your past and bring back one shirt . . . which t-shirt would you resurrect? . . . for me, it's a dead heat between my original "Cult Electric" concert shirt-- the white one with the guns and roses on it (Vincent Chase wore it on Entourage . . . they must have gotten it from a vintage shop) and my official Middlesex County "Mosquito Control" shirt-- it was bright yellow with the obtuse Mosquito Control in block letters and it always elicited weird looks when I wore it around campus (I was lucky enough to have TWO friends that worked for the Mosquito Control, so I had several of these t-shirts-- one survived until the mid-90's and then finally disintegrated).

There Must Be Some Misunderstanding

Sunday morning, after a long day of imbibing on a bachelor-party-camping-trip, I misread a sign on Route 18-- and the magnitude of my misread might indicate just how long a day of imbibing it was . . . and my only excuse for my egregious comprehension error is that I read the sign through a tree and so perhaps the branches made me parse the words the way I did; the sign was for a store called "Carpets and More," but I read it as "Car Pets and More," and spent several seconds puzzling over what kind of pet would live in a car and why anyone would want to have a pet that they kept solely in their car . . . and then, finally, my consciousness snapped back to normal and I realized that my brain was broken and would probably never recover (and as a side-note, I have hit the unfortunate age of the two day hangover).

This Meal Isn't Big Enough For The Both Of Us

I may have to duke it out with my five year old son at dinner, if my 2011 Taco Count is going to proceed unimpeded-- he ate three tacos Monday night, as did Catherine-- and there are only twelve in a packet, so I had to make do with a soft taco in order to eat a seventh . . . eventually our kitchen is going to be a two taco package town.

The Right Decision Is Not Always Fun

I asked my wife if I could show this YouTube video to our children, and she said that it isn't nice to laugh at other people's pain . . . but I think in this one instance (and maybe this one as well) it is okay to do so.

You Thought You Were A Nerd . . .

High school students of the world-- if you ever wondered what goes inside the English office once the door closes and the teachers are no longer with the students, you might be disappointed, or you might find the answer strangely satisfying: Lego Sporcle!

Thus Endeth The Streak

We went down swinging, but-- tragically-- our salamander streak is over . . . I lifted up every rock, cement block, and rotten log in the Meadows, but even though it was a damp night, we had no luck-- just ants, centipedes, worms, and a giant hairy spider, and this makes me wonder: Where the f-%#  did all the salamanders go? . . . it makes no sense, we found them by the dozens earlier this spring, but now they have vanished . . . and, to add insult to injury, my kids stepped in dog-shit and-- defying the laws of dog-shit physics-- they managed to transfer the dog-shit from their Crocs all up and down their skinny bare legs . . . and now that our run is done, I can honestly say that our attempt to match The Yankee Clipper is certainly a reminder of just how stupendous his streak really is.

Clutch Lifting

As far as our salamander streak was concerned, it was the bottom of the ninth, with two out and two strikes-- we had lifted up every log and rock in our secret salamander spot, but because of the previous week's dry weather, the ground wasn't as damp as usual . . . and the patches under the rocks, logs, and concrete were full of ants, termites, centipedes, black beetles, and fat worms . . . but no salamanders; both my children had given up (after asking me if we could "forget" this trip) but as we exited the woods, I gave the last (or first, depending on your perspective) log a quick check, and underneath was one scrawny red-striped salamander . . . a "Texas leaguer," but a hit nonetheless, and so though we are still forty-five shy of DiMaggio's magic number, our streak rolls on.

No Principles=Happiness

Last week, I received a phone call from my wife and she told me she was at the gas station and had been waiting for ten minutes but hadn't gotten any service-- she said she even tried to pump the gas herself but you needed some sort of code to do that in New Jersey-- and so she was pretty irate and then she said, "Oh here he comes," and I heard her ask for "thirty dollars of regular, cash," and then I didn't hear from her for a while-- a long while, because she was supposed to come home and cook some pasta for the kids while I went and retrieved them from the trampoline in our neighbor's backyard, but when I got home from that errand, she was nowhere to be found, which was annoying, because now we had to rush to eat, and then my cell-phone rang again and it was her and she said, "I'm still at the gas station, I'm waiting for the police," and then she told me why: the attendant had filled her tank, despite the fact that she asked for thirty dollars cash, and she didn't have any more cash and she refused to pay the extra twelve dollars or give the attendant her credit card because it was his mistake, so he threatened to to call the police on her because she wouldn't pay the full 42 dollars and he wrote down her license number, so she turned the tables on him, and she called the police on him, for threatening her and writing down her license for no reason, and eventually the police came and sided with her (she was in Edison, and she is an Edison teacher after all, and the attendant admitted his mistake, and after trying to negotiate-- "you pay six and I pay six"-- he told her that he was very poor and that the manager made him pay for mistakes such as this out of his salary, and so then my wife got out of her car and gave the manager a piece of her mind, and said that if he made the attendant pay for the mistake she was going to tell all her friends to boycott this particular Raceway) but of course my advice to her before she told me the whole story was, "Just pay the twelve dollars and get out of there! Come home to your husband and children! We need you!" but my wife said that she had to stay and fight the good fight because it was a "matter of principle," and she was emboldened by the fact that an old man at the station told her: "They did the same thing to my wife last week!" and so she felt she was standing up for everyone who had suffered over-charging at this station and had to set things straight and after it was all over I asked her a stupid (but sincere) question: "How did you call the police? How did you know the number?" and she said, "I dialed 911."

He Thinks He's So Smart

We were watching The Black Cauldron and it was getting near the end and the plot was tense and my five year old son was worried, but my seven year old son reassured him and said, "Three things have to happen or this isn't Disney . . . Gurgi has to come back to life, Taran and Eilonwy have to get home, and they have to find Hen-Wen, the magic pig," and like clockwork, in the waning minutes, these three things came true and Ian was relieved and Alex felt very clever . . . so I'm going to throw in Old Yeller next weekend and really blow his mind.

Back By Popular Demand! More Ha-Joon Chang Analogies!

Some analogies are so bad they're stupid; some analogies are so bad they're funny; and-- of course-- some analogies make a lot of sense, and help you to understand something complex in simpler terms . . . and in Ha-Joon Chang's book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, he uses a couple of metaphors to summarize his comprehensive data on free market history: 1) he accuses rich countries of what Friedrich List called "kicking away the ladder," which means that they arrive at economic stability and wealth through complex and strategic protectionism, tariffs, regulation of foreign investment, regulation on imports and exports, and subsidies-- but then once these these nations (and he uses America, Britain, and his home country of North Korea as his prime examples) have reached a position of economic power, they use institutions such as the WTO and the IMF, treaties, embargoes, copyright law, and tariffs to force impoverished nations into adopting extreme free market policies despite the fact that these countries are not ready to compete in a free market . . . and so, the rich nations use the ladder to climb, and then kick it away when poor countries want to use the same method 2) Chang's second metaphor about the irrationality of the current free market ideology centers around his six year old son, Jin-Gyu, who he ironically claims is "living in an economic bubble . . . over-protected," and so he "needs to be exposed to competition" . . . in other words, he should get a job-- he could be a successful shoe-shine boy or street hawker and learn the value of hard work-- but, of course, we don't do this to our children, we protect them for many years from the competitions of the free market until they can develop intellect enough to take part in the competition for the best jobs . . . and he compares this absurdity to how "free trade economists claim that developing country producers need to be exposed to as much competition right now, so that they have the incentive to raise productivity in order to survive . . . protection by contrast, only creates complacency and sloth," and Chang points out that this "infant industry argument," was proposed by the inventor of another great economic metaphor-- Adam Smith-- who claimed that an "invisible hand" guided the free market to efficiency, but even Adam Smith understood that free markets and protectionism need to exist in concert, not opposition.

Winter's Bone: Not Nearly As Depressing As The Blurb

Netflix describes Winter's Bone as an "unflinching noir drama set deep in the Ozarks," and because of that depressing description,  I kept moving it down my queue . . . avoiding it, though I had heard great things . . . but it wasn't depressing at all, in fact, seventeen year old Ree Dolly's quest for her meth-cooking dad-- who she needs to find (dead or alive) in order to save her homestead from the bail bondsman-- reminded me more of Lord of the Rings than Deliverance . . . the film is an an odyssey through the backwoods of the Ozarks, and instead of having to outwit Polyphemus, Ree has to out-fox Fat Milton: ten pots of deer stew out of ten.

It's Hard To Take Notice of Things When Sugar Is Involved

Apparently, if there is a pile of neatly packaged Ghirardelli seven layer brownies (two to a sandwich bag) sitting on the counter, then they are not intended for me to consume-- but I didn't notice the packaging style when I ate the first bag, because I thought that there were two brownies left over from my wife's book club party the night before, but then when I went back and found another bag with two brownies in it, sitting in a pile of similar bags, I should have realized that they might be for something other than random consumption . . . but I was in a sugar frenzy and the thought didn't even cross my mind . . . and then once I finished the fourth brownie I got all hyper and went to the park with the kids and played sports for two hours and forgot all about the oddly packaged leftovers until my wife-- typically amazed by my stupidity-- told me they were for the International Day bake sale (but no worries, I am going to pay for them).

Why Did I Read This?

I thought I should read something more literary before returning to the juvenile pleasures of George R.R. Martin, and so I tackled and finished Stewart O'Nan's Wish You Were Here, a 514 page account of the Maxwell family's last visit to their lake house in Chautauga, New York . . . the patriarch of the family has died and his wife Emily doesn't have the time, money, or patience to take care of their family vacation cottage, and her children aren't financially capable of taking over the deed . . . and so, in the span of a week, the novel shows all nine Maxwells-- who are definitely "lost souls" since Henry died, "swimming in the fish bowl" of the little cottage, as they literally run "over the same old ground" and find "the same old fears," and though a certain synopsis might sound exciting and full of conflict: let's stuff a failed artist, a recently divorced, often stoned recovering alcoholic mom, her hot and boy-crazy teenage daughter, a frustrated photographer, his shy teenage daughter who has an incestuous lesbian crush on her cousin, a kleptomaniac kid, a wacky retired teacher, and a cranky widow in a small space, and throw a ominous kidnapping into the background . . . but the reality that O'Nan is trying to capture is different . . . everyone is on good behavior and overwhelmed by nostalgia and essentially lost in their own heads and Lise sums up the theme: "She wondered what her life would look like in a book . . . now that was a depressing idea . . . she thought that her life was average and nothing to be ashamed of . . . the world wasn't as magical as people liked to believe . . . that was why they read books to escape it," but-- of course-- a book like this isn't an escape from reality, it's a portrait of it, and I am glad I am through with it and can return to a book where "wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside" because it is getting near summer, after all, and soon enough I'll be living O'Nan's reality, so I'm not sure why I forced myself to read about it.

My Deepest Sympathies

Just as Christians feel pity for all the people who died before the coming of Christ, and wonder about their fate in the after-life, I feel pity for all those who died before the invention of Blu-ray, and never got to watch The Fall in HD.

Wait A Minute . . . Who Is An Idiot?

We were playing the "Can You Help Me Figure Out Who I Just Had A Conversation With" game in the English Office the other day, and we were really getting close to figuring out who I had just talked to in the stairwell about Busch Gardens, were were closing in and everyone was doing their best to help me solve the puzzle, and then the light-bulb went off in my brain and I said, dramatically, to get everyone's attention, "Wait a minute," and then I asked my question, a question-- that if anyone knew the answer-- would crack the case, a question so incisive and clever that someone wrote it on the whiteboard . . . and here is what I asked: "Who spoke at graduation last year?" and my friend Liz stared at me for a long awkward moment . . . then realized that I was earnest and waiting for a serious answer, and finally said: "You did!"

Which Weeds Are Getting Whacked?

My wife took a look at out neighbor's freshly mowed lawn and asked an excellent question: Are dandelions being selected for-- are they surviving-- because of their ability to withstand lawn-mowing? and judging by the number that survived the mower, they are . . . perhaps the dandelions with the stronger, more flexible and whippier stems are surviving and these traits are becoming more pronounced in suburban dandelions . . . and I'm not sure how you could measure this-- you either need pre-lawnmower dandelion DNA or access to some wild strain of dandelion and then you could do some measurements on the tensile strength of the stems . . . or run an experiment with the wild strain and see if over generations the stems change . . . but maybe there is a more elegant solution: so I will ask Quora and see.

How To Use The New Explosions In The Sky Album

Get up early, don some big old-school headphones, put on "Take Care, Take Care, Take Care" and wander around the park before anyone else is there (it might also be good to listen to while roller-blading, but I haven't tried yet).

Another Free Idea . . . And I Did The Hard Part

So our on-line digital experience is becoming more and more concise; web-pages are difficult to wade through, blogs have consolidated some of this information into manageable nuggets, Facebook pared things down more, and Twitter seemed to be the end result: with its 140 character limit, brevity truly is the soul of wit . . . but I think there's room for one more application, one more level down on the communication ladder, and I call it GRUNT! and this platform will allow you to send a three second sound with a short title to your followers: perhaps you would GRUNT! the sound "yee-ha!" with the title "Bin Laden is Dead!" or "blah" with the title "Monday Morning" or "yum" attached to a local restaurant, and, of course, there's no way text can do these sounds justice-- as the expressive of a sound is  infinite and unlimited-- and a GRUNT! conveys an amazing amount of information in a short space (and also don't require much literacy) and so I think this is the future of communication . . . now I've done the hard part in this process and thought of the idea . . . all you need to do is raise the capital, write the code, design the web-pages, market the application, and run the company.

The Black Swan: Happy Mother's Day

My review of The Black Swan is appropriately schizophrenic-- I watched the movie in two parts and I found the first hour grueling and painful-- the plot is typical sports melodrama (the meek but hardworking underdog gets her chance to shine) and typical sports melodrama is the only melodrama that gets to me emotionally (Hoosiers, Rudy, King of Kong, Rocky, etc.), and so I was really rooting for Natalie Portman's character, hoping that her hard work and dedication to her sport would pay off (the images and sounds of her battered feet really got to me, maybe because I've been playing soccer with a broken toe the past couple of weeks and can empathize) and so Nina's complete lack of joy for her art-- her obsessiveness and isolation and her mental disintegration-- was really depressing (unlike Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which is also a depressing sports movie, but Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei are disintegrating physically, and that's never as bad as disintegrating mentally, and in the end The Wrestler feels oddly triumphant as each character learns to cope with their physical decay) but I got over the hump in the second half of The Black Swan . . . I learned to "stop worrying and love the bomb" . . . and enjoy how the film turns the corner and becomes a full fledged horror film  (and Portman turns into a full-fledged black swan) so if you're watching the movie and you want to quit, stick with it until it gets really macabre . . . and maybe you can explain to me exactly what happens to Winona Ryder's character in the hospital (enjoy the cheesy irony of Winona Ryder chastising Portman for filching her stuff) and though it almost needs two separate ratings for the two halves, I'll average it out to 8 tutus out of a possible 10.

The Last of the Dialers?

I can still recall the home phone number of a few of my childhood friends (several days ago, my wife needed to call the father of one of my old friends and I was instantly able to produce the phone number from memory) and this leads to my two questions of the day . . . and these questions may only apply to people of my generation and older: 

1) Can you remember any phone numbers from your youth? 

2) Will ours be the last generation that can do this?

More Difficult Than Fermat's Last Theorem

How do you get all of the tomato paste out of the little can?

Quora!

So I'm thinking of writing an epic science-fiction novel that is set in a number of giant self-sustaining bio-dome type structures dotted about the ruins of earth-- the people inside are waiting for the earth's ecosystem to regenerate from some cataclysm--and during the wait (which will be thousands of years) the various self-sustaining pods evolve different economic systems and this leads to a variety of debates, conflicts, and decisions about how to use the resources in each pod, and also how trade works between the pods-- it would be science-fiction of economics and conservation and so-- for preliminary research for this book that I will certainly never even attempt to write-- I posed this question to Quora: Is it more cost effective to eat the chicken or is it better to keep the chicken alive and eat its eggs? and people have already given me some logical answers . . . for free!-- so I suggest you create an account and ask questions for research you will never use but are mildly curious about.

Am I An Umbrellist?

Yesterday morning was rainy, and one of my male students proudly showed everyone his Sesame Street umbrella-- which I found shocking, as I would never be caught dead holding an umbrella-- they make me think of Mary Poppins and Singin' in the Rain, neither of which are particularly manly . . . and I am all man (except when I roller-blade) but I canvassed the class and found that most of the kids-- male and female-- were umbrella users, and quite a few had umbrellas on their person . . . and so I tried to explain my deep-seated emotions about umbrellas to them: first, if you don't use an umbrella, it's scary to walk by someone wielding an umbrella because you are in danger of getting your eye poked out by one of the vanes; second, an inattentive umbrella user might pour water on you; third, bad luck is certain to anyone who opens an umbrella indoors, yet kids find it irresistible, not only to open them, but also to twirl them; and fourth (and the root of my unbridled umbrellism) is that a man looks patently absurd while carrying one-- either opened or closed-- and he should either wear a hat or a hooded rain jacket and deal with the weather.

Watch Your Language

Last week, during the annual Poetry Festival at my high school, acclaimed poet BJ Ward spoke to my creative writing class about being sensitive to language-- he deconstructed the Pledge of Allegiance and wondered why the students were required to repeat it every morning if it was actually a pledge . . . a serious promise that is eternal . . . e.g. I have pledged to eat more tacos in 2011-- and since his presentation, I have been more alert to the words around me; for example, I noticed a Watch Children sign in Ward's hometown of Edison, and I wondered why they couldn't add the preposition "for" into the statement . . . Watch For Children isn't as ominous and ambiguous Watch Children, which could be advice from one pedophile to another, or a paranoid warning from a wary old person.

Breaking News! Bin Laden Will Cause Baby Boom!

Mark my words, the death of Osama Bin Laden will cause a mini-baby boom in the United States . . . hearing the story of the triumphant Black Ops mission and the resultant execution of the world's most wanted terrorist will make American males feel potent, virile, and masculine . . . and there is no better patriotic expression of potency, virility, and masculinity than impregnating your wife (except perhaps shooting a hand-gun while riding a jet-ski) and though Americans surely realize this event is only a symbolic end to an abstractly defined, on-going war, they will still view the world as a safer place for children now that Bin Laden is dead; the combined aphrodisiac of military success and optimism for our country's future will lead to some groovy, unprotected love-making  . . . so can someone remind  me to check the average birth rates next February (which is generally a month with comparatively less births than other months) to see if this half-baked thesis pans out?

A Useful Analogy (Hindsight is 20/20)

Ha-Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, makes a case for increased government regulation of the financial sector, despite the logic that "the government does not know better than those whose actions are regulated by it . . . the government cannot know someone's situation as well as the individual or firm concerned" and so "government officials cannot improve upon the decisions made by the economic agents," but he explains that regulations often work not because the government "knows better," but because the regulations limit complexity, and of course this applies to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, where the financial instruments and derivatives were more complex than the experts and investors could predict, and Chang makes this useful comparison: when a company invents a new drug it cannot be sold immediately . . . first the drug needs to be rigorously tested on carefully monitored patients because the interactions of a new drug in the human body are complex and unpredictable, and it will take a while to tell if the new drug has more positive benefits than its side effects . . . and, of course, this was not done before we sold unregulated sub-prime mortgages, packaged them into mortgage backed securities, packaged those into collateralized debt obligations, and insured those with credit default swaps . . . and it turns out the side-effects of this financial treatment are nausea, irritability, unemployment, mental confusion, erectile dysfunction, depression, problems sleeping, constipation, diarrhea, kidney failure, hostility, hallucinations, canker sores, foreclosures, and panic attacks.

Survival in the Busch

Despite a perfect storm of things that annoy me: crowds, lines, motion sickness, lack of food . . . I survived our first day in a real amusement park (we've been to Knoebels, but that doesn't count) and I didn't even get that grouchy . . . maybe it was because of the lousy weather, which kept the lines to a minimum, or maybe it was because my wife and kids enjoyed the park so much-- they love all the rides, no matter how scary: Alex was just tall enough to go on "The Loch Ness Monster," and he did it twice, and Catherine went on every roller-coaster in the park . . . I am a pathetic coward, but I did manage to conquer the log flume twice without puking (although I felt downright queasy on the flight simulator "Europe in the Air," which is pathetic) and I really enjoyed the "Pet Shenanigans" show-- it was like a Tom and Jerry cartoon with real cats and dogs-- and the seats stayed perfectly still.

A Vacation Highlight

After a day at Jamestown, a day at Yorktown, and several days in Colonial Williamsburg (we definitely witnessed 10-12 hours of historical reenactment) I am fairly confident that my kids know we fought the British in the Revolutionary War (although I'm not sure they know that the British are English) and I must admit that the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has done an impressive job at re-creating these places, but my favorite part of our vacation was our hike through York River State Park-- we collected numerous fossils from the river bank-- and I lifted rotting log and saw a small snake I've never seen before: after some research, my best guess is that it is either an Eastern Worm Snake or an Eastern Smooth Earth Snake and it looked like the snake in the picture above.

One of These Pictures Has Nothing To Do With Brisket

So I learned some valuable gastronomical information on our family vacation at Colonial Williamsburg; a colonial farmer on The Palace Green (or a guy pretending to be a colonial farmer on the pretend Palace Green) was grazing a large colonial cow (or perhaps it was a guy pretending to be a colonial cow) and this large, shaggy colonial cow had a giant, football shaped goiter-like sack hanging in a pouch of loose skin  below its neck, and this bulbous mass was so large and disgusting that I felt compelled to ask the colonial farmer about it, and he told me "That's the brisket," so if you like brisket and eat it often, then I suggest you take a look at the picture of the actual cow below the post (and not the sanitized graphic of a cow pictured above) so you have an idea of what you are really chewing on.

Several Monumental Firsts

Catherine told me she "didn't like me very much" the night before we left for Spring Break, for an odd reason . . . because I did something I rarely do: I put something away where it belonged . . . she claimed this was "the first time I ever put anything away in my life" which is hyperbole if I ever heard it, although I did admit to her that I made a mistake-- the portable sump pump was on the floor in the study (the portable sump pump we put in the basement shower when there is torrential rain) and it was right in the middle of the room and I nearly tripped over it which is probably why I acted the way I did-- despite the fact that it was raining buckets-- I put the pump away in the storage area under the house, which is only  accessible from a small door on the outside of the house, not thinking that my mother-in-law would want to set it up in the basement because of the storm-- so Catherine was pretty angry when she had to walk out into the rain to retrieve it (I was already in bed) and, also due to the storm, this was also the first time that I packed the car in the dark at 4:30 AM on Saturday morning, instead of getting things set up the night before, and so I put the kids' bikes on top of the car in one of those big latch-on sacks and I put our bikes on the back of the car on a latch-on bike rack and I remind you that I did this all in the dark and so it's no surprise that I was only 50% successful . . . a few miles down the Turnpike a woman drove up alongside of our car and made a repeated pointing motion at our roof . . . we stopped to investigate and realized that I never actually latched the sack with the bikes to the roof, I skipped that step and just tied the belts loosely around the roof rack (which I do at the end so they don't make that annoying flapping sound) so it was lucky that woman noticed the sack coming loose or in a few miles some unlucky driver would have gotten hit in the windshield with a sack of bikes.

Those Chauvinist Pixar Bastards

My creative writing students were naming kids movies and then suggesting appropriate morals for each film-- practicing their inductive reasoning-- and a student said the moral of Up is this: You can't have a real adventure until your wife dies (he admitted that he didn't create this moral himself-- he read it on-line-- but it is still an excellent use of an on-line resource in the classroom).

George R.R. Martin: Fantasy Without Whimsy

For the second time in as many months, I took on a novel with two things I despise-- a map and an appendix-- but George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones was so highly recommended by everyone who read it that I had to give it a shot, and unlike Dune, which I couldn't quite finish, I read all 676 pages of Martin's first volume of his epic Song of Fire and Ice series (and even referred to the map and the appendix several times!) and though I felt a bit childish at the start . . . I'm forty-one years old and usually reading books like this, not sword and sorcery stories . . . I very well may read the next volume (A Clash of Kings) and I will definitely check out the big-budget HBO series inspired by the first book; I will admit that I started the book trying to find reasons to hate it, but the form drew me in: short, exciting and strategic chapters, each told from a different character's point of view,  following Elmore Leonard's philosophy of "leaving out all the parts that people skip," with the pacing of a J.K. Rowling book, but sophisticated and very adult content (thus the need for the appendix) and far more entertaining and action-packed than the slow paced but similar Tolkien books and with one other extremely important improvement: no elves (I hate elves and anything else that smacks of whimsy, and a A Game of Thrones is definitely the least whimsical of fantasy novels).

Tetris to Impress

For the second time in my life, I have impressed my children: I completed the most difficult level (9.5) on Gameboy Tetris so the boys could witness the victory song of the "five fiddlers" and the Congratulatory Space Shuttle Launch; Alex was so moved by my performance that he said we should "write it on my gravestone when I die."

Nuts Sparring By The Fire

The charming Hotel Vienna of Windham, New York boasts a lovely breakfast room where they serve fresh baked cheese and raspberry danishes and croissants for you to eat before you ski, and they have large family style tables and even a fireplace, and I felt serene and relaxed while eating aforementioned danishes, contemplating a day of snowboarding with the family, while the other families around us did the same, and once our children finished their breakfast they asked if they could sit in front of the fire, and I said, "Of course," happy to be able to finish my coffee and Alex sat in the Adirondack style chair right in front of the fire and Ian sat just to his right and within minutes they were in a fist-fight over the chair that was right in front of the fire and I had to break them up and I couldn't beat them both senseless because there were these other peaceful families eating yogurt and granola and drinking tea surrounding us and observing us, and so I calmly and logically talked it out with them, and we agreed that they could take turns in the seat directly in front of the fire but that didn't work so well either because once Ian got his turn the good seat, he bonked his chair over and nudged Alex further away and tried to control both armrests and they got into another fight and I had to remove them from the quaint breakfast room and drag them back to the hotel room, where we proceeded to get dressed so we could enjoy a relaxing day on Windham Mountain.

How Smooth Is Smoov?

On the walk home from a very late night out, which began at the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, where we watched JB Smoov of Larry David fame do his especially bawdy form of minimalist prop comedy (he "birthed" himself through a white t-shirt, had sexual intercourse with a chair for a LONG time, and used a microphone and the cord as phallus and ejaculate) we got into a debate on how much he would tailor his material if he was playing to A) an all white crowd or B) an all African American crowd . . . and this was precipitated by this observation: the Stress Factory employees seated all the African Americans up front, and JB Smoov worked his rapport with them more often than with the other folks in the crowd-- now we don't know if this was intentional or just a coincidence, but it was apparent . . . and if anyone has seen JB in hypothetical crowd situation A or B, please leave a description of his act in the comments.

This Could Be The Idea That Allows You To Retire in Style

This weird hair discussion at G:TB reminds me of an idea a friend and I had about making a documentary where we interviewed people about the strange and rapid growth of unsightly body hair-- that crazy white hair that sprouts in the middle of your forehead or the curly gray hair that grows in your ear in the span of a nap-- and the "money shot" would be a time lapse segment of one of these hairs actually sprouting during the night, it would take thousands of hour of film to capture this, and it would be analogous to getting footage of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot . . . so does anyone have some venture capital they want to invest?

Small Pleasures

There's a certain joy in kicking a ball-- it's a similar pleasure to throwing something and hitting the thing you wanted-- but there's the added satisfaction that you did it with your foot . . . and my five year old son Ian understands this: the other day he spent a great deal of time and concentration trying to punt a soccer ball over the tennis court fence, which is an impressive feat for a forty pound child, and then once he accomplished it, he tried to do it again and again . . . and this reminds me of one of my favorite kicks of all time; it took place in our fraternity "pit," a carpeted area with benches and a television-- I was putzing around with a soccer ball-- and Kenny Bloom borrowed Brian Fogg's motorcycle helmet, sat on the bench, put on the helmet, and said to me, "Kick it at my head!" and I complied and I hit it hard and clean and perfect and it hit the helmet and snapped Kenny's head back and knocked the helmet clean off his head, and he looked at me, stunned, and said, "Remind me never to do that again."

I Am Put In My Place

For a Friday diversion, I like to create a "Life Quiz" for my students: ten general knowledge questions that I think they should know (my last quiz consisted of these questions-- 1) What was the first permanent English settlement in North America? 2) How many strings do the cello, violin, and bass guitar all have? 3) What is the vernal equinox? 4) Who said, "In the future, everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame? 5)What does a seismograph measure? 6) What does a Geiger Counter measure? 7) To what country is the platypus indigenous? 8) In Greek mythology, who was mesmerized by his own image in the pond? 9) What planet is Superman from? 10) Who holds the record in Major League Baseball for most consecutive games with at least one hit?) and, for some reason, the students find this fun-- perhaps because it isn't graded and I encourage them to challenge someone each time we have a quiz . . . and I find the quizzes fun as well because I make them up from my head to insure that they are "common knowledge" and I get to reveal all the answers and feel smart as I explain them, and I try the quizzes out on the other teachers, who often do quite well, but rarely go ten for ten, and then I feel smart because I knew all the answers-- but last Friday, after I tested the teachers, another teacher pulled out her fun Friday activity, a logic puzzle in this vein, that included an incomprehensible little chart to "help" you with the information and aid you in getting a solution, and she started in on the puzzle and Stacy did as well, and before long they were filling in the chart and making insane statements like "You know the Fuentes can't be Munoz because there is no appointment before 5 PM, so that only leaves California because we eliminated Michigan because Lukas isn't until 6 PM" and while I tried my best to join in, I was essentially just copying off them and not understanding one bit of the method, even when I did fill in the chart, and it wasn't fun for me at all and really lowered my self-esteem and it makes me feel bad for the kids who don't get any answers correct on the "Life Quizzes," but I guess you can't be good at everything (unless you're Einstein) and maybe I need to start with something simpler, like an easy Sodoku and work my way up to full blown logical thinking, which was certainly never my strong point, and why I was known as "The Poor Man's Galileo" in college.

Zombie Priorities

 If you haven't seen the AMC series The Walking Dead, then by all means do so-- it's not just about zombies, in fact, the zombie gore is secondary to the human drama (despite the fact that the zombies eat a horse in the second episode) and the true theme is not supernatural at all, but more about how humans respond and adapt to a new and stressful situation, but before you watch the series, you should get your priorities straight and read the comic books first: Robert Kirkman has taken Rick and his son Carl to such a dark place that I don't think the television series can follow, and-- I assure you-- reading the comics doesn't spoil the plot of the series: in fact, if you read the comics first then it is more stressful to watch the series because you'll be constantly expecting things to happen and they won't . . . and though there are differences in plot, the theme of both works are the same-- both rely on the fact that they are an open ended series of episodes, not a graphic novel or a movie, or even a series like Lost, where the apocalypse will be solved and resolved, instead, the only resolution will be death, but they question how people might live along the way, in a world irrevocably destroyed, a world where there is no solution to the problem . . . the zombies will not be vanquished . . . and judging by the end of season one of the AMC series, they understand this and are going to stay true to the comic books in this regard . . . but what do I know?

You Learn Something New Every Day

So I always assumed that everyone who has seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail finds the film at least moderately funny, but this is not true, and, in fact, there's a sort of reverse-Dane Cook Effect going on here . . . some people consider the film horribly unfunny . . . and think it is for nerds and hipsters to share with one another; I learned this in class the other day, when some of my students and the neighboring teacher banded together against the Python fans in a pointless debate (because it is impossible to convince someone that something is funny . . . you see it's funny because he is no longer a newt . . . you see it's funny because they forgot to hide inside the Trojan Rabbit . . . you see it's funny  because he forgot to say "three" and "four") but I can assure you that when I was watching the movie repeatedly with my dirt-bag high school friends, we were certainly not cool enough to be hip or smart enough to be nerdy . . . and so-- as a rare fan of both Dane Cook and Monty Python-- I urge you not to make hasty generalizations about taste in comedy and character.

I Can See Why People Are Pissed But . . .

Ha Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, explains how in a quest to curb inflation, the free market package known neo-liberal policy, emphasizes greater capital mobility (rich people can move large amounts of money quickly so they can make a killing on arbitrage and investment without penalty) and greater labor market flexibility (the ability to outsource, avoid unions and labor regulations, and essentially make jobs insecure) and these policies are wonderful for those who hold large liquid financial assets and like to move them quickly to avoid having them degraded by inflation and this also allows for large companies to be restructured quickly, but it doesn't help if you own a house or don't have loads of liquid assets or a large business, and the threat of some inflation essentially pales in comparison to job losses and foreclosures and economic instability, especially when people are stuck in houses they can't sell, so they can't take advantage of the greater flexibility companies have in moving jobs (my cousin who works at Pfizer says this is the "new normal," you can be laid off at any time) and because of this instability in the job market, people are pissed at teachers, cops, and firemen because we have a union and collectively bargain for our salaries and benefits (although legislation in New Jersey is trying to abrogate these rights) . . . essentially we have old time jobs that are stable . . . the kind of jobs most people in America don't have any longer . . . but instead of being pissed at us, why not be pissed at the neo-liberal policies that made this happen?

Overwhelmed By Sand

After a recommendation from a friend, I started in on a novel that has the four elements that I generally can't stomach: 1) a map 2) an appendix 3) a glossary 4) lots of made up words with apostrophes . . . I'm talking about "Science Fiction's Supreme Masterpiece" . . . yes, that's what it says on the cover, and like everything else in this book, it is said without irony . . . this is the blurb for Frank Herbert's Dune and, surprisingly, I made it through 400 pages of sand, the highly addictive life lengthening spice-drug melange, imperial plots for the aforementioned spice drug, wild religious prophesy among the Fremen, water reclaiming stillsuits, Sardaukaur, the coming of Muad'Dib, a ride on the maker (a sand worm), crys-knife fights, treachery, desert ecology, and all the rest . . . but I finally skimmed the last hundred pages or so, because-- despite the complexity of the world, the fantastic development of the characters . . . both in mind and lineage . . . and the well-paced and multifarious plot-- after four hundred pages of reading you deserve a joke or two, something funny or at least ironic, but like in the Bible and Lord of the Rings, the tone of Dune is epic, and during this epic and very dry time on Arrakis, nothing remotely humorous happens, nor should it I guess . . . this is a place so desiccated that when you die, they render your body for its water, and the pages and pages of sand finally wore me out (and from what I've heard, the movie is not so much fun to watch either).

I Had My Reasons (They Just Don't Make Sense)

I was nervous all day Tuesday, my mind turning over the possibility that my 1993 Jeep Cherokee would not pass inspection and I would finally have to spring for a new car, and so on the way to the inspection station, I alternately drove really fast, in order to blow out the catalytic converter, and very slow-- to test the brakes-- which might be a bit suspect, and I occasionally beeped my horn, which has been known to stick, and only beeps if you punch the upper lip of the device-- and I'm sure I was an odd sight, accelerating and braking down Fresh Ponds Road, occasionally tooting my horn, but luckily I didn't pass any police, and then when I got to the inspection station I learned that-- possibly due to budget cuts-- they don't employ very many people there . . . it's a ghost town and the only thing they inspect now are emissions (most cars have a chip, so they just plug a cord into the chip, but my car is so old that they had to hook up all these EKG monitor type devices to the outside and inside of the engine) and the gas cap for leaking fumes . . . they don't test the brakes or the doors or the blinkers and they don't even beep the horn,  and so the positive thing is that I can legally drive the Jeep until 2013 but the negative thing is that I can legally drive the Jeep until 2013 (and God knows what other barely serviceable vehicles are passing inspection with flying colors, so be careful out there!)

Proud Parent

So Ian is taking art lessons from an artist up the street, and she's been quite impressed with his work-- he's the opposite of his older brother who would rather talk about his artistic visions, but can never work up the gumption and patience to render them well-- Ian is quiet and patient and methodical when he works, and he's willing to revise a line several times until he gets it exactly right; he also has the ability to look at a picture of something and draw it and capture it's essence-- when he draws a penguin, you know it's a penguin (and the same with a dolphin or a scorpion or whatever) and this makes me very Proud as a Parent, that my young son has some Talent, and maybe, if I am very lucky, he will go to a good Art School and really learn to draw and paint and also make abstract steel sculptures-- for the low, low price of 30 grand a year-- and become an Artist and live at home until he's thirty (or maybe forever, like Emily Dickinson).

The Exception

As a rule, I never lick anything that been sitting in my shed (mice live in there) but, if a soccer ball or basketball needs air, I don't think twice before inserting the pump needle into my mouth, no matter where the pump has been-- nestled among mouse droppings, on a shelf in a filthy garage, among the detritus on the floor of my car-- simply because of the instructions: "Moisten needle before inflating."

Just A Hypothesis

We all know the idea of a gateway drug-- some habit forming substance that might possibly lead to addiction to a harder drug-- but I pose this question: is coffee a gateway drug to speed? or is drinking coffee a "prophylactic drug," as opposed to a gateway drug, because your coffee addiction prevents you from needing speed . . . and I think you could use this logic for other substances as well, especially if the assumption is that reality is so screwy that most humans will need some sort of controlled substance to deal with it, and that there's very little possibility of zero drug usage (note the abject failure of various prohibitions on controlled substances) and so we shouldn't be worrying about the danger of "gateway drugs" and instead we should be trying to foster controlled and responsible usage of the least addictive and harmful of these substances.

The World Will Never Know

I wonder what kinds of fantastic and creative ideas I would come up with if my consciousness was not constantly being interrupted by my children (mainly my son Alex, who is apparently scared of silence and feels the need to constantly fill it with his half-baked thoughts, which isn't so far off from the premise of this blog, so I can't really chastise him for the habit, except when he says, "Daddy? Daddy? Daddy? Daddy?" even though I am looking at him-- eyebrows raised-- waiting for him to finish the thought, but he keeps repeating my name until I say, "Yes Alex?" and by that time he has usually forgotten what it was he wanted to say and I have forgotten about whatever I was thinking as well).

For Once In My Life, I'd Love To Be On The Inside

The first half of Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job  is a clear review of the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis-- the film explains collateral debt obligations, synthetic mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, highly leveraged banking, banking deregulation, the merging of investment and traditional banking, and sub-prime mortgages . . . if you haven't done your reading, it's a good primer on these subjects, and there is some excellent footage of Iceland as well-- but the second half of the film spirals into less focused frustration and anger (despite some inspirational and slightly cheesy narration by Matt Damon) and the big players either refuse to be interviewed (Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke) or hem and haw under aggressive questioning, which is satisfying in one sense, but really doesn't help to explain anything, and then the film explores high salaries and bonuses for Wall Street traders and the culture of excess-- there's some rather pointless gossipy chat with a high-end escort who serviced numerous Wall Street employees . . . but, honestly, as long as the system gets fixed, I could care less how the traders spend their money; despite these flaws, the movie is certainly a must see and I'm going to teach it to my students during the business ethics unit (I'll use it instead of the Enron documentary-- The Smartest Guys in the Room-- which, though it's a bit dated, has better music and a more insular and resolved story . . . though it also gets a bit off topic when it rather gratuitously explores Enron exec Lou Pi's fascination with strippers . . . I guess when you've got a documentary with a lot of numbers, you need to throw in some T&A) and another advantage of Inside Job is that it is relatively non-partisan: the film also criticizes the Obama administration for appointing the usual suspects to fix the problem (Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers) and the film claims that Obama's new banking regulations lack teeth, and as far as I know the facts are fairly accurate . . . or as accurate as you can be when you try to make a movie about something as complicated as this. 

Costanza-esque

I don't know about you, but when I say, "I'm really hungry, does anyone have any food?" and a colleague says, "Oh no! I just threw a Pop Tart into the trash!" then I go into the trash and fish out that Pop Tart (which was still protected by it's foil wrapper) and eat it, because otherwise it would be eaten by rats in Edgeboro Landfill, and who wants to be defeated by a rodent?

An Analysis of My Netflix Queue

My Netflix queue has swollen to 233 films, and though I'm never going to view these films, they do reveal quite a bit about about my hopes, dreams, personality, and aspirations . . . and if you head over to Gheorghe: The Blog, you can read a Close Reading of the list.

I Am A Bad-ass

I was going to take my kids to the pet store and let them each choose a fish for our new fish tank, but they get into a fist-fight while getting into the car (they were arguing about who was going to get in and who was going to have to walk around the car and get in on the opposite side) and so I said I wasn't taking them as a consequence for fighting about something so stupid, and instead I made them pick up sticks and bark in the backyard (and the worst part is that I was looking forward to going to the pet store and getting some new fish, so I had to punish myself as well as them, but as I indicated, I am a bad-ass parent who will not back down when it comes to fish).

The Giving Ski

I was gung-ho on teaching my two boys to ski this season (for purely selfish reasons . . . I love to snowboard and this gives me an excuse to go) and after several days of ski school and some hairy trips down the mountain trying to help them while on my snowboard, I am proud to say that they can ski, and now that they've learned, there's part of me that wishes they would unlearn, because as a parent it is petrifying to see your progeny hurtle down an icy mountain, when you know that they don't make good decisions anywhere (moments before we drove from the hotel over to Windham, I watched my older son-- who is seven and should know better-- trying to stuff a rectangular Lego box into the round hole of a ruck sack, and he was jamming it in long ways and it was stuck, and he couldn't figure out to turn the box on it's side and slide it in) but I guess it's like anything else you give your children, like the ability to ride a bike, you imagine that it will create wonderful scenes of family unity, but instead they take the skill and use it to wreak havoc and chaos . . . perhaps I should have taught them to play tennis, how much havoc can you cause with a tennis ball?

Humble Buffet

I shouldn't be reading heralded economist Ha-Joon Chang's book  23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, because I'm trying to keep my happiness index up and thinking about economics never leads to greater happiness, but it's frustrating when politicians are saying their hands are tied about budget cuts, yet they won't consider raising taxes on the rich (or even renewing a current tax on the rich!) despite the fact that the rich in America earned their money just as much because of the American system as because of their wits-- as Chang puts it: there's no such thing as a free market; every market is regulated and stipulated by its context and the rich are beholden to that system for their wealth . . . but don't listen to me, listen to Warren Buffet, who said: 'I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned . . . if you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil . . . I will be struggling thirty years later . . . I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well-- disproportionately well."

I May Have Given These Words of Wisdom to My Students

The difficult thing about family vacations is that you're out in public, so you can't hit your kids.

You Make The Call

The United States spends 1.1 percent of the budget on foreign aid, the lowest percentage of any wealthy country besides South Korea . . . yet in absolute terms the 39.4 billion dollars that we donate to other countries for humanitarian, economic, and security concerns is the largest absolute amount allocated by any single country-- so the question is: are we stingy or are we generous?

Olfactory Query

My five year old son Ian asked a fair question last week: "Can you smell over the phone?" and-- considering the smell of most people's breath in the morning-- it's a lucky thing that the answer is "no."

El Cambio es Bueno

Hola, mi nombre es Juan, y aquí es una frase excelente para que usted pueda disfrutar, y me gustaría dar las gracias a David por la externalización de algunos de sus trabajos para mí, y le aseguro la calidad de este blog no van a sufrir a pesar del hecho de que yo va a hacer la mayor parte de la escritura ahora.

In Afghanistan, Happiness is a Warm Poppy

Eric Weiner's book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World won't give you any definitive answers about how or where to find happiness, but it is an incisive and entertaining tour of how some cultures reach contentedness: in the Netherland the method is tolerance; in Switzerland it is democracy, cleanliness, nosiness, boredom, and stability; in Bhutan, Weiner is advised to think about death five minutes a day . . . but this is also a country where they feed marijuana to pigs because it makes the "pigs hungry and therefore fat"; in Qatar easy money does not bring happiness; and in Moldova, comparing oneself to the Swiss and other Europeans makes Moldovans sad; in Iceland, darkness, failure, generous state-subsidized health care and unemployment benefits, and binge-drinking make for good times; in Thailand, it is best to think less; in Britain, muddling along is good enough (especially if you live in Slough); in India, to be happy you need to embrace the mysticism and the chaos, the wealth and the poverty, the yin and the yang, the thing and the anti-thing; and in America, sometimes in our search for happiness we forget what actually makes us happy, friends and family, and focus too much on money and materialism, so the next time you are unhappy, don't go shopping, go out binge drinking with your friends and then muddle along through your next day of work without thinking.