Knoebels > Disneyworld

Another ringing endorsement for Knoebels Amusement Park, and that's impressive-- considering that I hate amusement parks-- but a day at Knoebels costs a tenth of a day at Disney . . . there's no admission fee; plenty of trees; free parking; excellent, inexpensive food-- I highly recommend the pulled pork enchilada . . . not only is the meat tender and delicious, but they also give it a quick dip in the deep fryer to ensure tastiness; at Knoebels there's no claustrophobic feeling that you've got to stay and get your money's worth; they have several great wooden roller coasters; there are no people in costume . . . aside from the locals; and, finally, they have The Looper-- an ancient ride which became our children's passion: once they figured out how to spin themselves upside-down, they begged to ride it over and over . . . Ian and Nicky claim to have "looped" it sixty-four times . . . though I wonder if their counting abilities suffered due to the circumstances.

A Man Must Negotiate

Perhaps part of the reason cars are so over-priced at the dealer is because the dealers know that people come in expecting to negotiate and won't feel good unless they cut a significant amount off the sticker . . . and while I am not usually one for haggling (I was notoriously bad at it when I lived in the Middle East . . . I always seemed to end up purchasing two items instead of one) I was determined to get a good price on a minivan-- so I did my homework, made my phone-calles, visited dealerships and went through all that "let me go talk to my manager" negotiating, and then, after I got them down, I walked out-- because you've got to walk out . . . I told them I was a teacher with plenty of free time, and that this was my "summer project," to shop for a minivan, and that I was in "no hurry" . . . and by this time I had gotten the 21,995 dollar sticker price down to 17,000 -- but without the Toyota certified used car warranty-- but then I made some calls to far-flung Toyota dealerships and found a van with only 26,000 miles on it and got them down to 16,500 with the certification . . . and I found this too good to be true for a 2008 van . . . and it was, the information on the web page didn't match the CarFax, and so I called them, and they realized it was a typo . . . but before they changed the web page, I called the local Toyota dealership, made them pull up the page with the typo, told them the deal that Autoland Toyota offered me, and had them match it . . . and then I raced over there and bought the van before they realized that I had used a specious advertisement . . . but they were quite happy for my business, so I'm wondering if I could have got them even lower . . . but it doesn't matter, I got them low enough that I felt heroically macho in my haggling-- that I felt like I got one over on them and got a good deal, and that's all that matters, right?

It's Not Like I'm Letting My Seven Year Old Smoke Cigarettes

Last week, while I was biking with my dog, a woman in jogging attire, with a poorly behaved poodle, yelled to me, "You know, that's the worst thing you can do for your dog!" and so I circled my bike several times and politely listened to her explanation--she said she had a veterinarian friend who claims running along with a bike is bad for a dog's hips and that dogs need to stop frequently when they run and then she finished her lecture by challenging me to "look it up!" and I assured her that I would . . . though I know my dog and he loves biking with me and never has any trouble keeping up, but I humored her and "looked it up!" and there is nothing on the internet about how biking with a dog is bad for your dog (there are considerations, of course . . . your dog should be medium sized, you should avoid pavement when you can, and you should make sure your dog enjoys biking and can keep up . . . which my dog does easily because he can run . . . he begs me to take him out every morning) but this is all besides the point, the real issue here is why some people believe they can just yell out their opinions to a passerby . . .  I know how I should have reacted to this woman-- whose poodle was going bananas, yanking her around and rearing up, while my dog obediently followed my tightly circling bike as I listened to her lambaste me . . . after she said, "That's the worst thing that you can do for your dog," then I should have said to her,"The worst thing? If you think that's the worst thing you can do to a dog, then I have two words for you . . ." and then I should have said, "Michael Vick" or "bear-baiting" or "Vietnamese restaurant" but, of course, this "jerk store" theorizing is what the French call "the wit of the staircase," of which I have plenty, but in real time, I am a witless coward.

Voracious Packing

Now that I own a minivan, packing for the beach is an episode in gluttony, nothing is too big or useless to bring . . . it's like eating without a care in the world about what you're consuming, as your belly is so cavernous that you'll never feel engorged and your body so huge that you could never get fat.

Yet Another Miraculous Coincidence (With Noodles)

I mentioned Noodle Gourmet-- the hole-in-the-wall Hong Kong style noodle joint on Easton Avenue in New Brunswick that I often frequent for lunch with my father, brother, and children-- to a Taiwanese acquaintance, and she gave it high marks, and said that I should order the den dien dong shing and I said, "What?" and she said, "the dong ding dienty den den shin" and after several repetitions of this farcical dialogue (my friend Connell tried the reverse approach-- he told her, "Describe me to the people that work there, so that when I go in, they'll know to give it to me") she finally wrote the name of the dish in Chinese on a scrap of paper, which I put in my wallet . . . and the next day, I met my father and brother for lunch there, and my brother was ahead of me in line and he pulled out a little scrap of paper with some Chinese characters on it-- he wanted to order mini-rice cakes with seafood and that dish is not on the English menu, so he got a Chinese co-worker to write down the order, and after he presented his little piece of paper, and then I stepped forward and presented mine, which was for a noodle dish slathered in minced pork and hot peppers-- totally delicious-- and while this may not rank among the most profound miraculous coincidences in my life-- it was pretty funny, and both dishes were astonishingly delicious . . . and Noodle Gourmet could avoid such silliness if they simply translated all these secret dishes in English.

They Blew Up the Chicken Man in Albuquerque Last Season

My wife and I finally finished Season 4 of Breaking Bad, and the parting shot of the poisonous Lily of the Valley plant in Walt's yard has finally convinced me that Bryan Cranston's no longer playing a cancer-ridden, drug dealing version of the snide and mild-mannered dad from Malcolm in the middle . . . he's a bad dude, perhaps morally worse than Nancy Botwin of Weeds . . . but I'm still rooting for him, perhaps because he started out as a high school teacher and he gives me inspiration on how I might be able to escape the clutches of the bell schedule.

Instead of Web- Surfing, They Should Call It Web-Driving

Ask someone if they are an above-average driver and they will almost definitely say yes-- and that's why it's difficult to ride shotgun, as you can't watch someone else drive without criticizing them-- and the same is true for web-searching; it's really hard to watch someone Google for information because they're not typing in the terms that you would type into the search bar, and they're not clicking on the sites you would click on, and they're not scrolling to and reading the stuff you would scroll to and read . . . my wife got so fed up with watching me search for a dog-boarding place that she went in the other room, got the lap-top, sat down next to me, and beat me to the information we were looking for.

A Circuitous Journey

A few weeks ago, I picked up the new Geoff Dyer book at my local library-- and because I really like Dyer's writing, I wasn't disconcerted by the fact that the book claimed to be about unlocking the mysteries of a Russian science-fiction film called Stalker, which I had never seen-- nor even heard of-- because I assumed that Dyer would simply be using the film as a springboard for his trademark digressions (as he did in his "biography" of D.H. Lawrence-- Out of Sheer Rage-- which you can find in the BIO section of the library, but the book never actually becomes a biography of Lawrence, and instead is a treatise on procrastination) but this recent book, which is called Zona: A Book About A Film About A Journey To A Room, is actually about what it is billed as being about, the film Stalker, directed by the renowned Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky . . . so I took the book back to the library and spoke to a friend of mine, a film buff, and he told me I had to watch Stalker before I read the book, but that it wasn't going to be easy . . . and he was right, it wasn't an easy viewing, and this may be because I am certainly no film buff . . . I came to movies rather late in life and I have a limited attention span . . . and so it took me days to watch Stalker, which is nearly three hours and famous for its interminably long shots where relatively little happens-- and while I am glad I watched it, as it is compelling, ambiguous, profound, and beautifully filmed story-- and the journey of Stalker, Writer, and Professor is both archetypal and unforgettable-- especially the last scene-- while I admit all this is true, I think I came to this film too late in my life to really appreciate it, and Dyer explains this phenomena in the book: he explains that he saw Stalker when he was twenty-four and in a phase when he was doing a lot of LSD, and he became obsessed with the film, in a way that doesn't happen once you hit thirty or forty . . . he explains the sad fact that you probably won't see the film you consider to be the "greatest" after the age of thirty, and definitely not after the age of forty-- your ability to have your perceptions altered, your ability to respond to art with maximum focus and obsession, this declines with age . . . and so I am stuck with the films of the '90's as my benchmark movies: Goodfellas and The Big Lebowski and Fargo and Reservoir Dogs and the documentaries of Erroll Morris . . . not that a few films from my early thirties haven't snuck into my pantheon . . . Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation . . . but most of my films are light-weights compared to the greats-- fast-paced post-modern fun, as opposed to profound aesthetic journeys, and there is probably not much I can do about it . . . and funny thing, I actually reading about Stalker more than I enjoyed watching it . . . so I am guessing I will never become a cinephile. 

I Come To The End of Two Significant Nineteen Year Relationships on the Same Day

My mother-in-law passed away last night after a long battle with cancer-- and while it was very sad, she went on her own terms, peacefully, at home (she lives with us) and surrounded by family . . . and I can honestly say that our relationship defied the typical, as I got along quite well with her for the past nineteen years: she lived with us for seven of those years and took care of our children for much of that time, she was a vital woman and I have no regrets about electing to have my mother-in-law live in the same house as me . . . and as my mother-in-law was gradually losing consciousness, I was buying a used car-- more on my fantastic negotiating skills in a future sentence-- because my weather-beaten and ancient 1993 Jeep Cherokee was also near the end of its time . . . but the "Deathbox" managed one final ride down Route 130, to the Toyota dealership, where it immediately ceased working-- I couldn't get it started so the sales lady could take it for a test drive, and it took a team of people to jump start it and move it out of the main lot-- they gave me 100$ of pity money for the "trade-in," perhaps in deference to the many years of excellent service this car provided me (and all the material it has provided for this blog) . . . and so, in one of life's profound, mysterious, and miraculous coincidences, two outstanding nineteen year relationships ended on the same day yesterday, and my life will be very different from here on out.

A Fan's Notes on A Fan's Notes

Frederick Exley's fictional memoir A Fan's Notes is The Catcher in the Rye for sporting types . . . Exley is a grown-up Holden Caulfield, and that's not very pretty-- he's alienated, can't "run with the herd," and the only thing that gives his life meaning is drinking and New York Giants football-- especially Frank Gifford-- and though he moves in and out of asylums, fights, womanizes, and generally despises himself and his fellow man, spending alternate periods of frantic energy and stupefying malaise, in the end-- like Holden-- at the end of this wild journey, he ends up missing all the fringe dwelling characters with which he shared booze and adventures . . . I don't recommend this book for women, especially since they will get an even worse view of men than they already have, but if you are a sportsmen who likes to drink, and you're concerned with your age and the mark you've made on the world, then I think this is hard to read without thinking: there by the grace of God go I. 

Camping Is More Fun If You Stay In a Hotel With Air-Conditioning

There is a feeling of triumph for a father when he brings his children back from a camping trip, alive and uninjured (but, ironically, despite the fact that we braved campfires, sleeping together in a tent, Alex adjusting to his tooth-spacer . . . he ate lots of ice cream . . . repeated rides on the Looper at Knoebels, bug collecting on a giant mosquito ridden hill, a treacherous hike across a monstrously huge and sun baked spider infested boulder field, an escaped fugitive, and slippery paths along a waterfall, despite the fact that we survived all this and more without injury . . . once we got home and went to the pool, within fifteen minutes, Alex got stung on the stomach by a bee).

Hey Lolailo! Do You Really Need To Be That Specific?

The Lolailo Sangria label provides some concise and definitive instructions on when to use their "refreshing wine product with natural fruit flavors," their recommendation is that it "is a perfect beverage for relaxing with friends, family, and all social get-togethers," and while I appreciate their advice, I would also like to use their product when I sit in a dark room, sullen and alone, and play jazz chords on my guitar . . . but I guess I'll have to buy a different bottle of wine for that occasion.

Little Black Rubber Pellets Must Multiply Like Tribbles

If everyone that plays on the artificial turf field brings home as many black little rubber pellets in their shoes as I bring home, then how are there any black little rubber pellets left on the field?

Winter is NOT Coming

It hasn't snowed around here since Halloween.

Pink Floyd Should Have Robbed Banks

While I can bring to mind the countenance of any member of The Beatles or The Who or The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin, when a friend challenged me to produce the face of Roger Waters or David Gilmour in my mind's eye, I couldn't do it, despite the fact that I think Pink Floyd is the best band of the bunch.

Better To Get It All Over On The Same Night

My wife and I are lucky that our children are fantastic sleepers, rarely waking up in the night-- and though this occasionally results in a wet bed, it's worth it because we never lose any sleep-- but Thursday night both our children had nightmares: Ian dreamed that our dog Sirius had an evil twin, that attacked him, and Alex dreamed about being hypnotized by tiny bugs . . . and, unfortunately for Alex, he had his nightmare after Ian, and so when he came to crawl into our bed and escape the tiny mesmeric bugs, he found his little brother there, and had to retreat back to his room and battle them.

It's Not Just Me

Before this year's graduation ceremony, while I was milling around with the other educators, I posed this Final Jeopardy! question and then we got on the subject of the capital of Canada . . . and apparently, nobody knows the capital of Canada-- teachers, administrators, students . . . they were all stumped; I also asked this at a July 4th get together and my favorite answer was: "What? Canada has no capital!"

More Danger!

The cougars are coming . . . but what happened to the killer bees?

Danger!

Never, ever ever eat home-made sausage, because once you do, you will never be able to go back to the store bought stuff . . . and so now I guess I need to get a meat grinder, a sausage press, and some motivation to stuff pork into little tubes.

Six Pounds of You Isn't You

Researchers have recently mapped 99 percent of the approximately 10,000 types of microbes that populate our bodies . . . 100 trillion bacteria, weighing six pounds, and while this isn't as sexy as discovering the Higgs-Boson in the Large Hadron Collider, it probably has more siginificance to our everyday lives: our unique microbiome assists in the digestion of food, trains our immune system, and protects us from harmful bacteria . . . and bacterial imbalances have been shown to cause obesity, mood disorders, and obesity . . . bacteria can even cause specific behaviors in mice and rats-- toxoplasmosis gondii is spread from cats to mice and rats, and makes rats and mice less afraid of cats, so that they are easier prey . . . and I love this because it's something else to blame, if you get sick or have about of toxic flatulence or simply act whacky, then it might not be you causing this . . . it might be your bacteria (and soon enough, we will have a legal clause for this . . . instead of the "insanity defense," we will have the "bacterial defense").

Bonus Post For Dog Lovers At G:TB!

If you dig dogs, then head over to Gheorghe: The Blog for a special "Summer Dave" pet post that also includes original photography, shot by yours truly.

I am 60% Through the Ripliad . . . How Far Are You?

I just finished the third novel in Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley series . . . Ripley's Game is more of the same as far as the talented Tom Ripley is concerned-- he handles murder with as much aplomb as anyone in the literary canon-- but Highsmith introduces another character, a man corrupted by Tom Ripley's games-- his situation reminds me of Jonathan Pryce's role in Glengarry Glen Ross (and, coincidentally, the character's name is Jonathan) and so you get the interesting juxtaposition of a man well-versed in the art of murder and a man still wet behind the ears in the ins and outs of homicide . . . and then throw in his French Catholic wife and you've got another excellent novel: nine garrotes out of ten.

Physics Exclusive at G:TB!

Science buffs are probably aware that physicists at CERN glimpsed the elusive Higgs Boson yesterday, but you might not know that I scored an exclusive interview with the long sought after particle, which you can read over at Gheorghe: The Blog.

Will This Happen Someday Soon?

At the end of a day at the pool, not only do I not want to have to tell my kids to take a shower, but once I get them in there, doing what they're supposed to be doing, then I also don't want to have to go back into the locker room, fifteen minutes later, and tell them to stop wasting water and get the hell out of there.

Iberian Unity

 Catherine and I made another soccer pilgrimage to The Madrid and Lisbon Bar and Restaurant, and we learned a few things that I'd like to note for the future: 1) Portuguese folks will root for Spain when they play Italy . . . so I guess the Iberian Peninsula hangs together against outsiders 2) the bartender has incredibly distracting cleavage, so you have to stay focused on the game or you might miss a goal 3) the sangria, the clams casino and the garlic shrimp are amazing . . . the calamari not so much-- perhaps that's something you should only order in an Italian place 4) if Spain wins, then apparently drunk driving laws are suspended in Newark for the day . . . despite the insane heat, everybody was out in the streets, honking their horns and waving their red and yellow flags (although we did see a few dejected Italy fans here and there).

Is This Really Better Than Dead Air?

I wouldn't want to be a soccer announcer because there is a lot of space to fill . . . check out The Simpsons take on this in the above clip . . . but maybe the announcers should allow a few moments of silence, instead of saying vapid things like this-- and remember, Spain was coming off far less rest than Portugal-- and so, "Spain's fatigue may or may not have an effect on the outcome of this game."

Plumbing The Depths of Irony

So if you find yourself at the Plumbing Supply Store (because Home Depot doesn't carry any parts for one piece toilets) and you ask for a gasket and flapper for an American Standard toilet and the old man behind the counter asks, "Which one?" and you say, "Aren't they all the same . . . I mean, they're called American Standard," then you are setting the old man up for some excellent plumbing humor, as I found out when he said, "That's what they call themselves, but they don't mean it . . . did you bring the broken parts?" and I had to admit-- sheepishly-- that I did not, and the actual plumbers behind me in line were all laughing now at my naivete in trusting a brand name . . . but the old guy did come through in the clutch, with the right part, and now we have a working toilet again, but it has cost me my plumbing innocence and my faith in advertising.

Miracles On Top of More Miracles

All week, I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something-- but I couldn't put my finger on what it was-- and then Thursday morning when I went to the track, to do some intervals, I noticed a pair of blue Crocs near the soccer net and I realized what it was I had been missing, the lacuna in my life, for days and days-- my blue Crocs!-- I had worn them to soccer Sunday morning, changed into my cleats, and then left them there . . . and they were still there, unharmed-- four days later! a miracle!-- so maybe everything does happen for a reason, and the reason I went running Thursday morning was so I could be reunited with my hideously ugly blue Crocs and now the universe is back in order (aside from all that stuff in the middle East).

Yet Another Miracle

In preparation for summer, Catherine depilated my back and shoulder hair with Veet hair removal cream and then I used my beard trimmer to tame my chest and leg hair, and now-- miracle of all miracles-- I can dry myself off with just one towel (instead of the usual three towel routine that I used to practice).

Bomp Chukka Bomp . . . A Bicycle?

 The music in the Canadian documentary series How It's Made is decidedly pornographic sounding, and-- oddly-- this fits the content of this wonderfully mindless "educational" show . . . as there is no end to the thrusting, riveting, pounding, compressing, and generally pneumatic action that goes into the manufacture of the featured articles . . . and the camera lingers on these activities for an extensively graphic and gratuitous amount of time, so that you can truly enjoy the rhythm and the motion of the machines, while you zone out to the cheesy techno riffs and beats.

You Get The Ads You Deserve

The final lesson in Michael J. Sandel's book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets is that although a "fire hydrant with a KFC logo still delivers water to douse the flames" and "children can learn math by counting Tootsie Rolls" and fans still root for their home team in Bank of America Stadium, that doesn't mean that markets don't leave their mark . . . when ads appear in schools they undermine the purpose of education: critical thinking; when a person gets a tattooed body ad it demeans them; product placement corrupts the integrity of art . . . when everything is for sale it leads to the "skyboxification" of American life . . . we live and work and play in separate realms and this is not good for democracy . . . and so I am discontinuing my line of tampons with Sentence of Dave emblazoned on the penetrator, and instead I will try to allow my sentences to penetrate people's consciousness the old fashioned way.

Spearguns Aren't As Dangerous As You Think!

If you were wondering if it's okay to allow your children to play with spearguns, the answer is: go for it! . . . because even if your kid shoots himself right through the skull, he very may well survive, as Yasser Lopez did . . . so don't deny your children the fun and good times of spear-fishing . . . and I am definitely going to give my parents a piece of my mind, because every Christmas I put a spear-gun on the top of my list, and Santa never delivered one.

Costa Chica!

In contrast to the all-encompassing logic of yesterday's post, today I will give some exceedingly specific and local advice: if you live in the New Brunswick area, and you like authentic Mexican food, then try Costa Chica Mexican Restaurant and Pizzeria . . . it's right in the middle of the barrio, on Handy Street, and everything we ate there was delicious . . . excellent chips, salsa, and fresh guacamole; tender and spicy marinated pork in the tacos pastor; great verde sauce; spicy chicken mole (although the chicken was on the bone, not a breast, but still super-delicious) and we had some kind of weird sweet tamale for dessert, which was also tasty . . . the place was loud and crowded, the waitress spoke a little English, and the chairs are especially festive and brightly colored.

All Encompassing Logic

Some people believe Everything Happens For A Reason, but other people are annoyed by this philosophy--  so if you'd like, you can buy a t-shirt with Everything Happens For No Reason emblazoned on it-- but logically, both these statements are identical . . . if everything happens for a reason, then nothing that happens has any greater reason than anything else . . . the fact that you spilled your coffee and the fact that thirty volcanoes erupt simultaneously on your birthday are both equivalent-- in fact, if everything happens for a reason, then everything is already determined and laid out in some sort of clockwork pattern and the universe is deterministic . . . and if everything happens for no reason, that doesn't mean that things are random and meaningless, because it's statistically impossible for every single thing to happen without reason, so it must mean that the universe was set rolling and now it's just proceeding like a column of dominoes, one event knocking into another in a chain reaction, without individual meaning . . . but possibly in some master pattern . . . so really the only interesting variant of these statements is Some Things Happen For A Reason, and Some Things Are Totally Random because that means there's something out there that can control things, and this thing occasionally takes an interest in the affairs of the universe and occasionally falls asleep at the wheel . . .

Into The Wild With Condoms

Cheryl Strayed's new memoir Wild: From Lost To Found On the Pacific Coast Trail is the female version of Into the Wild,  John Krakauer's story of Christopher McCandless (a.k.a Alexander Supertramp) . . . both hikers change their names to something apropos and both Strayed and Supertramp escape their lives in the wilderness . . . and both find that the wilderness is no place to escape-- Strayed thinks she will reflect on her mother's death, her own divorce, and her flirtation with heroin addiction . . . but all she ends up thinking about is her boots, her heavy pack, rattlesnakes, and bears . . . luckily, her story ends happily, and there is some romance along the way-- my only complaint is that Wild drags on some at the end , Krakauer tells McCandless's more epic and more tragic tale concisely, but the books are still complementary and good reads for the summer if you like to get outdoors and hike (and I am still wondering if my prediction will come true about my wife's book club).

If You're Rich, You Can Shoot A Walrus

Michael Sandel examines the inevitable corruption of ethics in a society where market mentality is pervasive in his new book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets . . . and while you may have heard that hunters can pay 150,000 to shoot a black rhino in South Africa-- and that this seemingly vile practice has actually increased the endangered rhino's population manifold, because now it's worth it for South Africans to protect the creatures from poachers-- you may not have heard that you can pay an Inuit guide six grand and he will will allow you to shoot a walrus . . . the Inuits have a walrus quota and the Canadian government allows them to sell the rights to shoot the walruses to "hunters" . . . though it is hardly a hunt-- journalist C.J. Chivers describes this practice as "a long boat ride to shoot a very large beanbag chair," and if these anecdotes disgust you and you can't stand the fact that everything has a price on it, then perhaps you should move to Finland, where they want to preserve the moral rectitude of a speeding ticket-- they don't want the wealthy to view a ticket as a simple fee to be paid for the right to drive fast, they want the ticket to be viewed as a fine that is levied because you did something dangerous and wrong-- so when you show up in Helsinki traffic court, your ticket is a percentage of your salary, and so Nokia executive Anssi Vanjoki-- who earns seven million dollars a year-- was fined 217,000 dollars for driving 80kilometers per hour in a 40 km/h zone.

Commencement Anxiety

The high school where I teach holds their graduation ceremony down in Trenton, at the Sun National Bank Center, and every year I forget how long a drive it is to get there and how much traffic piles up around the arena . . . this year I actually did an illegal u-turn over a grass divider when I realized that was the way to avoid the long line of cars trying to make a left off of Hamilton Street . . . but though I ineptly timed my trip to the arena, once I got into my robe and sat down to listen to the names of seven hundred and fifty graduates, I improved: as the enunciators started their arduous task, I took a few samples, made some back of the envelope calculations-- without an envelope!-- and added my figure to the current time posted on the large red digital clock hanging from the arena ceiling . . . 46 minutes plus 12:04 . . . and I announced to the students around me that the reading of the names would be done at exactly ten of one . . . and forty-six minutes later, the last of the students lined up at the foot of the stage, waiting to be called, and I started getting nervous . . . it looked like I might be right . . . my palms started to sweat . . . one of my students said, "I think you're going to hit it on the nose" and the other students in my vicinity starting saying things like "Hurry up" and "Come on" and, though there was nothing on the line, I really, really wanted my prediction to come true . . . but, alas, there must have been some small flaw in my calculations, because the last student was announced at 12:51 . . . but the kids were nice about it and one consoled me: "That was still a really good guess."

The Best Present of All: Gluttony

I ate three chocolate croissants for dessert on Father's Day.

It's Not Like I'm Trying To Be A Gymnast

So for those of you anxiously awaiting my decision regarding the Trilemma of Dave, I actually rested my injured knee, and I have been wearing my orthotics, which has really helped my plantar fasciitis . . . so this Sunday I was able to return to the soccer field-- with one wrinkle: I did no stretching whatsoever before I played . . . I read some recent research that suggests that static stretching actually weakens muscles, and I always thought when you were injured that you should do a lot of stretching, but I've given up on that philosophy-- not that I ever did that much stretching to begin with-- and I had no problems on the field, and both my legs and my feet felt good after the game, so this makes me very happy, because I find stretching really really boring (so now the question is, do I forego stretching when I am coaching kids? . . . I think we will warm-up and do some sport specific exercises before we play, but no more of the tedious circling up and stretching as a group).

I Neglect My Family for the Good of the Blog

My wife had the audacity to suggest that I ought to have gone grocery shopping yesterday afternoon, instead of taking my paddleboard out for a spin, because we had recently discussed the grocery list and the house was lacking in several basic items . . . and if she would have told me to go shopping, I would have done so without complaint, but there's no chance that I would take initiative and do something like that on my own, especially since the kids were at their respective after school programs and I had the opportunity to paddle around on the river . . . and think of what I would have missed if I went to the grocery store instead of the river yesterday: some of my best real-time content ever.

Bonus Update: Urban Paddleboarding Emergency! (A Ridiculous Riparian Adventure in Real Time)

I took my stand-up paddleboard out on the Raritan this afternoon-- it's a dirty river, but the boat launch is only a couple hundred yards from my house, so despite the dead seagulls, I try to enjoy it as best I can-- and while when I paddleboard on the ocean, I hope to see dolphins and other beautiful sea life, I don't expect much on the river . . . however, today proved to be very, very different: three minutes after I shoved off from the dock, three fire trucks and an ambulance raced into the park, followed by several other vehicles; one of the fire trucks backed a small boat into the water, loaded with firemen, and they zipped past me and headed towards the nearby Donald Goodkind Bridge . . . and there were emergency vehicles up on the bridge, lights flashing, and a number of people looking down into the water . . . so I yelled to one of the firemen "What's going on?" and he told me that someone jumped off the bridge, apparently following in the footsteps of Detective Vin Markazian-- who leapt to his death off the same bridge in Season 1 of The Sopranos-- so once I found out this information, I kept paddling towards the scene, of course, despite the fact that I had to battle the wake of several boats, because when do you get to see an emergency situation on a stand-up paddleboard?-- and then a boat chugged past me headed the opposite direction, towards the way I came, so I turned and followed it: it was a small fishing skiff with a tiki hut and several corny flags flying that said things like COLD BEER and THE BAR IS OPEN and GONE FISHING . . . but it turns out this unlikely vessel fished the man out of the water, and delivered him to the dock, where he was taken into the ambulance waiting at the foot of the boat launch . . . and I find this slightly sad (and a little ironic) that whoever decided to end their life didn't have a more regal delivery from the murky waters of the Raritan, but I guess that's what you get when you jump off a bridge in Jersey . . . it's no Viking funeral, but it could have been worse . . . he could have been dragged in by a curious dude on a stand-up paddleboard (and I later found out that the man survived, and was actually treading water when the "Good Samaritan" boat rescued him).

There Is More Than One Female Singer Hailing From Canada

A few days ago the Final Jeopardy! answer was "THE BESTSELLING ALBUM OF ALL TIME BY A FEMALE IS A 20 MILLION SELLER BY THIS WOMAN WHO STARTED SINGING AT AGE 8 IN ONTARIO" and I confidently yelled "Who is Celine Dion!"-- pleased that I knew she was from Canada-- and all three Jeopardy contestants also wrote down "Who is Celine Dion?" but we were unanimously wrong . . . the answer is Shania Twain, and so once again, I realize Canada is more deserving of my attention and care.

Motivation

Running before work is risky, because if you get tired or injured miles from home, you've still got to get back in time to teach first period (I realized this Friday morning when I was three miles away from my house and my knee started to hurt . . . why I didn't realize it sooner and stay closer to home is a testament to my stupidity).

I Am A Coward When It Comes To Loud Noises

Blowing up a balloon is kind of scary . . . there's no pressure meter to tell you when to stop.

The Times They Are a-Chargin

I carry cash, and associate this with being a man-- a man should have some green in his wallet, so he can pay quickly and fluidly, without a lot of mucking around . . . because if the shit goes down, you're going to need cash, and a man should be ready for when the shit goes down . . . my wife, on the other hand, rarely carries a lot of cash, and uses her credit card for the bulk of her purchases, and I associate this behavior with females (Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble cry "Charge it!" when they race off on a shopping spree) but I am beginning to realize that transactions these days are actually faster and cleaner if you use a credit card . . . and so it's the women who are quicker on the draw now, but despite this knowledge, I can't seem to switch over (especially for a cup of coffee at WaWa; I'll use my credit card for larger purchases, but can't pull the trigger for smaller items).

My Dog Gets Treats But My Children Do Not

My dog bolted one time and learned his lesson . . . so last weekend when he popped loose from his collar, next to a busy road, and I told him to "stay," he did; he sat calmly and waited for me to reattach the leash-- it's wonderful, you tell him something once and he actually listens  . . . on the other hand-- and this happened in the same day, making the contrast all the more apparent-- my children and I were planning on going on a family bike-ride, but they were too impatient to wait for me-- though I am clearly part of the family-- and while I was in the house getting a water bottle, they took off on their bikes, crossed the street they are not allowed to cross, and then got into a furious race with each other, all through the park-- never looking behind to see if their dad was accompanying them-- and when I finally found them, fifteen minutes later and a mile and a half away, they were still racing, weaving in and out, and Ian cut Alex off and Alex crashed and scraped his elbow, knee, and hand, and some woman stopped to tend to him, but I put an end to that and told him to get on his bike and ride home-- injured or not-- and so the dog has been earning treats left and right, but my kids have lost them for the week.

Someone Needs To Calibrate This Stuff!

While the "super" setting on my window fan is hardly that, the "medium spicy" setting at our local Thai restaurant is absurdly spicy-- lip numbingly spicy, cold sweats in the night spicy, ring of fire in the morning spicy . . . we need a Better Bureau of Calibration for this stuff.

How To Use The Self-Checkout Kiosk At the Library

They have a new self-checkout kiosk at the library, so you can borrow a book without having to undergo the scrutiny of the librarian . . . now you can take out all those racy romance novels and sex manuals and hemorrhoid treatment tomes that you were previously too embarrassed to hand to the old lady at the desk, for fear that she'd make some small talk about them; I didn't go for anything particularly racy, instead I checked out Anne Coulter's newest book Demonic . . . I was curious as to what she has to say, but never wanted to be seen holding one of her books . . . I only read a few chapters, but I think I got the idea of the theme-- she creates a portrait of a typical liberal and then attacks that portrait, and in this book she paints a liberal as someone belonging to a mindless and dangerous "mob," which strikes me as funny, because-- according to Paul Krugman-- I am certainly a liberal, and maybe even a lazy progressive, but, as anyone who knows me knows, I hate mobs (unless I'm 19 years old and moshing to Primus) and absolutely refuse to take part in them . . . I get claustrophobic and anxious in large groups, hate chanting and marching, and I won't even do "the wave" at a sporting event, and so it's like an outer body experience reading this book-- as I know Coulter is attacking me, I'm right in her wheelhouse . . . I drive "the third most liberal car in America" and I think gay people should be able to get married, I think women should have free reign over their vaginas-- including the right to vajazzle-- I think drugs should be legalized, I think assault weapons should be illegalized, I think we should fund the arts, and I think the environment is more important than the economy, and-- though I am loath to admit it-- I think that I should probably be taxed a bit more and people that make a boatload of money should be taxed substantially more, so that we can make the infrastructure of this country as great as possible . . . and that probably completes someone's stereotype of a typical "liberal," and I'm sure I've got my own composite of a stereotypical conservative-- though none of the conservatives I know fit into that composite . . . Coulter occasionally attacks these run of the mill beliefs with inside jokes and sarcasm, but mainly it's this other thing: conservatives aren't the crazy racist zealous mob, liberals are! liberals are afraid of science! (unless it's evolution, I guess) liberals are the KKK! etc. and though I wish I had the patience to make it all the way through, because it's important to see both sides of the political spectrum, even the radical political spectrum, I found it much more politically enlightening to finish George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords . . . he is the conservative of the fantasy genre, concerned with realpolitik, finance, defense, and tactics, instead of happy elves.

Get Real, Duracraft

I think the "low" and "high" settings on my Duracraft window fan are accurate, but I'm not sure if the "super" setting is warranted-- if a fan has a "super" setting, then you should be able to fly a kite indoors or dry a soggy dog in minutes, not just rustle the curtains.

Anyone Feel Like Drawing This?

Here's a cartoon idea that is too difficult for me to draw: Samuel Jackson is waiting in line at the airport security check, and there's a number of pictographs depicting the things you can't bring aboard the plane, using the classic red circle with a line through it to depict this . . . there's one banning liquids and one banning aerosol cans and one banning produce . . . and the last red circle with a line through it contains a snake.

Don't They Have Levitating Magnetic Bullet Trains in Japan?

You'd think the recent explosion in digital technology would have rubbed off on public transport, but train conductors are still punching away with those handheld hole punchers, clicking some inscrutable pattern of holes onto your ticket and every other ticket on the train . . . you'd think they'd all have carpal tunnel syndrome.

A Drink Hooper Would Enjoy

During my trip to see the collegiate sevens rugby tournament, we impressed a school bus driver into our service and tried to get her to take us back to center Philadelphia from the stadium in Chester, but the driver could only take us to the airport-- so we decided to make the best of it and retire to the airport bar . . . and Gus suggested a tequila shot called "the stuntman" and I like tequila well enough, so I agreed to have one . . . and Gus said we needed lime and salt, which always works with tequila, but when you do a "stuntman," instead of licking the salt, you snort it up your nose-- which hurts!-- and then you shoot the tequila, and then you squirt the lime into your eye (but luckily I was wearing glasses, so unlike the other "stuntmen," I didn't burn my retina).

It's Hard To Look Menacing On A Scooter

I was walking through the park and I saw a couple of teenagers that looked like trouble-- black ski hats pulled low-- despite the warm weather-- saggy jeans revealing their boxers, surly expressions on their faces-- but they were zooming along on kick scooters and they weren't scrawny thirteen year olds, they were older teenagers . . . pushing twenty, and-- though I didn't have the heart to tell them-- once you hit a certain age, it's really tough to look like a bad-ass on a scooter.

Unfortunately, The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree

Of my two sons, Alex reminds me more of myself-- impulsive, talkative, and just shy of smart . . . in college, my friends called me "the poor man's Galileo" because of my half-baked theorizing, and Alex is following suit; several days ago, in the midst of one of his interminably long monologues, he had this epiphany: "Dad! I know how they can let you eat the strawberries when you pick them! Because mom said we couldn't eat them when we went picking! They could weigh you before you start picking! Then they could weigh you after you're done picking! And if you gain like .5 or something, then you pay for .5 strawberries!" and I loved the idea, of course, but that's not saying much, especially since I remember back in college, when I worked for the Middlesex County Election Board in Roosevelt Park, and they had a scale in the break room-- one of those accurate old-school balance scales-- and so on Fridays we would weigh-in before lunch and then go to the all you can eat Sizzler buffet and then weigh ourselves again after lunch, and the person who gained the most weight would win ten dollars (I vaguely remember gaining seven pounds during one of these gluttonous sessions).

The Beach Is A Good Idea

One of man's greatest inventions-- and I'm not being sexist here, as I am pretty sure that it was a man that designed the bikini-- is the beach . . . it's the one time that we outsmarted womankind; we convinced them to wear their underwear in public in broad daylight and all we offered in return is our hairy torsos . . . and if you've seen my back hair recently, then you will agree that we men are definitely making out on the deal.

My Dog Is Like A Dog But I Am Like A Cat

Let me preface this by saying that my dog Sirius is a good dog, but sometimes good dogs do bad things . . . especially if there is a bunny involved . . . I was biking in the park with Sirius at my side, using a product called the Walky Dog Hands Free Bicycle Leash, which is an innocuous enough sounding name for what is essentially a metal stick with a bungee cord running through it that clips under your bike seat and juts out perpendicular to your frame, but a better name for the Walky Dog Hands Free Bicycle Leash would be The Sling-Shot Canine Powered Kiss Your Ass And Your Family Good-bye Because You’re Never Going to See Either of Them Again Unless There Is An Afterlife Rocket Bike Attachment, and as we were biking along using this inaptly named product, a bunny rabbit scampered across the bike path and Sirius-- who is a good dog, but still, when all is said and done, a dog-- jetted sideways after the rabbit, putting him on the right side of two garbage pails and my bike and me on the left side of the two garbage pails . . . and so the stretched bungee cord and the metal rod hit the cans, abruptly stopping the bike and propelling my dog's head right out of his collar; the two garbage pails flipped over and I shot over the handlebars of my new mountain bike (and as this happened, I thought to myself: why aren't I wearing that nice new helmet that I just bought?) and I flew through the air and landed on all fours, just like a cat-- completely uninjured, with eight lives to spare . . . a minor miracle if there ever was one-- but despite the miracle, I still had the awkward job of brushing myself off, righting the garbage cans, putting all the bottles and cans back into the garbage cans, getting my dog's collar back around his neck, getting my dog reattached to the Walky Dog Hands-Free Bicycle Leash, and all the while three women at a picnic table watched me do this, and I felt like Kitty Genovese because they never offered to help me-- nor did they applaud my agility or passionately swoon at my feet in celebration of my feline landing-- instead they simply chuckled at me once I got rolling again (which I needed to do quickly, because my six-year-old son was ahead of me and never saw the crash, so he just kept on biking).

Loss of Essence

Trying to teach with laryngitis is like being a super-hero with no super-powers.

Sometimes It's Best Not to Know

We had an "energy assessment" done on our house, and apparently it's a big sieve with an ancient leaking furnace underneath it . . . but despite this troubling news, my kids enjoyed the part with the infra-red camera. 

It's Not Like I Know What A Hoosier Is

I wish I liked hockey, but I just can't muster up any interest in the Stanley Cup Finals . . . but I am interested in how many people that do not hail from New Jersey are familiar with the legend of the Jersey Devil . . . and do the people who don't know the legend think that the team is run by a bunch of Satanists?

Redefining the Terms

According to Paul Krugman, in his book The Conscience of a Liberal, I should define myself as a "conservative"-- because liberals have now become conservative in that they want to preserve public schools, Medicare, unionized workers, collective bargaining, separation of church and state, Social Security, and government regulations on Wall Street and the environment . . . and I should also define myself as a "progressive," because I think there should be universal health care (and the book really educated me on health care and its costs . . . we pay more than double what Canada, France, Germany, and Britain pay per person on health care, and have the lowest life expectancy among them . . . and a large portion of the costs of healthcare is the bureaucracy of the system, which would vanish if the government was the primary insurer for everyone . . . as it is for Medicare . . . read the book, it's too boring to summarize here) and I am also progressive because I wrote an editorial on how we should preserve our public school system instead of privatizing it and because I think taxes should return to the levels they were at in the 1970's . . . and the current movement conservatives should be defined as "radicals," as they want to dismantle the New Deal, government programs, regulation over finance, public education, Medicare, unions, collective bargaining, the estate tax, and other traditional American programs, and have us enter some weird new version of The Gilded Age.

The Avengers Are Not As Super As My Wife

The Avengers is certainly action-packed, but the heroes are too super for me . . . when the characters are invincible, there's not much on the line (plus they stole the ending from the movie version of The Watchmen) but my wife, on the other hand (who is a mere mortal) did perform a super-heroic feat while we were watching The Avengers and she did it with everything on the line . . . my son Ian said, "My tummy hurts, I think I'm going to throw up," and in a split second, with her super-human reflexes, my wife whipped out the giant bag of potato chips that she had smuggled into the theater, got it perfectly positioned in front of Ian's face as he yakked-- in the dark! the the fucking dark!-- and then calmly took Ian and the bag of potato chips/vomit to the bathroom, tossed the latter, cleaned up the former . . . and brought him back so he could enjoy the rest of the movie . . . I'd like to see Natalia Romanova pull that off.

The Great Political Paradox

The great mystery in politics is why anyone poor or lower middle class would vote against their own interests-- against social services and public schools and a clean environment and unionization and regulation of big business and more taxes on the wealthy-- but, of course, this happens across broad swaths of our nation, especially in the mid-west and the South . . . Thomas Frank tried to explain it in his book What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, and while it is a great read on how Republicans used so much more than hot-button issues to distract voters from economic realities, and actually built a brand-based belief system and ethos into the party-line; Paul Krugman, in his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, wonders if that is truly the heart of the matter . . . he acknowledges that hot-button issues such as abortion and national security are partly to blame for the paradox, and also details how movement conservatism has galvanized the evangelicals (or is it the other way around? are the evangelicals using the movement conservatives to create a new kingdom of heaven on earth? either way, I'm going to hell) but Krugman feels the nexus of Republican power over the lower class voter stems from race, and explains how race was exploited in the deep South to bring those voters over to the GOP; while this is an awkward issue-- in the 1940's, when Harry Truman tried to create a universal health care system, his main opposition came from the American Medical Association and Southern whites, who feared integrated hospitals . . . and most of the fears of lower class Republican voters-- who are predominantly white-- are fears of redistributing income to undeserving minorities, black or otherwise . . . but America is becoming less racist and America is becoming more diverse and America is becoming economically more unequal . . . and so I am wondering how the GOP will gain these votes in the future . . . Kansas is still Kansas, according to the New York Times, but this movement conservative absurdity-- this radical and bi-partisan divisiveness that is at best a fringe in every other developed nation-- this can't continue forever, can it?

My Sixth Grade Teacher Was Passive Agressive AF

I found my sixth grade "yearbook" and this is what my teacher-- who will remain nameless for her own protection-- wrote to me . . . and notice the tone shift, it's almost like she couldn't help herself:

Dear David,

Good luck next year . . . I'm very happy you were a member of my class . . . you have been a great sport thoughout the year, your sense of humor was a bright spot many times . . . now all you have to work on is your talkativeness . . . we helped your organization (and that was a chore) and I believe you can master your talking mouth . . .

and then she had the gall to write: I'll miss you very much, please come back and visit . . . and when I was younger, I would have probably thought this was a relatively sweet note, but now that I am a master of the female tone, I get the big picture . . . I must have been a royal pain in her ass, but I was too skinny and nerdy to scream at, so she had to express it passive aggressively in that note.

Sometimes Technology Doesn't Improve Things

Art History in Two Pictures

I've got a scanner and I am determined to use it . . . sorry . . . maybe it's just a phase that I will outgrow (or maybe I should stick to scanning my six year old son's art, which is far better than mine).

Rimshot

I had pizza last night, but I'm not going to tell you anything about it . . . it was personal.

Confessions of a Lazy Man

I've finally gotten my new printer/scanner hooked up (check out my six year old son Ian's abstract art-- he could give Marla Olmstead a run for her money) but that wasn't the only package from Amazon that I received that day-- there was another one, a smaller one, and I figured it contained a book or two, but I didn't get around to opening it for a few days and when I did, I found two books inside, neither of which I ordered: An Eyewitness Guide to Spain and a history of Shea Stadium . . . so I looked at the outside of the package, and it wasn't addressed to me, it belonged to the house several doors down, and so I put the package on top of the scanner, informed my wife of this, and went on with my life . . . two weeks later my wife noticed that I never returned the package to the rightful owners and she chastised me (and I didn't tell her what I was thinking: I figured you would return it . . . smart move on my part) and she told me I needed to walk it over to the neighbors immediately, so I took the dog for protection-- because I figured this was going to be embarassing, since I had opened the package and then neglected to return it to them in a timely fashion, and I was hoping Sirius would drag me to safety if things got to awkward (or at least dispel the awkwardness with his powers of cuteness) but luckily no one was home . . . which means they were probably wandering through Spain without a guidebook.

A Fun and Easy Way To Spice Up Your Diction

I learned a technique from a student last week that might be Generation Y's greatest contribution to our culture-- it's not age exclusive, it's more entertaining than Facebook and Lady gaga combined, and it's easy to learn but difficult to master . . . so here it is: you add the acronym "AF" to any statement that would benefit from the additional modifying phrase "as fuck," but by using the acronym, you avoid the profanity and still get your point across . . . and make yourself feel better to boot (although I'm not sure if it has the same effect on pain as actually swearing) because nothing relieves stress like an expletive . . . here are a few examples to get you started:

1) it's humid AF in here . . . I used this one yesterday in class yesterday when my knees started sweating and my pants reflected this . . . really gross . . .

2) it's hot AF in here . . . complementary to #1 and a set-up for #5

2) you're late AF . . . also wonderful to use in class . . .

3) that was rude AF . . . useful in class and all of New Jersey . . .

4) I am hot AF . . . use this immediately after #1 and #2, especially if your pants have knee-sweat stains, and you're sure to get a laugh from teenagers.

Next Time I Will Hire Someone

I'll build a bike shed under the deck, I thought, all I need to do is level out the dirt under there . . . just go under the deck and level out the dirt because it looks like there's a bit of a slope . . . ha!

Old School

There is no question that the world has changed drastically since I was a kid, but some things never change: last week, my son Alex got in trouble in school for shooting spitballs, playing with scissors, and administering noogies.

My Son Ian Says The Right Thing (But Probably For the Wrong Reasons)

Last week, my two sons and I were walking on the Asbury Park boardwalk, in search of a video arcade, and my son Alex said, "I would do anything for video games!" and then his younger brother-- ever the opportunist-- told him, "You shouldn't say that," and then Ian looked at me and said, in his sincerest voice: "I would do anything . . . for my family."

Exciting Technological Times

I am excited to announce that we have a new printer/scanner (but I am loath to admit that it is still inside the box it was delivered in . . . it's been sitting on the kitchen table in that box for nearly two weeks, and though each and every day I announce, "We're going to set up the scanner today!" we never seem to get around to it . . . and my worry is that if I don't do it soon, it is going to become obsolete).

City of Bohane

Even though it meets my definition of true science-fiction, I gave up on Irishman Kevin Barry's new novel City of Bohane, but I did like this bit of description about how the place where you live affects your personality: "too little has been said, actually, about living in windy places . . . when a wind blows in such ferocious gusts as the Big Nothin' hardwind, and when it blows forty-nine weeks out of the year, the effect is not physical only but philosophical . . . it is difficult to keep a firm hold of one's consciousness in such a wind . . . the mind is walloped from its train of thought by the constant assaults of wind . . . the result is a skittish, temperamental people with  tendency towards odd turn of logic," and it makes me wonder how different a person I would be if I was born in Argentina . . . would I have many lovers? be able to dance? wear leather pants? walk around with a rose between my teeth? . . . unfortunately, I will never know . . . there is no escaping the fact that my genes were forged and tempered in that crucible known as Central Jersey.

Canine Economic Boost

Now that we have a dog, our consumption of duct tape has gone way up.

Don't Monkey With the Monkey

Sometimes you've got to shock the monkey . . . unless you actually are a monkey . . . then you are far less likely to shock a fellow monkey, even if it means starving to death . . . while, as Stanley Milgram certainly proved, we humans are quite willing to shock each other, for little or no reward . . . and I certainly won't put myself above this behavior, as I'm quite willing to shock my students-- in fact, one way I like to shock them is by repeatedly playing "Shock the Monkey" while they try to write an analysis of Milgram's experiment . . . especially the part that goes "monkey monkeyeeeeeee," and, I must tell you that kids today find it shocking that "Shock the Monkey" was a popular song that made the charts back in the '80's, but-- of course-- the '80's were a pretty shocking decade,

I Am a Man (and so Is Connell)

My wife and I went out with our friends in Asbury Park last weekend, and if you haven't been there recently, you are in for a surprise-- the boardwalk is renovated, full of attractions, and it is thriving . . . after downing a few beers, we started walking towards the restaurant (Stella Marina-- really good) and we passed one of those old fashioned high striker games-- the strongman test where you swing the mallet and try to shoot the puck up to ring the bell; it was on the boardwalk and unattended-- you were supposed to throw a dollar in the jar for two tries, but the guys in front of us took more swings than that and they were unsuccessful-- and they were big guys-- but the thing was antiquated and looked very rusty . . . Connell and I took turns at it, and after several tries I was able to ring the bell by incorporating a little jump in my swing, and then Connell followed suit, and rang the bell and it's a good thing he did because if I rang the bell and then he didn't, then he would have had low self-esteem for the rest of the evening and his wife would have probably left him, which would have been sad since we were celebrating their anniversary.

Children of the Carp

I was walking the dog last weekend through Donaldson Park, and it was foggy and drizzling slightly, and as we passed the little pond next to the river, I noticed a number of large boils and splashes . . . closer inspection revealed that these were giant fins and tails, brown and gold, breaking the surface all over the pond . . . so I ran home and got my children and we watched the giant carp for a while-- they were leaping and breaching and finning . . . incredibly active for very large fish-- and so we decided we would fish for them the next morning (our poles weren't set up and Alex had a soccer game so we couldn't take immediate advantage of what was happening) but Sunday morning was windy and clear and the carp were gone . . . we missed our chance.

Diamonds Are a Girl's Worst Nightmare

My friend Stacy showed up to work last Friday with a big cut on her forehead, and I asked her how this happened and she said she scratched herself while she was sleeping, but after further interrogation I discovered that she scratched herself with her diamond engagement ring, and that she wears the ring while she sleeps . . . and this practice is shocking to me-- to go to bed with a sharp object made of the hardest stuff on the planet attached to your finger-- but apparently a lot of women do this (but not my wife, so this sentence is truly altruistic) and so once again I am giving a free idea to whatever entrepreneur happens upon this desolate corner of the internet . . . these compulsive ring-wearing women need  "ring covers" . . . soft little Velcro wrappers that can attach to a ring, kind of like a grill cover, and thus prevent them ring doing any damage to the wearer during sleep (better yet would be to abandon this crazy practice of strip-mining stones from the ground  and presenting to women as a symbol of love, a symbol loaded with financial implications-- but I doubt that's going to happen any time soon).

Tick Streak!

Business as usual around here, as far as minor miracles-- this time it's a Tick Streak, and while I'm not closing in on Dimaggio's unassailable record, I still think it's an impressive chain of consecutive events: the last four times I've gone running in the orchard near the high school, I later discovered a tick crawling somewhere on my body . . . and I can see why I am attractive to a tick, as my legs are thick with hair, but still-- how long can this streak continue?-- I would like to go eight for eight since a tick is an arachnid and has eight legs (and I am wondering how long the streak has to go before it is considered a major miracle and I am canonized as the patron saint of ticks).

Oops . . .

My wife was fishing for a compliment about her use of proper English-- at my behest, she's been instructing our dog to "lie down" instead of to "lay down," but I may have ruined my credibility when I told her, "Yeah, you've been doing really good at that."

The Waitresses Might Know What Boys Like, But I Know What Teachers and Coaches Like . . .

I have been a coach and a teacher for many years and this is the deal: on the playing field, we want girls to act more like boys . . . while in the classroom, we want boys to act more like girls.

How To Get A Beautiful Young Stranger Into Your Kitchen

So last weekend there was a beautiful twenty-five year old girl in my kitchen-- she was blonde, blue-eyed, taller than me, wearing next to nothing, and I didn't know her from Adam . . . and you're probably wondering, "How do I get beautiful, winsome young strangers into my kitchen?" and so I will tell you:

1) you need to live on a steep hill;

2) you need a friendly visiting brother-in-law, who should be a bachelor, and he should be outside working on replacing your bay window;

3) you need a nasty skate-board crash to happen on the steep hill in front of the aforementioned friendly brother-in-law, who will then chivalrously offer medical aid to the girl (possibly motivated by her stunning good looks and skimpy outfit) and suddenly you've got three twenty-somethings in your kitchen and you're fetching peroxide and ointment and bandages, and watching as one girl tends to the other and wondering if anyone should ride a skateboard with that much skin exposed because, though it's very appealing to look at, it's rather dangerous (and funny thing, my wife missed it all . . . she was napping, and I'm not sure if she really believes the story).

Question of Culpability

Once again, I've got a legal question for all the litigators out there: if someone working for Jan's Boutique places a glossy Prom 2012 flyer under your windshield wiper and you don't notice this flyer until you start driving and you have no interest in the $25 in FREE Accessories or the FREE $20 Compact Mirror or the FREE $10 Hair Pin, and so you turn on your windshield wipers in order to remove the flyer because it is obstructing your vision, and the flyer goes flying . . . is this considered littering?

Trilemma of Dave

I read to encounter new stories, new ideas, and new words, and I found all of these in Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 . . . I read stories of economic disaster in Latin America, Japan, and Thailand; I read that the global crisis of 2008 might not have been completely caused by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act (which was put in place after the Great Depression and ensured compartmentalization between commercial banks and investment companies) and might have been more the result of a "run" on the completely unregulated "shadow banking system" . . . which wouldn't have been regulated by the Glass-Steagall act anyway; and I read the word "trilemma," which Krugman used to explain the problem with national monetary policy . . . you can either let your money "float" and fluctuate on the exchange rate, which fights recession but adds a great deal of uncertainty to your economy, or you could fix the value of the rate and attempt to guarantee that the currency would never be devalued, or you can maintain an adjustable peg . . . and he explains the defects in all of these and calls the problem a "three-cornered dilemma" . . . a "trilemma" and the only trilemma in my life right now is not particularly exciting . . . it's not like Heidi Klum, Karolina Kurkova, and my wife are all battling for my affections . . . but there certainly are three corners to my problem: I have a knee injury, but it's not a terribly bad injury-- my knee cap popped out of place and I sprained the inner ligaments and my bursa sac is a bit swollen, and so I can either: 1) rest it properly until it heals . . . which is what I should do, but is rather impossible since I have two active boys, a dog, and I am hyper-active 2) I could do light exercise . . . jog, walk, play with my kids, lift weights, bike, and swim . . . which alleviates my hyper-activity but is rather boring, or 3) I can tape myself and wrap myself and brace myself and keep playing basketball and soccer until my knee explodes and my plantar fasciitis returns.

Three Reasons Dave Will Be Remembered For Eternity

In no particular order, here are my three greatest contributions to society:

1) The "Don't Eat It" Psychological Mind Trick 

2) The Zombie Soccer Drill

3) The Year as a Week Metaphor . . .

and while I've explained the first two ideas here at Sentence of Dave, I've never bothered to write about the "Year as a Week" Metaphor because it's only applicable if you're a teacher . . . but because of recent developments, I feel obligated to set the record straight; fifteen years ago, in the infancy of my teaching career, I developed a metaphor to help the staff make it through the grind of the school year, and it works like this: the first day of school is also the start of a monumental, macro-cosmic year-long school week, so the first day of school is simultaneously the first minutes of the macro-cosmic first period . . . and once we've made it to mid-terms-- the exact center of the school year-- then we are smack in the middle of Wednesday in the macro-cosmic Year as a Week metaphor-- and once there are thirty-five days left in the year (slightly less than 20% of 180) then we have entered the Friday of the the Year as a Week . . . this metaphor is motivational for both students and teachers alike, and I often calculate "convergences," or when the Year as a Week and the actual school week coincide-- this is very exciting, because then the way you feel about the microcosmic week mirrors the way you feel about the macro-cosmic week-- for instance, we just had a Friday convergence at the start of second period and we all felt pretty good about that-- anyone can make it through Friday; the summer, of course, represents the weekend, and it's the reason the metaphor works well for teachers and students . . . perhaps workers with less time off could create a Career as a Week metaphor, with summer being retirement; it usually takes students a while to "get" the metaphor, but most of them eventually grasp the concept (although there are always a few students who just can't think analogously, and when I say things like "It's finally Friday!" on a Tuesday, they stare at me in confusion) but this year, for the first time ever in my career, when I explained the metaphor, a student raised her hand and said, "I do that too!" and she explained that she had developed the exact same metaphor as me, and I thought that was cute and funny until last Friday, when I was explaining to a different class that we were having a convergence and a student said, "Where'd you get that from?" and I told him that I invented The Year as a Week Metaphor many years ago, and he said, "You know Student X does that? Are you sure you didn't get it from her?" and I told him that I invented the Year as a Week Metaphor before Student X could talk, so though I admired her creativity, the credit still had to go to me for the invention of the metaphor, and there's no way I'm doing a Darwin/ Wallace thing with this as I thought of this way before this girl, and so hopefully now I have set the record straight.

Take Shelter is a Movie, Not A Rolling Stones Song!

Take Shelter-- an excellent film which I will sadly admit that I referred to as "Gimme Shelter" on several occasions-- is well-acted, tense, and thrilling; and essentially, it asks this question: if you you act paranoid, delusional, and batshit crazy about something you think is going to happen . . . something no one else believes will happen . . . and in the end, that insane thing actually happens, then are you still utterly batshit crazy?

No Country For Old Sissies

I was discussing my mother-in-law's various medical problems with one of her friends, and she offered me this aphoristic gem, which she claims her father coined: "Growing old is not for sissies."

Jersey's Finest

New Jersey has the best pizza in the world, the fattest governor in the world, and the best surrealist-post-modern hyperkinetic meta-fiction writer in the world . . . his name is Mark Leyner and he's just written a new novel, called The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, after a fifteen year hiatus (his last novel was The Tetherballs of Bougainville) and I won't even try to summarize the "plot" but I believe it's a send-up of how religious texts are transmitted to mortals, edited by mortals-- think Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicea on Ecstasy-- and finally canonized . . . with major digressions about the worship of celebrities and the female anatomy-- but a synopsis does the book no justice, so I will simply present you with a long sample passage, verbatim (the ellipses are Leyner's) because this is the best way for me to review the book . . . if you like this passage, then go for it:

 --the flowing auto-narrative of the basketball dribbling nine year old who, at dusk, alone on the family driveway half-court, weaves back and forth, half-hearing and half-murmuring his own play-by-play: ". . . he's got a lot going on that could potentially distract him . . . algebra midterm . . . his mom's calling him to come inside . . . his asthma inhaler just fell out of his pocket . . . but somehow he totally shuts all that out of his mind . . . crowd's going ca-razy! . . . but the kid's in his own private Idaho . . . clock's ticking down . . . badass craves the drama . . . lives for this shit . . . Gunslingaaah . . . he can hear the automatic garage-door opener . . . that means his dad's gonna be pulling into the driveway in, like, fifteen seconds . . . un-fucking believeable that he's about to take this shot under this kind of pressure, with the survival of the species on the line . . . and look at him out there--- dude's ice . . . is this guy human or what? . . . his foot's hurting from when he stepped on his retainer in his room last night . . . but he can play with pain . . . we've seen that time and time again . . . he's stoic . . . a cold-blooded professional . . . Special Ops . . . Hitman with the Wristband . . . hand-eye coordination like a Cyborg Assassin . . . his mom's calling him to dinner . . . the woman is doing everything she can possibly do to rattle him . . . but this guy's not like the rest of us . . . he is un-fucking-flappable . . . he dribbles between his legs . . . OK, hold on . . . he dribbles between his legs . . . hold on . . . he dribbles . . . hold on . . . he dribbles between his legs (yes!) . . . fakes right, fakes left, double pump-fakes . . . there's one second left on the clock . . . and he launches . . . an impossibly . . . long . . . fadeaway . . . jumpaaah . . . it's off the rim . . . but he fights for the offensive rebound like some kind of rabid samarai . . . throwing vicious elbows like lethally honed swords . . . the severed heads of opponents litter the court . . . spinal cords are sticking out of the neck stumps . . . but there's no ticky-tacky foul called, the referees are just letting them play . . . there's somehow still .00137 seconds left ont he clock . . . now there's a horn honking . . . might that be the War Conch of the Undead?"

The Scream is so 90's . . . 1890's

Some lunatic paid 119.9 million dollars for Edward Munch's "The Scream" last night, and I don't think that's a very wise investment, as the image-- which was the ubiquitous icon of anxiety and angst for the 20th Century-- has lost its relevance . . . that screaming face doesn't do it for us in the 21st Century, because we don't have that kind of emotional energy to waste, we don't have the wherewithal to scream at the multiplex of horrors we face every waking moment-- horrors from our own lives, horrors from the lives of others, horrors from around the world, digital horrors multiplied a million times over . . . a constant barrage, an infinite deluge of horrible, contradictory, complex, awkward and terrible information . . . Joseph Kony is abducting children! Greece is going to default! My LDL cholesterol count is 340! Angelina and Brad are on the rocks! Eddie Money is still touring! I need to refinance! The sea levels are rising! . . . we'd be screaming all the time . . . we'd lose our voice; in fact, we don't have even have enough emotion left to utter a Homer-esque "Doh!"-- that's so '90's--  instead the essential reaction to the 21st Century, the facial expression for our times is Jim Halpert's ironic half-smirk . . . one of these : /  because how else can you react to the inconceivable? . . . I am afraid that the "The Scream" is destined to be lumped with King Lear and Oedipus Rex: an evocative piece tragic art, but also full of antiquated outpourings of melodrama and emotion . . . I wish I could paint so I could update the idea-- I would call it "The Smirk"-- not that there needs to be more parodies of this thing, which-- like I said-- has run its course, but I really do wish I could paint (mainly so I could paint a giant squid battling a sperm whale on my bedroom wall, a suggestion that my wife vetoed, probably because I can't paint).

Michael Chiklis and Andrew Strong are the Same Person

The proof is in the pudding: Andrew Strong never made a guest appearance on The Shield, and Vic Mackey never breaks into song after he tortures a confession out of a bad guy (because then you would identify the voice, that distinctive set of lungs that made The Commitments transcend the "band in a movie" genre . . . and I guess Shawn Ryan didn't want to give Mackey a sensitive, soulful side-- imagine if he sang his final confession-- but I think he missed a golden opportunity to make Vic Mackey even more disturbing  . . . Hitler was a failed painter, and that doesn't make him any less frightening, but it does add a strangely human touch to his evil).

Some Good Movies and TV You May Not Have Seen #6

Watching video of something extinct is poignant, nostalgic, and sad . . . but the knowledge of the subject's impending demise imbues the viewing with something special-- for example, check out the video above to see one of the last living thylacines, soon after this film was shot (in 1933) the "Tasmanian tiger' was eradicated by humans; the seminal TV series Freaks and Geeks evoked the same feeling in me . . . as by the time I watched it, it had already been cancelled (only super-hip people watched the show when it was broadcast) and so each episode-- no matter how excellent-- was a countdown until extinction; and once again, my wife and I are in the same predicament, this time with the 2009 sitcom Better Off Ted . . . it's funny, smart, satirical, fast-paced, and rather lighthearted send-up of business ethics, research and development, technology, and office politics; the jokes are clever, and Portia de Rossi is perfectly cast as the cold and callous dragon-lady boss, and though it was critically acclaimed, apparently no one watched it . . . we've got ten more episodes before it dies in front of us, never to be queued on Netflix again.

Cryptonomicon

I finally finished Neal Stephenson's 915 page tour de force of a novel Cryptonomicon, and a number of superlatives are appropriate: Pynchon-esque, epic, prescient (the book predates Bitcoin by a decade), sprawling, comprehensive, dense, mathematical, and extremely intelligent . . . but I should warn you that it doesn't really pick up until page 850 . . . although if you make it to page 546, then there is a break from the text in the form of some lovely charts, which explain the relationship between code-breaking genius Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's clarity of mind and frequency of his ejaculations-- including the difference in the sawtooth pattern between visits to the whorehouse and onanistic release and an explanation of how the graphs are differentially complicated by the arrival of his love interest Mary Smith . . . priceless stuff but you have work for it; ten gold bars out of ten.