A single sentence can't do our soccer pilgrimage to Newark justice, so head over to Gheorghe:The Blog to read my photo essay about our trip: I promise you drama, tension, a celebrity sighting, crack, riots, technology, and a flaming sausage.
Portugal vs. Spain: A Riotously Good Time in Newark
A single sentence can't do our soccer pilgrimage to Newark justice, so head over to Gheorghe:The Blog to read my photo essay about our trip: I promise you drama, tension, a celebrity sighting, crack, riots, technology, and a flaming sausage.
6/29/10
Though I doubted their skinny bodies could remain buoyant for a full length of the Rutgers pool, both my boys proved me wrong and passed their deep water tests last week-- so now they have complete freedom in the pool and are allowed to jump off the diving board-- which Ian did seventy or eighty times in a row, including a few "360's" . . . a term which he learned from another boy while in line, so it's going to be a more pleasant summer than the last one, when the boys could swim, but not so well, so they always looked like they were on the verge of drowning, which makes it really hard to look away from them and at the page of whatever book you are reading (and I have banned them from the kiddie pool, which they like to fool around in when they get cold in the big pool, because they are now big enough to be considered the annoying kids who the parents of actual toddlers hate because they fear for their toddlers lives when the big kids invade the kiddie pool, and this is nice as well, because now I don't have to look for them in two bodies of water, only one).
Hose of Plenty
It has been pointed out that perhaps Americans have TOO much of everything; that there is such a thing as too much "plenty" in the "land of plenty," and that all this choice and plenty doesn't necessarily lead to happiness-- we never make the top ten in any of the "happiest countries" surveys, though impoverished places like Guatemala and Nigeria are always high on the list, and even Mexico-- while in the midst of a violent drug cartel war-- was ranked as the second happiest place in the world in a University of Michigan study-- and nowhere is this paradox of plenty leading to misery more evident than on the nozzle of my garden hose, as there are NINE settings, count them: 1) fan 2) cone 3) shower 4) center 5) jet 6) mist 7) soaker 8) flat 9) angle . . . and no matter which one I use my shorts always get soaked and there is no difference between angle and cone and fan . . . and "soaker" should just be called "leaking" and I am sure that in El Salvador (another happy country) they just put their thumb over the end of the hose to control the spray.
Likeable But Forgettable
Rock Which Town? And When?
I was listening a rockabilly program on Princeton college radio (WPRB) and the DJ was playing classic stuff by Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran and Bill Haley, but then he played "Rock This Town" by The Stray Cats-- which is in some ways indiscernible from the other, older music-- though it is from 1982 . . . and my post-modern dilemma is this: "Rock This Town," which I consider somehow disingenuous and satirical because it is from my youth, a period of punk-rock, synth-pop, and Men Without Hats-- and though The Stray Cats made great music, there was an element of parody in their dress, their musical style and their lyrics . . . but they sounded like they were from the '50's, and now the song is so old (and regarded as one of the 500 most important songs of all time by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) that it has become classic, so "classic" that the DJ didn't point out the difference between "Rock this Town" and the other "authentic" songs he was playing, and I know this shouldn't bother me and maybe it's because it makes me feel old, that I can make the distinction between an eighties band and real rockabilly and it's so far in the past that no one else seems to know or care . . . but it is scary that the eighties are the same amount of years from the fifties as they are from the present.
Keeping It Yogi
Here's a real quotation said by a real administrator at our end of the year meeting, I think it does Yogi Berra proud: In order for things to happen, a lot of things have to get done (and this is so much better than my bogus Yogi Berra quotation but not nearly as good as my sincere apology for my phony Yogi Berra quotation).
Free Thesis
6/22/10 Wish Me Luck . . . or Hope I Bomb: It's Your Choice.
6/21/10 It's a Girl!!
6/20/10
I simultaneously read Steve Martin's Born Standing Up and Hampton Sides' Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin and though they both focus on America in the late sixties, you wouldn't know it was the same country; Steve Martin lived an odd life you couldn't invent, getting his start at Disneyland doing patter in the magic shops and slowly evolving his act towards the avant-garde while he drifted through the Flower Power era . . . meanwhile, Dr. King was organizing a general revolution among the poor, hoping to bring them all to Washington to camp out and make the rest of the country understand their plight, and he was being stalked by both J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, as well as a shifty man that went by various names, including Eric Galt and James Earl Ray, who-- after assassinating King, led the FBI on a wild hunt that required detective work across the South, in Mexico, Canada, and, finally, London, where he was captured by Scotland Yard's finest (which annoyed J. Edgar Hoover).
6/19/10 The Thousandth Post! $$^%&^ You!
6/18/10
So I finally executed this stupid gag at school-- it's rather Andy Kaufmanesque: we started reading an essay on Modernism and then I asked the kids if it would help if they could see a video clip about this topic before they wrote their essay and they said yes (of course) and I agreed with them that sometimes it helps to see what we're reading about, especially if it is about art, and so then I played a video of me reading the exact essay on Modernism that we just read and then I asked them if that helped . . . being able to see it, and they laughed, but next year I want to do this gag once a month, so that just when they think I'd never do it again, I do it again (and I show enough actual video clips that they would forget) so I've got a lot of filming to do . . . I feel like it will work especially well for Hamlet . . . would you like to see this scene? It's a great one to actually see . . . and then I'll play a film of me reading it in a horrible British accent . . . and then I'll use the same accent for A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, because, oddly, my British and Irish accents are identical and they are also very high-pitched, I think the students enjoy my bad accents more than if I could actually do a convincing accent . . . and if you're wondering about the relevance of this tangent, I think it fits into the category of comedy that is also Kaufmanesque.
6/17/10
6/16/10 It's Number Day!
Somebody Better Write This Quickly (Before We Forget About The Gulf Oil Spill and Start Worrying About Some Other Disaster))
I hereby donate this bad science-fiction plot to whomever would like to develop it into a full length novel or movie: the US Government develops a petroleum eating bacteria in order to clean up an oil spill, but the bacteria mutates into an airborne strain and slowly expands around the globe, eating the fuel at filling stations and in individual gas tanks, essentially paralyzing world transportation-- and the bacteria creates propane as a waste product, which is highly flammable, so there are LOTS of explosions and lots of chaos, but one man-- in his home made electric car, with his battery powered fan, and his electric razor, and his electric chair-- will save the earth from complete pandemonium . . . admittedly, it sounds pretty dumb, but it's a better plot than The Human Centipede.
We Don't Know How to Relax
6/13/10
6/11/10
6/11/10 It's Phallus Rubicundus Day Again!
Like a Splinter in Your Eye
6/9/10
Ouch
European Crime
I'm still on a foreign crime kick: if you want a Scottish crime novel that's reminiscent of Fargo, try Denise Mina's Still Midnight; and we just watched the Kenneth Branagh version of Henning Mankell's novel Sidetracked-- Branagh plays tortured Swedish detective Kurt Wallander and the start of the show is stunning-- you'd never believe something called "rapeseed" could be so beautiful.
6/6/10
I Think Dane Cook Is Funny
A Case of Premeditated Plumbing
I'm not Mother Theresa, but I am proud to say that last night I did not beat, strangle, or kill my youngest child, and you might say, "That's nothing to be proud of!" but let me tell you the whole story: yesterday morning, our kitchen ceiling started dripping and I discovered that the "S" pipe in our upstairs bathroom was leaking, so we mopped up the water (and Ian helped!) and considered ourselves lucky that the leak was in plain view and then we instructed the kids not to use that sink-- and it's not even the main upstairs bathroom, it's the bedroom bathroom, so they don't use that sink anyway, and Catherine wisely put a towel over it to remind us not to use it-- now flash to yesterday evening, we're getting ready to go to the school carnival and Alex is drawing on the computer quietly and Ian is roaming around and suddenly the ceiling starts dripping lots of water, way more water than in the morning and I get very upset-- where could it be from?-- but I go upstairs and our bedroom door is open and the bathroom door is open-- and it is a difficult door to open-- and the towel is pulled aside and THE TAP IS RUNNING! . . . because Ian, bored and annoyed because Alex was playing quietly on his own, went upstairs, went into our room, removed the towel, and turned the water on and then came downstairs, didn't say a thing, and just waited to see what would happen . . . and by this time Catherine had left for the carnival (she was a volunteer) and so I had to deal with this alone and I was having serious rage issues and Ian admitted that it was premeditated, that he knew what the result would be and that he was in serious trouble, and-- after I told him that he had "betrayed the family," he was sent to his room and missed the carnival and lost all of his reward marbles and got a stern talking to and I may have kicked a chair, but like I said, there was no beating or strangling of the child, and I'm pretty proud of that, considering he nearly ruined our kitchen ceiling ON PURPOSE . . . just to see what would happen, and I'm getting angry all over again as I write this sentence . . . deep breaths, deep breaths.
6/3/10 (That's Right, Dave Has Been Married for TEN Years!)
Secret Lives of Your Children, Part II: I ran into Ian's pre-K teacher, Mrs. Z, at the grocery store-- she is the sweetest, greatest teacher, and so patient with my stubborn grouch of a son, and she has the kids doing all kinds of hands on projects having to do with science and gardening and cooking, and this is what she said to me about Ian, you can insert the subtext: "You know, Ian is so smart . . . not book smart, and he's compassionate too."
6/2/10
The Form of This Sentence Reflects Its Function
A Wired article called "Chaos Theory" summarizes Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows, which argues that the riot of hyper-linked information on the Internet actually rewires our brain so that we comprehend less, and read in a cursory manner.
