All's Well That Ends Well When the Well Delivers Running Water
An excellent end to 2016: a great day of snowboarding/skiing at Bromley Mountain . . . or a great day of East Coast snowboarding/skiing-- some decent snow on the ground, only a couple of icy patches, no lift lines, fairly warm (20s) and no major crashes; Ian did have one moment when he thought he was going to barf (he didn't) probably due to the combination of being overdressed in the steamy lodge and too much hot chocolate, but he recovered and did another run, where he zipped into the woods and then inadvertently did a jump back onto the trail . . . I'll be happy when my kids are old enough to navigate the mountain on their own, so I don't have to watch them; we then had a fantastic lunch at The New American Grill in Londonderry-- highly recommended-- and I had another laudable Vermont beer: Zero Gravity Cone Head IPA . . . and then the kids had enough energy to do some runs on the superfast and super scary sled run we built on a trail in the woods below the cabin, now that we've ridden it numerous times, the trail is slick and extraordinarily dangerous, especially when riding the orange plastic toboggan . . . I took some video, and I'll post it eventually-- the sled run has a cartoonishly Calvin and Hobbes quality to it-- there's jumps and bumps and logs to dodge and a sapling tree we bent out of the way that might turn catapult at any moment-- so I'm glad everyone is inside now, safe and sound and I'm sure we'll be asleep long before midnight, so we can do it again tomorrow . . . and I've come up with an extremely practical (and achievable) resolution, which I'll post sometime tomorrow.
Running Water Kicks Ass
Robert Gordon's book The Rise and Fall of American Growth asserts that some economic advances are unrepeatable-- technological innovations such refrigeration, air-conditioning, television, air travel, and motor vehicles are probably never going to be surpassed-- and thus, the era of massive economic growth is coming to an end; running water and indoor plumbing are in this exalted category, and though we survived a day without running water, flushing the toilet with melted snow, we were very happy when the well started pumping again this morning-- we were able to shower, brush our teeth, go to the bathroom conveniently, and do the dishes . . . and this also freed us up to do other leisure activities (just as all those major advances created massive economic opportunities) and we built a wild and fast sled run through the woods-- Catherine set a new landspeed record-- and played Settlers of Catan (I won, but more significantly, Ian bult a wall across the island, blocking all our advances and Alex called him Donald Trump and then Ian tried to engineer an absurd trade with me so he could bolster his wall and Alex said, "He's making you pay for it, Dad! You're Mexico!") and then Cat and I dug the car out-- we got over a foot of snow-- and we drove down 91 and ate lunch at the Whetstone Station in Brattleboro (I finally tried some Hill Farmstead beer: Edward and I pronounced it very very good, also had Legitimacy IPA, almost as excellent . . . wish I could find cans of this stuff in the stores here) and we wandered around town until we found a couple of new sleds for the boys (the old ones were fairly shredded) and some very good coffee and some houseplants for my home improvement project . . . you'll have to see it on Pinterest, and we plan on getting up early tomorrow to go snowboarding-- I was quite impressed by the job the plows and sanders did on the roads, even the dirt ones, so we should be able to make it west through the mountains to Bromley . . . and all this vacation stuff was made possible by running water . . . aside from the dog's vacation dream: he found a frozen dead mouse on the porch and ate it.
Snow Snow Everywhere . . . And You Can Drink It If You Have To
On the map, Westminster, Vermont looks fairly close to Bromley Mountain (Google Maps and my GPS say 22 miles) but we learned today that this is on dirt roads, which are passable if the weather is good . . . but once it started to snow folks along the way warned us that we'd better have a shovel and blankets if we wanted to get home later in the afternoon-- so we moved our lift tickets to Saturday and Sunday, stocked up on food and beer, and beat a hasty retreat back to the cabin at Windsor, and the snow has been falling all day and doesn't show any sign of letting up . . . we'll probably be snowed in tomorrow and, as an added wrinkle, the pipes appear to have frozen (or there's been a water main break) because we've got no running water . . . and we've got no cell-service, so we can't call a plumber or the town municipal office, but there's plenty of snow to melt if need be (for the kids) and I have beer and we showered last night, so I think we'll be okay (although I guess if anyone has to defecate, they're going to have to do it outside in the snow).
A Meditation on Vacation Juxtaposition
Our first day of vacation in the woods of Vermont was an odd mix of country living and science-fiction:
1) I supervised a wood delivery (the truck driver was very pleasant, but when he dumped the wood, he missed the tarp . . . the driveway was fairly icy);
2) our dog tried to eat a chicken;
3) Ian set up his Anki OVERDRIVE track in the main and only room of the cabin, under the only table, so he could race Alex . . . the track is wide and magnetic, and you use a cell-phone or Ipad to steer the cars and deploy digital weapons and force fields and such, which then affect the actual physical cars zipping around the track;
4) Alex played with his BB-8 app controlled droid robot-- he taught it some voice commands and made it navigate an obstacle course;
5) the kids built a snow fort and did some sledding, and incorporated their battery-powered Nerf machine gun into both activities;
6) we drove to Brattleboro and walked out on the frozen river to get a closer look at the ice fishing shacks, while I bored the children with a description of the ice industry in the 1900's;
7) we tasted delicious cheeses at the Grafton Village Cheese Shop and then hiked the retreat trails behind the farm, climbing the mountain overlooking the river and then passing the Ice Pond and the Harris Hill Ski Jump . . . I had never seen an Olympic-style ski jump up close-- it's much steeper, bigger, and monumental than I thought;
8) we ate at the Whetstone Restaurant and Brewery . . . and it may be my favorite place in the world: a great view of the Connecticut River from the bar and nearly every table, wide selection of delicious and obscure beers-- and fairly cheap too . . . the beer they brew themselves is only $4.95 a glass-- the food is awesome, and they kept giving us free stuff: the beer I ordered was kicked, so the waitress brought me a taste of the Off the Rails Imperial Double Black IPA, which sounds insane but it was delicious . . . so I ordered it, and then she brought me another tasting pour, which someone didn't want, and then she brought me another full glass of the beer, because the bartender had poured too many . . . by the time we left I was feeling quite good . . . and she also gave the kids free cookies, and to continue sci-fi/country-living theme, the beer menus were on little tablet devices so you could scroll through the many types and descriptions, while everything else about the place said Vermont-style microbrewery;
9) once we returned to the cabin-- in the spirit of a family vacation in the woods-- we started a fire and sat down to play a board game . . . we decided to play a new one (for us) that we got for Xmas: Carcassonne . . . but it's fairly complicated and while we don't have cell-service, we do have wi-fi, and so we watched a couple YouTube videos which explained the rules of the game and then we were able to play (I won!) without the usual bumbling (it took us six or seven times to learn Settlers of Catan);
10) the cabin doesn't have a DVD player but it does have a big TV and Netflix, so we finished the evening with a 30 Rock marathon, our new favorite family indulgence . . . how could you live out in the woods without Russian mobs, invisible motorcycles and sex pooping?
1) I supervised a wood delivery (the truck driver was very pleasant, but when he dumped the wood, he missed the tarp . . . the driveway was fairly icy);
2) our dog tried to eat a chicken;
3) Ian set up his Anki OVERDRIVE track in the main and only room of the cabin, under the only table, so he could race Alex . . . the track is wide and magnetic, and you use a cell-phone or Ipad to steer the cars and deploy digital weapons and force fields and such, which then affect the actual physical cars zipping around the track;
4) Alex played with his BB-8 app controlled droid robot-- he taught it some voice commands and made it navigate an obstacle course;
5) the kids built a snow fort and did some sledding, and incorporated their battery-powered Nerf machine gun into both activities;
6) we drove to Brattleboro and walked out on the frozen river to get a closer look at the ice fishing shacks, while I bored the children with a description of the ice industry in the 1900's;
7) we tasted delicious cheeses at the Grafton Village Cheese Shop and then hiked the retreat trails behind the farm, climbing the mountain overlooking the river and then passing the Ice Pond and the Harris Hill Ski Jump . . . I had never seen an Olympic-style ski jump up close-- it's much steeper, bigger, and monumental than I thought;
8) we ate at the Whetstone Restaurant and Brewery . . . and it may be my favorite place in the world: a great view of the Connecticut River from the bar and nearly every table, wide selection of delicious and obscure beers-- and fairly cheap too . . . the beer they brew themselves is only $4.95 a glass-- the food is awesome, and they kept giving us free stuff: the beer I ordered was kicked, so the waitress brought me a taste of the Off the Rails Imperial Double Black IPA, which sounds insane but it was delicious . . . so I ordered it, and then she brought me another tasting pour, which someone didn't want, and then she brought me another full glass of the beer, because the bartender had poured too many . . . by the time we left I was feeling quite good . . . and she also gave the kids free cookies, and to continue sci-fi/country-living theme, the beer menus were on little tablet devices so you could scroll through the many types and descriptions, while everything else about the place said Vermont-style microbrewery;
9) once we returned to the cabin-- in the spirit of a family vacation in the woods-- we started a fire and sat down to play a board game . . . we decided to play a new one (for us) that we got for Xmas: Carcassonne . . . but it's fairly complicated and while we don't have cell-service, we do have wi-fi, and so we watched a couple YouTube videos which explained the rules of the game and then we were able to play (I won!) without the usual bumbling (it took us six or seven times to learn Settlers of Catan);
10) the cabin doesn't have a DVD player but it does have a big TV and Netflix, so we finished the evening with a 30 Rock marathon, our new favorite family indulgence . . . how could you live out in the woods without Russian mobs, invisible motorcycles and sex pooping?
Country Living Lesson #1
After a violent bout of freezing rain last night, we are enjoying some unseasonably warm Vermont weather today; Catherine and I took the dog on a hike down the dirt road, and we met the neighbors . . . and Sirius met the neighbor's dog-- and everyone was friendly and social and having a good time, until Sirius attempted to eat the neighbor's chickens, which I found embarrassing at first, until the neighbor-lady told us that her dog had actually eaten one of her mother's chickens . . . so now I know that my dog, if given the chance, will eat a chicken, and if he's in the vicinity of a chicken coop, he needs to be monitored carefully to avoid this pastoral faux pas (this information is going to come in handy when I buy a farm).
Bonus Sentence: You Can Never Pack Too Much
Despite some freezing rain and wacky conflicts between the GPS, Google Maps, and MapQuest, we made it to our Vermont AirBnB rental cabin in the woods without incident . . . and I suppose I shouldn't have questioned all the packing . . . I didn't think my kids needed to bring the semi-automatic Nerf machine-gun they won in a steal-a-gift on New Year's Eve, nor did I think they needed to bring the Star Wars themed bobble-head dolls, but they set up a nifty shooting gallery from the top bunk bed-- the idea is to knock down as many bobble-heads as you can with one clip of Nerf ammo, and they haven't bickered with each other in over an hour-- a world record-- so the moral is: if you've got a minivan, you might as well fill it up.
Doing the Snow Dance
Perfunctory sentence . . . we are in the midst of packing everything we own into the minivan so that we can transport it to a tiny cabin in the woods of Vermont.
QuikCheck: Where the Learnin' Never Stops (Even on Xmas!)
After unwrapping our Xmas booty, my wife sent me on a last-minute-Xmas-errand; she needed eggs and a can of whipped cream so she could make a chocolate cream pie . . . the eggs were easy enough to find, but the local convenience (which possesses the oddest of names: B-B-Big Food Mart Inc) did not have any whipped cream, so my wife told me to try QuikCheck, but I searched the store and couldn't find any whipped cream and despite the long queue, I asked the young lady at the register if they had any whipped cream and she told me they did not because there was a whipped cream shortage, and this piqued my curiosity, and so-- despite the line-up of people that did not seem all that interested in the reasons for the dearth of ready-whipped canister cream-- I asked her why that was so, and she gave me quite a story: apparently one of the Airgas nitrous oxide tankers (in Florida) exploded, killing an employee and causing havoc at the Airgas facility, and the government is investigating why this happened and there are only two other nitrous oxide facilities in the country and they are having trouble meeting the demand for nitrous oxide, and medical uses take precedence over whipped cream (which makes sense) and I was quite stunned by this news and thanked her, and then I went home and did some fact-checking (because you can't trust everything you learn from the cashiers at QuikCheck) and her story checks out, Dan Tillema, of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, is still investigating the explosion, and he implores you to think of the plant operator that died (Jesse Graham Folmar, 32 years of age) instead of lamenting over your lack of ready-whipped cream (and then, an Xmas miracle . . . Catherine found an unopened can of whipped cream in the back of the refrigerator . . . I suggested we sell it on Ebay).
School is Weird and Crazy
Nicholson Baker, the post-modernist who wrote an entire novel (The Mezzanine) about an escalator ride, has produced his weirdest piece of writing yet: a 719 page piece of non-fiction called Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids . . . the premise is simple, Baker signs up as an on-call substitute and he provides his services for twenty-eight days, subbing at every grade level in several schools near his home in Maine, and he writes down everything that happens while he is in school, and nothing makes for weirder writing than reality . . . I read four-hundred pages-- enough to get the gist-- and then skipped to the end, and while Baker's findings are close to my heart-- especially since we've just been through the winter solstice, and sunlight is scarce, high school kids are groggy, and my school day begins before the sun is fully up-- which I think is nuts (and so does everyone else who has thought about this, including the CDC) but it's definitely not a priority; Baker agrees, he considers the school day insanely long and tedious and without empathy or logic . . . no one in their right mind who wanted people to actually learn would march them from one activity to the next, manically and without transition; he admires the kids who are just trying to make it though, the kids who aren't all that academic and don't really care about the work, but need to jump through the same hoops as the kids that do care . . . and he notes that the vast differences between the successful, smart and motivated kids and the kids who are not thriving -- he is always impressed by the studious children, and finds empathy for those captive kids simply surviving the day without going completely insane . . . he is frightened by the use of technology and the pervasive assessment, quizzing, and panopticon-like educational platforms, but also sees the value of cell phones and Ipads and laptops as an easy escape for the disaffected, and a way for kids to make the day passably interesting . . . he realizes what teachers know: that it's more about bus schedules and child care than setting up an ideal learning environment and schedule-- that anything else is just not feasible with the current set up-- and he is amazed by teachers that keep it together and do a good job under these constraints, and he is mildly indignant about teachers who do not sympathize with the plight of the students and by the end he professes his love for the "whole broken, beautiful, wasteful, totally crazy educational system" that he spent a short time being a part of . . . and though I often have similar sentiments about the problems with American education, in the end, I love it too, but if you're not familiar with it, browsing through this book will remind you how odd a school day is for the captive audience that participates.
The Test 71: One for the Ladies (Kitchen Stuff)
Apparently America is not ready for a female president yet, and so the women will have to head back to the kitchen for the next four years-- but this won't pose a problem for Stacey and Cunningham, as they ace this culinary quiz and appear to be overly qualified to cook and serve their male overlords in perpetuity (in fact, they are so knowledgeable on this episode of The Test, that they actually prove the fallibility of God and the internet . . . but feminists shouldn't get too excited, as Stacey still gets all sweaty doing math).
On a Highway to Hell or High Water
If you 're looking for a neo-noir thriller with moral ambiguity, compelling characters, and a slow burn, a movie in the vein of all those '80's and '90's classics: Blood Simple, Red Rock West, Fargo, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Shallow Grave, Natural Born Killers, The Boondock Saints, and A Simple Plan, then you'll love Hell of High Water . . . Jeff Bridges has so much fun playing the archetypal old law officer on the brink of retirement and while there's a bit much on the Robin Hood financial thematics, that may be warranted, all things considered in bumfuck East Texas -- the economy has left many of these folks behind, and their way of life as well -- but everybody gets a last shot (literally) when the Howard Brothers start robbing Texas Midlands Branch Banks to raise a stake for the future . . . Marcus (Jeff Bridges) gets his last chance at adventure and all the law abiding Texas citizens get a chance to use those guns they're toting on some real villains . . . this movie is the exact opposite of Rogue One: quiet and slow in the right parts, with an ominous soundtrack, and enough action to make it exciting, but it's really the dialogue, between the two outlaw brothers and between Marcus and his Native American/Mexican sidekick Alberto that make it something more than the typical: five buried cars out of five.
Crimetown!
If you're looking for something to listen to in the vein of Serial, check out Crimetown . . . the first season investigates organized crime and corruption in Providence, and the show is going to move city to city, investigating how the criminal underworld operates in each location; my favorite episode is Chapter 2: The Wiseguys, because Jerry Tillinghouse, who was once an enforcer for the Patriarca family (and allegedly killed the bookie Mousie Rotondo) is also a D&D aficionado; Tillinghouse lovingly describes his role-playing character-- Hunter-- who is "psychologically" linked to a companion tiger, so that Hunter can send the tiger on scouting missions into dangerous terrain and (up to a mile) he can see through the tiger's eyes . . . as a bonus, Tillinghouse also lovingly describes nearly beating a man to death in jail with a twenty-five-pound weight; I love the show, but my only caveat is it's a little heavy on the theme music, the audio montages, and the sound effects . . . these are all entertaining elements, but they can sometimes make me lose focus on important plot and character details.
O To Be A Young Punk
I'm always trying to think of age-appropriate monikers for my ill-fated, slow-moving music projects (Almighty Yojo, Greasetruck, The Density, Mister Truck, King Daveman, etc.) but if I were young and forming an edgy punk-rock band, then I'll tell you the name I'd jump on . . . and since I'm not young and I'm not forming an edgy punk band, I've decided to cede this name to whichever gang of young punks claims it first . . . and here it is: President Don and the Pussygrabbers.
Dave Spoils Rogue One (No Spoilers)
We took the kids to see Rogue One, the new Star Wars movie, and while I wouldn't recommend it-- it is loud, frenetic, and exhausting-- I will admit that it's a serviceable storming-the-beach-style war movie, with lots of aerial cover, ground tactics, and important missions . . . and because it's detached from the actual Star Wars trilogy, anyone and everyone can die; my biggest problem with the film (besides lack of interesting characters, cheesy dialogue, and far too many scenes) is that you've got an advanced space-faring culture that's invented and perfected faster-than-light travel, but they have yet to stumble on the USB thumbdrive . . . a major part of the plot is stealing the schematics for the Death Star, which are stored on a bulky DVD ROM cartridge, that has no online access, so you have to pull it out with a manually controlled arcade-style grab-the-prize gadget . . . I know I shouldn't try to make sense of things like this during such a silly film, but it's so long that you've got time to ruminate . . . and why are all the fighter ships manned-- wouldn't you have some drones flying missions as well?
The Lorax and The Grinch Wish You Happy Holidays
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I finally convinced my wife to send a digital card instead of contributing to the environmental-materialist-consumer-disaster-that-is-XXXmas (the XXX is for the pornographic nature of online shopping, which I succumb to as much as anyone) and she did a fantastic job . . . now I just need to convince her that we should eschew wrapping paper, and instead do the old close-your-eyes-hold-the-gift-behind-your-back-style method of giving presents.
Good News and a Lot of Bad News
Amidst all the awful information Callum Roberts imparts about the state of our oceans in his book The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea, there is some good news:
"Great tits in cities sing shorter, faster songs at a higher pitch than those in the countryside,"
and while this doesn't override the problems discussed in the latter half of the book, which I will list in a moment, I'm always pleased when I hear about singing tits in the city, especially if they are great tits, especially a mated pair . . . but a pair of great tits, singing or not, isn't enough to undo what mankind has wrought: the undersea noise pollution that interrupts aquatic communication; the invasive species making their way across the globe; the sheets of sea lettuce, fertilized by pig-farm run-off, that that piled in sheets on the surface of the water and trapped poisonous gasses created by the very run-off that fertilized the sea lettuce; the rampant destruction of wetland and mangrove forest-- the coastline's safety system-- in order to create aquaculture pens and ponds; the hundreds of thousands of tons of krill and other small fish made into fishmeal to feed the aquaculture fish, thus eliminating food for the wild stock; the threat of genetically mutated fish breeding with wild fish; the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria within the densely populated fish pens; the bays and river mouths that lack circulation because of warming currents, and so contain incredible amounts of toxins, heavy metals, and effluvium; the dredgers that destroy habitats and churn the polluted sediment back into the water; the loss of habitat and groundwater and storm protection because of the destruction of mangrove, salt marsh and wetlands; the utter devastation wrought by fishermen catching predatory fish high on the food chain-- the reported collateral damage of catching 211 mahi-mahi on a long line in Costa Rica is beyond abysmal (here is the death toll: 468 olive ridley turtles, 20 green turtles, 408 stingrays, 47 devil rays, 413 silky sharks, 24 thresher sharks, 13 smooth hammerhead sharks, 6 crocodile sharks, 4 whitetip sharks, 68 Pacific sailfish, 34 striped marlin32 yellowfin tuna, 22 blue marlin, 11 wahoo, 8 swordfish, and 4 ocean sunfish . . . and I though line-caught was something positive) and the difficulty of convincing politicians to mandate sustainable fishing practices-- despite scientifically proven paradox that if the fishermen fish a bit less, then there will soon be more fish . . . but though there are some bright spots, and a number of organizations and nations are getting wise as we approach the brink, we're going to need to change our ways sooner rather than later, or we're going to lose some of our greatest megafauna-- which would be tragic-- and destroy an incredible source of food . . . and delicious food at that, and we're going to destroy the wildest, most alien and possibly most resilient place on the planet.
"Great tits in cities sing shorter, faster songs at a higher pitch than those in the countryside,"
and while this doesn't override the problems discussed in the latter half of the book, which I will list in a moment, I'm always pleased when I hear about singing tits in the city, especially if they are great tits, especially a mated pair . . . but a pair of great tits, singing or not, isn't enough to undo what mankind has wrought: the undersea noise pollution that interrupts aquatic communication; the invasive species making their way across the globe; the sheets of sea lettuce, fertilized by pig-farm run-off, that that piled in sheets on the surface of the water and trapped poisonous gasses created by the very run-off that fertilized the sea lettuce; the rampant destruction of wetland and mangrove forest-- the coastline's safety system-- in order to create aquaculture pens and ponds; the hundreds of thousands of tons of krill and other small fish made into fishmeal to feed the aquaculture fish, thus eliminating food for the wild stock; the threat of genetically mutated fish breeding with wild fish; the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria within the densely populated fish pens; the bays and river mouths that lack circulation because of warming currents, and so contain incredible amounts of toxins, heavy metals, and effluvium; the dredgers that destroy habitats and churn the polluted sediment back into the water; the loss of habitat and groundwater and storm protection because of the destruction of mangrove, salt marsh and wetlands; the utter devastation wrought by fishermen catching predatory fish high on the food chain-- the reported collateral damage of catching 211 mahi-mahi on a long line in Costa Rica is beyond abysmal (here is the death toll: 468 olive ridley turtles, 20 green turtles, 408 stingrays, 47 devil rays, 413 silky sharks, 24 thresher sharks, 13 smooth hammerhead sharks, 6 crocodile sharks, 4 whitetip sharks, 68 Pacific sailfish, 34 striped marlin32 yellowfin tuna, 22 blue marlin, 11 wahoo, 8 swordfish, and 4 ocean sunfish . . . and I though line-caught was something positive) and the difficulty of convincing politicians to mandate sustainable fishing practices-- despite scientifically proven paradox that if the fishermen fish a bit less, then there will soon be more fish . . . but though there are some bright spots, and a number of organizations and nations are getting wise as we approach the brink, we're going to need to change our ways sooner rather than later, or we're going to lose some of our greatest megafauna-- which would be tragic-- and destroy an incredible source of food . . . and delicious food at that, and we're going to destroy the wildest, most alien and possibly most resilient place on the planet.
Giving the Gift of Omelas
I've been pretty good this year about controlling my Xmas Ranting . . . maybe it's because my children have moved beyond The Age of Getting Loads of Plastic Toys to less overt consumption, but I've still had a couple of Grinch-like moments: in Philosophy class, we read the classic Ursula Leguin utilitarian-parable-turned-nightmare "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" . . . if you haven't read it, then you must-- and after sharing some fairly typical Dave-like opinions on the evils of wrapping paper and the vacuous environmental disaster of mindless gift giving, I told my class that I had a brilliant idea: the only gift I would give my children for Christmas would be a gift-wrapped copy of the story (on recycled paper) and they told me I was an awful person, and I told them as much as I wished I could do that, my wife wouldn't allow it, and then I even offered them a different, more hopeful view on the story . . . an inspirational and fascinating TED Talk by Leslie T. Chang about how Chinese factory workers aren't oppressed slaves of the first world, and actually choose working in cities over awful rural conditions, and how these workers-- many of them women-- have far more autonomy and choice and upward mobility than Leguin's boy-thing in the closet . . . I recommend you consume both the story and the TED Talk, and then make your own decision as to how much you should rant about the holiday season.
Hillbilly Paradoxes
J. D. Vance's bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is an excellent primer for liberal city folks who want to learn about the culture that voted Donald Trump into office: if you go by Vance's assertions, then these white mainly Scotch-Irish generally non-college educated majority-minority "hillbilly" folks are a bundle of paradoxes:
1) they are often fiercely loyal and protective of family, especially to outsiders, but within the family there is much violence, divorce, infighting, and abuse;
2) they are vocal about the value of hard work and express a desire for jobs, but often awful about actually working-- because of factors such as frequent absences, addiction, lack of motivation, self-entitlement, refusal to pursue training and education, teenage pregnancy, and general feeling of victimization;
3) they are vocal about religion, Jesus, and church, but often awful about actually attending church-- especially in Appalachia and rural Ohio; in southwestern Ohio, church attendance is the same as in "ultra-liberal San Francisco," but folks there are afraid to admit they don't go to church, so reported church attendance is high, but actual attendance is low;
4) for those that do attend church, according to MIT economist John Gruber, people are happier, make more money, liver longer, have better health in general, drop out of high school less frequently, commit fewer crimes, and all sorts of other good stuff . . . and this appears to be "causal . . . church seems to promote good habits" but while these hillbillies-- in Kentucky or transplanted elsewhere-- are "deeply religious but without any attachment to a real church community," and thus, not receiving any of the benefits of that people who regularly attend church enjoy;
5) though liberals see them as people that could use social safety-net programs and benefits, within the community the hard-working folks see the people who take these benefits (and often game the system) as scoundrels, who are "laughin' at our society! we're gettin' laughed at for workin' everday!" and this results in the weird situation that Thomas Frank has so often written about, that the people who need the government assistance most often vote against their best interests, but it's because they often can't stomach the people in their society that need and use these programs;
6) they lionize the American military and are jingoistically patriotic, but they are disgusted with the results in Iraq and Afghanistan;
7) despite their patriotism, they don't embrace the ideas that could vault them out of their social class-- they don't trust the mainstream media, think the deck is stacked against them, and believe that if you attend a superior college and develop critical thinking skills, then you're "too big for your britches" and "uppity," and even Vance still suffers from this cognitive dissonance . . . he made it out, but still often feels regret at the culture he lost, and finds himself an alien in the oddly nice, well-adjusted, healthy, well-educated liberal elite circles that he now frequents . . . these people don't understand that the kind of folks that join the military (as he did) are far more various than the liberal stereotypes and they don't understand the kind of folks that might take a circular saw to someone's leg because of a familial insult (as his uncle once did) and they don't understand these very very tough people that need to get even tougher (and a bit more flexible) because government policy isn't going to be enough to help them . . . they're going to have to be tough enough to shed some of their old-fashioned ways and tough enough to trust the institutions and the the liberal culture they find soft and unappealing and tough enough to love their kinfolk a bit less and the future a bit more.
1) they are often fiercely loyal and protective of family, especially to outsiders, but within the family there is much violence, divorce, infighting, and abuse;
2) they are vocal about the value of hard work and express a desire for jobs, but often awful about actually working-- because of factors such as frequent absences, addiction, lack of motivation, self-entitlement, refusal to pursue training and education, teenage pregnancy, and general feeling of victimization;
3) they are vocal about religion, Jesus, and church, but often awful about actually attending church-- especially in Appalachia and rural Ohio; in southwestern Ohio, church attendance is the same as in "ultra-liberal San Francisco," but folks there are afraid to admit they don't go to church, so reported church attendance is high, but actual attendance is low;
4) for those that do attend church, according to MIT economist John Gruber, people are happier, make more money, liver longer, have better health in general, drop out of high school less frequently, commit fewer crimes, and all sorts of other good stuff . . . and this appears to be "causal . . . church seems to promote good habits" but while these hillbillies-- in Kentucky or transplanted elsewhere-- are "deeply religious but without any attachment to a real church community," and thus, not receiving any of the benefits of that people who regularly attend church enjoy;
5) though liberals see them as people that could use social safety-net programs and benefits, within the community the hard-working folks see the people who take these benefits (and often game the system) as scoundrels, who are "laughin' at our society! we're gettin' laughed at for workin' everday!" and this results in the weird situation that Thomas Frank has so often written about, that the people who need the government assistance most often vote against their best interests, but it's because they often can't stomach the people in their society that need and use these programs;
6) they lionize the American military and are jingoistically patriotic, but they are disgusted with the results in Iraq and Afghanistan;
7) despite their patriotism, they don't embrace the ideas that could vault them out of their social class-- they don't trust the mainstream media, think the deck is stacked against them, and believe that if you attend a superior college and develop critical thinking skills, then you're "too big for your britches" and "uppity," and even Vance still suffers from this cognitive dissonance . . . he made it out, but still often feels regret at the culture he lost, and finds himself an alien in the oddly nice, well-adjusted, healthy, well-educated liberal elite circles that he now frequents . . . these people don't understand that the kind of folks that join the military (as he did) are far more various than the liberal stereotypes and they don't understand the kind of folks that might take a circular saw to someone's leg because of a familial insult (as his uncle once did) and they don't understand these very very tough people that need to get even tougher (and a bit more flexible) because government policy isn't going to be enough to help them . . . they're going to have to be tough enough to shed some of their old-fashioned ways and tough enough to trust the institutions and the the liberal culture they find soft and unappealing and tough enough to love their kinfolk a bit less and the future a bit more.
The Test 70: Random Drug Test!
We've made seventy episodes of The Test, and Stacey decided it was about time to administer a random drug test . . . Cunningham and I pass with flying colors, but it's a long strange trip: keep score, see how you fare, and try to avoid having your face eaten under a bridge.
Mold Spores Make Dave Smarter!
Not only did I survive yesterday's inhalation of dangerous stinky mold spores, but I think they may have made me smarter . . . so see if you can follow me here, as I intend on explaining and connecting all the issues of the day in one sentence; in a previous post I discussed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's theory on the difference between liberals and conservatives, and why liberals have such a hard time stomaching conservative values and understanding conservative perspective; first he breaks down social/political concerns into five categories:
1) fairness/reciprocity;
2) harm/care;
3) purity/sanctity;
4) in-group/loyalty;
5) authority/respect;
and then he explains the results of his experiments: he has found that liberals care about number one and number two, while conservatives have a "five channel" moral system . . . and I find this to be true about myself-- if you take an issue like gay marriage, then I don't think it's fair to ban gay people from marrying, and why would I care anyway?-- it helps them and gay marriage doesn't harm me-- but conservatives will often have far more complex views about the sanctity and tradition of marriage-- which I could care less about-- or loyalty to their church or religion, or respect for authority figures who disdain gay marriage . . . again which is all stuff I would never even consider-- so take a typical liberal view and you'll see that conservatives have a lot more to worry about-- I just don't give a shit about things that conservatives care deeply about, and often find them silly, which makes me lack empathy for conservatives-- and it's a problem and I see no clear solution to it, even though I understand what I don't understand about conservatives-- but here is something I figured out: I think this five channel morality explains the reason conservatives fall for fake news and conspiracy theories far more than liberals-- which absolutely infuriates everyone on the left: this debate about what is real-- the fact that in America, people ask if you "believe" in global warming, like it's a religion-- and for some background, I recommend you listen to the new Planet Money: Finding the Fake-News King, because the fake-news king is actually quite smart (and a liberal) and was creating incredible fake-news stories first as a joke and then as a very lucrative profession, and he found that he couldn't make any money with liberal fake-news, it only worked on conservatives-- people on the left would quickly fact check the news and the fake-story would fizzle, but I don't think anyone has definitively explained why this is so-- until now! thanks mold spores!-- so here it is: conservatives are more likely to fall for fake-news because the stories trigger more of those five channels-- conservatives are more loyal, and thus more likely to trust something passed along to them from a friend or trusted source, conservatives are more likely to respect the authority of the internet and not go to Snopes or start fact-checking away, and conservatives find their views to be more pure and sanctioned, so they are more likely to buy more of the same . . . while liberals-- while callous and unsympathetic to many conservative views-- are also less likely to respect a source, or think of themselves as part of a big pure group that believes a certain thing . . . it's not that liberals never fall for fake news, but they often recognize that they are just "rooting for the clothes" and don't wholeheartedly believe in anything, so the fact that the right could push an email scandal into the media for the entirety of the election-- and that conservatives could focus on this issue for that long-- while a plethora of real issues like climate change and the fact that Trump is an anti-vaxxer who said NAFTA is terrible were pushed to the side . . . don't get me started-- anyway, that's why conservatives think liberals are nice people with bad ideas, and liberals think conservatives are horrible people with insane opinions, and that's why fake and silly news stories had such a profound effect on this election, and things aren't going to get better any time soon . . . because while I now understand this better, it's not helping me any, I still think it's crazy to care deeply about channels three through five, and I still think anyone who is getting their news from random Facebook feeds and passing it along is an idiot without any critical thinking skills . . . so maybe I need to sniff another batch of mold so I can figure out the next step.
1) fairness/reciprocity;
2) harm/care;
3) purity/sanctity;
4) in-group/loyalty;
5) authority/respect;
and then he explains the results of his experiments: he has found that liberals care about number one and number two, while conservatives have a "five channel" moral system . . . and I find this to be true about myself-- if you take an issue like gay marriage, then I don't think it's fair to ban gay people from marrying, and why would I care anyway?-- it helps them and gay marriage doesn't harm me-- but conservatives will often have far more complex views about the sanctity and tradition of marriage-- which I could care less about-- or loyalty to their church or religion, or respect for authority figures who disdain gay marriage . . . again which is all stuff I would never even consider-- so take a typical liberal view and you'll see that conservatives have a lot more to worry about-- I just don't give a shit about things that conservatives care deeply about, and often find them silly, which makes me lack empathy for conservatives-- and it's a problem and I see no clear solution to it, even though I understand what I don't understand about conservatives-- but here is something I figured out: I think this five channel morality explains the reason conservatives fall for fake news and conspiracy theories far more than liberals-- which absolutely infuriates everyone on the left: this debate about what is real-- the fact that in America, people ask if you "believe" in global warming, like it's a religion-- and for some background, I recommend you listen to the new Planet Money: Finding the Fake-News King, because the fake-news king is actually quite smart (and a liberal) and was creating incredible fake-news stories first as a joke and then as a very lucrative profession, and he found that he couldn't make any money with liberal fake-news, it only worked on conservatives-- people on the left would quickly fact check the news and the fake-story would fizzle, but I don't think anyone has definitively explained why this is so-- until now! thanks mold spores!-- so here it is: conservatives are more likely to fall for fake-news because the stories trigger more of those five channels-- conservatives are more loyal, and thus more likely to trust something passed along to them from a friend or trusted source, conservatives are more likely to respect the authority of the internet and not go to Snopes or start fact-checking away, and conservatives find their views to be more pure and sanctioned, so they are more likely to buy more of the same . . . while liberals-- while callous and unsympathetic to many conservative views-- are also less likely to respect a source, or think of themselves as part of a big pure group that believes a certain thing . . . it's not that liberals never fall for fake news, but they often recognize that they are just "rooting for the clothes" and don't wholeheartedly believe in anything, so the fact that the right could push an email scandal into the media for the entirety of the election-- and that conservatives could focus on this issue for that long-- while a plethora of real issues like climate change and the fact that Trump is an anti-vaxxer who said NAFTA is terrible were pushed to the side . . . don't get me started-- anyway, that's why conservatives think liberals are nice people with bad ideas, and liberals think conservatives are horrible people with insane opinions, and that's why fake and silly news stories had such a profound effect on this election, and things aren't going to get better any time soon . . . because while I now understand this better, it's not helping me any, I still think it's crazy to care deeply about channels three through five, and I still think anyone who is getting their news from random Facebook feeds and passing it along is an idiot without any critical thinking skills . . . so maybe I need to sniff another batch of mold so I can figure out the next step.
It's Been Fun
I've had a good run here on earth but I'm fairly certain that my time is coming to a close: I got motivated this morning and decided to finally clean out the refrigerator in the basement that broke months ago-- many many months ago, because back in July I said that this fridge broke "several months ago" . . . that's one of the saving graces of this stupid blog, I can actually get a decent timeframe on the significant events in my life-- anyway, I opened the freezer door and was whacked in the face by a horrendous moldy stink, and I felt the mold spores burrow straight into my brain . . . I got some bleach spray and wore a shirt over my mouth and nose for the rest of the clean-up, but I'm certain that the fungus is gestating in my skull, and I'm afraid to look on the internet for the consequences of breathing in fermented refrigerator mold, but I'm sure it's fatal, and I'm sure there's going to be a period of insanity before I die so blue monkey carrot chocolate burp sound licks the claws.
New Brunswick: Taco Trucks on Every Corner!
While I realize this is The Marco Gutierrez Nightmare, the town across the Raritan River from me--New Brunswick-- now has a thriving Hispanic population, and with that scene come the tacos and burritos and enchiladas and posole and mole Oaxaqueno and empanadas and chorizo . . . I could go on and on, but I'm already salivating; anyway, here are two recommended options, one upscale and one incredibly cheap:
1) for the best tamales in town-- and they only cost a buck and a quarter-- head to Punto Y Coma; it's on French Street right in the heart of Little Mexico, and you'll have to dust off your Spanish to order, but it's worth it . . . great tacos al pastor, too, in homemade corn tortillas;
2) for something fancier, if you're looking for a real night out, then head to Esquina Latina . . . this place has more of a weirdly lit dance-club lounge feel, but the sangria is amazing and the food is really good too . . . especially the empanadas, just don't pronounce them "empanyadas," or you'll sound like a rube (as I did).
1) for the best tamales in town-- and they only cost a buck and a quarter-- head to Punto Y Coma; it's on French Street right in the heart of Little Mexico, and you'll have to dust off your Spanish to order, but it's worth it . . . great tacos al pastor, too, in homemade corn tortillas;
2) for something fancier, if you're looking for a real night out, then head to Esquina Latina . . . this place has more of a weirdly lit dance-club lounge feel, but the sangria is amazing and the food is really good too . . . especially the empanadas, just don't pronounce them "empanyadas," or you'll sound like a rube (as I did).
Doors Open and Doors Close
Stop the Country, I Want To Get Off!
In more news that sounds fake but isn't, Betsy DeVos-- the billionaire freelance Christian educational reformer who Trump has chosen for Secretary of Education-- has revealed that she would like to "help advance God's Kingdom" in the pedagogical realm . . . she's not content just donating money to Christian schools, instead she wants to "be in that Shephelah, and to confront the culture," which basically means she wants to fight the good fight against the Philistines-- of which I am one-- and she acknowledges that "the church-- which ought to be in our view more central to the life of the community-- has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity, the center for what goes on in the community" but she hopes with charter schools and tax credits and vouchers that the church can get more and more central and involved in the education of the youth . . . and I know she's not speaking to me, or my area of the country-- but still . . . HOLY SHIT . . . this is a wonderful, wild, weird admission of actual political/religious purpose-- in a way it's lovely because it's so clear and so crazy, an incredibly brazen violation of the separation of church and state, the admission of a deep-held desire for the government to fund religious affiliation-- Christian religious affiliation-- and a bizarre plan to unravel the most accessible democratic institution in American life-- the public school-- which is now a place where parents of any class, status, religion, and/or belief can have an immediate effect . . . a place where local people can run for school board or serve on the PTA or volunteer or coach or simply attend functions and have influence-- and so I love to see her ardent longing laid bare, her yen to turn this special place into a segregated religious institution . . . to place the secular setting where arts and music and sports and various clubs of all stripes and denominations happen under a religious purview, and more importantly, to taint the place where our critical thinking is taught with the tincture of Christian ideology-- hello Creationism!-- and I just love that she says it out loud, for everyone to hear . . . it's a great reminder of how ideologically different people are in this great country of ours; for a loosely connected reason why this is a weird and wild turn of events, listen to Sam Harris talk to Shady Hamid about his new book: Islamic Exceptionalism . . . Hamid explains that one of the major differences between the Islamic nations that often export terror and Western nations that do not, is that Islam is completely intertwined with politics, and there is no separation of church and state, nor is there even the idea that it's possible to separate religion and politics in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia . . . but there's no way that the Senate in the United States of America will approve her, right?
Te Cacharon!
Ian failed a Spanish quiz last week, so my wife has been on his case, to ensure that he's ready for the test this week-- last night Ian was sitting at the dining room table, doing an online quiz on the laptop, reciting Spanish words aloud, when my wife-- who was in the kitchen-- said to him, "What are you doing?" and Ian said, "Doing the quiz" and my wife said, "Look in the window" and Ian turned and looked and he realized that my wife could see the reflection of the laptop screen in the dining room window, and he also realized that his clever ruse of mumbling random Spanish words while he played Slither.io (an online Centipede-like video game) had failed him . . . te cacharon!
Do NOT Read This Book
I'm in too deep to stop, but it would be hard for me to recommend Callum Roberts' book The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea-- it's just too depressing-- though he tries to keep the tone as hopeful as possible, the weight of the evidence is overwhelming: our oceans, the life within them, and the complex food-chains and filters of our planet are in dire jeopardy, unless we collectively start doing things very differently; here are some awful things I've learned so far:
1) the ocean is absorbing much of the carbon dioxide emitted when we burn fossil fuels, and this is causing a usurious problem that has been overlooked until recently: ocean acidification . . . to an extent that hasn't been seen in 300 million years-- at the end of the Permian, when there was a mass extinction; many corals, marine plants, and shelled animals need "dissolved carbonate minerals" and the lower pH makes it harder for these animals to "crystallize carbonate" out of a solution;
2) a cool fact, a pint of seawater contains two billion viruses, and they are helping to slow the rate at which the ocean is acidifying, but no one knows at what level of pH those tiny organisms won't be able to function-- or if they function too well, then there is an increase in global warming, because they recycle the the nutrients in sunlit waters-- keeping carbon in the cycle, instead of letting it sink into the deep sea;
3) nutrients, fertilizer and run-offs are causing toxic algal blooms at a much greater intensity and rate, red tides and other toxic phytoplankton which, when ingested, can cause hallucinations, nightmares, nerve-damage, cancer, birth defects, and tumors (especially in sea turtles) and the increase of big storms with high-winds has exacerbated airborne instances of sickness and contact, the "storms churn the sea into a spray which can be inhaled," resulting in rashes and lung inflammation . . . but what's bad for us is good for one creature-- the "triple combination of nutrient enrichment, low oxygen, and overfishing" is wonderful for jellyfish, so if you're taking a trip to the beach, make sure you bring meat tenderizer;
4) persistent organic pollutants (POPs for short) are building up in water and ice and animal fat all over the world, chemicals like DDT and PCBs are especially deleterious-- the toxic load carried by male dolphins in Sarasota Bay makes their flesh equivalent to biohazard . . . females have lower amounts of toxins because they pass much of the bad stuff to their offspring through pregnancy and breast feeding . . . and these toxins are making their way up the food chain, into large animals like whales and humans, and there are thousands of new chemicals wending their way through the waters and polar ice and food chains and we don't even know the consequences, so get used to the acronyms, there will be more to come;
5) if the chemicals don't get you, the heavy metals will-- the most toxic is mercury, and the main culprit for mercury pollution are coal-fired power plants . . . Asian plants produce over half of the world's mercury pollution, and it seems they are "hell-bent on building more" such plants . . . and if Trump has his way with deregulation, maybe we'll see more coal burning in America as well . . . anyway, my son loves sushi, but he really shouldn't be eating it, as tuna often exceeds safe levels of mercury . . . but the FDA also recommends that children and pregnant women don't eat swordfish, king mackerel, tilefish, and shark . . .
and I'm not even halfway done with the book, so sorry, but there will be more bad news to come.
1) the ocean is absorbing much of the carbon dioxide emitted when we burn fossil fuels, and this is causing a usurious problem that has been overlooked until recently: ocean acidification . . . to an extent that hasn't been seen in 300 million years-- at the end of the Permian, when there was a mass extinction; many corals, marine plants, and shelled animals need "dissolved carbonate minerals" and the lower pH makes it harder for these animals to "crystallize carbonate" out of a solution;
2) a cool fact, a pint of seawater contains two billion viruses, and they are helping to slow the rate at which the ocean is acidifying, but no one knows at what level of pH those tiny organisms won't be able to function-- or if they function too well, then there is an increase in global warming, because they recycle the the nutrients in sunlit waters-- keeping carbon in the cycle, instead of letting it sink into the deep sea;
3) nutrients, fertilizer and run-offs are causing toxic algal blooms at a much greater intensity and rate, red tides and other toxic phytoplankton which, when ingested, can cause hallucinations, nightmares, nerve-damage, cancer, birth defects, and tumors (especially in sea turtles) and the increase of big storms with high-winds has exacerbated airborne instances of sickness and contact, the "storms churn the sea into a spray which can be inhaled," resulting in rashes and lung inflammation . . . but what's bad for us is good for one creature-- the "triple combination of nutrient enrichment, low oxygen, and overfishing" is wonderful for jellyfish, so if you're taking a trip to the beach, make sure you bring meat tenderizer;
4) persistent organic pollutants (POPs for short) are building up in water and ice and animal fat all over the world, chemicals like DDT and PCBs are especially deleterious-- the toxic load carried by male dolphins in Sarasota Bay makes their flesh equivalent to biohazard . . . females have lower amounts of toxins because they pass much of the bad stuff to their offspring through pregnancy and breast feeding . . . and these toxins are making their way up the food chain, into large animals like whales and humans, and there are thousands of new chemicals wending their way through the waters and polar ice and food chains and we don't even know the consequences, so get used to the acronyms, there will be more to come;
5) if the chemicals don't get you, the heavy metals will-- the most toxic is mercury, and the main culprit for mercury pollution are coal-fired power plants . . . Asian plants produce over half of the world's mercury pollution, and it seems they are "hell-bent on building more" such plants . . . and if Trump has his way with deregulation, maybe we'll see more coal burning in America as well . . . anyway, my son loves sushi, but he really shouldn't be eating it, as tuna often exceeds safe levels of mercury . . . but the FDA also recommends that children and pregnant women don't eat swordfish, king mackerel, tilefish, and shark . . .
and I'm not even halfway done with the book, so sorry, but there will be more bad news to come.
The Test 69: Livin' La Vida Cunningham
This week on The Test, Cunningham forces Stacey and I to get in touch with our inner-Latina: check it out, keep score, and see if you're a supermalo estudiante de espanol.
Trump Saves Jobs and the American Economy!
Sorry . . . everyone else is writing fake news clickbait, so I've decided to join them-- I'm also sorry that Trump did not save the American economy when he strong-armed Carrier air-conditioning into staying in Indiana with a stick and a carrot-- respectively: he threatened them with tariffs on products they import into the U.S. and provided them with a 7 million dollar state-subsidized tax break . . . this, of course, is taking America one step closer to the isolationist insanity of North Korea-- not that I think there will be too much more of this, I'm hoping Trump did it purely so he could tweet-brag something, and that this is not as an economic policy . . . anyway, for those of you who are confused at how saving 800 jobs is not such a good thing, first of all, understand this is a drop in the bucket-- we've lost five million manufacturing jobs in America since the year 2000-- and if you want to know the effects of enacting high tariffs and forcing companies to stay in the country, listen to this excellent episode of Planet Money: Tires, Taxes, and the Grizz . . . or read my summary of it, anyway, all this means is that Indiana is subsidizing these jobs, and the threats to enact tariffs on parts and labor in Mexico is going to upset the complex supply chains between the U.S. and Mexico, and so Carrier air-conditioners will get more expensive and Americans will foot that bill-- the same way we foot the bill for Chinese tire tariffs . . . it's always cheaper to just pay off or retrain the 800 workers who lost their jobs and let the globalized market work its magic, but that's not fun to tweet about . . . in future fake news (that just might get real) avocadoes: $45 each!
Spacehog: Things Get Eponymous
A notable Topic of Interlocution at the Park Pub last night-- we attempted to determine the best eponymous song . . . in other words, the best song with the same title as the band that played it; here are some of the contenders:
1) "Bad Company" by Bad Company;
2) "This is Radio Clash" by The Clash;
3) "Black Sabbath" by Black Sabbath;
4) "They Might Be Giants" by They Might Be Giants;
5) "Minor Threat" by Minor Threat;
and there was only one song that was not considered; this song was brought to the attention of the panel by Roman, but despite the fact that it was Roman's name day, "Spacehog" by Spacehog was pronounced not only downright awful, but also very silly.
1) "Bad Company" by Bad Company;
2) "This is Radio Clash" by The Clash;
3) "Black Sabbath" by Black Sabbath;
4) "They Might Be Giants" by They Might Be Giants;
5) "Minor Threat" by Minor Threat;
and there was only one song that was not considered; this song was brought to the attention of the panel by Roman, but despite the fact that it was Roman's name day, "Spacehog" by Spacehog was pronounced not only downright awful, but also very silly.
Let Them Eat Squid
I am in the middle of reading a rather depressing book called The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea, and so far, the theme is that the oceans are depleted-- humans have always pulled an incredible bounty from the sea and that has declined precipitously of late . . . and because we always reset the baseline, we can't even imagine how many fish were in the sea before our own time, unless we take an empirically scientific approach, as Loren McClenachan did with the shifting baseline of fish in the Florida Keys . . . this is not a fun study to read (nor is it amusing to look at the photos . . . but that's the story) and things are only getting worse . . . because of over-fishing of sardines and other filter feeders, and the resultant unchecked algal blooms and sulfuric up-swellings, and the warming of the top layer of the ocean-- a product of global warming-- which causes greater sequestration of oceanic layers and less mixing of the oxygen-deprived middle layer of water and the much warmer nutrient-rich upper layers, the ocean is a much less hospitable for large delicious finned fish and they are becoming more and more rare . . . but while big fish (and aquatic mammals) are on the decline, one of the few big animals that can survive in this ugly environment is the seven-foot, rather-intelligent, rather-vicious Humboldt squid, and this fearsome creature is edible, and so we may not be able to enjoy tuna and mahi-mahi and Chilean sea bass and cod, but we may still have some ersatz seafood on our table, nonetheless: slabs of chewy calamari . . . unless, of course, we make some serious regulatory changes in how much carbon we pump into the atmosphere and how much we harvest from the oceans-- but certainly America, in voting for Donald Trump, has expressed a disinterest in any of this (or perhaps even a malevolent skepticism that any of this science actually exists and holds water) and so when the price of fish skyrockets and there is nothing left to haul in except ten-tentacled suction beasts, we must assume that the powers that be will simply say: "Let them eat squid."
No Such Yuck
A bird shit on my driver-side car door handle last night, but instead of wiping it off, I gingerly opened the door-- gripping the handle with two fingers, thus avoiding the poop-- and I figured that the rain would wash it away by morning, but no such luck . . . apparently bird shit is water-resistant (and I still haven't wiped it off . . . today the rain is supposed to be torrential, so I'm hoping for the best).
This Underground Railroad is Actually Underground
I was pleasantly surprised (and pleasantly horrified) by Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad . . . I assumed that because of all the critical praise the book received (and because of the content) that reading it would be like eating fiber, good for you but no fun, but I was very wrong; Whitehead starts with the childhood conceit that the underground railroad is actually an underground railroad, and in the spirit of the magical realists, he makes you buy his fantasy . . . and in between the dream-like underground journeys on the train, the main character Cora-- a runaway slave-- who suffered abominably on the plantation and witnessed things even worse than she endured, finds herself in a fragmented variegated mainly hostile country; each stop on her journey is insidiously evil in it's own unique way; there are scenes reminiscent of the Tuskegee experiment, Anne Frank's captivity, Flannery O'Connor's Gothic South, and the stereotypical Southern plantation . . . and the common thread that unites this ugly patchwork of loosely connected territories of racism and abuse, is the slave-hunter Ridgeway and his odd companion/slave Homer, an educated and erudite miniature lackey on a bizarre epic journey far from his African-American roots, making his way in the only way that he can, betraying his people in order to thrive and survive; the book certainly evokes the state of our country today: fragmented, unsympathetic and divisive, and the theme is ominous-- perhaps only a civil war and the consequent reconstruction can mend the rips and tears in the fabric of our nation . . . but despite this heaviness, the novel is a damned good read . . . horrific, hallucinatory, compelling, and epic by turns, and just when you think you can't take it any longer, when you've entered the broken mind of the slave and see no escape from the shackles and chains, then the plot takes off and you're on the train, underground, excited to poke your head above ground in some new place, with some new tone and tenor, possibly better than what came before.
This Sentence Is Not About A Bench
Early Sunday morning at the dog park, behind the bench, in the shadow of the bench, there was a white bench-shaped outline of rime-frost on the dark soil . . . the sun had melted the frost everywhere else, except within the shadow of the bench; forty-six years on this planet, and this was the most beautiful (and first) bench-shaped rime-frost outline I had ever seen.
The Test 68: The Key Piece
This is the episode of The Test we recorded the day after the election-- we decided we wanted to capture some audio as close to the incident as possible-- and you can certainly hear the depression and shock in our voices, but despite this ugly subtext, there's a good test buried amidst the maudlin political ramblings; dig in, give it a shot, and see if you can identify the key piece.
Trump Sez the Chinese Curse is a Hoax
The Chinese Curse is devastatingly simple: may you live in interesting times, and-- unless the Chinese Curse is a Chinese Hoax-- there is no question that we have entered The American Era of the Chinese Curse . . . and I've exhausted myself thinking about the implications of this, and I've been trying to process and digest everything I've seen, read, heard, and thought before I posted on the election, but now that I've heard Trump's pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, things have hit close enough to home and I need to vent about it all . . . and so here are some of my thoughts:
1) Betsy DeVos is a union-busting proponent of charter schools and vouchers, and she'd like nothing better than to privatize the most venerable community democratic institution in America, the public school . . . this causes me a great deal of anxiety, both for my job and the future of funding for the public school my children attend . . . and DeVos has ties to Amway . . . yuck;
2) I live in a wonderful liberal enclave where the kids walk to school, play in the streets (and occasionally get hit by cars) and enjoy a fairly safe, often wonderful, multi-cultural, friendly community . . . in my town, the vote tally was 3900 for Clinton and 1100 for Trump, and most of the Trump support seems to have come from the Orthodox Jewish population, who held a Trump rally at a synagogue, and who were probably voting for Trump for the reasons outlined in number one-- they pay Highland Park taxes, but they send their kids to private schools, and Trump would be their best bet on saving some money in this regard;
3) I was excited by Trump's infrastructure promises because I thought I might get air-conditioning in my classroom, but since Trump's infrastructure plan is to incentivize private companies to do infrastructure work and he'd like to appoint someone who wants to dismantle the public education system, I'm not going to hold my breath;
4) Clinton didn't get people out to vote the way Obama did-- perhaps because she was an establishment candidate in an anti-establishment campaign, and the Ohio and Pennsylvania counties that flipped are the ones plagued by heroin and opioid epidemics, so while I thought America was Pretty Great and Addressing Some Issues So It Might Get Greater, the people in these towns really think America Sucks-- they are uneducated, jobless, angry, and addicted to drugs or surrounded by people addicted to drugs, or working a crappy job, or working a decent job but surrounded by people working crappy jobs and addicted to drugs and watching their town go to shit-- and so while I liked some of the policy tweaks Clinton was proposing . . . maybe they would make college cheaper, or provide more pre-K and childcare, or help working mothers, maybe she would strengthen Dodd-Frank, etcetera-- and while she wasn't overtly proposing things I really care about-- she wasn't promoting unionization and radical environmental protection and carbon taxation, at least she wasn't completely opposed to them . . . but my life is generally great, and so while I fear massive change from the status quo, a bunch of people that I don't know or live near were really angry and wanted any kind of change, especially one that would make things worse for immigrants and minorities and terrorists and women, because if you can't find a way to improve your life, the best way to feel better about yourself, is to make someone else's life worse;
5) the best best case scenario of Trump's term (which will probably be eight years, unless he does something really really egregious, because he'll be able to create some short-term-- but very costly-- windfalls in the economy in order to get elected again) is that he fosters some diplomatic ties with Russia, remains a bit isolationist and doesn't get involved in some awful militaristic adventure, doesn't go too nuts with the wall and immigrant thing, and doesn't dismantle too much of the Clean Air and Water Act and other environmental regulations, figures out a way to revise Obamacare without making 22 million people lose healthcare, and basically doesn't get much done . . . but the more typical scenario is that moderate Republicans like John McCain reign him in a bit and we just have a typically terrible Republican term . . . so you can expect tax cuts that will drive up the national deficit, cuts in government programs, a stupid purposeless expensive adventure in the Middle East, a weakening of organized labor, a super-conservative Supreme Court, the return of torture, environmental deregulation and devastation, but a bit of a windfall from tearing all the coal from the mountains and fracking all the gas out of the earth and drilling for oil everywhere, financial deregulation followed by a financial bubble followed by a recession . . . for more on this, just read about the eight years under George W. Bush . . . yuck;
6) Myron Ebell, the climate change contrarian leading Trump's EPA transition team, is a scary motherfucker . . . while the education stuff hits close to home, nothing scares me more about Trump than his belief in conspiracy and hokum, and his lack of understanding of the scientific method . . . he's an anti-vaxxer, for Christ's sake;
7) if you're a guy like me, and just can't understand why anyone would vote for Trump, and would consider him a populist here, then you need to read this great post my friend John sent me . . . it's written by a guy who grew up in a white Jesus-fearing red community, and he says stop trying to understand the rural Christian voters because they don't understand themselves-- they are angry and brand loyal and would never let any "facts" or "critical thinking" or argument or logic sway them otherwise . . . Clinton is a socialist crooked politician and God is a white guy with a beard who controls the weather and the best news source is the post that makes you happiest on Facebook-- whether it's fake or alt-right propaganda and white people are superior and no elitist coastal bastard is going to tell you otherwise . . . and these people have been voting against their best interests for quite a while, Thomas Frank fully explains it in his masterpiece What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America . . . it's a moral choice that's about brand loyalty, not critical thinking or policy, and if you're brand occasionally talks about grabbing women by the pussy, well, you can put up with that;
8) even if Trump said the things he said purely in order to win the election, the hate and vitriol he spewed against women, Mexicans, immigrants, and Hillary Clinton should never be forgotten and the pussy grabbing remark should be mentioned at every press conference . . . despite blind conservative brand loyalty, I'm surprised that any father with a daughter or any woman at all voted for this crass idiot, and I am ashamed for them . . . and I know that these people who voted for Trump hate me because I pity them for their ignorance and provincialism, it's an ugly dynamic;
9) worst case Trump scenarios are really scary: he's capable of bullying, intimidating, and coercing the press; he might really screw up banking regulations and trade deals; he might hurt the U.S. diplomatically for many years to come; he might start a nuclear war; he might intern all Muslims; the First and Second Amendment will be under attack; he might spend tons and tons of money building a wall; he's angry, petty, and he's been the butt of the joke for decades and now, in the ugliest and weirdest "underdog" victory ever, the butt of the joke-- the Ugliest American-- has become the most powerful man in the free world . . . it's best not to think about these situations and just concentrate on the stuff he will definitely fuck up, and scrutinize him constantly;
10) the press really dropped the ball-- they were vetting Clinton as if she won, and not doing story after story about Trump's crazy conspiracy theories, his lack of core principles, his corrupt business practices, his lack of tax information, his insane business conflicts, and the very real possibility that he might end up running an autocratic kleptocracy . . . he won't be doing political favors for people, he'll be directly enriching himself with his policy moves . . . this one is too depressing to continue;
11) I was trying to explain to my wife why we still have the electoral college, and I was really having trouble-- I know the Founding Fathers wanted to give rural states enough power to have some say and they wanted to promote a more stable two-party system, and the electoral votes make this possible, but it's gotten to the point where there are two Americas . . . and there are a lot more of us progressive city folk, who would like parks and good schools and clean air and water and green energy and multicultural tolerance and more Northern European style policy such as single payer healthcare and better family leave and help with college education and a progressive Supreme Court, and then there are these smaller states that are holding us hostage, and I'm not sure what they want-- and I don't think they know what they want either-- and I don't want to be stereotypical, so I'll refrain from speculating, but if there are any red state Trump supporters who read this blog (not a shot in hell) then please explain in the comments what policy you expected from Trump . . . anyway, we're getting to the point where we should be two separate economic entities, which would be nice, because the blue states are far less reliant on the federal government, and would do much better without the baggage of the red states-- who are incredibly thankless for the money we send to subsidize them;
12) some folks voted for Trump because he'd be tough on terrorism and ISIS, but I can't understand why people in rural America-- the least likely place for a terrorist attack-- are far more fearful of Muslims than the folks on the coasts, and some people voted for Trump because they see him as a bastion of law and order, a voice of reasonable justice wearing "the mantle of anger" amidst the gun violence, flood of immigrants, city riots and kowtowing to minority groups like Black Lives Matter . . . and while I don't agree with any of this, and think these people received their information from fake news on Facebook, at least it's a reason;
13) I'm not saying Trump is like Hitler . . . that would be hyperbolic, plus Hitler was organized, a compelling speaker, and Hitler actually had a plan of action-- joke stolen from David Cross-- but Hitler promised jobs, Hitler promised revenge for the deals that Germany had made with the world (The Treaty of Versailles) and Hitler was an intimidating bully who hated immigrants and promised to make Germany great again . . . those are just some interesting parallels, but I'm not comparing the two leaders because I don't want to get put on leave, like this teacher;
14) and so that's what it's come down to . . . the majority of the country, myself, included, can't believe what has happened, and many of us would have no problem leaving the red states to fend for themselves-- I would gladly vote to secede from the crap that's going to happen in the next 4-8 years . . . the red states can pollute themselves to hell, cut all the government services, privatize everything, dismantle the schools, ban gay marriage, make kids study Creationism, do lots of heroin, carry semi-automatic weapons everywhere, refuse to vaccinate, insult women and the disabled, deport immigrants, build walls and do whatever insane shit they want to do, with a spray-tanned game-show host as their beloved daddy-leader . . . just don't touch my America, because my America is Pretty Great . . . it could use improvements, but it's certainly never been better than this . . . so all I can hope for is that the political forces in my town and state can keep the political forces of Donald Trump and his ilk at bay, and maybe that's why we have the electoral college and why we are a loose federation of states . . . and readers who voted for Trump, perhaps you could explain yourselves in the comments, because you folks are an angry apocalyptic cipher to me . . . I still haven't gotten to have an actual conversation with a real Trump supporter, which makes me pretty sheltered-- I guess I live behind my own wall of elitist coastal intellectualism, which I've erected out of brain cells and books, but maybe someday soon some folks from Trump's America will make their way over my wall and explain things to me.
1) Betsy DeVos is a union-busting proponent of charter schools and vouchers, and she'd like nothing better than to privatize the most venerable community democratic institution in America, the public school . . . this causes me a great deal of anxiety, both for my job and the future of funding for the public school my children attend . . . and DeVos has ties to Amway . . . yuck;
2) I live in a wonderful liberal enclave where the kids walk to school, play in the streets (and occasionally get hit by cars) and enjoy a fairly safe, often wonderful, multi-cultural, friendly community . . . in my town, the vote tally was 3900 for Clinton and 1100 for Trump, and most of the Trump support seems to have come from the Orthodox Jewish population, who held a Trump rally at a synagogue, and who were probably voting for Trump for the reasons outlined in number one-- they pay Highland Park taxes, but they send their kids to private schools, and Trump would be their best bet on saving some money in this regard;
3) I was excited by Trump's infrastructure promises because I thought I might get air-conditioning in my classroom, but since Trump's infrastructure plan is to incentivize private companies to do infrastructure work and he'd like to appoint someone who wants to dismantle the public education system, I'm not going to hold my breath;
4) Clinton didn't get people out to vote the way Obama did-- perhaps because she was an establishment candidate in an anti-establishment campaign, and the Ohio and Pennsylvania counties that flipped are the ones plagued by heroin and opioid epidemics, so while I thought America was Pretty Great and Addressing Some Issues So It Might Get Greater, the people in these towns really think America Sucks-- they are uneducated, jobless, angry, and addicted to drugs or surrounded by people addicted to drugs, or working a crappy job, or working a decent job but surrounded by people working crappy jobs and addicted to drugs and watching their town go to shit-- and so while I liked some of the policy tweaks Clinton was proposing . . . maybe they would make college cheaper, or provide more pre-K and childcare, or help working mothers, maybe she would strengthen Dodd-Frank, etcetera-- and while she wasn't overtly proposing things I really care about-- she wasn't promoting unionization and radical environmental protection and carbon taxation, at least she wasn't completely opposed to them . . . but my life is generally great, and so while I fear massive change from the status quo, a bunch of people that I don't know or live near were really angry and wanted any kind of change, especially one that would make things worse for immigrants and minorities and terrorists and women, because if you can't find a way to improve your life, the best way to feel better about yourself, is to make someone else's life worse;
5) the best best case scenario of Trump's term (which will probably be eight years, unless he does something really really egregious, because he'll be able to create some short-term-- but very costly-- windfalls in the economy in order to get elected again) is that he fosters some diplomatic ties with Russia, remains a bit isolationist and doesn't get involved in some awful militaristic adventure, doesn't go too nuts with the wall and immigrant thing, and doesn't dismantle too much of the Clean Air and Water Act and other environmental regulations, figures out a way to revise Obamacare without making 22 million people lose healthcare, and basically doesn't get much done . . . but the more typical scenario is that moderate Republicans like John McCain reign him in a bit and we just have a typically terrible Republican term . . . so you can expect tax cuts that will drive up the national deficit, cuts in government programs, a stupid purposeless expensive adventure in the Middle East, a weakening of organized labor, a super-conservative Supreme Court, the return of torture, environmental deregulation and devastation, but a bit of a windfall from tearing all the coal from the mountains and fracking all the gas out of the earth and drilling for oil everywhere, financial deregulation followed by a financial bubble followed by a recession . . . for more on this, just read about the eight years under George W. Bush . . . yuck;
6) Myron Ebell, the climate change contrarian leading Trump's EPA transition team, is a scary motherfucker . . . while the education stuff hits close to home, nothing scares me more about Trump than his belief in conspiracy and hokum, and his lack of understanding of the scientific method . . . he's an anti-vaxxer, for Christ's sake;
7) if you're a guy like me, and just can't understand why anyone would vote for Trump, and would consider him a populist here, then you need to read this great post my friend John sent me . . . it's written by a guy who grew up in a white Jesus-fearing red community, and he says stop trying to understand the rural Christian voters because they don't understand themselves-- they are angry and brand loyal and would never let any "facts" or "critical thinking" or argument or logic sway them otherwise . . . Clinton is a socialist crooked politician and God is a white guy with a beard who controls the weather and the best news source is the post that makes you happiest on Facebook-- whether it's fake or alt-right propaganda and white people are superior and no elitist coastal bastard is going to tell you otherwise . . . and these people have been voting against their best interests for quite a while, Thomas Frank fully explains it in his masterpiece What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America . . . it's a moral choice that's about brand loyalty, not critical thinking or policy, and if you're brand occasionally talks about grabbing women by the pussy, well, you can put up with that;
8) even if Trump said the things he said purely in order to win the election, the hate and vitriol he spewed against women, Mexicans, immigrants, and Hillary Clinton should never be forgotten and the pussy grabbing remark should be mentioned at every press conference . . . despite blind conservative brand loyalty, I'm surprised that any father with a daughter or any woman at all voted for this crass idiot, and I am ashamed for them . . . and I know that these people who voted for Trump hate me because I pity them for their ignorance and provincialism, it's an ugly dynamic;
9) worst case Trump scenarios are really scary: he's capable of bullying, intimidating, and coercing the press; he might really screw up banking regulations and trade deals; he might hurt the U.S. diplomatically for many years to come; he might start a nuclear war; he might intern all Muslims; the First and Second Amendment will be under attack; he might spend tons and tons of money building a wall; he's angry, petty, and he's been the butt of the joke for decades and now, in the ugliest and weirdest "underdog" victory ever, the butt of the joke-- the Ugliest American-- has become the most powerful man in the free world . . . it's best not to think about these situations and just concentrate on the stuff he will definitely fuck up, and scrutinize him constantly;
10) the press really dropped the ball-- they were vetting Clinton as if she won, and not doing story after story about Trump's crazy conspiracy theories, his lack of core principles, his corrupt business practices, his lack of tax information, his insane business conflicts, and the very real possibility that he might end up running an autocratic kleptocracy . . . he won't be doing political favors for people, he'll be directly enriching himself with his policy moves . . . this one is too depressing to continue;
11) I was trying to explain to my wife why we still have the electoral college, and I was really having trouble-- I know the Founding Fathers wanted to give rural states enough power to have some say and they wanted to promote a more stable two-party system, and the electoral votes make this possible, but it's gotten to the point where there are two Americas . . . and there are a lot more of us progressive city folk, who would like parks and good schools and clean air and water and green energy and multicultural tolerance and more Northern European style policy such as single payer healthcare and better family leave and help with college education and a progressive Supreme Court, and then there are these smaller states that are holding us hostage, and I'm not sure what they want-- and I don't think they know what they want either-- and I don't want to be stereotypical, so I'll refrain from speculating, but if there are any red state Trump supporters who read this blog (not a shot in hell) then please explain in the comments what policy you expected from Trump . . . anyway, we're getting to the point where we should be two separate economic entities, which would be nice, because the blue states are far less reliant on the federal government, and would do much better without the baggage of the red states-- who are incredibly thankless for the money we send to subsidize them;
12) some folks voted for Trump because he'd be tough on terrorism and ISIS, but I can't understand why people in rural America-- the least likely place for a terrorist attack-- are far more fearful of Muslims than the folks on the coasts, and some people voted for Trump because they see him as a bastion of law and order, a voice of reasonable justice wearing "the mantle of anger" amidst the gun violence, flood of immigrants, city riots and kowtowing to minority groups like Black Lives Matter . . . and while I don't agree with any of this, and think these people received their information from fake news on Facebook, at least it's a reason;
13) I'm not saying Trump is like Hitler . . . that would be hyperbolic, plus Hitler was organized, a compelling speaker, and Hitler actually had a plan of action-- joke stolen from David Cross-- but Hitler promised jobs, Hitler promised revenge for the deals that Germany had made with the world (The Treaty of Versailles) and Hitler was an intimidating bully who hated immigrants and promised to make Germany great again . . . those are just some interesting parallels, but I'm not comparing the two leaders because I don't want to get put on leave, like this teacher;
14) and so that's what it's come down to . . . the majority of the country, myself, included, can't believe what has happened, and many of us would have no problem leaving the red states to fend for themselves-- I would gladly vote to secede from the crap that's going to happen in the next 4-8 years . . . the red states can pollute themselves to hell, cut all the government services, privatize everything, dismantle the schools, ban gay marriage, make kids study Creationism, do lots of heroin, carry semi-automatic weapons everywhere, refuse to vaccinate, insult women and the disabled, deport immigrants, build walls and do whatever insane shit they want to do, with a spray-tanned game-show host as their beloved daddy-leader . . . just don't touch my America, because my America is Pretty Great . . . it could use improvements, but it's certainly never been better than this . . . so all I can hope for is that the political forces in my town and state can keep the political forces of Donald Trump and his ilk at bay, and maybe that's why we have the electoral college and why we are a loose federation of states . . . and readers who voted for Trump, perhaps you could explain yourselves in the comments, because you folks are an angry apocalyptic cipher to me . . . I still haven't gotten to have an actual conversation with a real Trump supporter, which makes me pretty sheltered-- I guess I live behind my own wall of elitist coastal intellectualism, which I've erected out of brain cells and books, but maybe someday soon some folks from Trump's America will make their way over my wall and explain things to me.
Tim Wu Tang Claim Part II
Once in the English Office, our old boss once pronounced her love of email, because it saved her so much time, but my sagacious friend Mike reminded her that it didn't save as much time as not using email at all . . . and if you're my age and you still remember a work environment without email, things worked just fine-- I occasionally have faint recollections of how much less stressful and anxiety free those days were: I'd see you when I saw you, and if you didn't see me, you could tell me the information next month at the meeting.
The Wu Tang Claim Helps Dave Understand the Election and More
I'd like to assure Zman that yes I am working on a post about the election results, but I'm taking my time and trying to process and digest everything before I put it on wax, and-- oddly-- one of the things that's helping me think about what happened is Tim Wu's new book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads . . . the book is ostensibly a history of advertising in America, from snake-oil salesmen pitching addictive spurious cure alls to the first fake news stories created purely to garner attention (my favorite is a report in the New York Sun that Sir John Herschel had discovered four foot tall hairy bat men on the moon . . . people were surprisingly willing to accept this as fact) to Lucky Strike's brilliant campaign proposing that the secret ingredient in their brand of cigarette protected your throat from cough and irritation (It's TOASTED!) and then Wu moves on to things more recent and familiar: radio advertising, product placements, TV commercials for the masses, TV commercials for the unique individual, email, Oprah, clickbait, data harvesting, Google Adwords, Twitter, Facebook, ad-blockers, etcetera . . . as advertising gets more modern, more data-driven, more insidious, and more fragmented, Wu gets more severe in his warnings-- he frames the epic battle to get our attention as a series of technological leaps, which the advertisers soon harness for their own purposes, followed by a revolt of the masses against that particular kind of advertising . . . but we may have reached the end of the road: Wu sees Buzzfeed, essentially clickbait on "the fourth screen," and social media sites like Facebook as the purveyor of "news" as particularly egregious forms of media and while there is hope once more-- for those willing to find it, Netflix and HBO offer some of the best ad free content ever created-- but you've got to pay for it . . . and if you want to learn about it, you can find something of quality on Youtube or in the podcast universe . . . if you're willing to do some research; now I'd like to bring this back to the election and make my Tim Wu Tang Claim: that the media-- driven by clicks and views-- totally dropped the ball with their coverage . . . they focused on speculative poll clickbait instead of doing on the ground journalism-- talking to Trump supporters and doing in depth coverage of the policy and issues that these supporters desired and imagined could Trump deliver, and contrasting this with Clinton policy promises . . . but instead they focused on scandals and silliness; of course, there is a better alternative to mainstream media: I'm quite proud of how I analyzed the race and what I learned about the issues; I avoided internet clickbait for the most part and listened to high-quality long form podcasts like The Weeds, Slate Money, Waking Up With Sam Harris, Radiolab, Common Sense, This American Life, and Planet Money, and I even did my due diligence and listened to Dan Levin and Rush Limbaugh (who were both repetitive blowhards pushing the mainstream media to be less about policy discussion and more about clickbait scandal) and I became something of an expert on the major issues and policies: healthcare and jobs and trade agreements and immigration (and even the spurious email "scandal") and if you like, you can find media that is not fragmented and not totally driven by clicks and views-- there is an alternative to the Facebook/Twitter style news platform, which propagated fake news and bite-sized weirdness (and while some would argue that the podcasts I've listed have a left-leaning slant, if you listened to the many many episodes about the election, they took a much more empathetic and sincere analytical look at the Trump phenomenon than anything on the right di with Hillary Clinton . . . Dan Levin simply chanted "crooked Hillary" and "lock her up" on his show . . . so the mainstream media went right along with this internet model, casting the election as a horse race, with this scandal or that scandal affecting the polls, someone is up, someone is down-- the kind of reporting that could be done without getting out of bed-- and there was no discussion of global warming-- an existential threat-- or the actual implications of repealing NAFTA, or the pros and cons of allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, or how unionization might help the jobs we still have in America or anything of substance) and Wu ends with a quotation from William James, who believed that "our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we paid attention to" and I believe this too, which is why I make my students park their cell-phones at the door and pay attention to me . . . because I truly believe I'm paying attention to and what I'm making them pay attention to is better than the things the vast majority of the American people pay attention to, and that might be elitist and judgmental, but it's also true . . . I spend my attention reading books written by people smarter than me and listening to long, intelligent podcasts presented by experts in various fields; Wu also reminds us of this by quoting the ironically named James Williams: "Your time is scarce, and your technologies know it," and I think the ultimate lesson here is that we all need to remember this (myself included, while I generally use my attention for critical thinking and creative enlightenment, I still occasionally get sucked in to my stupid fantasy football team, which is great on paper and finally peaking, but it's too late . . . I'm 2 - 9 and I could have spent that time reading or practicing the guitar, instead of shuffling players around an imaginary line-up).
Dave Learns What Women Really Want . . . And It's Sick
After suffering a wicked twenty-four hour stomach virus, I returned to work yesterday, tired but noticeably lighter, and no less than three people-- all women-- expressed their jealousy and wished that they could suffer a twenty-four hour bout of feverish and violent intestinal evacuation, in order to strip off a few pounds before all the holiday gluttony; I told them they were crazy, and this was not a good way to lose weight, but despite my description of the general awfulness of the condition, one woman still insisted that I should have kissed her good-bye on Friday, on the lips, because then she would have lost weight over the weekend.
Two Signs of the Impending Apocalypse
It is no secret that I am past my prime-- on the bell curve of life, I am on the other side of the peak, every day I slide a bit more towards the bottom of the curve, towards senility, dementia, ineptitude, befuddlement, disease, fragility, and decay; on the other hand, my children are on the groovy side of that inevitably morbid roller-coaster ride, and here are two recent anecdotes that illustrate my theme:
1) we played tennis Saturday morning, and Alex and Ian beat me in a game of mixed doubles, and I was trying to win; then Ian played me one-on-one and he beat me to five and decided to continue playing to eleven, for the pound of good chocolate (the running bet is that if Alex or Ian can beat me at ping-pong or tennis in a game to eleven, I'll buy them a pound of chocolate from the good chocolate store in town) and I had to play my ass off to beat him 11-9 . . . I generally I hit the ball hard when I play Ian-- he's good-- but I try to get it back near him so he has a chance to hit it, but he was killing me-- he hit three perfect backhand lobs and was whistling his forehands down the lines, despite the fact that I was running him side to side; I finally got him at the net and put the game away, but this doesn't bode well for the future . . . though right now we play without serving, instead we rally three times to begin the point, so once we start playing with serves, I should enjoy a brief bump in tennis prowess . . . and I think I'm safe for a while with ping-pong, as it doesn't require as much running;
2) Alex was very excited about a National Geographic special on Mars, but the show was on Monday nights at 9 PM, which is past his bedtime (and my bedtime) and so I told him he could read in bed until 9 PM and then, if he was able to stay awake, he could go downstairs and watch the show . . . and he succeeded both times, and though the rest of the house was fast asleep (Ian tried to stay awake as well, but fell asleep reading and Catherine-- who stays up a bit later than me-- was on the school camping trip) and so I've reached the point when my child can and will stay up later than me, and I've given him permission to do so . . . the rest is all downhill.
1) we played tennis Saturday morning, and Alex and Ian beat me in a game of mixed doubles, and I was trying to win; then Ian played me one-on-one and he beat me to five and decided to continue playing to eleven, for the pound of good chocolate (the running bet is that if Alex or Ian can beat me at ping-pong or tennis in a game to eleven, I'll buy them a pound of chocolate from the good chocolate store in town) and I had to play my ass off to beat him 11-9 . . . I generally I hit the ball hard when I play Ian-- he's good-- but I try to get it back near him so he has a chance to hit it, but he was killing me-- he hit three perfect backhand lobs and was whistling his forehands down the lines, despite the fact that I was running him side to side; I finally got him at the net and put the game away, but this doesn't bode well for the future . . . though right now we play without serving, instead we rally three times to begin the point, so once we start playing with serves, I should enjoy a brief bump in tennis prowess . . . and I think I'm safe for a while with ping-pong, as it doesn't require as much running;
2) Alex was very excited about a National Geographic special on Mars, but the show was on Monday nights at 9 PM, which is past his bedtime (and my bedtime) and so I told him he could read in bed until 9 PM and then, if he was able to stay awake, he could go downstairs and watch the show . . . and he succeeded both times, and though the rest of the house was fast asleep (Ian tried to stay awake as well, but fell asleep reading and Catherine-- who stays up a bit later than me-- was on the school camping trip) and so I've reached the point when my child can and will stay up later than me, and I've given him permission to do so . . . the rest is all downhill.
Dave Successfully Eats Honey-Drizzled Toast . . . Yes!
The honey-drizzled toast I ate twenty minutes ago seems to be content inside my body, unlike all the other food I consumed in the past twenty-four hours . . . that non-honey-drizzled-toast food kept me up all night, as it couldn't get away from the virus in my stomach fast enough.
The Test 67: One for the Slacktivists
Despite her bronchial infection, Stacey presents a smart and topical quiz on political terms and issues . . . this one is short and sweet-- Terry's dream-- but, amidst the political jargon and the juvenile and canine intrusions, we still manage to cram in a few laughs . . . so give it a shot, keep score, and if you're not careful, you just might learn something (even if you're a slacktivist . . . or a cracktivist or a hacktivist).
Dave Falls Prey to the Sequential Contrast Effect
The new episode of Freakonomics Radio: How to Make a Bad Decision is a lesson in how subjective we are in all our judgements; major league umpires fall prey to the "gambler's fallacy" and are more likely to call a "ball" on a close pitch after they've called two previous close pitches "strike" . . . this is the same psychological effect that makes many people think that tails is more likely to come up on a fair coin toss after someone has tossed ten heads in a row-- they think a tails is due to happen, despite the fact that every toss is an independent 50/50 event; I don't think the gambler's logical fallacy affects me when I'm grading essays, but the episode also details the perils of the "sequential contrast effect," and I know this can influence my evaluation of an essay-- so much so that I've often told the class, after we've heard an especially excellent piece of writing by a student, "Wow . . . you don't want to be next in the pile after I read that one," and while I was kidding, of course, there's no question that reading something really amazing (or really awful) resets the grading bar a bit higher or a bit lower . . . the solution is to take frequent breaks when grading (or doing any task where the previous work can influence the current decision-- like approving loan applications or determining asylum or parole) and recalibrate your internal judgement meter: remind yourself exactly what criteria you are looking for . . . this is easier said than done, of course, especially when you're umpiring a baseball game in real time.
The Apple Ruins Everything
As a parent, it's wonderful when you see a trait in your child that you possess yourself, especially if it's something you consider essential to your character . . . one of those "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" moments; Wednesday night my son Alex introduced me to a show called Adam Ruins Everything-- and he revealed that he's watched nearly every episode . . . I'm not sure exactly when and where he's done this-- his friend Gary, who is super-smart, recommended it and I think he consumed most of them when he was at my parents' house, but I'm not going to investigate exactly how he binge-watched the program, because if this is the kind of thing he's binge-watching on the sly, then I'm all for it, as this is exactly the kind of thing I'd want him to binge-watch; the show scientifically debunks commonly held misconceptions, and individual episodes have titles like "Why Weddings Are a Total Rip-Off" and "The Awful Truth About Salmon" and the best thing of all is that Adam is essentially a more annoying version of me-- and Alex thinks Adam is really funny and smart, which made me happy-- and I knew my assessment of Adam's character was accurate when my wife said, "It's an interesting show, but I don't like that it's so negative."
Dave Votes For Burnt Up Bugs
Yesterday morning at school, I noticed that the hallways and cafeteria smelled weird (and if I noticed it smelled weird, then it really did smell weird-- because I have no sense of smell) and though I noticed the weird smell, instead of alerting the authorities, I went around and asked random students if they thought it smelled weird . . . and they all agreed that it did indeed smell weird (one kid insightfully and precisely described the smell as "inside a hair salon") and then, right when I had settled in at my duty in the weird smelling cafeteria, the fire alarm went off and we all evacuated the building and the fire department came and inspected things-- at first people suspected a gas leak, but I also heard someone say that it might be dead animals, and my favorite theory, which was presented as definitive by a teacher who shall remain nameless (because I don't know her name) was that the odor was caused by "burnt up bugs in the radiators," which was patently false, but incredibly evocative nonetheless-- something right out of Snowpiercer-- but the truth turned out to be fairly mundane: a battery was left on a charger for too long, and started to burn up (the only mildly interesting thing I heard about the cause of the smell-- and this is hearsay-- was that the battery was for a Harley Davidson).
Dave Wins a Presidential Debate!
I am not a great debater . . . I tend to forget what want to say mid-argument, I am easily confused and side-tracked, I'm capricious and change positions when confronted with new evidence, and I'm always willing to go meta, but I am pleased to announce that Monday afternoon in the English Office I ended a dispute with resounding finality-- I actually said the thing I needed to say exactly when I needed to say it, not forty-five minutes later, to myself, in the car; so here is the situation: we were in the English Office, chewing the fat before our faculty meeting, and I was prognosticating about Trump and how he was going to reenact the same terrible things that happened during the George W. Bush administration: environmental deregulation and devastation, military misadventures, the use of torture, profligate defense spending, tax cuts for the rich and a resulting massive deficit, deregulation of banking and economic policy and the inevitable bubble and recession-- but Stacey and Cunningham barely remembered this, and they said that George W. was "so cute," because he's been doing portraits of wounded warriors and I told them they were nuts, and Stacey said, "How bad could he be? He's a painter" and I triumphantly slapped the table and I said, "So was Hitler!" and they conceded my authoritative victory, and we went down to the meeting.
Stuff With Manasquan in the Name
The Manasquan Dog Beach (Fisherman's Cove) is a bit smaller than I expected (and you're supposed to keep your dog on a leash, although no one does) and fairly underwhelming, but Manasquan Reservoir is WAY bigger than I expected: I thought we could walk the 5.1 mile perimeter trail in a little over an hour, but apparently-- according to the map-- it takes "twenty minutes to walk a mile on the trail, traveling at a brisk pace," which was about right-- it took us over two hours and we were NOT traveling at a brisk pace . . . if we would have seen the time caveat on the map sooner, we would have either walked at a much brisker pace or not walked around the entire perimeter; so we started at a leisurely pace, we stopped and investigated an eerie beach studded with numerous blackened and protruding dead trees, the kids climbed on the rock levy, and then we decided to start covering some ground, until Alex got a blister and had to take his boots off and walk in his socks, and Ian's legs got tired-- he had run himself out at soccer the night before-- so the three of us (Ian, the dog and I) lagged far behind (Ian did catch a snake, however, which was fun-- although it pooped on him) and by the time we finally got back to the parking lot, everyone was ravenous (I left the snacks in the car because I thought it would be a much shorter walk) and we drove to Pete and Elda's for some thin crust pizza, but the place was packed because veterans get 30% off their bill on Veteran's Day (but the service was still fast and we inhaled our thin crust pizza in record time).
The Test 66: TV Theme Song Escapism
Despite our collective election hangover, Stacey, Cunningham and I got together on Wednesday, November 9th in order to record three episodes of The Test . . . and while we were a bit less chipper than usual, Cunningham did her best to cheer us up with a brand new, totally mindless, completely entertaining TV Theme Song quiz--which the ladies oddly refer to as a TV Theme Show quiz-- so if you're sick of pondering the future, chill out and see if you can identify the seven clips (with the added bonus that you just might learn something . . . and no one will try to grab your pussy).
Desert Truffles
During our three year stint in Damascus, my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed a short period of time in the spring-- just after the desert rains-- when the Bedouins would come into town with sacks of white truffles; they were dirt cheap, as far as truffles go-- four dollars a kilo (and that was the price for a white guy who spoke rudimentary Arabic and was a notoriously bad haggler) and a recent episode of Planet Money: A Trunk Full of Truffles inspired me to do some research about these "desert truffles," which are called "kimmay" in Syria . . . they are not nearly as expensive as Italian truffles (which can cost up to $2200 per kilogram) but white and brown desert truffles do fetch much higher prices than we paid on the streets of Damascus . . . anywhere from $80 to $270 per kilogram; I should point out that truffles are not very dense, and so a kilogram of truffles is a LOT of truffles: we baked them like potatoes, sauteed them like onions, and sliced them thin and put them in salads . . . this is not how you're going to eat truffles in the States, as they are very expensive and the market for them is quite strange-- I highly recommend this episode of Planet Money, as you'll learn about truffle smuggling, truffle depreciation, and why people like the smell of old socks.
Leeroy Jenkins Edges Out Crazy Eddie Antar
If the Bourne Identity series and Good Will Hunting had a child, it would be The Accountant-- a fairly absurd (but also fairly entertaining) thriller about an autistic tax expert who not only has super-numerical abilities, but can also kick some serious ass (thanks to his overbearing, rather hokily insane dad) and while I'm not going to seriously analyze the plot and characters of this convoluted, highly improbable story, I will give the film credit for having the runner-up to the coveted SOD Allusion of the Year . . . Ben Affleck's character Christian Wolff has an epiphany about the bad guys, inspired by his memory of Crazy Eddie Antar's insane attempts at stock manipulation.
Dear President Elect Trump: If You Really Want to Build That Wall, Here's How To Do It . . .
Here's a fun possibility in Trumperica:
Trump scraps NAFTA, the peso tumbles even lower, causing a terrible recession in Mexico, and illegal immigrants actually start flooding across the border to America (despite Trump's baldfaced lies, there's been a net loss of immigration from Mexico in the past few years, but Trump could self-fulfill his own prophecy) and this massive influx of illegal immigrants gets so bad that we actually have to build a wall to curtail the human deluge; I'm sure someone smarter than me has thought of this possibility already, just as the Simpsons imagined that Trump would become president (and bankrupt our country) sixteen years ago . . . but if not, someone should pass this sentence along to the oval office once Trump takes over (and perhaps I'll obtain a cabinet position for my good work).
Bill Bryson Makes Me Nostalgic For Britain
Bill Bryson's new book The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain has dislodged some memories from my own brain . . . sometime after Catherine and I lived in Syria (which is well documented in a series of rambling email updates) and before I started writing this blog, in the sleep-deprived haze of having a new child, I went to England with some English teachers (in lieu of the teacher workshop days that were being held at school, this was back when those sorts of things were permissible) and stayed in the "charming old wool merchant's town" of Chipping Campden, which is located in the heart of the Cotswolds-- an especially scenic part of Britain that has thatched houses, honey colored limestone buildings, and wonderful walking paths; my memory is shit, which is why I now write this blog, but I do vaguely recall a few things from the trip, besides the endless pints of beer at The Volunteer Inn;
1) on the ride from the airport, everyone was tired from the flight except me-- I had taken dramamine, and used a neck pillow, earplugs, and a blindfold to block out all stimuli, and I slept like a baby, and so I bravely volunteered to drive the rental car from Heathrow to our cottage-- I assured the crew that I had some experience driving on the left, which was technically true, but I did not tell them that my experience consisted of driving a motor-scooter in Thailand, and I did a poor job at that (and I have enough trouble driving a car on the right in America) and so when we were driving through a roundabout under construction in Oxford, and I got distracted by some licorice, I ripped the passenger side mirror off the car . . . I can't remember how this was resolved in the end, it might have cost Allie a few bucks at the rental car place;
2) on one of our hikes-- Broadway Tower, Stow-on-the-World . . . I can't remember-- I got us very lost and off-the-map, and I nearly killed Linda, one of the teachers accompanying us, as she's a diabetic-- it was getting dark and we couldn't find out way out of the woods, but the funny thing-- in retrospect-- is that I thought she was in desperate need of insulin, and that I would be brought up on manslaughter charges, because I deprived a diabetic of her insulin due to my poor orienteering skills, but she actually needed food, to increase her blood-sugar . . . and as she was about to lapse into a coma, just as we were finally approaching the end of the hike, I comprehended this and told said: "Food? I've got plenty of food, right here in my bag . . . I always carry lots of snacks and bars and chips when I'm on a hike" and if she wasn't so weak from diabetic shock, then she would have punched me;
3) we confidently participated in Trivia Night at the local pub, assuming five English teachers would crush all comers . . . but we were completely unprepared for the depth of English trivia, and couldn't answer any of the questions-- except one about Iron Maiden . . . I think we also may have resorted to cheating, and getting some answers from one of our local pub friends;
4) we visited Oxford, Bath, Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's house, and . . . Cropredy . . . the oldest teacher in the group, John, insisted we go to the Cropredy because it hosts the Fairport Convention, a folk festival that he loves . . . and the town was lovely;
5) we ate lunch at pubs and dinner in our stone cottage-- this was long before Brexit and the pound was very strong-- everything cost twice as much as in the States;
6) we made many local pub friends-- the town plumber and the town carpenter and lots of other blue collar types, and they were fun and informative and out at the bar every night-- we learned that only honors students read Shakespeare in England, and we also learned that the pub owner's daughter-- a barmaid-- had married an American man, moved to North Carolina, and then returned to England once she learned that his business trips weren't for business at all, they were to meet a male lover . . . he was gay; Sean and I learned this from the pub owner one night, but his accent was very thick, so it took us a while to comprehend what he was telling us;
7) despite the accents, I found it astounding that we were in a foreign country and people spoke English-- remember, Catherine and I had just gotten back from three years in Syria and so met with daily struggles trying to speak a very difficult language-- and so I talked to everyone about anything, on one of our hikes I asked a pretty British lass directions, occasionally gawking at her and the horse next to her, but mainly looking at my laminated fold-out map of the region, and I thought she was blowing me off a bit and the rest of the group was awkwardly laughing . . . apparently I had interrupted her while she was shoeing this large beast and she was trying to concentrate on affixing the shoe to the horse without being kicked and not on how to give directions to the stupid inconsiderate American;
anyway, enough about me-- the new Bryson book is nearly four hundred pages of rambling anecdotes like this, as Bryson traverses Britain from the southern tip to Cape Wrath, the northernmost point in Scotland, and there is history and description, accounts of beauty and anger at modern development, plenty of getting lost and of difficult travel-- I never knew there were so many places in England, especially so many seaside resorts (in varying states of grandeur and decay) and there is plenty of grouchiness and fairly frequent use of the f-word, much drinking of pints and eating of spicy food (with the usual consequences) and a general appreciation of the small things that make life wonderful and the big things trying to destroy this . . . he mainly basks in the wonder of Britain, it's astounding mass of history and historical sites, all situated in on a small island : "there isn't a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in than the countryside of Great Britain . . . it is the world's largest park, its most perfect accidental garden" but-- and he is a man of my own mind, as I like nothing more than getting up early, taking a hike, having a beer, and then going to bed and doing it again the next day-- and so he describes his vision, which is so appropriate after yesterday's election results, as I concur so completely with this, that I am reproducing here-- with periods!-- while conceding that if any American politician said this, they'd be labeled a radical communist:
May I tell you what I'd like to see? I would like to see a government that said "We're going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn't produce national happiness, it produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we're going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We're going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we're going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes."
and Bryson admits that this will never happen, and he's mainly happy with the parts of Britain that are like this . . . I will do the same in America, and enjoy the pleasant parks, good schools, and enlightened people of my town (and enact my vacation dollar ban on all the states that voted for environmental devastation and Trump . . . that leaves plenty of coast, New Mexico and Colorado as western outposts, and Vermont for snowboarding . . . plenty of wonderful places, I just hope they don't get destroyed in the oncoming storm of deregulation).
1) on the ride from the airport, everyone was tired from the flight except me-- I had taken dramamine, and used a neck pillow, earplugs, and a blindfold to block out all stimuli, and I slept like a baby, and so I bravely volunteered to drive the rental car from Heathrow to our cottage-- I assured the crew that I had some experience driving on the left, which was technically true, but I did not tell them that my experience consisted of driving a motor-scooter in Thailand, and I did a poor job at that (and I have enough trouble driving a car on the right in America) and so when we were driving through a roundabout under construction in Oxford, and I got distracted by some licorice, I ripped the passenger side mirror off the car . . . I can't remember how this was resolved in the end, it might have cost Allie a few bucks at the rental car place;
2) on one of our hikes-- Broadway Tower, Stow-on-the-World . . . I can't remember-- I got us very lost and off-the-map, and I nearly killed Linda, one of the teachers accompanying us, as she's a diabetic-- it was getting dark and we couldn't find out way out of the woods, but the funny thing-- in retrospect-- is that I thought she was in desperate need of insulin, and that I would be brought up on manslaughter charges, because I deprived a diabetic of her insulin due to my poor orienteering skills, but she actually needed food, to increase her blood-sugar . . . and as she was about to lapse into a coma, just as we were finally approaching the end of the hike, I comprehended this and told said: "Food? I've got plenty of food, right here in my bag . . . I always carry lots of snacks and bars and chips when I'm on a hike" and if she wasn't so weak from diabetic shock, then she would have punched me;
3) we confidently participated in Trivia Night at the local pub, assuming five English teachers would crush all comers . . . but we were completely unprepared for the depth of English trivia, and couldn't answer any of the questions-- except one about Iron Maiden . . . I think we also may have resorted to cheating, and getting some answers from one of our local pub friends;
4) we visited Oxford, Bath, Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's house, and . . . Cropredy . . . the oldest teacher in the group, John, insisted we go to the Cropredy because it hosts the Fairport Convention, a folk festival that he loves . . . and the town was lovely;
5) we ate lunch at pubs and dinner in our stone cottage-- this was long before Brexit and the pound was very strong-- everything cost twice as much as in the States;
6) we made many local pub friends-- the town plumber and the town carpenter and lots of other blue collar types, and they were fun and informative and out at the bar every night-- we learned that only honors students read Shakespeare in England, and we also learned that the pub owner's daughter-- a barmaid-- had married an American man, moved to North Carolina, and then returned to England once she learned that his business trips weren't for business at all, they were to meet a male lover . . . he was gay; Sean and I learned this from the pub owner one night, but his accent was very thick, so it took us a while to comprehend what he was telling us;
7) despite the accents, I found it astounding that we were in a foreign country and people spoke English-- remember, Catherine and I had just gotten back from three years in Syria and so met with daily struggles trying to speak a very difficult language-- and so I talked to everyone about anything, on one of our hikes I asked a pretty British lass directions, occasionally gawking at her and the horse next to her, but mainly looking at my laminated fold-out map of the region, and I thought she was blowing me off a bit and the rest of the group was awkwardly laughing . . . apparently I had interrupted her while she was shoeing this large beast and she was trying to concentrate on affixing the shoe to the horse without being kicked and not on how to give directions to the stupid inconsiderate American;
anyway, enough about me-- the new Bryson book is nearly four hundred pages of rambling anecdotes like this, as Bryson traverses Britain from the southern tip to Cape Wrath, the northernmost point in Scotland, and there is history and description, accounts of beauty and anger at modern development, plenty of getting lost and of difficult travel-- I never knew there were so many places in England, especially so many seaside resorts (in varying states of grandeur and decay) and there is plenty of grouchiness and fairly frequent use of the f-word, much drinking of pints and eating of spicy food (with the usual consequences) and a general appreciation of the small things that make life wonderful and the big things trying to destroy this . . . he mainly basks in the wonder of Britain, it's astounding mass of history and historical sites, all situated in on a small island : "there isn't a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in than the countryside of Great Britain . . . it is the world's largest park, its most perfect accidental garden" but-- and he is a man of my own mind, as I like nothing more than getting up early, taking a hike, having a beer, and then going to bed and doing it again the next day-- and so he describes his vision, which is so appropriate after yesterday's election results, as I concur so completely with this, that I am reproducing here-- with periods!-- while conceding that if any American politician said this, they'd be labeled a radical communist:
May I tell you what I'd like to see? I would like to see a government that said "We're going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn't produce national happiness, it produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we're going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We're going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we're going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes."
and Bryson admits that this will never happen, and he's mainly happy with the parts of Britain that are like this . . . I will do the same in America, and enjoy the pleasant parks, good schools, and enlightened people of my town (and enact my vacation dollar ban on all the states that voted for environmental devastation and Trump . . . that leaves plenty of coast, New Mexico and Colorado as western outposts, and Vermont for snowboarding . . . plenty of wonderful places, I just hope they don't get destroyed in the oncoming storm of deregulation).