Stacey and I have the same schtick when we begin Hamlet-- we both play the role of Horatio, who-- in the opening moments of the play-- is skeptical of ghosts and the supernatural . . . Marcellus explains, "Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy, And will not let belief take hold of him" and Horatio, in reference to the apparition, confidently asserts "tush, tush, 'twill not appear" but, moments after he says this, the ghost of Old Hamlet DOES appear and, after some good natured "I told you so!" by Barnardo (How now, Horatio! You tremble and look pale.Is not this something more than fantasy? What think you on't?) Horatio admits that "Before my God, I might not this believe without the sensible and true avouch of mine own eyes" and just before the apparition enters, Stacey and I always ask the class if they believe in ghosts, then chastise the believers for their irrationality and then we try to summon the dead, call upon the spirit world to strike us dead and stop our hearts, etc . . . and there are usually a few kids who get upset by this-- who don't think we should fuck around with the netherworld, whether we believe in it or not-- but we've never been haunted or struck dead . . . until now-- apparently last week, the night after Stacey did her ghost bit, she was visited by a spirit in the night, a little girl in a green sweatshirt that hovered over her bed-- twice!-- and she woke her husband up but he didn't see her and now she wonders if there might be spirits walking the earth, and she wonders if she has summoned them . . . but of course, I think she was dreaming or saw a shadow or whatever, as I am a logical and rational man-of-logic who would never be perturbed by such rubbish.
Potpourri
I returned to my old stomping grounds for a tennis scrimmage match today and while the match was a great success tennis-wise (Ian, Alex, and Boyang won their singles matches, as did our second doubles team-- against a school in the highest division, a school five times our size) but Boyang left his expensive blue puffy winter jacket at the court and he didn't realize until we were well on our way back to Highland Park-- so we'll see how that turns out, hopefully, the coach grabbed it-- and I had a meltdown at school because of this insane Excel spreadsheet that all the Rutgers college writing teachers need to fill out-- what a pain in the ass-- I was ranting and raving about it so much that my boss just ignored me and left (very wise of her) but Brady had a decent solution-- we'll only put the kids on it that want Rutgers credits; also, Stacey had a different Wordle word than the rest of us (we all had "stove" but Stacey had "harry") and I solved it for her-- with some help from Smurphy-- and we figure Stacey is either dead or living in an alternate universe . . . and people are starting to get used to us walking backwards up the terminal.
Ups and Downs
Weird day yesterday, hard to characterize . . . got to school, kind of tired from the snowboarding trip, and found a mysterious envelope in my box; I opened it and found a book called There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster-- Who Profits and Who Pays the Price and the author was one of my old students-- Jessie Singer-- and she wrote me a lovely note inside that said:
I have no doubt that without your encouragement and support, I would not be a writer today.
Thank you for being the spark, for helping me see myself, and for convincing me I had this in me.
With Forever gratitude--
Jessie Singer
and I would have taken a picture of the note but I threw my phone in the wash and it's dead, so I need to get a replacement phone ASAP . . . I also went to the wrong duty yesterday at school-- I forgot that it was an A day and went to cafeteria duty and wondered where all the regular folk were-- but Stacey texted me and told me I was in the wrong spot . . . and then Alex and I went to the gym and did some backwards walking and pulling for our knees-- Stacey has also embraced the kneesovertoes guy and she even bought a cheap treadmill to walk backwards on (and his book!) so there will be more of that in the near future . . . anyway, I need to research a new phone and figure out how to survive this week, I'm sure it will be an adventure.
Pandemic Stuff
Michael Lewis's new book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story is not satisfying reading but it's sure as hell informative and interesting-- it's not satisfying because there's no end to this story in sight, and our country was ill-prepared, ill-informed, and barely organized in its response to the COVID pandemic; you'll learn why certain things went the way they did and you'll also learn that there isn't a "cabal of people at the top controlling this entire thing"-- which is what an old guy at a wake told me last Sunday-- because all the decisions came from the bottom up-- often from state and county employees referred to as "L6" because apparently, the answer to big problems doesn't come from top administrators-- you've got to go six levels down until anyone knows how to actually do anything . . . one piece of logic I learned was that when that first person died of COVID at the end of February, it was all over . . . because COVID kills about a helf of one percent of people and it takes a while to die from it, so that meant that 200 people had COVID 3-4 weeks before that person died-- so the genie was way out of the bottle, there was no reason to close the borders, the virus was rampant, no one had been contact traced and the rest was history . . . if this isn't enough, Sam Harris just did a major take on the lessons of the pandemic, and here are some highlights from the book:
The CDC was avoiding controversy
Charity could see that the CDC’s strategy was politically shrewd. People were far less likely to blame a health officer for what she didn’t do than what she did. Sins of commission got you fired. Sins of omission you could get away with, but they left people dead.
In a pandemic, you've got to utilize utilitarian thinking
Ahead on the tracks, you spot five people. Do nothing and the train will run them over and kill them. But you have an option! You can flip a switch and send the train onto a siding, on which, unfortunately, there stands a man named Carl. Do nothing and you kill five people; flip the switch and you kill Carl. Most college freshmen elect to kill Carl and then, wham, th professor hits them with the follow-up. Carl has five healthy organs that can be harvested and used to save the lives of five people in need of them. All you need to do is shoot Carl in the back of the head. Would you do that, too? If not, explain the contradiction . . .
All Thinking is Flawed
He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,”
Carter poked fun at the way Richard walked around saying important-sounding things, like “All models are wrong; some of them are useful,” but he felt the alchemy in their interactions.
Richard viewed models as a check on human judgment and as an aid to the human imagination. Carter viewed them more as flashlights. They allowed him to see what was inside a room that, until now, had been pitch-black.
My Job is a Hot Zone
“I couldn’t design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system,” he said after his visit. To illustrate this point he created a picture, of a 2,600-square-foot home, but with the same population density as an American school, then turned it into a slide. “The Spacing of People, If Homes Were Like Schools,” read the top. The inside of the typical American single-family home suddenly looked a lot like a refugee prison, or the DMV on a bad day. “There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses,” said Carter.
You Need to React Quickly
“Public Health Interventions and Epidemic Intensity during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” the piece revealed, for the first time, the life-or-death importance of timing in the outcomes of 1918.
Cities that intervened immediately after the arrival of the virus experienced far less disease and death.
Charity Dean Came From Another Planet: rural Oregon
They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders sent her a letter instructing her to drop out of medical school and return to Junction City.
It Could Have Been Worse
So little about it was known that a trained pathologist had stared at a picture of it and mistaken it for human immune cells. It had been detected only a few dozen times since its discovery—once in a dead four-year-old girl. No one knew what it ate when it wasn’t eating the brains of mandrills or humans. Asked to explain what he’d found, Joe would only say, “Balamuthia is an amoeba and it eats your brain, and there is no cure.”
Politics Played a Role
But then, on April 9, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton as his national security adviser, and the next day, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, and demoted or fired everyone on the biological threat team. From that moment on, the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation-states. The Bush and Obama administrations’ concern with other kinds of threats was banished to the basement.
Sometimes You've Got to Light a Fire to Escape
“Escape fire,” was what they’d call it. The event so captivated the writer Norman Maclean, best known for his only other book, A River Runs Through It,
In fire you could see lessons for fighting a raging disease. He jotted them down:
You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.
It Wasn't Just in Italy
On March 1, it announced that the United States would screen people arriving from other countries for symptoms of the virus. “I wouldn’t waste a moment of time on travel restrictions or travel screening,” Carter wrote. “We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe.”
Most of Us (Including Me) Had No Clue
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force. “He said, ‘Charity, you need to push these things through. You’re the only one who can do this.’ ” She was taken aback by his insistence. “He wasn’t pleading with me to do the right thing. He was yelling at me. He was basically implying that the White House is not going to do the right thing. The White House is not going to protect the country. So California needs to take the lead.”
Charity Dean realized just how lost and desperate the people at the top were.
half of 1 percent of the people who get the disease die, you can surmise that for every death, there are 199 people already walking around with it. That first death—which California already had experienced—was telling you that you had two hundred cases a month earlier.
In Park’s time with the federal government, he’d dealt with one technology crisis after another. He’d noticed a pattern that he’d first identified in the private sector: in any large organization, the solution to any crisis was usually found not in the officially important people at the top but in some obscure employee far down the organization’s chart. It told you something about big organizations, and the L6s buried inside them, that they were able to turn Charity Dean into a person in need of excavation.
Sometimes You Need the Government to Take the Lead
Far more often than not, some promising avenue of research would die as a failed company. He hated that; he hated the way financial ambition interfered with science and progress.
The absence of federal leadership had triggered a wild free-for-all in the market for pandemic supplies. In this market, Americans vied with Americans for stuff made mainly by the Chinese. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, flew in a planeload of materials from China to the UCSFmedical center with boxes of functional, though less than ideal, nasal swabs on board.
American government, circa April 2020, was just how different appearances on the outside could be from the understanding on the inside. Inside California state government, inside even the Trump administration, there was some logic to everything that happened;
“The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.” She wondered if perhaps they had undergone a process similar to her own—a descent, which
You have this burden of maintaining optics. It’s all optics.”
He finally more or less gave up on the state. “There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped,” Joe would later say. “There’s no one driving the bus.” And the CDC—well, the CDC was its own mystery.
Her conclusion had pained her some. Once she’d become a public-health officer, she’d imagined an entire career in public service. Now she did not believe that the American government, at this moment in its history, would ever do what needed doing. Disease prevention was a public good, but the public wasn’t going to provide anything like enough of it. From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.
We Are the Walking Dead
Our soccer team has so many injuries-- bad knee, hip flexor, concussion, broken collarbone, pulled quad, etc-- that my younger son Ian got to start today . . . and he was playing well but ten minutes into the game he got elbowed in the face, right under his eye-- pretty much a knock-out punch, and while we bandaged up his face and he went back in, it wasn't for long . . . soon enough he was sitting on the bench with all the other injured folks, including my older son (pulled quad) . . . what a mess (although we did win our first GMC tournament game).
Deacon King Kong: Read It!
Deacon King Kong is the 51st book I read this year-- 2020 was good for something-- and it is the best piece of fiction I've run into in a long while; I'm not going to write a long review-- just read the thing-- but I will post up my Kindle notes . . . my favorite sentences from this fever dream that's exploded from James McBride's brain-- a fictionalized account of the Brooklyn housing project in which he grew up . . . the year is 1969 and it's all going down in this book, which is about urban decay and revitalization, baseball, drugs, race, language and tall tales . . . it is so much fun, even when it gets dark-- and there's some romance and a mystery to keep the plot cooking . . . the book begins with Sportcoat-- the old drunk church deacon, walking up to a young heroin dealer (who he coached as a child) and shooting him in the ear . . . but really the book begins with the mystery of the free cheese:
“Look who’s talking. The cheese thief!” That last crack stung him. For years, the New York City Housing Authority, a Highlight hotbed of grift, graft, games, payola bums, deadbeat dads, payoff racketeers, and old-time political appointees who lorded over the Cause Houses and every other one of New York’s forty-five housing projects with arrogant inefficiency, had inexplicably belched forth a phenomenal gem of a gift to the Cause Houses: free cheese.
and then there's some backstory on Sportcoat:
When he was slapped to life back in Possum Point, South Carolina, seventy-one years before, the midwife who delivered him watched in horror as a bird flew through an open window and fluttered over the baby’s head, then flew out again, a bad sign. She announced, “He’s gonna be an idiot,”
At age three, when a young local pastor came by to bless the baby, the child barfed green matter all over the pastor’s clean white shirt. The pastor announced, “He’s got the devil’s understanding,” and departed for Chicago, where he quit the gospel Highlight and became a blues singer named Tampa Red and recorded the monster hit song “Devil’s Understanding,” before dying in anonymity flat broke and crawling into history, immortalized in music studies and rock-and-roll college courses the world over, idolized by white writers and music intellectuals for his classic blues hit that was the bedrock of the forty-million-dollar Gospel Stam Music Publishing empire, from which neither he nor Sportcoat ever received a dime.
At age five, Baby Sportcoat crawled to a mirror and spit at his reflection, a call sign to the devil, and as a result didn’t grow back teeth until he was nine.
Sportcoat was a walking genius, a human disaster, a sod, a medical miracle, and the greatest baseball umpire that the Cause Houses had ever seen, in addition to serving as coach and founder of the All-Cause Boys Baseball Team.
and then-- in contrast to old school Sportcoat-- you've got the corrupted youth:
you've got the Clemens was the New Breed of colored in the Cause. Deems wasn’t some poor colored boy from down south or Puerto Rico or Barbados who arrived in New York with empty pockets and a Bible and a dream. He wasn’t humbled by a life of slinging cotton in North Carolina, or hauling sugarcane in San Juan. None of the old ways meant a penny to him. He was a child of Cause, young, smart, and making money hand over fist slinging dope at a level never before seen in the Cause Houses.
and the requisite Italian mobsters . . . this is Brooklyn in the late '60s:
Everything you are, everything you will be in this cruel world, depends on your word. A man who cannot keep his word, Guido said, is worthless.
and various kind of crime:
“A warrant ain’t nothing, Sausage,” Sportcoat said. “The police gives ’em out all over. Rufus over at the Watch Houses got a warrant on him too. Back in South Carolina.”
“He does?” Sausage brightened immediately. “For what?”
“He stole a cat from the circus, except it wasn’t no cat. It got big, whatever it was, so he shot it.”
Where’s the box?” “The church got plenty money.” “You mean the box in the church?” “No, honey. It’s in God’s hands. In the palm of His hand, actually.” “Where’s it at, woman?!”
“You ought to trade your ears in for some bananas,” she said, irritated now.
and superstition:
His wife put a nag on him, see, like Hettie done to you.”
“How you know Hettie done it?”
“It don’t matter who done it. You got to break it. Uncle Gus broke his by taking a churchyard snail and soaking it in vinegar for seven days. You could try that.”
“That’s the Alabama way of breaking mojos,” Sportcoat said. “That’s old. In South Carolina, you put a fork under your pillow and some buckets water around your kitchen. That’ll drive any witch off.”
“Naw,” Sausage said. “Roll a hound’s tooth in cornmeal and wear it about your neck.”
“Naw. Walk up a hill with your hands behind your head.”
“Stick your hand in a jar of maple syrup.”
“Sprinkle seed corn and butter bean hulls outside the door.”
“Step backward over a pole ten times.”
“Swallow three pebbles . . .”
They were off like that for several minutes, each topping the other with his list of ways to keep witches out, talking mojo as the modern life of the world’s greatest metropolis bustled about them.
“Never turn your head to the side while a horse is passing . . .”
“Drop a dead mouse on a red rag.”
“Give your sweetheart an umbrella on a Thursday.”
“Blow on a mirror and walk it around a tree ten times . . .”
They had reached the remedy of putting a gas lamp in every window of every second house on the fourth Thursday of every month when the generator, as if on its own, roared up wildly, sputtered miserably, coughed, and died.
and there's a shooter in the vein of The Wire's Brother Mouzone:
He wanted to say, “He’s a killer and I don’t want him near you.” But he had no idea what her reaction would be. He didn’t even know what Harold Dean looked like. He had no information other than an FBI report with no Highlight photo, only the vaguest description that he was a Negro who was “armed and extremely dangerous.”
and a romance between an Irish cop and an African-American church sister:
“I’ll be happy,” he said, more to the ground than to her, “to come back and bring what news I can.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Sister Gee said. But she might as well have been speaking to the wind.
the dark side of the drugs:
Men who made their girlfriends do horrible things, servicing four or five or eight men a night, who made their women do push-ups over piles of dogshit for a hit of heroin until, exhausted, the girls dropped into the shit so the men could get a laugh.
and, finally, a clash of values that is epic and poetic:
"I’m in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain’t got many more Aprils left. It’s a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.”
He released Deems and flung him back against the bed so hard Deems’s head hit Highlight the headboard and he nearly passed out again. “Don’t ever come near me again,” Sportcoat said. “If you do, I’ll deaden you where you stand.”
The Usual Quarantine Stuff
Earlier Thursday, it was more TV. So much TV. I watched some Bosch with the wife, The Expanse with the kids, and The Wire with the wife and kids. I tried my best to watch some of the Parks and Rec reunion but found it awkward and sluggish. Headed back to Zoom pub night (which is also awkward and sluggish, I think that's just what Zoom is like).
I woke up at 4:45 AM this morning. Decided to get up and get some grading done. Waded through a bunch of narratives and some other assignments. Then went back to bed. That's a plus about remote learning: you can work on your own schedule.
Zoom meeting with the English Department at 8:30 AM.
Then I did some community service and went shopping for an old guy. Bought the usual stuff: liverwurst, ham turkey, pineapple chunks, soup soup soup, grapes, applesauce, etc. Old person food. I'm getting quicker in the store. Listening to electronica helps (Amon Tobin and Boards of Canada).
When I dropped the food off, a cute lady finally witnessed my community service! She answered the door. She was either a relative or some sort of aid. It's nice when someone cute sees you doing community service, but-- unfortunately-- I was dressed like a homeless person.
Note to self: if you wear a mask and you forgot to brush your teeth, you're going to smell some bad breath. Your own bad breath. And there's no way to escape it.
Ian and I did our usual three-mile run. It started pouring rain ten minutes in and didn't stop until we got home. Huge drops. Now it's warm and sunny. Springlike.
Ian stumbled on a fawn while walking the dog.
I just finished my second Josephine Tey mystery: a Shilling For Candles. She's a great writer. Weird characters, a run-of-the-mill detective without the tortured past, and a great ear for dialogue.
Here is a sample passage, summarizing the information the police received about possible sightings of an alleged murder suspect on the run:
By Tuesday noon Tisdall had been seen in almost every corner of England and Wales, and by tea-time was beginning to be seen in Scotland. He had been observed fishing from a bridge over a Yorkshire stream and had pulled his hat suspiciously over his face when the informant had approached. He had been seen walking out of a cinema in Aberystwyth. He had rented a room in Lincoln and had left without paying. (He had quite often left without paying, Grant noticed.) He had asked to be taken on a boat at Lowestoft. (He had also asked to be taken on a boat at half a dozen other places. The number of young men who could not pay their landladies and who wanted to leave the country was distressing.) He was found dead on a moor near Penrith. (That occupied Grant the best part of the afternoon.) He was found intoxicated in a London alley. He had bought a hat in Hythe, Grantham, Lewes, Tonbridge, Dorchester, Ashford, Luton, Aylesbury, Leicester, Chatham, East Grinstead, and in four London shops. He had also bought a packet of safety-pins pins in Swan and Edgars. He had eaten a crab sandwich at a quick lunch counter in Argyll Street, two rolls and coffee in a Hastings bun shop, and bread and cheese in a Haywards’ Heath inn. He had stolen every imaginable kind of article in every imaginable kind of place—including a decanter from a glass-and-china warehouse in Croydon. When asked what he supposed Tisdall wanted a decanter for, the informant said that it was a grand weapon.
And here is my favorite line from the book:
It is said that ninety-nine people out of a hundred, receiving a telegram reading: All is discovered: fly, will snatch a toothbrush and make for the garage.
It's interesting what people lose themselves in during quarantine. Some people are watching old sports. My buddy Whitney is mainlining music documentaries. All I want is crime stuff. The chase scenes, the investigation, the freedom of movement, the bars and dives, and the various localities pull my mind from the reality of quarantine confinement.
Are Dogs the New Black Dudes?
So who suffers?
My family doesn't watch many scary movies because my older son Alex is a sniveling coward. Catherine, Ian and I like them, so it's always a treat when we get to hunker down and put one on. I'm definitely not a horror movie aficionado though. Usually when I mention a horror movie I've seen to someone who really likes horror movies-- usually one of my students-- she'll be like: "That's not scary!"
I get scared by pretty much anything (especially Blair Witch and Paranormal Activities).
The other night, Alex elected to go upstairs and pirate some Star Wars spin-off series called The Mandalorian (which sounds like a citrus fruit) so Catherine, Ian and I watched The Babadook.
It's really scary!
Terrifying.
It's the story of a mom who is possessed by the physical disembodiment of her tragic grief. And her super-creepy kid. And an even creepier children's book. There are some mean Australian moms, too-- a macabre Liane Moriarty milieu. It's well acted and vivid, and-- in the end-- profound about death and loss. A good scare and a good film.
My only complaint is the use of the dog.
Dave's 2019 Book List
I read forty books in 2019-- a number which seems about average-- and for the most part, I kept it eclectic: fiction, non-fiction, genre stuff, graphic novels, economics, history, and even some self-help. My friend and fellow English teacher Kevin pointed out that I don't read enough books by women. While I definitely consume some chick-lit every year, he is right. Only six of the forty books were by women authors (but several of the books by men are about women, so that should count for something). I might remedy this in 2020 . . . but I might not. Books are one of the few things in life that you have control over. If books by women appeal to me, I'll read them. If not, Kevin can fuck off.
I did go down a couple of rabbit holes.
I read the entire Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Cixin Liu . . . and it wasn't easy. I'm quite proud of this and highly recommend these books to diehard sci-fi fans. I also read four mystery novels set in Wyoming. I don't know how this happened, but I really enjoyed the Longmire stuff by Craig Johnson.
I wrote about my seven favorite books of the year over at Gheorghe:The Blog, so you can check that post out if you like, but if you want just one book to read, here it is:
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe.
This selection may be a result of the serial positioning effect, but the best book I read in 2019 is the last book I read in 2019.
The book is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, mainly during the 1970s and 1980s, but there is a frame story that is completely topical. The story is scary and compelling and violent and incredibly researched. It will dispel any romanticized notions you have about the IRA. The British are portrayed as no better.
These books provided a lot of material for me to write about. If it wasn't for books, my dog, my wife, and my absurd children, this blog would have died long ago.
Thank you books!
1) The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
2) An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
3) The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
4) God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright
5) Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail by Rusty Young (and Thomas McFadden)
6) The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
7) The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry
8) The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
9) Death's End by Cixin Liu
10) Atomic Habits by James Clear
11) Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and The Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy
12) Glasshouse by Charles Stross
13) Educated by Tara Westbrook
14) The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan
15) Redshirts by John Scalzi
16) Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nicholas Nassim Taleb
17) The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson
18) The Walking Dead 31: The Rotten Core by Robert Kirkman
19) The Walking Dead 32: Rest in Peace by Robert Kirkman
20) The Dark Horse by Craig Johnson
21) FreeFire by C.J. Box
22) Old Man's War by John Scalzi
23) Hell is Empty by Craig Johnson
24) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
25) The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block
26) Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane
27) Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop
28) The Last Colony by John Scalzi
29) Locke and Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez
30) Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
31) Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall
32) The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
33) Real Tigers by Mick Herron
34) Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic by Ben Westhoff
35) Slow Horses by Mick Herron
36) Giants of the Monsoon Forest by Jacob Shell
37) Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
38) Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
39) Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap by Ben Westhoff
40) Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
Hail Fellow Well Met?
Hail Fellow Well Met?
If You Haven't Seen HBO's Chernobyl, I Sentence Thee To The Exclusion Zone
See Bill Murray Play Himself Pretending to be a Zombie
See Bill Murray Play Himself Pretending to be a Zombie
New Paltz with No Kids: A Study in Words and Photos
This post is about what to do in New Paltz if you're lucky enough to go without your kids. In December. In all sorts of weather. In a tiny cabin. With a dog. And a sick wife. Not only will I regale you with my eloquent prose, but I'm also going to include a visual feast for the eyes: digital photos! I will save the best shot for last: during a chance wildlife encounter, I actually had the wherewithal to snap a picture with my cellular phone. I generally forget that my phone has this capability, but now I'm emboldened. Now I'm a photographer (as well as an expert at indoor plant installations . . . but that's for another post).
Two days after Christmas, we dropped the kids at my parents and headed to New Paltz for our romantic getaway. The dog traveled in the crate, which turned out to be a godsend. Lola normally pukes on longish car-rides-- which is not very romantic. She had recently puked directly into our tennis-ball hopper. The hopper contained at least forty-five tennis balls. Tennis balls have a radius of 1.25 inches, so if you multiply that by 4Ï€ then you get nearly twenty inches of surface area per tennis ball. There was dog vomit on most of the balls, hundreds of inches of vomit covered surface area. Really gross. But in her crate, she lay down and slept. Vomit-free trip. Very romantic.
While we were traveling northbound on Route 1, we saw something kind of sexy on a Sonic sign (if you're into carnivorous bestiality).
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| Our little cabin |
My wife looked over her handwritten list of great things to do around New Paltz, provided by her friend Kristen. Kristin highly recommended an Irish bar/restaurant called Garvan's. We checked the map and learned that while downtown New Paltz was nearly a mile from our cabin, Garvan's was only a few hundred yards. It was just across the Rail Trail, by the golf course. We were walking distance to a bar! On a vacation without the kids! Pretty sweet. And it had a fantastic happy hour.
Catherine went with a half and half (also known as a snakebite or a poor man's black velvet). It consists of half cider and half Guinness. We also had the beet and jicama salad, some truffle fries, and some sliders. And some fish and chips. Very Irish and very delicious. The place is awesome, especially for happy hour.
Then we walked back to the cabin, walked the dog, and watched Derry Girls. If you haven't seen it yet, Derry Girls is the perfect show to watch after going to an Irish bar. It's an Irish Netflix comedy; essentially Mean Girls meets Adrian McKinty's "Troubles Trilogy." Catholic school girls (and one boy) amidst the political/religious conflict in Northern Ireland. In the
The bed was a bit soft and there was some coughing and snoring from my wife's side of it, but I had consumed enough Guinness to sleep through the sniffling.
The next morning, I walked the dog down the Rail Trail again (while my wife slept). And I realized that while the location of the cabin was great, the cabin itself was not perfect. It was clean, and it was cheap, but it was cozy. I am a solidly built American male, so when I say the cabin was "cozy," I actually mean claustrophobically small. Normally when we travel, we make some coffee and grab a light breakfast at home, then do something active, eat lunch out, and then-- at least a few times-- we cook dinner back at the ranch. This is the most economical way to do it. Lunch is the cheapest meal to eat out. It's also nice to get back to home base for dinner. You can drink as many local beers as you desire, without worrying about driving under the influence in a new locale. And going out for breakfast is just stupid. Pay for eggs? I can make eggs.
On this trip, our normal schedule got turned on its head. The first morning, I tried to make some coffee, but I kept banging into things in the kitchen. The kitchen was too small to make coffee in. I made an executive decision and told my wife we were going to the Mudd Puddle for coffee and breakfast. She readily agreed. She loves to go out for breakfast but recognizes that going out for breakfast defies all my logic and reason. Lunch food is better than breakfast food. I hate to eat before I do some exercise. If you eat breakfast out, then you're not hungry for lunch. If you eat breakfast out, then you're not ready to snowboard, ski, hike, run, etc. It's completely insane to eat breakfast out. But my claustrophobia (and the lack of children) overrode that decision.
We had been to New Paltz once before-- with the kids-- and remembered that the Mudd Puddle had the best coffee in the universe. While we would never bring the kids to a local coffee shop for breakfast-- the place was too small and slow and local-- we realized that we did not have the kids with us. We could bring our books and read while we drank coffee.
So we went to the Mudd Puddle, got coffee, read our books, and I ate a James Special sandwich, which involves eggs, bourbon-soaked bacon, balsamic caramelized onions, and some kind of homemade bread. It was wild! It was crazy! We were eating food before doing exercise. The sandwich
Then the rains came. We beat a hasty retreat back to our tiny cabin. Catherine, still nursing her cold, fell fast asleep. I took the dog for a long walk down the Rail Trail in the rain. It was gross.
It was pouring. The kids were sending us pictures. Ian caught a lizard. They were lounging around the pool. What the fuck were we going to do? The cabin was tiny and it was raining cats and dogs. Once again, it took a moment to realize that we didn't have to amuse the kids. They were in Florida. We took a ride to the Yard Owl Brewery. It was run by James, the guy who owned the Mudd Puddle. The beer had to be good.
It was. But playing Bananagrams in a small craft brewery on the Hudson Valley Rail Trail with my beautiful (but phlegmy) wife was even better than the beer, though. Very relaxing. Time seemed to stand still. And you could blame it on her illness, but I kicked her ass three times in a row (which doesn't usually happen).
The best beer at the Yard Owl was the Chouette D'or. It was divine! Divine I say! And that means a
Catherine also liked the local cider.
The next day the rains let up. We went hiking in the morning on one of the trails in the Mohonk Preserve. We wanted to see the Mohonk Testimonial Gatehouse up close. It was built in 1908 and apparently, it was in a 1985 horror movie called The Stuff.
The Mohonk trails are beautifully maintained, but there is a $15 dollar fee daily fee per hiker. Fuck that! We trespassed.
After going for a hike, we headed over to Mid Hudson Sporting Clays to shoot some shotguns.
Over the next few days we did more of the same (aside from the shooting). We visited Catherine's favorite cider house: Bad Seed. They had a lot of interesting ciders on tap. There was also a wild double birthday party going on in there. A gaggle of women in their mid-fifties dressed in 70's style clothing. Apparently, this is what you do around New Paltz. Drive out to breweries and cider houses and have a good time. They are spacious places. You can bring kids and dogs. It's a sweet set-up.
Here's a shot of historic Huguenot Street. If you look closely, you can see that I am balder than I think I am. If you look very closely, you'll see my dog's anus.
Here's a shot of Awosting Falls. The falls were really running because of all the rain.
And now, as promised, I'll show you the pièce de résistance . . . some stunning wildlife photography. I was out walking with the dog at dusk, on the Rail Trail, and I felt a presence. Something looming over me. It was an owl! A very appropriate animal, since we had been to the Yard Owl Brewery (where Cat bought an owl hat). And the owl is the Highland Park mascot (Highland Park is the town in which I live and coach).
Because of all this heaping significance, I actually remembered to pull my cell phone out and snap a photo. A few people who saw the photo were curious as to my equipment: I used an LG Harmony phone to take this picture. It costs twenty dollars when you sign up for Cricket. I don't think I had it on the highest resolution. Here is the photo. It's a keeper!
Let me zoom in. This is the stuff of National Geographic.
We had a smooth ride back to Jersey, hosted a small New Year's Party/game night, and picked up the kids at the Trenton airport on New Year's Day. The kids were fat, happy, and tired. Alex had gained 8 pounds and Ian had put on 5.
Once we got home from New Paltz, the dog seemed pretty depressed but then when Ian walked in the house she went totally bananas. It was like a miniature version of the end of the Odyssey; Odysseus returns home after his twenty-year voyage and his dog Argus sees him and gets so excited that he dies. Lola did not die (nor did she pee in the house) but she was pretty damned excited to have the kids back (and so were Cat and I . . . especially because they had followed our instructions and watched Derry Girls, so we had a lot to discuss).
One More Sad Tale
Dave Spends $5 Dollars on Future Human Capital
In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating-agency executives went to jail . . . the SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivative industries . . . just kidding! . . . banks took the money the American people gave them, and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform . . . and then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers . . .
Intelligent Life, on Earth and in the Universe
Can My Dog Read My Mind?
2016 Book List
1) Trunk Music (Michael Connelly)
2) Hide & Seek (Ian Rankin)
3) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Robert D. Putnam
4) One Plus One Jojo Moyes
5) Andrea Wulf The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt's New World
6) Death Comes to the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
7) The Milagro Beanfield War (John Nichols)
8) Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)
9) The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run-- or Ruin-- an Economy (Tim Harford)
10) Tim Harford The Undercover Economist
11) The Expatriates (Janice Y. K. Lee)
12) Tim Harford The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
13) Dale Russakoff The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools?
14) Charlie Jane Anders All the Birds in the Sky
15) Mohamed A. El-Erian The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse
16) Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh)
17) The Power of Habit:Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
18) Angels Flight (Michael Connelly)
19) Robert J. Gordon The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War
20) Tony Hillerman A Thief of Time
21) Peter Frankopan Silk Roads: A New History of the World
22) Tony Hillerman Hunting Badger
23) Tony Hillerman Listening Woman
24) Tony Hillerman The Wailing Wind
25) The Lost World of the Old Ones:Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest David Roberts
26) Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers)
27) Chuck Klosterman But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past
28) White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer
29) The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will Shape our future by Kevin Kelly
30) Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
31) Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) Jerome K. Jerome
32) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
33) Truly Madly Guilty Liane Moriarty
34) Seinfeldia by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
35) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil
36) Ghosts by Reina Telgemeier
37) The Walking Dead 23-26
38) The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark For the Ivy Leagues by Jeff Hobbs
39) The Nix by Nathan Hill
40) Bill Bryson The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain
41) Tim Wu The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
42) Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad
43) Nicholson Baker Substitute
44) The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea by Callum Roberts
45) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance.