A Good Read (If You're Over Thirty)

If you grew up in the '80's, Ernest Cline's sci-fi novel Ready Player One is so entertaining and satisfying that it feels like a guilty pleasure . . . it's set in the nearish future and things are predictably bleak and apocalyptic, but the masses find sanctuary in a massively multiplayer online virtual reality simulation called OASIS, which was created by the '80's nerd culture fanatic James Halliday; when Halliday died, he left a posthumous easter egg quest in the game-- and the winner would take control of his company, the game, and the incredibly vast fortunes that he amassed over his life (Halliday is a Steve Jobs/ Bill Gates hybrid) and the story follows Wade, the narrator, as he navigates the quest (and the violent repercussions of his success in reality) but the fun of the book is in the references and allusions: Joust, Zork, Pac-Man, Tempest, TRS-80,War Games, Star Wars, Bladerunner, John Hughes, Dungeons and Dragons, vintage Japanese TV and film, etcetera, etcetera . . . Cline packs in the '80's references on every page, from the obvious to the obscure; I'm not sure if the novel would be entertaining to anyone who wasn't a nerd in the '80's, but if you did grow up then, and know what a dodecahedron is, then read it.

Dave is Almost a Good Person

While walking around the school, I noticed a soda cup (complete with plastic top and straw) stuck in a boxwood shrub next to the soccer field-- a lazy student must have used the bush as a trash receptacle-- and so I went over, removed the cup, and threw it in the trash can (which was less than twenty yards from the shrubbery) and while part of me felt very good about my altruistic behavior, there was another part of my brain, the quid pro quo part, that was thinking: Dave just earned the right to litter (one time only) in the near future.

You Shouldn't Grade Coincidences (Unless You're a Jerk)

In the middle of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which is a play that hinges on a wild sequence of coincidences, Fabian comments on the madness: "if this were played on a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" and I'm sure this same idea flashed across the collective consciousness of millions of baseball fans last Thursday night when Derek Jeter, during his final at bat in Yankee stadium, drove in the game winning run in the bottom of the ninth inning with a walk-off single . . . it seemed too perfect, an "improbable fiction," but-- as Shakespeare well knew-- coincidences happen all the time . . . they are a product of statistical likelihood-- but no one wants to hear about probability if the event in question happened to them personally . . . no one wants their coincidence "graded" because if the coincidence happened to you, then you believe it is special; for example, my wife saw a car the other day with four bumper stickers, each advertising a geographical location: Highland Park, Ireland, Ocean Grove, and Chatham, and she thought it was especially coincidental that she had been to all four of those places but I argued that people who had been to two of them had likely been to all four, and that an astronomical number of people saw the back of this car-- because we live in a densely populated state-- and that many of them had the same experience as her, thus diluting the uniqueness of her coincidence, but this didn't matter to my wife, who found the event special from her point of view . . . if you like this topic, then you'll love the Radiolab podcast A Very Lucky Wind, which explores coincidence in both a rational and emotional manner . . . and includes a metaphor which ruined my older son's appreciation of the magic of coincidences; a golfer drives a ball out onto the fairway and it lands on a particular blade of grass and this blade of grass cannot believe that he's been selected out of all the blades of grass in the world, that the ball landed on him, but from our point of view, this isn't special at all, because the ball had to land somewhere . . . so when one of the players on my son's soccer team expressed his amazement at the fact that the guy who moved in next door to him had the exact same name as him, my son Alex was not particularly moved by this event and later said to me, "it's like the golf ball and the blade of grass, people are moving all over the place and eventually someone is going to move next to another person with the same name."

I'd Do a Hunger Strike, But I'm Afraid I Would Get Too Hungry . . .

If it doesn't cool down soon, I'm going to hold my breath until fall starts.

It's Not Plagiarism If You Change a Word, Right?

My existence (in the fall, anyway) is but a brief crack full of soccer between two eternities of darkness (with thanks to Vladimir Nabokov). 

A Good Movie to Watch

The purpose of Wes Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel is to remind you how funny it is to watch people run around . . .  the situation doesn't matter, as long as the camera is far enough away and someone is running away from someone else on a colorful, lavish set (the secondary purpose of the film is simply to look at the sets . . . the colors and details are even better than an episode of Madmen).

Orphan IS the New Black, Dammit!

I'm not sure if this is a spoonerism or simply a transposition of words, but several times last week, I called Orphan Black-- the Canadian sci-fi show about clones-- Orphan is the New Black . . . and while this was certainly a mistake, it does make sense on a sub-conscious level, because I "broke up" with Orange is the New Black half-way through the second season . . . I loved the first season, which was fast-paced and dark and funny, but the second season the episodes were longer and much heavier (and even though I still love Orphan Black and plan on continuing our relationship, I am glad to be finished with season two . . . I need to watch something less "black" for a while).

Me? Allergies?

I don't consider myself susceptible to things other people fall prey to-- broken bones, arthritis, back pain, mortality, the constraints of the space/time continuum, etc. --but I've been waking up every morning at 4 AM and sneezing my brains out, and then repeatedly sneezing throughout the day, while suffering from red eyes and an itchy nose; despite these symptoms, I've put off buying any allergy medication because I can't accept the fact that I'm allergic to something-- pollen or dust or ragweed or whatever is out now . . . I keep waiting for the dry weather to break and figure my allergies will disappear once we get some rain, never to return, as there's some part of me that thinks if you just endure the allergy, your body will "get used to it" but I'm not sure if that's scientifically true or not, and I don't feel like checking.

There Are Two Types of Sockpuppetry?

Charles Seife may come off as a stick-in-the-mud, but his new book Virtual Unreality is chock full of examples of the "trickery, fakery, and cyber skullduggery" that exists on the internet; for instance, the art of sockpuppetry . . . type 1 sock puppets are created so that a person gets more attention or authority or notoriety for an opinion -- if you're an American student in Edinburgh and you want to blog about the Middle East, it's much better to do it as a "gay girl in Damascus" . . . and it's popular to create a type 1 sock puppet and then have this puppet come down with a fatal malady, so that you garner loads of attention and sympathy as you "die" on-line . . . type 2 sockpuppetry is even more sad and nefarious: you create on-line personas to agree with your real online presence . . . to bolster reviews and denigrate your competitors, to laud your writing and opinions, and to provide reinforcements for on-line feuds; it's always embarrassing when you get caught doing this, as Scott Adams found out several years ago (and because of the permanence and persistence of information on the net, real or false, though Adams made this error in 2011, it's easy enough to resuscitate the story years later . . . so be wary out there).

Double the Compliment = Half the Value

After I gave my spiel at Back to School Night-- and the way it works is that you run through your day's schedule, except that each "class" is seven minutes long-- and so after I talked to the parents of my third period class, a kind and lovely mom stayed after the bell and told me "I have two kids here in the high school and my daughter is a senior so I wasn't going to bother seeing any of her teachers, but she told me that I had to come see you, so you're the only one of her teachers that I visited" and I thought this was a very sweet compliment, but then when I went inside the English Office, Stacey repeated the identical story . . . a mom had two daughters, one a senior, one a junior, and she was visiting the younger daughter's teachers, but she was making one exception: Stacey's Philosophy class and so Stacey and I compared notes and it turned out that the mom who said this to Stacey was the same mom who said it to me . . . but it's still a nice sentiment, even if it's only half true (or could it be one third true? did she say the same thing to her daughter's math teacher?)

The Fever

For me, finishing Megan Abbott's novel The Fever was like surviving a nasty roller-coaster ride without puking-- I don't like roller-coaster rides-- and there's a part of me that doesn't like Megan Abbott novels, because they are so disturbing . . . and while I acknowledge that the writing is sharp and the plot moves and the characters creep off the page, the topics of this book are malevolent and particularly disturbing: hypochondria, seizures, algae in the drinking water, HPV vaccines, panic, social media rumor-mongering, peer pressure, and inscrutable teenage girls . . . despite this, I couldn't put it down, this is the kind of book that you read over coffee and breakfast before work at 6:15 in the morning, just to get through a few more pages: nine algal blooms out of ten.

Bag Therapy

I am a disorganized person, and I don't write lists or keep a calendar or use any other aid to remedy my scattered brain . . . or so I thought . . . but a particularly observant colleague of mine recognized that some people-- women especially-- use bags to order their lives, and that is certainly the way I do it; I have a bag for my school stuff, a bag for my laptop, a cooler for my lunch, another cooler for water bottles, a smallish bag for my high school soccer coaching, a large hockey bag for my youth soccer coaching, two bags of soccer balls, a portable AED in a bag, a gym bag, two PUG goal bags, and, finally, a small backpack and a large backpack for spontaneous excursions . . . and I can hide a mess in each of these bags, but it's a contained mess; I keep all my school stuff in packed folders-- again, each folder hides a mess-- and I'm trying to shift my lesson plans and writing to Evernote, which is an application which allows you to access digital "bags" from anywhere there is wifi . . . most of my bags live in my car, and this system works well for me, as I can store and remove them when necessary, and-- once a year-- I clean them out and find all sorts of interesting and surprising treasures.

Almost Vegan

A big thumbs up for the MorningStar Chipotle Black Bean Burgers . . . going vegetarian is less taxing on the environment, saves loads of fresh water, and is morally the right thing to do; not only that, vegetarian options are more delicious than ever (unfortunately, I've gotten into the habit of putting several pieces of cold-cut ham and/or several slices of bacon on top of my veggie burger, which makes it even more delicious but might not count as eating vegetarian).

Awkward Dave Pays For His Silence

Last year, when the Wawa checkout guy asked me how big my coffee thermos was, I said "20 ounces, I think" and since then I've always paid the twenty ounce price for my refill, but the other day-- when I forgot my plastic coffee thermos in my classroom-- I bought a sixteen ounce coffee in a disposable cup and when I returned to school I poured the sixteen ounces of coffee into my plastic mug, so that it would stay warm longer, and I found out-- to my chagrin-- that my plastic coffee cup only holds 16 ounces: the paper cup to plastic mug transfer filled my plastic mug to the brim (it's obviously larger because it's insulated, so I am an idiot) but I am too embarrassed to tell the folks at Wawa that my cup only holds sixteen ounces, and so they are still ringing me up for twenty ounces . . . but I did catch a break on Friday, because there was a new checkout girl, and when she asked me what size my mug was, I told her "sixteen ounces" and so I guess I'll just have to wait until the entire staff turns over before I consistently pay the proper price for my mug.

Breaking News!

One of the advantages of living in a small town is that people you know might see your kids doing something stupid and report it back to you so that you can address the matter . . . and so apparently my son Alex has been getting on his skateboard and letting our dog -- who is a very fast runner-- pull him down the giant hill into Donaldson Park  . . . and, of course, Alex does this stunt without a helmet because you only have to wear a helmet when you ride a bike (even though getting pulled by a dog that weighs the same amount as you down a poorly paved road into a three way intersection with frequent park traffic and no braking method whatsoever is far more dangerous than riding a bike) and while I admire his courage-- as I was scared to skateboard on a flat surface when I was a kid-- I've advised him to wear a helmet because (relatively recently) as a society we've decided that kids should protect their heads as best they can from concussions (though I sustained a number of them, and look at me . . . I'm fine!)

Four-bagger

To baseball fans, a "four-bagger" is a home run, but if you own a dog, it's a particularly full day of fecal clean-up; last Tuesday, I bagged one in the morning, two in the afternoon (old piles I found in the yard) and a final bagful during our evening constitutional.

Super-Reverse Psychology

While my son Alex is very good at entertaining himself, my other son -- Ian-- often has trouble in this department, and he's also stubborn and doesn't take suggestions very well, but I've figured a way out of the dilemma; when he's roaming the house, annoying people and breaking things, I need to give him a list of choices that does not include the thing I want him to do . . . because it's a power thing with him, he hates succumbing to anyone's will; the longer the list, the better chance that he'll do what I want . . . so if I he needs to practice the piano, I'll say to him: "Ian you could do art or unload the dishwasher or read a book or go outside and juggle the soccer ball or collect bugs or take out the garbage or clean your room and play with Legos" and he'll say back to me "Okay, I'm going to play the piano."

Consistency and Varmints

I hadn't talked to this particular neighbor since Hurricane Sandy, but I saw him the other night while I was walking the dog and there was a small metal cage-trap in his driveway and he says to me--like we hadn't skipped a beat-- "I just trapped a possum" and I say back to him, "Yeah, they're around" which is a fairly lame reply, but I deny that in the heat of the moment you could have done any better.

Who Knew There Was a Battery in My Grill?

For the past few months, my grill ignition lighter has been performing poorly, but last weekend -- serendipitously-- I ripped the cap off the ignition lighter button with the grill cover and was shocked to discover that there's a battery underneath the lighter button . . . and so I changed the battery, found the cap under the grill, screwed it back on, and now the ignition lighter works like a charm and my propane ignites instantaneously (and if you already knew there was a battery inside your grill ignition lighter, that you have to access by unscrewing the cap, because you read the grill manual cover-to-cover when you bought your grill, then I hope you contract a horrible skin rash).

Buttons vs. Touch Screen: A Logical Debate

My 5th Generation iPod Nano died the other day and I'm trying to make do with an iPod Touch-- which I know is an absurd statement, since an iPod touch is essentially a tiny computer and I should be counting my blessings that technology has advanced so far in such a short time (I've spent a great deal of my life using a Sony Walkman) but I can't stand the touch screen-- my fingers are too fat too accurately enter any information, and though my mother gave me a tiny turquoise jeweled stylus to aid me in poking at the screen, my wife made fun of me for it-- and so I'm solving my problem by going retro (slightly) and I am buying a 6th Generation iPod Nano, which still has the analog buttons and the wheel; in other words, if we're going to debate this topic, then I say: buttons! buttons and wheel all the way!