Sentence of Dave

This afternoon, my brother, Alex, Ian and I played some doubles at Mercer County Park before Easter dinner-- Alex hadn't played since th...

The wind is the most annoying element in sports (except when it becomes a tornado-- then it's one of the most deadly elements) and while...

New episode of We Defy Augury  up . . .  I read a couple of history books and learned a few things-- but probably not as much as I should h...

I was texting with my friend Whitney today and I recommended he listen to   the album "10000 gecs"-- but I also recommended the c...

No tennis match today-- the weather is truly ugly-- and we could probably use a bit more practice so this might be a good thing, so this af...

Today at tennis practice, our third singles player and I beat Ian and Ethan -- first and second singles-- in a set . . . Ian has the yips wi...

Last Night in Soho , which on first glance might seem like some other kind of film-- perhaps a feminine/Anglophile version of Woody Allen...

I've just started listening to  The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling  and it seems Rowling is a useful and fascinating lens with which to ob...

Last night, Catherine and I watched the horror movie Barbarian  and while I will admit that every decision every single regular person made ...

Long last day of school-- I covered a class so I worked every minute, plus the kids are wild animals the day before break . . . this poor gi...

I took over a new class today (because Cunningham got knocked up) and my co-teacher was out, so I had to learn a lot on my own (sort of, I c...

My son Ian, a senior, and Ethan-- an athletic and skilled sophomore, played their challenge match today for the first singles position and i...

The Rutgers Expos team is slogging its way toward Spring Break but there's a bunch of essays, an Excel Spreadsheet, numerous college cre...

The weather apps did not concur-- my students, with their newfangled iPhones, said their Apple weather app predicted 90% rain, but my much d...

It's easier to fight a deranged possessed puppet than it is to be an executrix . . . or at least that's my argument in this week'...

  My high school tennis team is going to play one-on-one doubles every day at practice-- they can't do it well yet, but they have improv...

I am still obsessed with the album 10000 gecs  . . . I'm sure I'll get sick of it, but I'm listening to this album the way I lis...

I haven't played with Chat GPT in a while, but it rained today-- resulting in no tennis practice-- so I got to screwing around and I ask...

If you liked this song , then you might like 100 gecs . . . if you need some context, listen to the new Switched on Pop . . . or go all t...

The long angry week: half days with no lunch, four fucking days of spring parent conferences-- unheard of anywhere except East Brunswick-- t...

If you're looking for a horror novel with serious puppetry, Being John Malkovich  level marionette skills, then check out the new Grady ...

I was going to run over to T.J. Maxx today and buy some athletic socks, but instead I ordered them on Amazon.

I played pickle ball today and tennis Thursday and Friday, and I did not fall down on any of those days . . . good times.

Rutgers doesn't make March Madness but Princeton and FDU move on . . . a New Jersey minor miracle (after a St. Peters major miracle last...

Whirlwind day: reverse schedule because of testing; Cunningham had a mental breakdown because of the positioning of her horizontal oblique f...

On our ride home from the Catskills, my son Alex gave me the lowdown on college-- apparently fraternity hazing still happens, as does the us...

  Take a trip back to the '90s in my new episode of We Defy Augury  . . . the internet didn't quite work yet, but the movies were a...

Last spring, Alex and I took a trip to Belleayre Mountain to do some snowboarding in celebration of his acceptance to the Rutgers Engineerin...

 Enough said.

Yesterday, I had leftover tilapia for lunch and I needed some gum before I went back to class and breathed on the students and even though m...

If you're looking for a grim, bloody, disturbing podcast that investigates the unreliability of memory and the possibility that all firs...

I converted one of my podcasts to text (using Otter.ai) and then cleaned it up and made it into a blog post and it turns out that a podcast ...

Lynn Steger Strong's novel Flight  is a reminder of how difficult it is to be an adult-- to deal with money, finances, children, death, ...

So I was going up for a rebound Saturday and some kid continued to box me out, even though I was in the air, and I took a hard horizontal fa...

A couple of pictures of me circa 1993 (courtesy of my buddy Neil) when we went out to meet our buddy in Tahoe-- apparently thirty years ago ...

I went up for a rebound today while playing four-on-four basketball with my son and somehow got my legs swept out from under me and hit the ...

I got one sporting birthday gift for my birthday, and one sporting slap in the face: 1) Alex and Ian played together in a volleyball tournam...

The day has arrived, the day of my birth-- The day Seuss and I debuted on the Earth; And while the good doctor has passed from this place, I...

  My older son Alex turned nineteen today (WTF!) and my wife slipped out of work at lunch and went to his dorm and decorated his dorm room d...

 If I acquire a big beer belly, I'm wearing my friend Cunningham's pregnancy jeans!

Which was scarier: watching last night's Rutgers basketball game or the new "spooky mall" episode of The Last of Us?

This is it: the long haul of school that precedes Spring Break-- five-day week after five-day week, tedium and repetition and no breaks in s...

I ran my new episode of We Defy Augury   through an online transcript generator (Otter.ai) because I wanted to edit it and make it a blog po...

Today I learned three things from my students: 1) Chronophoto is an awesome online game; 2) InspiroBot is more fun than ChatGPT; 3) a girl...

This morning the students in my first period Public Speaking class crushed their Demonstrations speeches-- I always get nervous before we do...

The College Writing Crew was embroiled in another meeting about the state of the Rutgers Expository Writing Course . . .  which will now b...

  One of the benefits of teaching high school is that it helps me keep up with what the young people are into; yesterday in Public Speaking ...

  Episode 30 of We Defy Augury reviews a couple of critically crucial creative concepts to help you captivate, compel, and command the crow...

A perfect President's Day-- it was 60 degrees and sunny in February, so Catherine and I played some pickle-ball-- the whole crew was out...

If you've finished both seasons of White Lotus and you need a lampooning-the-uber-rich fix, then you might enjoy Triangle of Sadness . ....

I had a long, fun, and busy Friday into Saturday -- I played early morning basketball at 6:30 AM and got a very good run in, as I was part o...

Yesterday the current EBHS Rutgers Expository Writing team (so Stacey, Cunningham, Soder, Brady, and me) and my boss took a meeting with two...

Yet another sentence set at the  Wawa -- and NOT at the Starbucks, I might add . . . there are ZERO sentences on this blog set at Starbucks ...

Catherine, Ian, and I had a fun (but not very romantic) Valentine's Day-- we watched episode five of The Last of Us , which was gripping...

 New episode of We Defy Augury  up and it's a good one-- as close to being in my Creative Writing class as it gets . . . "William ...

It's official-- both my kids can properly shoot a basketball (and they learned to do it sooner than I did . . . I think it took me until...

It's Sunday night, I'm wiped out and want to pack it in and get ready for school tomorrow, but we're off to a SuperBowl party-- ...

I've now hit the age where I can have three alcoholic drinks and feel okay the next morning, but if I have four alcoholic drinks then I&...

When my son Ian was a sophomore I could still occasionally win a set when I played him in tennis; last year, his junior season, I could stil...

My vet still requires masking . . . for people-- but pets don't have to wear masks and they are the patients!

  New episode of We Defy Augury up-- I read Gabrielle Zevin's novel about creativity, collaboration, and video-game design  Tomorrow an...

Making a salad in the morning to bring for lunch seems like a great idea in the AM-- healthy, nutritious, delicious and fibrous-- but then w...

Full on Monday today . . . as a model narrative, I told a story in Public Speaking I haven't recounted in a while-- the time Catherine a...

Today at the dog park, when this older guy's dog Max pooped in the far corner, I went and picked it up and disposed of it-- and I didn&#...

The third episode of The Last of Us -- the HBO show based on the video game with the same name-- is some very ambitious, very emotional, ver...

After many fruitless attempts, my wife and I finally got a seat at Salt during happy hour; Salt is an upscale seafood joint in New Brunswick...

We had our first "Show and Tell" session with the new Creative Writing kids today-- they read something from the world that they f...

It's mid-year . . . mid-terms are over and it's back to the repetitive grind; I did "first day of school stuff" in my thre...

Get busy, pack it in and compress yourself-- it's February, you sons of bitches, and you've only got 28 days to get it done this mon...

We stopped buying bags of pre-grate cheese (mainly because they have weird chemical additives to prevent clumping) and this had two good out...

  Wow . . . this new Riley Sager book The House Across the Lake  is a hot mess . . . but it certainly inspired me to think about the rules...

I was quite pleased with myself (for a few minutes) at indoor soccer this morning-- the first two games were zero-zero ties (no wonder Ameri...

I'm not very good at sarcasm-- I don't have the voice for it-- so I've got to broadcast it . . . here it comes: you know what...

An EB AM record . . . nineteen people at Friday morning basketball today-- pretty wild, we had an upstairs game and a sub-gym game-- and the...

Here they are: 1. Why is it so hard for me to get a pair of socks on without ripping them? 2. Why have I gotten so into listening to The Bri...

I'm not a medical doctor (though I often play one in my home, when I'm diagnosing my children and telling them various remedies: try...

When I play pickleball, I get great joy from hitting my opponent square in the chest with the ball-- if they pop up a "dink," this...

  Kate Beaton's graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands  is heavy viscous stuff . . . I get into it in my new episode of We Def...

Another gray, kind-of-mild winter day . . . where is the snow? 

Yesterday at early morning basketball, we had sixteen players so we had to run a pair of four-on-four games across the gym-- while this was ...

I hope my son learned his lesson yesterday at night court-- my lawyer buddy Jay got his violations knocked down to two points (and a stern l...

It would be a perfect Thursday afternoon to relax, take a nap, perhaps have a beer or two and avoid the ugly weather, but instead, I'll ...

 I made a playlist on Spotify called "psychedelicious" but -- once again-- I haven't coined anything new . . . dammit.

  Jennifer Egan's new novel The Candy House , ostensibly a "sequel" to her tour-de-force A Visit From the Goon Squad , reminds...

The Sporting Gods did shine their benevolent (and sweaty) light on New Jersey yesterday-- for five glorious hours, as Rutgers defeated Ohio ...

This could be-- if the sporting gods will it-- a great sporting day for New Jersey-- Rutgers vs. Ohio State basketball game is about to star...

Kate Beaton's autobiographical graphic novel Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands  is heavy, viscous stuff; Beaton heads from Nova Scotia t...

This is the week COVID finally caught Catherine and Ian-- but not me! . . . or not yet-- and earlier in the week the principal caught Ian go...

Catherine and I couldn't agree on the difference in meaning between "pocket change" and "pocket money"-- the argumen...

This afternoon, Ian and I played basketball with a big man who could really pass-- it was like he had eyes in the back of his head-- and whe...

  New episode of We Defy Augury up and streaming . . . "Stars, Caves, and Everything"  is loosely inspired on the new Neil deGras...

I never listened to Pink Floyd's Animals  enough-- perhaps because of the weird song lengths . . . 3 songs that are over ten minutes and...

Entertaining day in the city yesterday-- we took an 11:30 AM train in, along with lots of hockey fans going to the Devils/Rangers game (and ...

Colin Quinn has still got it-- more to come tomorrow, but a full day in the city (but MVD . . . Most Valuable Driver . . . to Ian, who drove...

The Banshees of Inisherin  is evocative, beautiful, bucolic, awkward, insular, funny and weird-- it will make you evaluate your friends, you...

Foggy and unseasonable warm this week, which is annoying as far as snowboarding conditions go but a great week for our hot water heater (and...

I was playing badminton yesterday morning-- singles-- and I was heading to the right but the shuttlecock came back more to the left and I un...

  A weird episode about a weird book: in  "Livin' La Vida Lapvona" , I try to make sense of Ottessa Moshfegh's repugnant f...

My wife and I had to teach today, despite the fact that it was a federal holiday, while Ian got to sleep in; Alex didn't get in until tw...

  We just finished one of my favorite TV shows ever: Atlanta . . .  my son Alex finished ahead of Ian and me, but Alex watched the last few ...