10/14/2009

My five year old son Alex let me in on the plan that he and his two friends concocted at school-- they are going to build robot replicas of themselves and send the robots to school in their stead; I asked him why he wanted to do this and if he didn't like kindergarten any longer, and he said, "I still like school, I just get tired in the middle of the day and want to take a nap," which-- I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree-- is exactly how I feel about teaching school.

10/13/2009

So it was a lucky day in the ISS (in school suspension) room-- no students-- so I had an empty room to myself in which to grade papers and otherwise relax . . . in fact, I was so relaxed that I let loose with a bout of flatulence (hard to do anywhere else in the school, since you're always on display) and, of course, like in a bad movie, immediately after I let'er rip, not ten seconds later, the school police officer walked in with a girl that obviously had some major problem and had to be escorted from class and he walked right into my poison cloud and then the girl came to my desk to sign in, and I was half embarrassed and half wanting to giggle like a sophomore, but no one accused me of anything, so I'm hoping they were secretly blaming it on each other.

10/12/2009

At bedtime, I've been reading my kids a children's version of Moby Dick (which, honestly, is hardly a bedtime story-- people die every other chapter) and Ian asked why Ahab wanted to kill the whale and Alex told him, "because the whale ate his leg off" and then Alex made a good point; he said, "Ahab really only has to cut off one of Moby Dick's fins, that would be fair, since Moby Dick only ate one of his legs."

Bonus Sports Conundrum

Can a coach receive a taunting penalty?

10/11/2009

Does everyone cut their cornbread into tiny little cubes so there's more surface area to coat with butter, or is it just me?

10/10/2009

In the office the other day, all the English teachers were lamenting the fact that progress reports were already due, and it felt like school had just started and no progress had been made-- and while it may be true that progress report time did come a bit early this year, it also might be true that we are all getting older, and as we get older our metabolism slows and time appears to rush by, instead of crawl along (like it did when we were children) but when I suggested this, none of the other teachers wanted to contemplate this bleak reality so we blamed it on Labor Day being so late this year.

Adventureland: A Review and Other Thematically Related Stuff

Days after visiting the funky, vintage Knoebels Amusement Park in central Pennsylvania, I watched a movie that looked as if it had been filmed there: Adventureland, starring Jesse Eisenberg (who hails from East Brunswick, his sister-- who is a senior now at the high school--- was the little girl in the Pepsi commercials who spoke like the Godfather when she was served a Coca Cola) and it wasn't as gross and funny as Superbad or as witty as Juno, but in a laid back way it was just as good a film, and the 80's music, cars, clothes, houses, amusement park, and people are as much fun to look at as the sets on Madmen . . . and so I give it twelve partially thawed boxes of corn-dogs out of a possible fourteen, but I'm still putting up a clip of the Pepsi sister because I think she's still more famous than Jesse (although he's also in Zombieland with Woody Harrelson, so I guess he's an A list star now . . . and I hear the sister gets very uncomfortable when teachers or students bring up her past as the Pepsi girl . . . and are either of them as famous as Heather O'Reilly, who is possibly the most famous East Brunswick resident?)

Girl Stuff

There has been discussion in the office of what appears manly and macho and what doesn't, perhaps we dwell on this because we're English teachers and we teach poetry so we're already a little defensive . . . and I claimed that I cannot type because typing is for girls (it's easier to say this than to admit the truth-- I'm spastic on the keyboard) and some folks took offense at this, but then we decided that Ernest Hemingway couldn't type either . . . because he was too drunk (although F. Scott Fitzgerald could put it away, yet I'm sure he could touch-type with the best of them) and now there's a juggling craze in the office because Stacey learned to juggle, and while I was accomplishing an astounding juggling feat (juggling three tennis balls off the wall while standing a good five feet away from aforementioned wall) someone remarked that I didn't look very macho doing this astounding feat-- touche-- and this reminds me (this sentence is so long, why stop now?) last week I saw a guy pull out of his driveway on a unicycle, and it made me want to get a unicycle . . . is a unicycle macho?

Hammurabi's Law Doesn't Apply to Water

My son Alex's kindergarten teacher sent a note home informing us of some inappropriate behavior: apparently, Alex filled his mouth with water from the fountain, and then he spit it on another boy . . . but it's not like you can make the punishment fit the crime-- you can't ban a kid from drinking water, or at least not for long-- so hopefully he'll just stop doing this because it's gross and annoying.

10/6/2009

While I was running in the school orchard last week, I nearly ran into a red fox on the trail-- I was close enough to see the white splotch on the end of his tail before he loped away-- but fans of this blog will remember that last fall I saw TWO foxes in the span of two days, so one fox doesn't really rate a sentence, so I'm going to revise this one: while running in the school orchard I saw THREE foxes . . . and a llama . . . and . . . and Barak Obama and Rush Limbaugh making out behind a shrub.

10/5/2009

I would offer a review of Len Fisher's new book Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, an engaging overview of game theory that doesn't cover much new ground if you've done some reading on this, but does provide lots of excellent anecdotal real world examples, especially in experiment,s the author himself concocted, which often involve pub life in Australia, but why should I offer a review when I don't know if you'll reciprocate and offer me anything in return . . . perhaps I'll do it just this once and test the waters, but if it's not worth it, then I'm not going to continue: I give it seven tits out of a possible nine tats.

Is a Sloth Spooky?

My favorite ride at Knoebels Amusement Park is the Haunted House, as I'm not much for roller coasters (even the kiddie coaster made me green) and my young sons love the haunted house as well . . . Ian was holding on to me for dear life, as it is very dark and spooky in there, with lots of skulls, witches, floating eyes, banging doors, creepy music, talking paintings, etcetera-- the only time the ride loses its spookiness is in the last room, which inexplicably has a tropical theme and reminds me of The Jungle Room at Graceland . . . but the ride is certainly vintage and maybe before Diego kids were scared of the jungle, as they should be . . . we're talking about a place that has fire ants, anacondas, yellow fever, and cholera (and I'm sure kids are scared of Elvis).

10/3/2009

I'm embarrassed to say that my wrist still hurts from an incident this summer-- and if there is such a thing as divine retribution for despicable behavior than it should still hurt . . . after an evening where everyone imbibed a fair bit, and my friend Rob imbibed a bit more than a fair bit, I lost patience waiting for him to get out of the beach house, as we were on our way to see the greatest cover band in the universe, and -- having just read Born to Run and being high on the merits of barefoot running, I said to Dom and Michelle, "I'll get him!" and took off at full speed in my crocs, which was fine for a hundred yards, until I hit a muddy patch of grass in between the sidewalk and our driveway (there was a flood that morning) and my legs flew into the air ahead of my body and I flipped back onto my wrist and it really hurt, despite the beer, and I also got soaked and coated in mud, and so when I ran into the house to tell Rob to get a move-on . . . and also to change my soiled clothes . . . he happened to be coming down the steps and so, in a fit of immature rage, I punched him in the stomach (with my bad wrist) and caught him in the diaphragm, knocking the wind out of him . . . and though I apologized profusely, I still probably deserve the wrist pain for my impatience.

10/2/2009

Petting a baby alligator at Clyde Peeling's Reptiland made me think: "That's surprisingly smooth . . . maybe I would like a pair of alligator skin pants."

10/1/2009

Sometimes the best antidote for a mediocre pulled pork sandwich (provided by some church in Watsontown) is a really good pulled pork sandwich (provided by Ali's caterer).

This Is How They Roll In Watsonville

Apparently, on town-wide garage sale day in Watsonville, PA, it's not only time to sell your old clothes, toys, and furniture, but it's also acceptable to wheel your grill out onto the sidewalk and then cook and sell the old, expired meats from your freezer (but we did get some delicious home-made french fries made by a couple of wheel-chair bound old ladies).

To Spit or Not to Spit

The New Jersey Shakespeare Theater's presentation of Hamlet is fantastic, but it's also a vector for H1N1-- the theater is quite small and no seat is very far from the stage, in fact, we were close enough to see that when you deliver your lines with passion, you spit prodigiously and profusely, and when expectoration is back lit, it's quite impressive and very gross.

9/28/2009

It doesn't look like I'm going to be mentally capable of helping Catherine and her co-coach Lauren with Alex and Ian's soccer team, in fact, it might be better off for the children and my sanity if I don't even watch-- I wish I was more flexible, but I think I have some fascist dictator in me.

9/27/2009

My Achilles tendon doesn't feel like it's connected to my foot anymore.

9/26/2009

My wife calls me "retarded" an awful lot, considering that she's a Special Education teacher.

9/25/2009

Although it makes me look very silly, the Breathe Right nose strip is actually making me sleep better during ragweed season . . . and the alternative (dosing myself with NyQuil) isn't really a viable option because it makes me more retarded than normal in the morning.

Nothing Says Welcome Home Like Giant Wasps

I used to consider turning on the porch light after dark a polite gesture, especially if Catherine was still out, as the porch light illuminates the keyhole . . . but I no longer think this, because for the past two weeks, the light has invariably attracted one to three giant wasps-- which hover, buzz, and stupidly bump into the light and the door-- and if I'm feeling brave then I swat and kill them, but they always miraculously regenerate by the next evening; and though I am loath to admit it, when I got home from the pub last Thursday night, they looked so menacing that I took the coward's way out, and elected to avoid them completely; I entered my house through the side door, rather than fight my way through them.

9/23/2009

After a discussion about food in general (including Michael Pollan and Big Corn) and oranges in particular-- my grandmother told us that back in the day she would receive an orange in her Christmas stocking-- and some gluttonous eating (Cannoli!) I had a most peculiar dream . . . a dream where oranges fell from the sky and then . . . attacked.

9/22/2009

You will meet an old friend, who is now involved in international espionage, and you will become entangled in a byzantine plot with this old friend, and the outcome of this plot will determine the fate of our country and the entire Western Hemisphere, but your old friend will in no way indicate that you are involved in said plot, and you will never find out-- not even on your death bed . . . not even in the afterlife-- how your actions influenced the fate of the world or what involvement you had in the plot, and your old friend will never mention this again for the rest of his/her life.

Don Draper Needs To Use His Words

A combination of allergies, teaching a full week of school, and soccer try-outs made me lose my voice, so Saturday morning I felt like Donald Draper, roaming the house silently while my wife scolded the children for their various infractions (but I certainly didn't look anything like him).

9/20/2009

Though Katherine Howe's novel The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is about witchcraft, it is the opposite of a Harry Potter tale, as it moves at the pace of a research paper-- which isn't surprising, considering Howe is getting her PhD. in American Studies at Harvard; Howe is a direct descendant of Elizabeth Proctor, and the novel flashes from the 1692 witch trials to the present . . . and while it was a little slow, it was detailed and authentic, and I especially liked her essay at the end explaing the veracity of her historical references: I give it seven mandrake roots out of ten.

9/19/2009

The other morning, while I was filling my water bottle at the water fountain, a little sophomore boy walked past, but then I saw his head turn and he said-- with the sincerity and enthusiasm of someone striking oil-- "OOO! Water!" and he attached his face to the shorter fountain and started sucking, this was so pronounced that it was altering the water pressure in my fountain, thus making the pressure of the stream inconsistent, and so I was having a hard time getting the stream of water into the neck of my water bottle, plus I was so absorbed (and disturbed . . . this kid was literally licking the metal) that it was hard to concentrate-- I was wondering if anyone had put their mouth to the taller fountain in the same fashion, but before I was grossed out enough to say something, he popped up, sated, and vanished.

It's Hard to Say Go-Gurt With A Straight Face

It's hard to look like a bad ass when you're eating a frozen Go-Gurt, especially because it means you took the time to think ahead-- that you knew in the past that you wanted to eat a frozen Go-Gurt and so you took your child's snack and put it in the freezer for your own consumption . . .  because there's never a frozen Go-Gurt in the freezer when you crave one and it takes overnight for them to freeze, and then you usually forget to eat them and your kids eat them and then you really sound like a wiener, when you say, "Hey! Who took my frozen Go-Gurt!"

9/17/2009

Finally watched Quentin Tarantino's B Movie parody/homage Deathproof: I can't say that I loved it, although Kurt Russell is entertaining and there are some good stunts, but the dialogue is closer to bad Kevin Smith than bad Tarantino, and bad Tarantino is better than bad Kevin Smith . . . but is good Kevin Smith better than good Tarantino?-- who knows, but the film does have a great 70's look, except for random anachronisms: texting, cell phones, an Ipod-- I'm not sure what's going on with these . . . I'll give the movie 300 horsepower out of a possible 425.

New Song! Dear Ozzy . . .

For several years, my friend Whitney and I have been pursuing the great white whale of novelty songs, an epic entirely composed of lyrics from other songs, and the premise is this: someone (or a group of people) actually listened to what was being said in the songs and followed the advice as if it were gospel . . . and of course, bad things result . . . and this is the result of several recording sessions, with Whitney, and a number of teachers and friends who I will allow to remain nameless unless they want to chime in on the comments . . . you can play the song on the widget to the left (it's called Dear Ozzy (Thanks for Nothing) or --even better yet, you can head over to http://gheorghe77.blogspot.com/ and read Whitney's introduction and the lyrics and an "answer key" of all the bands mentioned-- but first you should try to identify them yourself . . . the version on the internet is very lo-fi, but if anyone wants a better copy, e-mail me.

Energizer Dave

So yesterday I ran a few miles before soccer practice started, and then I ran quite a bit at practice-- I do all the sprints and running to inspire my players (beat the fat man!)-- and then when I got home, Alex wanted to use his new (used) cleats, so I went out and played some soccer with him and Ian, and then I showered, ate a piece of pizza, had a bathroom issue, probably due to the amount of time I spent running around in the heat, and then I went to the youth soccer coaching meeting . . . I was Catherine's proxy, as she is officially going to be the coach, but she had back to school night so she couldn't make it, and I figured they would be going over the rules and procedures and practice schedule, but it turned out to be a coaching clinic as well, and the ageless guy who's been running soccer camps for forty years (Spencer Rockman) was running the show, and apparently we were going to do drills and play soccer for two hours and then have the meeting-- so I had to run home, change out of my crocs, and play several more hours of soccer (and though I should have taken it easy, I couldn't-- once you start running around after a ball, it's hard to stop) so by the time I got home, after nine, I had been playing soccer and running for something like five hours, and I'm worried that at some point today while I'm teaching, I'm going to fall asleep mid-sentence.

9/15/2009

The vocabulary of the recession is creeping into the students' lexicon: last week in my senior writing class, a girl complained that she was in a "toxic relationship."

9/14/2009

In this rather surreal picture Alex drew of our family (sans himself) he portrayed his younger brother Ian as a many armed cyclops, which made Ian upset, but Alex-- always the diplomat-- smoothed things over by telling him "your one eye can find things in the dark and having a hundred arms is great, you can do many things at once, you can play with Legos and draw a picture and play soccer all at the same time."

9/13/2009

Never underestimate the Super Powers that your children attribute to you: I was describing my abortive trip to the East Brunswick Library to my family-- I arrived mid fire-drill so I couldn't enter, a woman needed me to jump her car, and then I dropped my school folder into the book drop slot along with my pile of books so I had to seek aid from a librarian-- but when I described how I had to jump this woman's car, my son Alex thought I jumped her car-- which actually makes more sense, and I asked him if he thought I jumped her car with my car, or if I did it with my legs; he said he thought that I did it with my legs, and I was quite pleased that he thought I was capable of such a super-human feat.

9/12/2009

Some members of my family have remarked that my policy on allowable television viewing is similar to that of a communist dictator's stinginess when doling out toilet paper, and so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when my exceedingly honest son said that he didn't watch the Obama Education speech when they showed it in the school cafeteria-- instead he chatted with his friend, so that he wouldn't "use up all his video watching and he could still watch some at night."

9/11/2009

Absence does make the heart grow fonder: you'd never suspect, seeing our happy family eat Chinese food, that just days before we were close to entering a violent no holds barred death match in our house . . . but all we needed was some time apart, once we all went our separate ways in the morning, to our separate classrooms, we found newfound love for one another when we got home.

One Pill Makes You Larger . . . and One Pill Makes You Italian

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small-- and according to Steve Silberman in his article in this month's Wired magazine-- it doesn't matter if the pills are made of sugar, as placebos are consistently vying with mood enhancing drugs in effectiveness, as long as they are administered by a caring physician, and even the color of the placebo has an effect: yellow sugar pills are the best anti-depressants, red pills are the best stimulant, green pills reduce anxiety, and blue pills make a good tranquilizer . . . unless you are Italian-- why?-- because Italians associate the color blue with vigor and athleticism, as their national soccer team is the Forza Azzurri.

9/9/2009

Something overheard in New Brunswick the other night: "we were so shit-housed, I can't believe we built the entire gazebo . . . and we started at like ten at night!"-- I note this for two reasons 1) I've never heard the words "shit-housed" and "gazebo" in the same sentence 2) gazebo is on my short list of least favorite words, along with "bonanza" and "jubilee."

Amish Market Etiquette

I was sternly reprimanded by a customer at the Amish Market last Saturday, and I probably deserved it . . . but you would have done the same thing, I swear; my wife and I were trying to browse Beiler Dairy Farm's selection of delicious fresh cheeses, but the boys were running amok and I was a little hung-over and not thinking totally straight, and there were all these little sample containers full of cubes of different kinds of cheese-- farm cheese, smoked Gouda, goat's milk cheese, and horseradish cheddar . . . and when I read the words "horseradish cheddar," naturally, without thinking, I reached out and grabbed a cube and popped it in my mouth, and then went back to tending to my kids, but an older guy behind me noticed my breach of etiquette and said, "That's what the toothpicks are for!" and grunted and stomped off, and after a bit of looking, Catherine and I found the toothpicks, intended for spearing cheese cubes, but they were NOT prominently displayed and Catherine said that the last time she was there she grabbed a couple cubes for the kids with her fingers, so I'm thinking the proponent of toothpicks over-reacted a bit-- it's not like I double dipped a chip . . . and anyway, if you're eating any kind of publicly displayed sample food, you're playing Russian roulette with your immune system and you should know that and accept it.

9/7/2009

Neill Blomkamp's new movie District 9 should be a TV show: like the new Battlestar Galactica, the movie uses sci-fi to explore politics, bureaucracy, racism, and the character of someone thrust into a leadership position (but Wikus van der Merwe is no Laura Roslyn, he's pretty much a chipper bumbling idiot) and the first forty-five minutes are awesome-- tense, satirical, and like City of God in their gritty depiction of a shanty town, but then the movie has to end, and it becomes a Hollywood action flick . . . but if it were a TV show, instead of a blockbuster movie, then they could have kept going in the same vein, instead of blowing up things for an hour . . . but what can you do-- except write, produce, and direct your own sci-fi movie?--and it is certainly worth seeing so I give it seven cans of cat food out of a possible nine.

9/6/2009

Another reason not to pay 100 bucks for a Broadway show: these performers are so polished it's not really live, there's little to no chance of improvisation or sloppiness or a major screw-up . . . in fact, it's closer to watching a video, except without all the comforts of home; would you see a band in concert if they sounded exactly like the album?

This Land is My Land, This Land is Methland

So I started this great book by Nick Reding, Methland: the Death and Life of an American Small Town, right? and it was so gripping that I wanted to just read and read and read, so I went and saw my man and then, it was like I couldn't stop reading, like I was a super-reading machine, like I knew the end of the sentence before I started, like a train, like a rolling stone, like a greased up hog on a luge coated with Vaseline, because the story was so compelling, just wild, the ma and pa labs, the single batchers, the superlabs, the Mexican DTO's, the ephedrine laws, the pseudoephedrine chemistry, the ins and outs of the dealers and the traffickers and the narcs and the informants, it was just great, but then it got a little complicated, and I started to slow down, lose focus, get a little edgy, you know? because it was convoluted . . . the political take on big agriculture, Monsanto and Cargill, the demise of family farms, the socio-cultural underpinnings of doing a drug that essentially makes you feel so good that you WANT to work, whether it's meatpacking or agriculture, and the book, there was something wrong with the pages, too much friction maybe, because when I turned the page it was so LOUD, like talons on a chalkboard, like a dentist's water-pick, like a billion gnats in a megaphone and I couldn't read well anymore and I kept seeing severed heads out of the corner of my eye and then, right when I started to understand the drug lobbyists' complicity in the epidemic, I saw a black helicopter hovering above my house . . . they knew I was getting to the truth and they were ready to pounce on me, so I got under my bed and read with my flashlight and finally, finally, I turned that last page and there were no more pages, just a crazy looking picture of the author, one of those pictures where it looks like he's looking at you no matter where you turn, like that Uncle Sam Poster, and that's when I knew I was done . . . and I give the book one trillion canisters of anhydrous ammonia out of one billion gallons of Coleman lantern fluid.

9/4/2009

Alex transmogrified the Sister Sledge chorus "We are family" into a ditty about the long-pig . . . "Eat your family."

Methland

If the Tom Arnold story isn't for you, then perhaps you'd prefer his sister Lori's rise and fall . . . I just learned about her in Nick Reding's new book, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town-- apparently she went from high school drop-out to the nation's most successful meth dealer in several years, buying from enormous amounts of the drug from the Mexican mafia and then building her own super-lab, and laundering her profits with a bar, a car dealership, and fifty-two race horses (plus horse farm, grooms, jockeys, etc.-- hiding drugs in a horse trailer is a great way to smuggle) before it all fell apart and she went to prison.

9/2/2009

For two weeks at Sea Isle City, we watched the same odd scene enacted over and over in front of the life guard stand: the same burly blond wild man would emerge from the ocean, perhaps by kayak, perhaps not, run towards the stand and do his signature move, a forward roll/flip (no mean feat for a guy this size) and then he would talk for a moment or two to the cute female lifeguards, but soon enough he would erupt into a dance/karate routine, complete with moves running from the crane to the sprinkler to the spin and hair flick-- and I have to remind you that this is a big guy, shaggy haired and burly-- and he would continue the dance routine for a number of minutes, one time even dancing his way backwards into the ocean until he disappeared . . . and our kids thinks he lives in the ocean (Poseidon's retarded son?) but we can't figure what his story is, but it has been an added amusing bonus for vacation, and I'll miss him if we're at a different beach next year.

9/1/2009

After a long day of running, skim-boarding, and beach soccer, I made the mistake of complaining about my bad ankle in front of my wife; she showed no sympathy, played the tiny violin, and wondered sarcastically what she should reply to my complaint . . . maybe something like, "I'm so sorry your ankle hurts, do you want me to rub it for you? You're so brave to continue vacationing while injured" but she was punished for her insouciance, the next day at "Boot Camp" on the beach she sprained her ankle, badly enough that the trainer drove her back to our beach house and made her keep her foot in a bucket of ice water until she nearly screamed and we had to take a trip to the medical clinic in Avalon for an x-ray . . . and though we contemplated gettin one of those giant bubble wheeled wheel chairs to get her down to the beach, instead I gave her a piggy back ride, which was fun on the first three trips, but after the pavement got hot and I had a few beers, it might have been ill advised.

Spelling Tarantino Is Hard Enough

In his new movie, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino extends the Indiana Jones quip in The Last Crusade (Nazis . . . I hate these guys) into a tense, rich, satirical, funny, gory, violent and extremely entertaining two and a half hours-- the movie has nothing to do with WWII, it is a thinly disguised Western, with the Jews as John Wayne and the Nazis as Liberty Valence . . . and though the best performance comes from Colonel Landa, The Jew Hunter-- polyglot Austrian actor Christoph Waltz-- Brad Pitt delivers the best line, when he's told, "You'll be shot for that!" and he replies: "No . . . more like chewed out . . .and I've been chewed out before."

Recommended Eating

While we were on the beach, Catherine gave me the rest of her buffalo chicken sandwich and I ate it while standing in the ocean; I highly recommend this.

Bruce Springsteen Was Born To Drive, The Tarahumara Were Born To Run

Part six: so I'm telling my wife about all the new-found knowledge I've learned while reading Born to Run, and I'm especially amped because I've been training barefoot for a few months now (mainly on the basketball court at the gym) and my experience coincides with Christopher McDougall's-- my feet feel better-- and so instead of talking about the book, I'm making grand proclamations about how I'm not going to buy running shoes any longer and I don't really want our children to wear sneakers because I've been observing them while we play soccer on the grass at the pool-- which we do barefoot, of course-- and their running mechanics look very natural and although I think I am making some sort of logical sense, in retrospect, I now realize that what my wife is hearing is: let's send our kids to school without shoes! humans should never wear shoes! humans that wear shoes are stupid! and I'm sort of reinforcing this by saying things like, "Well, you didn't read the book so you can't argue about it, all you can do is listen to me" which is not only an asinine statement, but it is also very poorly phrased (the theme!) and so we had a "discussion" on how I was presenting my ideas and then I apologized and I tried to objectively explain the ideas in the book  and I also told her that I hadn't finished it yet, which makes me think I'm insane because I was making all these grand statements and I hadn't even read the end of the story . . . but now I have, and I highly recommend the book and I'm about to go for a run over to the track, where I will ditch my shoes and see how I fare.

8/30/2009

Alex swam the width of the pool a few days ago in the four foot section (which is over his head) and he used the dog paddle to breathe and the breast stroke to propel himself-- it's as close to drowning as swimming can possibly be, his main problem is lack of body fat . . . if he's not moving forward or paddling furiously, he sinks like a stone; in other news, Alex can ride a two wheeled bike fairly proficiently . . . I have to RUN to keep up with him in the park-- I'm thinking by next summer the kids are going to be on their own in the water and on the land.

8/28/2009

Part five: Born to Run espouses a less is more approach to running footwear, and makes some well researched and valid claims that bulky expensive running shoes lead to more injuries than running with cheap flimsy shoes or with no shoes at all . . . I'm not going to get into it, if you're a runner you should read it, the theme of this serial edition of The Sentence of Dave is: I need to phrase things better.

I Need to Work on How I Phrase Things (Part 4)

Example number four: after I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, I had a meltdown about all the products we were using with corn 2 in them; I freaked my wife out and made her life even more difficult and made her doubt the safety of much of the food we were giving our children . . . and I must admit, I probably went a little overboard . . . especially since there's no way we could feed the entire bloated population of the earth without corn 2 and factory farming, nor can we even afford to switch our entire diet to organic and local stuff, and still have money for the important things in life, like guitars and electronic gadgets.

Live Update from the Beach

Sorry to break the flow of the serial story, but here's the quick report on the Lecompt Show at the Springfield Inn: 1) we got to hang out with him for a while before the show, he talked about the Phillies and their unassisted triple play and how when they play in Avalon they have to lighten up their set and how he plowed into someone while using his cell-phone, among other things (in fact he talked so long we wanted him to stop and get up and play, the drummer was waiting) and Dom said he sounded "slow" while Rob said he "sounded like a million other musicians" 2) Lecompt's brother was in town from L.A.-- he is a studio drummer there and he looks to be about fifty five, so Lecompt's claim that he played with Miles Davis might be true, and he played an insane version of "Wipeout" and the regular drummer joined in-- it was like nothing I've ever heard 3) another special guest took the stage (among many, a local cop sang "War Pigs" and some chick sang "Bobby McGee") and the band actually played "Freebird," and when the solo started the special guest, who we later learned played in Lecompt's band Tangiers in the 90's, played the solo in perfect lock-step with the normal lead man . . . and the band did their usual and played until 2:30 AM, and they are playing again Friday night-- so perhaps one more time before school starts?

8/26/2009

Part three: But I have a wife, and she has to live with me after I read a new book.

8/25/2009

Part Two: Sometimes when I read a book, I get really excited and forget there was ever a time before I had read that book, and want to implement all the ideas in the book immediately.

8/24/2009

Part one: I need to work on how I phrase things.

8/24/2009 Live Update From the Beach!

Yesterday, a particularly tenacious Herring gull, attempting to impress the coaches and secure a place on the 65 man roster, blocked a barefooted punt by yours truly, which knocked him into a tailspin, but the scrappy bird recovered gracefully, and was able to continue flying . . . and his effort severely affected the trajectory of the punt, making it land far short of its target.

8/23/2009

My son Ian, who loves the water and has a different swimming stroke for every animal (the caterpillar, the whale, the shark, the squid) often stays in too long, until his bladder is about to burst, but the kiddie bathroom is a bit dirty for his taste, so he insists on putting his crocs on before he goes, which makes for some good comedy . . . watching a kid who has to pee put shoes on, and yesterday, while we watched, Catherine yelled some encouragement: "hold it, hold it" and Ian looked at her and followed her instructions, literally, and grabbed his crotch.

8/22/2009

Whenever you have a party to get rid of excess beer in your fridge, you end up with more than when you started.

8/21/2009

Next summer, in order for Catherine and I to have some peace and quiet, and in order for the boys to have the activities and socialization they need, the boys are going to camp . . . space camp . . . in outer space.

I'm Sure I'll Pick It Back Up . . . or Maybe Not

I needed to take a break from the sardonic wit of Infinite Jest, lest I hang myself like the author did last year, and so I started (and finished, I raced through it, ha) Christopher McDougall's Born to Run: it is the exact opposite of David Foster Wallace's post-modern masterpiece . . . it is non-fiction, it is inspirational, it is clearly written, it is mainly about the Tarahumara, a tribe of Indians isolated in Mexico's trackless Copper Canyons who are notorious as fantastic distant runners, but it is more philospohical than anything else, and I would highly recommend it, especially if you are mired in the self-reflexive meta-futility of post-modern art, as the ideas in Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen will allow you to mentally transcend your body, instead of dwelling on its slow decay.

8/19/2009

62% of the way through Infinite Jest, which is set in the near future, when each year has its own corporate sponsor (Year of the Depend Undergarments, Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, Year of Glad) and there is a revolutionary new meta-treatment for cancer, the doctors feed the cancer lots of processed food products, encourage the cancer cells to smoke cigarettes and consume loads of Diet Soda, and voila, the cancer gets cancer and dies . . . but the treatment doesn't work on AIDS, because AIDS is a meta-disease . . . and I'm getting sick of reading meta-fiction: I may have to take a break and read something else-- something short and easy-- before I finish.

8/18/2009

When you want to play darts, the standard operating procedure at The Corner Tavern is to trade your driver's license for them-- and hopefully at the end of the evening, you're sober enough to remember to trade the darts back . . . but what if when you ask for your license back the youngster who took it says she can't find it?-- do you get to keep the tattered darts as compensation?-- do you leave, without your license?-- or do you watch the staff search for a while?-- or does someone finally realize that you should take a look at the license they do have . . . which turns out not to be you, but your wife, because she put her license in your wallet two weeks ago on vacation and never removed it, so you handed the bartender THAT license without realizing it, and then when you tried to trade the darts back, she looked for a guy's picture but could only find female license's . . . and so she was worried for her job and you were worried for your license . . . and who solved this mystery anyway, I don't think it was me . . .

8/17/2009

I debuted as a music producer this weekend, and although I wanted to channel the genius of Paul Martin or Brian Eno, or at least wave a gun around like Phil Specter, I ended up mainly getting stir crazy sitting in a chair clicking buttons, but in between the socializing, a diverse crowd (Whitney, Eric, Liz, Mary, Mose, John, Chantal, Keith) laid down a diverse number of tracks: violin, spoken word, melodies, harmonies, screaming, etc. and the final product should be available by Christmas.

Hypocrisy

I had a very interesting dream the other night: I was in a car with some college friends and we got lost near the Philly Zoo and then got involved in a jewel heist and had to bury some loot in an industrial zone in what looked to me like Secaucus, but when I tried to describe this very interesting dream to my wife, she silenced me with my own words . . . she said, "Aren't you the one that always says nothing is more boring than hearing someone else's dream?" and I said, "Yes, but this is my dream" and it was a very interesting dream and she's the one who missed out.

8/15/2009

I know it's a remnant of the agrarian calendar and it fuels tourism, but financially speaking, school recess should be in the winter, not the summer, as it is generally far cheaper to air condition a building (you usually only need to lower the temperature ten to twenty degrees to make it comfortable) then it is to heat a building . . . where in the Northeast you're talking about raising the temperature in the building between 30-60 degrees (I hope this happens for selfish reasons-- then I wouldn't have to pay for air-conditioning and I would also do a ton of snow-boarding).

Special Bonus Sentence!

Anticipating a weekend of recording music with Whitney, I partied like a rock star in South Amboy last night with Ed, Stacey, and Quackenbush (you heard me right-- his name is Quackenbush . . . and oddly enough-- and I'm just realizing just how odd this was-- we had a lengthy conversation about pet ducks and not once during the conversation did I make the connection between the content of what we were talking about and his name) and three things of note occurred: 1) a random guy told me he liked my new glasses and that I look good in them and that he wore the same pair for two years-- not that there's anything wrong with telling a random guy that you like his glasses and he looks good in them-- but still, it's a strange way to strike up a conversation with another dude . . . although when I mentioned this to my wife she called me a homophobe 2) I karaoked "Don't Pull Your Love," a song by Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds that's known for its melodic chorus and three part harmony, but, unfortunately, I am neither known for singing melodically nor for singing harmonically . . . and so I butchered it, but it was 2 AM and although I was pretty embarrassed by the time I was through "singing" it, I'm not sure anyone even heard me 3) when I walked to the Hess Station to buy a tin of chewing tobacco, I walked past "Bourbon Street," which is apparently, judging by the girls standing outside, a strip club and as I walked into the convenience mart an absurdly large breasted stripper walked out, so on my way back I tried to take a closer look at the girls, but while I was ogling I was also climbing over the metal divider between the parking lots and I banged me knee really hard on the top edge but I didn't even look down to see if I was bleeding because I didn't want to look like a wuss in front of the strippers, so I pretended like nothing happened until I was behind the dumpster and then I checked my knee for a large gaping flesh wound, but it was only scraped.

The Top Ten Montreal Expos

For no other reason than it has come up in conversation twice in so many months, here is my list of the top ten Montreal Expos:

1) Tim Wallach-- for his comment on summer in Canada: "I went 0 for four";

2) Gary Carter-- for the perm;

3) Tim Raines-- because doing a little blow won't keep you off this list;

4) Andres Galarraga-- for his nickname, El Gato;

5) Andre Dawson-- for being a triple crown contender year in and year out;

6) Otis Nixon-- like I said, doing a little blow won't keep you off this list;

7) Pete Rose -- he wasn't there long, but he did get his 4000th hit in Canada;

8) Al Oliver-- for the mustache;

9) Jeff Reardon-- for the beard;

10) Vladimir Guerrero -- for the talent and the Hispanic-Slavic name.

Infinite Rest

It's sick, but I've had David Foster Wallace's lengthy tour de force novel Infinite Jest lying around my house for years and years, and I've started it once or twice, but it's daunting, both in style and size (1000 pages plus end notes) but I've become more motivated to read it since he committed suicide last year-- I'm not sure why, but that's the fact-- and now I'm 43% of the way through (easy to compute because it's out of a 1000 pages) and once you get into the groove, kind of like Gravity's Rainbow, the book is a lot of fun: I just finished the tale of Eric Clipperton, the junior tennis player who played all his matches with a Glock 9mm pressed to his temple and threatened immediate suicide if he ever lost a match . . . the kids always let him win.

8/12/2009

Anyone who possesses male genitals might want to stop reading now . . . last week my son Alex was climbing a tree and he learned a hard lesson when both his feet slipped at the same time, and he fell, crotch first, onto a rough branch and then slid down it-- he bruised the tip of his member, bruised it purple, the sight of it nearly made me pass out, but the doctor said as long as he could urinate, it was fine . . . and this incident reminded me of something that happened to me a few weeks ago that was so painful and embarrassing that I guess I repressed it-- because I didn't tell my wife or write a sentence about it, but describing what happened to my son reminded me: I was in my boxers in the bedroom and I leaned over the dresser to look at something on my face in the mirror, and a drawer was slightly open, and this drawer was groin height, and the tip of my member must have slipped out of the fold in my boxers and into the slightly open drawer, and when I leaned in to look at the mirror, I shut the drawer on the tip of my member, and it really hurt and made a little bruise-- and it makes me wonder about two things . . . one, is this punishment for vanity and two, were Member's Only jackets really intended only for those who possessed a member?

Nothing Cheaper Than FREE

Chris Anderson-- chief editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail-- has written a new book called Free: the Future of a Radical Price; it's about how the cost of many products and ideas is essentially moving towards zero, and that the most effective way to deal with this is to round down-- think Facebook, Google, pirated music Ryanair, drinks at Casino's, naked women at strip clubs, Linux, many web applications, and often, even commodities once they become overly abundant-- and not charge people at all, and then make your money in other ways; this interests me because I write this blog for free, of course, and I'm also often hard at "work" making digital music, which I also distribute for free . . . I do it it for the fame (pretty minor) and because it's fun to have a creative outlet that connects people, but I'm also driving the price down of entertainment people pay for, because people have limited time and there is pretty much an unlimited amount of entertainment, so if you're choosing to read this sentence or listen to a Greasetruck song rather than read or watch or listen to something you have to pay for, essentially you are making those people figure out how to compete with FREE, and the only way to compete with FREE is FREE, and make your money elsewhere . . . e.g. you're famous and everyone pirates your music, so you don't make it there, but you can sell out venues that you never could because you're music has become so popular, the trick is to offer FREE product in a market that has been driven down to FREE and then figure out how to make your money elsewhere-- and this sentence has gone on too long, but you can read Anderson's book for FREE on-line, although I recommend doing what I did-- taking it out for FREE from the library (and, of course, FREE isn't always completely free, when you take a book out of the library, it has been paid for by tax dollars, but again, when you divide the price of the book by the number of tax dollars paid by East Brunswick residents to run the library, it's close enough to FREE that our brain just rounds down to zero, and Anderson, who has experience as an economist and a physicist as well as a writer, explains all this much more coherently than me . . . and he's not constrained by a single sentence).

8/11/2009

There comes a time, when you are older and grayer and your metabolism has slowed, that you need to look in the mirror and level with yourself . . . you need to take a deep breath and say: "I need to shell out some cash for a bigger skim board, as the one I have is too small."

8/10/2009

The six most eccentric pitching wind-ups: 1) Luis Tiant 2) Dan Quisenberry 3) Masatoshi Ishikawa's pitching robot 4) J.R. Richard 5) Hideo Nomo 6) Rudy Stein.

8/9/2009

Sometimes, when I'm on the computer and I don't get the anti-bot code correct (that distorted word puzzle that you need to enter into the box in order to prove you're human-- also known as a "captcha") I wonder if I am a replicant.

8/8/2009

You know you had a few too many the night before when you go to pour a cup of fresh brewed coffee and it's way too weak-- in fact, it's completely clear, because you ground the beans, but never transferred them from the little grinder into the coffee machine . . . and so, in essence, you made yourself a nice steaming container of hot water.

8/7/2009 Live from Sea Isle City

Some bad band names: 1) tonight in Sea Isle City at the Ocean Drive Bar (Fun Food and Music), "Burnt Sienna" is playing-- I suppose their name is in the same genre as Maroon 5, The White Stripes, The Black Keys, Goldfinger, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Green Day, Deep Purple, Blue Oyster Cult, Silverchair, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Black Crowes, Yellowcard, etc-- but I think they went for too obscure a shade 2) the other night at the Springfield Inn, Mike LeCompt opened with "Don't Pull Your Love," a groovy song from the seventies by a band that no one could properly name, and so I looked it up . . . and I can see why a one-hit wonder band who knew they were going to be a one-hit wonder band would want every member to get his or her due-- but it's not like they could predict the future, although with the name they chose they pretty much insured their future, but still, you'd think that the band would be more optimistic and at least try to come up with something catchier than Hamilton, Joe Frank, Reynolds & Reynolds (and though the second Reynolds isn't included on the youtube video, it is included on the Itunes MP3 version, which my cousin happened to have on his Ipod).

8/6/2009

Alex has discovered the artifice of modern art, and while he claims that his younger brother Ian draws "real things," he now only works in the realm of the "abstract"-- and it's my fault for teaching him the word-- so while his vocabulary is increasing , his art skills are regressing toward the primitive (and he's quite happy about it).

8/5/2009 Live from Sea Isle City

Some things you don't see every day: 1) two dudes running at a decent clip down the beach, each dude juggling three balls as he runs-- and occasionally, every three steps or so, one dude flips a ball to the other and the other dude does the same, so there is a mid-air juggling exchange, and this occurs without any break in their collective strides, which is quite impressive . . . but I'm not sure if this was flamboyantly gay behavior (not that there's anything wrong with that) or just a couple of circus clowns trying to keep fit 2) a sweaty mesomorphic and hirsute Italian man (yours truly) decides that he wants to swim after his run on the beach, to get near some dolphins, and he decides the beach is deserted enough that he can strip off his shorts and swim in his spandex . . . this was definitely flamboyant behavior 3) the same sweaty hairy man (but with his shorts back on, thank God, but shirtless) walks into the wrong condo unit because he's tired and thought he climbed three flights of stairs when it was only two, sees someone much younger than his wife on the couch, says "Sorry" and quickly retreats.