11/24/2009 TWO YEARS OF SENTENCE OF DAVE!

Today is the two year anniversary of Sentence of Dave, and I would like to thank my fans for their support over the past 730 days, as it is your words of encouragement that have kept me plugging away . . . comments like "this dopey-- even for you" and "typical" and "I find it odd that you own three towels" and "Dave, you're getting sloppy, Earth Day is actually tomorrow" and "So you snookered a couple of teenage girls-- you should be proud of yourself" and "this is the worst sentence I've ever read" and "this sentence is canned" and (from my lovely and always supportive wife) "NO ONE wants to hear about your dream!!!"

Wiffle Fun

I try to run my kids through the usual educational, artistic, and athletic paces-- chess playing, drawing, music appreciation, storytime, soccer and bike riding-- but while I was cleaning up the yard I saw what they'd rather be doing if I left them to their own devices: each of them wielded a thick plastic wiffleball bat, and, without any prior discussion, they began pounding out an atavistic rhythm on the lawn furniture while chanting "Ooga looga, booga looga, omooga looga, ooga looga" and they kept this up for five minutes without fighting, which is the longest time they've ever done anything cooperatively without adult supervision.

Does the Lorax Use TP?

I hate December because I constantly think about all the trees that have been cut down to be used as wrapping paper, which is hardly an honorable way to be used-- to be the thing that obscures the other thing-- and then I think about all the trees I've murdered by assigning essays and it makes me not want to assign any . . . but at least that can sometimes be an honorable way for a tree to die, you might shuffle off this mortal coil as an "A"-- and then, of course, there is the least honorable way of all to exit, unrolled from your tube, desecrated, and then flushed.

Suspicion Haunts the Guilty Mind

Last Friday the English teachers had some fun at my expense: Stacey made an educated guess and decided that I probably hadn't read the email from the principal "reminding" us in a rather stern tone that we needed to check IDs, attend all necessary meetings, give students hall passes before they left the classroom, and not "kill the messenger" when we received phone calls during class from the nurse or guidance or attendance . . . and she was right, I hadn't read this e-mail, and so when Soder remarked that he had received less than usual in his pay-check and I went down to my mail-box to check on mine (greed is partly to blame for my downfall) and I found a letter addressed to me from the principal and it was this exact email . . . addressed personally to me, I fell for their ploy hook, line, and sinker-- and I would like to think that I did not disappoint my audience (who captured my reaction on camera) as I read the letter and line by line refuted each accusation-- "Okay, so I missed a few meetings, but I had soccer!" and "I'm always nice to the ladies from Guidance when they call! In fact, Mrs. Balogh just told me how nice I always am on the phone!"-- until, finally, I decided to write a nasty note to the principal demanding that he high-light which infractions I had committed because it was ridiculous that someone didn't just tell me to my face what I had done wrong and instead gave me a long-winded letter with a host of crimes that I had not committed (or been caught at) and good thing I was too consumed by my the eating of my sandwich to actually go down and deliver said letter because no one was going to stop me from doing so and finally someone walked in who wasn't in on the joke and when I showed her the letter she said, "Wasn't that an email? I got that email," and the gig was up.

11/20/2009

Exciting time at Donaldson Park last night: I walked down there with the boys for a game of game of hide-and-go-seek and we heard the sounds of donuts, peel outs, and power slides coming from the far parking lot-- when we went to investigate the cute blond park jogger said, "he's been doing that for forty five minutes" and so when he sped out of the lot, I jogged down the bike path and intersected him on the road, and he was kind enough to stop and wave me across the street but I STOPPED in the middle of the road (HA HA HA!) and memorized his license plate ( NN 81 9L -- I made mnemonic) and then when the park policeman drove into the park to lock the bathrooms, the kids and I walked over to report the plates, but as we approached his SUV, it started moving . . . but he was inside the bathroom, and so I figured there was someone in the passenger seat inching the vehicle forward, but actually his car had slipped out of gear and was heading on a driver-less collision course with the brick wall of the bathroom-- but first it hit and crushed the metal garbage can, which absorbed the blow, and by this time the ranger had gotten out of the bathroom and was able to jump into the car and put it into park, and it was after this bit of reckless non-driving that we were able to report the reckless driver (and it turns out Catherine also grabbed this guy's plates when he was speeding up and down Valentine Street so he is a menace, but perhaps he will get his comeuppance and hopefully it won't be as bad as the kid in the purple Camaro who sped up and down the streets of North Brunswick when I was a youngster, until that fateful night when neighbors of ours that lived near Route 130 heard intermittent beeping all night long and couldn't figure out why, and it was because the local hot-rodder had flipped his Camaro into a drainage ditch and was trapped inside, slowly bleeding to death while he beeped his horn to no avail).

Stacy Inadvertently Prevents Me From Making a Really Stupid Decision

My friend Stacy is kicking herself, because during a discussion on back-hair maintenance, I told her that it might be time to resurrect my idea for a giant tattoo (the great undersea battle between the squid and the whale) because then I would no longer have to maintain my back hair, as hair does not grow through tattoos, but she said, "Hair does too grow through tattoos!" and I checked and she was right, so getting ink all over my back isn't the solution-- but now Stacey is angry because if she didn't open her mouth, then I would have learned the hard way.

11/18/2009

Sometimes I get so angry because we'll never know what colors dinosaurs were.

I Am a Libertarian Paternalist

Sorry for all the book reviews, but I read a lot when I was in Florida: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness is a good one for people who are disillusioned with the axioms of liberalism and/or conservatism, and the authors offer a third way of doing things, which they (Thaler and Sunstein) call "libertarian paternalism," which sounds like an oxymoron, until you accept their thesis that there is no way to set up a neutral choice situation, and that all choices are somewhat influenced by the context in which they are made (the book begins with an apt example from a school cafeteria-- students most often choose food items that are placed first and eye-level, so how do you arrange the food? do you put the healthiest items there? or the most profitable? or is it fairer to do it at random? no matter what you do, you have an influence . . .) and they explain that for many choices -- in the realm of health care, preserving the environment, increasing retirement savings, etc.-- there are ways to increase people's liberty and freedom of choice while also using defaults to nudge people towards decisions that will lead to better lives and a cleaner planet . . . but honestly, their ideas make so much logical sense that I can't imagine America ever implementing them, we'd rather be mired in an eschatological red state/blue state battle until the end of time, when God's rapture will finally sort out the sinners from the saved . . . that's just how we roll in America.

Fresh Tech . . . Ahhhhh

If this sentence seems especially shiny and wonderful, it is because I typed it on my new iMac, which is utterly beautiful and judging by the fact that it hasn't crashed in the last fifteen minutes and required re-imaging, an unbelievable upgrade over my last computer-- but I will say that it was really weird to cave in and just go buy something without doing months of research, comparison shopping, eBay bidding, etc. because a mac is a mac and it's actually cheaper just to go to the store and show your teacher ID card (for the discount) and just buy it on the spot, as is, and the very, very nice guy at the store (am I going to become nice now that I've got an Apple?) wanted to tell me lots of things and sign me up for Apple classes and help me, but I just wanted my computer and I wanted to say to him: I just re-directed my 16 pin PCI card digital audio converter pre-amp through IRQ line 11 so it wouldn't conflict with my NVIDIA GEForce 9500 video card, which is on IRQ line 10 and seems to have driver problems when you lower the resolution and defer it's power to background processes so that you don't have audio drop out, despite the fact that it's set in a quad core chip set, so just give me my computer and let me figure it out myself.

11/15/2009

Shakespeare wrote the maxim "brevity is the sole of wit" but he had that blowhard Polonius deliver the line, so I don't think Shakespeare believed that at all, because he was never brief, especially not in Hamlet and when you think of witty people, they usually aren't terse like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne, they are usually voluble, like George Carlin or John Stewart or me.

Bee in a Cup

Perhaps it was because of smelling the sandwich stench or maybe, just maybe, it was the voice of God, but while I was building a prop for one of my lessons (a bee in a cup-- it's a rite of passage essay about harvesting honey, and the main character has to get stung numerous times to build resistance before he can take part in the harvest, and so I tell the students that I've caught a bee and I'd like a volunteer-- someone who isn't allergic and won't go into anaphylactic shock-- to be stung in front of the class, and I always get a volunteer and there are always plenty of students who believe I've really got a bee, but I wanted to increase this percentage) and so I had a little paper bee and a semi-opaque cup and I was going to tie the bee to a string and let it hang from the top so it appeared to be flying, and when I walked in the English office to find some string or twine or something and I saw a bunch of yakking women, a voice spoke to me and that voice said: Use Human Hair! and so I asked for a piece of hair and my request was immediately granted and I tied the paper bee to the lid with that tiny piece of filament and it worked like a charm, nearly every student believed there was actually a bee in the cup and the best part about the lesson is that I don't think anyone learned anything.

11/13/2009

Jim Haner's book Soccerhead: An Accidental Journey into the American Game further reinforces what I have wholeheartedly come to believe: there is no better sport than soccer-- and although I can't and probably wouldn't take back the time I spent experimenting with other sports-- golf, football, rugby, mountain biking, road biking, tennis, ping-pong, pong-ping, track, swimming, marathon running, rock climbing, snow-boarding, fly fishing, wrestling, hiking, kayaking, surfing, basketball, skim boarding, and yes, even roller-blading (insert gay joke here)-- I sort of wish that I had just focused on the beautiful game alone . . . I certainly would have saved a lot of money on gear; but the book also presages my future and it might be monotonous and bleak-- in between coaching the eighth grade boys I'll be coaching my own kids on their travel teams, and my '92 Jeep, which is already full of soccer equipment for half the year, will become a full time soccer storage facility for PUGS and corner flags and balls and cones and ripe smelling pinneys, we won't be able to go on vacation or do anything else because the kids will always have games and tournaments and practice and eventually soccer will replace life, and so part of me wonders if my future would be more relaxing, fun, and enjoyable if my kids join the chess club instead (but this doesn't seem likely-- now that my school season is over, my backyard is full of cones and balls and I run a short fun soccer clinic for Alex and Ian every day).

11/12/2009

Greg Grandin's new book Fordlandia recounts Henry Ford's epic attempt to build a model American town and rubber plantation deep in the Amazon jungle, and while their foray is a disaster, it is a valiant disaster-- one in which Ford tried to introduce hygiene, good diet, and economic stability to a disease-ridden, corrupt region-- but the moral of the story is this: once Ford introduced assembly line capitalism and consumption into the world, there was no way to bottle up the genie, and although he failed to "civilize" the jungle, capitalism is doing a pretty good job of it now, and there are huge free trade zone cities in the Amazon, and all the pollution, poverty, waste, and environmental devastation that come with big cities, but since there's nothing we can do to stop this, our only recourse may be to give up and deforest as we please until it is all gone and we have consumed everything green on earth, and then the human race will finally extinguish itself in a blaze of materialistic glory and magnificent and unexpected new flora and fauna will rise from our rotting corpses . . . but until then, live it up!

11/11/2009

Yesterday a teacher thought she discovered the source of the foul stench in the English office refrigerator (a moldy wrap in a plastic clam shell) but she didn't want to infringe on anyone's food rights and toss it (the last time she cleaned, people complained) and so I heroically volunteered to open the container and smell the sandwich and then offer my expert opinion on whether or not the stench was emanating from this particular piece of food-- and so I put the container right under my nose, clicked it open, and took a deep whiff . . . and suddenly I was euphoric . . . light headed . . . I had never felt so alive, the horrific odor raced through my nasal passages and deep into my sinus cavities, and then finally, directly into my brain, it was better than twenty cups of coffee, better than two snorts of crystal meth, it was a mind blowing, life changing smell-- but no one else wanted to smell it, and when I ran to the trash to toss it, everyone in the room yelled, "Outside, throw it outside!" and so I did, but I will always wonder: what have we lost?

11/10/2009

The documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil doesn't just allude to This is Spinal Tap, it is This is Spinal Tap, except that it's "real," or sort of real, because obviously director Sacha Gervasi is as much paying homage to the greatest of mockumentaries as he is telling the story of an absurd (but well regarded in the industry) heavy metal band . . . and if you are a fan of Spinal Tap, then the film becomes weirder and weirder as the scenes grow more literally parallel-- and some are obviously constructed this way: such as the montage of ridiculous Anvil album covers and the knob in the studio that goes to 11, but when the two founding members of Anvil!, who were childhood friends, nostalgically hum the riffs to "Thumb Hang," one of the first songs they wrote together, and the scene happens in a deli, you can't help but think of Michael McKeon and Christopher Guest riffing on "All the Way Home" and it just keeps getting more and more like Spinal Tap-- there is a scene at Stonehenge and a disastrous tour and the drummer's name happens to be Robb Reiner, until, finally, in the last scene (which I won't spoil) you wonder if the whole thing is an elaborate joke-- but apparently it isn't, so sometimes life mimics art, and sometimes art mimics life, and sometimes I think I've seen Spinal Tap more times than is good for me.

11/9/2009

Ian slept on the floor in our room on our vacation in Florida and when I mistakenly kicked the spring door stopper it made a long lasting wacky sproinging sound which Ian took a liking to (Catherine wondered why anything in a bedroom would make such a sound) and then EVERY time he entered or exited the bedroom he kicked it and laughed . . . even at 3 AM when he went to the bathroom, although that time he only gave it a little poke with his toe, so although we were annoyed by the sound, we were impressed with his late night decorum.

11/08/2009

We are back from Florida but our laptop is still broken, so I haven't been following my blog-- but I know you have all been waiting for my son Ian's first experience with chewing gum; we gave him some on the plane ride home because his ears hurt, but he very quickly swallowed it and claimed" it went down the wrong tube and got in my ear."

11/7/2009

It is really hard for a competitive person like myself to "let" my kids win when we play a game, so I have to handicap myself: for example, when we play Hulk Operation, I remove the Hulk's organs with my left hand, which is actually pretty tough, and then if I win, I'm proud of myself, but more often than not, I lose, and I'm not acting . . . I really lost.

11/6/2009

I quit James Ellroy's new book four hundred pages in, which made me a bit sad, but I really couldn't give a fuck what happened to anyone in the novel and reading it was like a second job, and so I started Zeitoun, Dave Eggers' non-fiction account of a Syrian contractor that remained in New Orleans after Katrina hit in order to maintain his properties and equipment-- it's an apocalyptic story that seems to take place in a third world country rather than America, and I highly recommend it: thirty-nine starving dogs out of forty.

11/5/2009

They need to "fall back" earlier-- because the dark morning were absolutely killing me, and then they need to "winter back" another half an hour as well-- once we're inside for the cold season, who cares when it gets dark?

PAH!!!!!!

It is odd that adults don't get together and ban Halloween-- I can't even begin to imagine a more annoying holiday and it all hinges on the complicity of adults: if we didn't buy the candy, create the costumes, and man our houses with free sugary treats, then we wouldn't have to put up with the melt-downs, the pedophiles, the razor blades, the sugar high, the weight gain (because who actually eats all that candy?) and the inconvenience . . . and really, isn't Christmas enough . . . and so I am starting a new organization, named PAH!!!! (Parents Against Halloween).

11/3/2009

Our lap-top caught a virus from the internet (and no, I wasn't looking at softcore pornography, it was actually my wife who did it, when she clicked on "self-cleaning ovens") and we haven't had internet access at home all week; this has made me feel very anxious and disconnected from the world (meaning: I actually have to interact with my wife and children instead of looking up interesting facts and statistics, pirating music, browsing used books, and organizing our Netflix queue).

11/2/2009

I recently read that daydreaming may have important cognitive functions, especially in regards to processing long-term memories and deciding on . . . . what was I talking about?

11/1/2009

By this time, my family and I should be in West Palm Beach, and unfortunately, my laptop died and we lost everything (I really SHOULD back things up) so I won't be able to give you any fresh sentences from the beach (but who wants to hear about somebody's beach vacation anyway) but don't worry there will still be sentences, and although they won't be quite as fresh as usual, they will not be stale either.

10/31/2009

I should really back-up my files more often, I really should.

I Learn A Lesson (That I Should Have Known)

Last Sunday I decided to free myself from the traditional constraints of breakfast (we had a dinner party Saturday night, so there were lots of leftovers) and so I ate a bowl of shrimp salad, a couple of pierogies, and a large slice of chocolate cake . . . and then I went to play soccer: needless to say, the traditional constraints of breakfast are traditions for a reason and I am back to eating a bowl of plain yogurt with grape-nuts in the morning.

10/29/2009

I would like to commend all the people in my life that have made it into a Sentence of Dave-- because I am so self-centered, this only occurs rarely-- most of the time I'm living in my own little world, where Dave is King and his Decrees are Holy . . . so if you penetrated my consciousness deeply enough that I wrote about you, you must have done something extraordinary.

I Issue A Challenge

I am a skeptic of all things paranormal, but I'm willing to keep an open mind . . . and so by the powers invested in me as the author of this blog, I hereby challenge all ghosts, spirits, and other denizens of the spectral world: MANIFEST YOURSELF! MAKE ME BELIEVE!

A Biblical Allusion Illustrated

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Shylock the moneylender explains to his nemesis Antonio that entrepreneurship dates back to Biblical times and he uses Jacob's successful business ploy as an example; in short, Jacob and his uncle Laban were shepherds, and the deal they made with each other was that after the rams and ewes bred, all the "streaked" lambs would go to Jacob and all the white ones would go to Laban-- which would seem to ensure a fairly equal split of the brood-- but Jacob secretly put striped wands in front of the ewes while they were engaged in the act of copulation, and, according to Biblical biology, if you look at something striped while you are engaged in the dirty-dirty, then your offspring will be striped, and (in the Biblical story) that is exactly what happened, they were all "pied," and so Jacob was rewarded for his business acumen . . . this is a tough section of text, but apparently if you draw it, as I did above, the kids really understand and appreciate what Shylock has to say (they liked my graphic so much that they took photos of it with their cell-phones, so perhaps I should make a t-shirt).

10/26/2009

My wife is a great cook, and I am a great eater of what she cooks . . . this is like the zen koan about the tree falling in the forest, except that food tastes better than trees.

10/25/2009

Note to self: the two dollar margaritas at Charlie Brown's on Tuesday nights are worth exactly that.

Dig on This Semi-Historical Trip

So it seems silly to write my typical run-on sentence about James Ellroy's new novel, Blood's A Rover, since his sentences run five words max, but if you feel the need to read a book that's closer to working an extra job, because of the number of plots, the number of characters, the number of betrayals, the number ambiguous motives and the number of pages, and you want to learn lots of subterfuge slang-- the "bagman" and the "cutout" and "giving snout" and you want to travel back to the sixties and meet everyone from Nixon to "the old girl" J. Edgar Hoover to "Dracula" (Howard Hughes, who likes to inject heroin into his genitals) to the members Mau Mau Front, all done Ellroy style, plus his usual host of fictional scumbags, mercenaries, peepers, private dicks, and revolutionary women, then this is the book for you-- but I still liked the non-fiction Nixonland better, during this decade, the times were so interesting that you don't need any conspiracy theories.

10/23/2009

It's gotten cold and one of my favorite things to do when it's cold is put on baggy fleece pants and eat a shitload of food, but luckily I've discovered a new dieting technique; I call it "dieting through better posture" and essentially all you need to do is this 1) NEVER weigh yourself, it's not about what you weigh, it's about how you look 2) whenever you look in the mirror, stand up nice and tall and suck in your gut-- this makes you look ten pounds lighter, so that you can sit back and enjoy winter like any good mammal should.

10/22/2009

So here's my idea for a great party: it's called a "YouTube Party" and everyone who comes is allowed to play one YouTube video and then everyone votes on the best-- so you really have to do some research on YouTube to find a video that's excellent but also a video that no one has ever seen-- and once this preliminary tournament is over, which should take long enough for everyone to get drunk, then the winner gets to be the director for the rest of the night and he can realize his or her own vision of a brilliant viral YouTube video using the people at the party as his "actors"-- I know this is a brilliant idea but i'm giving it away for free here at The Sentence of Dave and all I want is the credit when this becomes a national sensation . . . hopefully this party will come to fruition sooner than my "Survivor Party" idea, where every twenty minutes or so someone is voted out of the party and they have to go hang out a boring designated spot until everyone else is voted out of the party . . . that idea never seemed to catch on, but the YouTube Party is a surefire success, in fact, maybe I'll make a YouTube Video of a YouTube party so people can see how it works (but then at some unexpected point I'll hit an unsuspecting partier in the nuts with a volleyball).

10/21/2009

Although I regard cable television as an evil time squandering monopolistic specter, I may have to get it for social reasons-- we were all having a great time in the new kitchen last Friday when it came time for the Rutgers/Pitt game, and my 56 inch HD television, which I use to watch documentaries and award winning movies and high quality television (such as Battlestar Galactica and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) on DVD, so that I have control over when I watch and don't have to be influenced by commercials (except product placement) was suddenly useless, and we all had to trek out to New Brunswick to see the game, essentially abandoning my wife (but luckily some lady friends came over who didn't care about the game, which assuaged my guilt) and more than anything it just makes me angry that I don't have more control over what I buy from the cable company . . . I would love to be able to buy a channel for a day, or even choose five extra channels beyond 2-13 but apparently everyone wants a hundred channels to scroll through despite the fact that we are all pressed for time as it is and don't read enough or play enough amateur music or spend enough time with our kids or friends or families or travel to Europe enough or cook enough healthy meals, despite all this, no one wants any control over the amount of media that pours into their house and so I'm going to get stuck with the Cartoon network and QVC and the Game Show Channel and a thousand other complete wastes of time that will invade my families consciousness and suck them into a void of pixels.

10/20/2009

So I've been using my the patch of poison ivy on my forearm as a teaching aid (if you get the answer wrong, the threat is that I make you look at it up close, but no one has been subjected to this torture . . . I guess the method works) and it started kind of gross and bubbly, but now it has crossed the line into full suppuration-- I put my arm down on a napkin and I left a wet mark, which is beyond gross and into the repugnant neighborhood, and the pus is matting my arm hair as well, and I can't stop looking at it and in some strange way, I'm going to miss it when it's gone.

10/19/2009

My Asus Gigabyte motherboard has some compatibility issues with my NVidia GE Force 9500 video-card, possibly because the video-card shares an IRQ line with the sound-card, and so I had to restore the Vista sytem to a previous date, lower the resolution and the refresh rate and switch the priority of background services because I was experiencing drop-outs during audio recording . . . and this, cross my fingers, has seemed to work so far; I have also placed three smooth stones from a chicken's gizzard (which I then coated with my own blood and chanted over for two straight hours) inside my DVD drive.

10/18/2009

If you're looking for a drama about a high school teacher that's a little more intense than Welcome Back Kotter (even more intense than Head of the Class!) then check out Breaking Bad, which stars Bryan Cranston-- the bumbling amiable dad from Malcolm in the Middle, as a regretful chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer and needs to resort to cooking meth with a delinquent ex-student (Aaron Paul) to pay the bills and leave something for his family, as his wife, Anna Gunn-- from Deadwood-- is pregant and they also have a crippled son . . . and to add to the fun, Cranston's brother-in-law is a DEA agent; it sounds like a grim show and at times it is, but it's also deeply and darkly funny and there's chemistry lesson in every episode (hydrochloric acid will melt a dead body to jelly but it won't eat through a plastic container!) and so I give it nineteen Erlenmyer flasks out of twenty.

10/17/2009

The past two days my sentences have been egregious, and so to reconcile with you, my loyal audience, I will provide a sexy picture of Farrah Fawcett for you to enjoy . . . despite the fact that she is now food for worms, and her lovely body, which was riddled with cancer when she died, has liquefied by now into a viscous jelly . . . but a very sexy viscous jelly.

Meta Failure

This is hardly a sentence.

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.