2/8/10

Together is a Swedish film about a commune in the mid-seventies, and the moral is that you can't fight human nature: no matter how much of a hippie you, no matter what your beliefs are, no matter how committed you are to changing the world order, your kids will still desire meat (the kids picket for hot dogs in the kitchen one night) and TV and play violent games (there's a great scene where one kid plays Pinochet, the Chilean torturer, and forces the other to "say you like Pinochet!") and adults will desire stability and loyalty and family . . . as Birger says, "It is better to eat porridge together than pork chops alone," and-- like this sentence-- the plot rambles through the lives of all the members of the commune and a few outsiders . . . there's no need to focus on a particular story, it's really more like surreal episode of the TV show Big Brother, but from the seventies and with deeper characters and a nostalgic look that makes it more like an artifact from that era than a film; I give it one congealed glutinous Socialist bowl of porridge out of one, I loved it.

2/7/10

Apparently, high school kids find it really scary and funny if their teacher leaps over his desk and knocks over a chair and a water bottle and a stapler on his way to intercept a note being passed from one boy to another . . . even if it is during the filming of a short film that they wrote in Creative Writing for their "final exam"-- I think they thought I would calmly get up and walk over and demand the note, as I would do if I were playing myself, but what they didn't know is that I was acting-- I was no longer their calm and collected teacher, I was someone else; one guy actually leaped out of his seat when I came charging over, and for the next scene (where I had to take another note-- this wasn't the most thrilling plot) we set up a stool, a stack of thirty books, and a garbage pail for me to run through . . . and now I know why it's fun to be an action hero: you get to knock stuff over indoors.

2/6/10

Missed the turn for Wawa and had to go to Quick Check for coffee, and I'm glad I did because on the register there was a sticker that read: We check ID for anyone under 40 for alcohol and tobacco . . . that's right, if I were buying cigarettes the cashier would have taken a look at me, discerned that I was thirty nine, and then taken a peek at my license to make sure I wasn't artificially thinning my hair so I could buy some KOOLS . . . I suppose you are safe if you exhibit signs of Alzheimer's or wearing a Depends undergarment or have a pock-marked and wrinkled face and a rosacea red nose that can only come from decades of alcohol abuse but otherwise-- because just about anyone can appear to be under forty-- you will be carded at the Quick Check (which I do admire for spelling both words in its name properly, though were are so many trashy variations available, think of the ink they would have saved if they named it Kwik Chek).

If You're Dave, You Need to Know This Shit

Just in case there's some kind of Freaky Friday type incident, and your mind suddenly inhabits my body, here is my mnemonic for remembering which side of each car the fuel tank valve is on: Subaru has an "R" in it and the tank valve is on the right (which also has an "R" in it) and JEEP is spelled with four letters and so is the word "left," and this mnemonic also works with the nautical direction "port," which also has four letters and also means left (so if my JEEP were an amphibious vehicle when it was in the water and I was pulling up to a dockside gas station, I would pull up with the port-side facing the dock).

2/4/10

Alex and I were both occasionally a little lost and occasionally a little antsy during Charles Ross's One Man Star Wars Trilogy, but by the end Alex (who is five) and his dad (who is thirty-nine) had gotten into the groove; it really is a one man show, no props or special effects or costumes, just Charles Ross playing every character from the old trilogy and also providing music and sound effects (I don't know how he does two shows a night, his voice must be ragged from doing Darth Vader and all the lasers and explosions) and his Jabba the Hutt impersonation was priceless, as were his "additions," to the films-- at first Alex yelled, "That's not in the movie," every time Ross made a joke, but then he understood the concept (although I don't think he got the joke at the end, when Vader took his mask off and Luke said, "You're not black?") and after it was over Ross gave a sneak preview of his new show: One Man Lord of the Rings, and his Golem was spot-on . . . and he certainly needs to start doing a new show, he's been doing his one man Star Wars performance for the last SEVEN years.

2/3/10

My wife thinks we should spend some money on painting our house, but I think we should spend some money on a hollow-bodied guitar; my rationale is this: if we paint the house, our house will look nicer and then we will more likely be robbed . . . so its better for our house to look a bit moldy, but be full of cool stuff (but she's not buying it).

My Cast For Catcher

Now that J.D. Salinger is finally dead, perhaps his family will allow a movie to be made of The Catcher in the Rye, and I'm assuming this will take a LONG time to get sorted out, and so the digital technology will be such that any actor from any time period will be available . . . so here is my star-studded cast-- but you have to imagine the person at the proper age to play the role-- for Holden Caulfield I will go with Arrested Development age Michael Cera; Alan Ruck (Cameron Frye from Ferris Bueller's Day Off) will play Ackley; young Brad Pitt for Stradlater; John Malkovich for the wise but creepy and perhaps latently gay Mr. Antolini; Lindsay Lohann for Phoebe-- briliant choice both for the red-hair and her fall from grace; East Brunswick's Jesse Eisenberg for Holden's younger (and dead) brother Allie; Gabe Kaplan as Old Spencer; Risky Business era Rebecca De Mornay as Sunny; and Johnny Depp for his cool and affected older brother D.B.

Olympic Snowboarding Theme

Today my blogging efforts are here; I wrote an Official Olympic Snowboarding preview for Gheorghe: The Blog, which mainly consists of rambling commentary, a Greasetruck rendition of the Olympic Theme Song (for Snowboarders)-- you can play it if you click over on the left--and the observation that Shaun White (otherwise known as "the flying tomato") looks a little like Carrot Top (and they both have vegetable nick-names) . . . so if you have a few minutes, check out it out, and if you tool around a bit on Gheorghe, you'll find more absurd Official G:TB Olympic Previews.

1/31/10

This is a very subjective review, but the new Neon Indian album "Psychic Chasms" seems to be tailored exactly for my brain-- it's a collection of short, psychedelic heavily filtered pop-like compositions that I can't stop listening to, it's like Ween doing even better drugs than Ween has access to, it's like the band channeled my thoughts and set them to music . . . so I don't know if this review is helpful, but The Week gave the album four stars and those people over here agree, so it's not like I'm crazy or something.

Some Cars

More Malcolm Gladwell tidbits from What the Dog Saw: in most cities, five percent of the cars produce 55% of the carbon monoxide pollution; most cars, especially newer models, run quite clean, but "kit" cars, older cars, and dirty engines can produce carbon monoxide emissions which are one to two HUNDRED times more than standard-- so the pollution problem isn't so much about everyone driving, it's about a small group of people driving a small group of annoyingly filthy cars.

1/29/10

According to a Malcolm Gladwell in his new anthology What the Dog Saw (and also according to the cities of Denver and St. Louis) it is easier to cure homelessness than to manage it; in other words, giving the most incorrigibly recalcitrant homeless people their own apartments-- for free-- and providing one counselor per ten homeless people to check up on them and aid them in gaining a foothold in society is far cheaper than paying the medical bills they generate because of frequent ambulance rides, detox, dialysis, pneumonia, and head injuries (they are constantly being brought in to the emergency room, where they are given treatment despite their inability to pay . . . thus how Reno's Million Dollar Murray earned his nickname) but this solution often meets with outrage from the general populus, despite its cost effectiveness, because it just doesn't seem fair that someone might work three jobs in order to make ends meet yet someone who contributes nothing to society gets a free ride . . . but the store owners in Denver were quite happy when the crew of chronic inebriates (whose drink of choice was mouthwash) were no longer a permanent fixture on Sixteenth Street.

1/28/10

I hate our new coffeemaker, though it looks much nicer than our old coffee maker-- which was a cheap piece of junk, and it had no built -in grinder, so we used a little grinder, which wasn't very loud; this new machine is fancier, and it has a built-in grinder, but the problem with this is that the built in grinder gets wet from condensation every time you make coffee, so you really need to clean it far more often than the old combination, and it sounds like an airplane taking off . . . so in essence, our upgrade was a downgrade.

1/27/10

Good thing there were witnesses: after eating most of my apple last Friday, I announced to Stacy and Rachel (that's right, go ahead and ask them; they will confirm it!) that i was going to throw the core over my head, without even looking first, and it would drop into the wastebasket, which was probable twelve feet behind me (but guarded by the mini-fridge and the table with all the food prep stuff) and Rachel said, "You'll splatter it over everything," but she was so wrong, because I dunked it.

1/26/10

If you want to watch something weird and artsy, with shades of Welcome to the Dollhouse (a world where children are more adult than the adults that "care" for them) then check out Me and You and Everyone We Know: Miranda July (who actually is a performance artist) and John Hawkes are both incredibly difficult not to watch-- they are visually compelling as well as bizarre, and there a few priceless scenes that are nothing like anything you've seen . . . I give it 6000 punctuation marks out of a total of 8000.

1/25/10

I know it's crass, but sometimes when I'm about to complain about something trivial, I think to myself: what do you have to complain about? at least you don't live in Haiti! and then I move on with my life, suddenly feeling fortunate . . . but I wonder, where do Haitians think of when they want to feel fortunate . . . stop complaining, at least you don't live in a box on the surface of the sun?

Seamen Nailing Things

You know it's going to be a good history book when you read a sentence like this: 

"Among the able seamen, the initial going rate was one ship's nail for one ordinary fuck, but hyper-inflation soon set in"

and this sentence was written by author Richard Holmes, while describing Lieutenant James Cook's expedition to Tahiti in his book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

1/23/10

In the Loop is a political satire with enough profanity rival David Mamet's Glengarry Glenross and enough droll comedy to rival the original version of The Office; it satirizes two governments (Britain and America) in the midst of the most monumental decision making process-- the the decision of whether or not to go to war; the plot is Byzantine and the language dense and allusion filled (Catherine stopped watching because she said it didn't seem like they were speaking English) but when the Prime Minister's angry Scottish spin master refers to opera as "subsidized foreign fucking vowels" and threatens to "hole punch" someone in the face, it really doesn't matter if you know what 's going on: I give it 11,000 troops out of 12,000.

1/22/10

I was rushing to finish "making water" because the bell had rung and I needed to get to class, and in my rush, I somehow flung my paperback copy of Much Ado About Nothing into the urinal, but it didn't get particularly soaked with urine, and so-- thinking of the title of the play-- I pulled it out, wiped it on my pants, and went to class, and my students were none the wiser.

Update!

Click here for the news story about what I witnessed yesterday-- see the sentence below-- the guy who I watched jump off the edge of the bridge over the Turnpike in order to elude the police broke both his legs!

1/21/10

While driving home from Monroe yesterday after a Craigslist purchase of a desk for Alex (which filled the back of my Jeep because there was also a hutch, which I balanced on top of the desk) I came one car away from being smashed: it was just before the Hilton towers on Route 18, where the road divides, and a white four door car raced by me on the right, rolled onto two wheels, spun out to the left, parallel to the oncoming traffic, smacked the side of a pick-up and then crashed into the divider . . . and by the time I stopped my car and took a breath, the lunatic driver extricated himself from the airbag, leaped from car, ran back across Route 18 and jumped off the edge of the bridge to whatever lay below, and, in the meantime, a police car pulled beside me on the right and a cop jumped out and pursued the insane driver/bridge leaper, and the guy who was clipped by him in the pick-up also pursued him, but when they reached the edge of the bridge they just stood there and looked down, so I'm assuming it must have been a steep, rocky, impenetrable drop that only someone who was wanted by the law would chance; I took the scene in for a moment and then slowly rolled past, feeling sorry for the people farther behind, who would be stuck on the exitless stretch of 18 for the long time it would take to sort out the mess.

1/19/10

We have the screen saver on our new iMac hooked into iPhoto, so it shows random pictures throughout the day, which is cool, except when it selects shots I took of our old refrigerator for Craigslist.

It's Cool, Man

Alex had the misfortune of having two accidents at school in one day: 1) he misjudged the consistency of his flatulence 2) he soaked himself with his own urine . . . and I was able to keep my cool about this-- because, honestly, what can he do?-- and so I tried the tact of reminding him that all the other kids in his class saw this, and I tried to make him see the embarrassment of having to change into his "emergency clothes," but apparently, these days, kindergarteners are pretty understanding when it comes to bathroom accidents, because Alex reported that, "no one laughed at me at all, it happens to everybody."

1/17/10

Something I am proud of: in twenty two years of driving, I have never run out of gas (I mention this because my wife told me a teacher at her school ran out of gas the other day . . . how does this happen in central New Jersey, where there is a gas station every twenty five feet or so?)

1/16/10

In Benjamin Phelan's essay "How We Evolve" (another from the collection The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2009) he explains how scientists have changed their view about human evolution: once it was thought that we were at the end of the line, that because of medicine, longevity, the end of polygamy, equal rights, and ample opportunity to mate, human evolution had all but stopped, but now that DNA analysis can trace alleles in populations ancient and modern, scientists have found that natural selection is still alive and dynamic in human populations . . . and one of the most studied mutations is that of lactose tolerance, which was non-existent in 5000 year old German skeletons, at 30% rate 3000 years ago, and nearly (but not quite, thus the need for Lactaid!) ubiquitous now . . . so the real question is, what will we evolve into and how will that creature regard us?

1/15/10

At some point during every successful rock band's existence, they underwent a radical change, a phase change, and it must have been wild and it must have led to the downfall of a number of rock stars; I am talking about the night where the band switched from setting up their own gear-- assembling the drums and cymbals, tuning guitars and the PA and effects boxes and mixing boards and cords and changing strings and generally sound checking the rig-- to allowing their newly hired roadies to set everything up . . . this must be when bands realize they've "made it," when they're sitting around backstage while other people do the worst part of the musical performance; why might this be the beginning of the end for many rock stars . . . more time to do heroin.

1/14/10

If you miss old trippy Ween, check out Animal Collective's album Merriweather Post Pavilion-- it sounds like the album cover (above).

1/13/10

I feel sorry for businessmen because there's no way they can live up to the standards George Clooney sets for them: in the looks, coolness, and vocal delivery department there is no one else who better portrays the company man (and I'm glad he hasn't made it a habit to play high school teachers . . . I've only got to compete with Gabe Kaplan and Howard Hesseman) and he pulls it off again in Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, which has enough laughs to temper a grim topic; Clooney is an expert at curtailing redundancies in human resource departments . . . he travels around the country and fires people; the film is a cautionary tale and it features the reactions of real people interspersed among the actors, which is powerful in itself; the moral of the tale is both existential and inspirational (and partly delivered by Sam Elliott in a great cameo) and so I give it 8 million miles out of a possible 10 million.

1/12/10

Intelligence is immunity, stupidity a contagion.

1/11/10

Fans of this blog will be happy to know it is that time of year again . . . that special time when the thermometer remains stubbornly below the freezing mark, triggering some strange reaction inside my driver side door that freezes the locking mechanism, forcing me to get in through the passenger side door and then gracefully leap over the center console into the driver's seat each and every time I get in my car (and I have to do the reverse when I get out, which is a little scary if I get into an accident . . . there's only one way out).

1/10/10

Ian has been very polite in the mornings lately; he has encouraged me to have a "happy holiday," a "happy new year," and (most poignantly, as I left the house for work) a "good winter."

1/9/10

The scene is the dinner table: Ian says, "Is this bad to say-- the god is dead?" and Dad says, "Yeah, you probably shouldn't say that, although Nietzsche said it," and Alex says, "Who is that, one of the kids in your class?"

1/8/10

One of my favorite things to think about is that brief (archaelogically speaking) period of time when modern humans shared the European landscape with Neanderthals . . . maybe 25,000 to 30,000 years ago . . . you could be walking along the plain with your fellow hunters and see off in the distance a similar group of creatures, doing similar things, but so alien, so distant, so different . . . but maybe not so alien to be repulsive, if you know what I mean (Captain Kirk knows what I'm talking about).

Don't Read This Post (or Watch This Movie)

Two works that will make you feel bad about being a member of the human race: 1) Hunger, the story of IRA leader Bobby Sands' hunger strike to gain political concessions for Irish prisoners-- though the movie is a bit one sided and hagiographic in its portrayal of the Irish prisoners in The Maze . . . it forgets to mention that the IRA bombs were often blowing up innocent people, but that is another story for another film . . . and I'm sure that will be an even worse indictment of humanity  2) the first three essays of The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2009 (you can guess the tone from their titles . . . Faustian Economics, The Ethics of Climate Change, and Is Google Making Us Stupid?).

1/6/10

While driving to the Snydersville Diner-- on our FAMILY vacation-- Catherine noticed a billboard that read "Spread Eagle Realty: a full service real estate firm" and I've done some research and this is not a hoax, Spread Eagle Realty is a venerable institution (established in 1989!) and they aim to provide their customers with the highest level of professional experience when "transacting real estate" . . . I assume they mainly sell brothels, bordellos, and massage parlors and you can imagine the occasional misunderstandings about the name, because if I came home and said, "I just met the woman at the house and I like her position, you know Spread Eagle really does the job," my wife would throw a frying pan at me.

This Movie Should Not Be Rated G

Don't believe the previews, Up is not a movie to see with your kids (only because it's disturbing for them to watch a grown man cry).

1/4/10

If it were possible to patent a party concept, our neighbors should patent this one: on New Year's Eve they had six or seven families over, all with youngish kids, and they set their clocks ahead so that all over their house, at 8 PM they would read midnight, and they recorded last year's ball drop in Times Square and put it on their TV (there was a moment when someone paused the countdown so that all the kids could get organized, but no one suspected a thing) and we convinced all the kids that it was WAY past their bedtime (in my opinion, this is even better subterfuge than Santa Claus) and so not only was it the first time my kids rang in the New Year (with noisemakers, lots of popping balloons, kiddie champagne, and plastic wrap to pop . . . the noise made me want to curl up into the fetal position under the piano) but I also managed to tie one on from 5 PM to 9 PM and pretend that I made it to New Year's as well . . . which I haven't done since we were in Bangkok seven years ago.

He Turned Them Into Newts! It Gets Better . . .

War with the Newts by Karel Capek falls into a small but illustrious category: Super Excellent Books I've Read by Czech Authors (the other five books that reside there are Kafka's The Castle and his parallel work The Trial, Josef Svorecky's The Miracle Game, Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk, and Milan Kundera's The Joke) and I would have never heard of this one if it wasn't for a random recommendation by a friend over at Gheorghe (thanks Zoltan!) and I'm not sure how I made it nearly forty years without reading this . . . it's about a race of intelligent salamanders that undergo a population explosion due to the meddling of humans and the social, political, and geographical consequences of enslaving these newts so they can perform undersea construction, and then eventually educating, arming, and trading with the newts in a natural progression of amphibious advancement until-- in the last four chapters-- the title finally becomes an inevitability; the book was published in 1936, and it satirizes the post World War I political milieu as well as just about everything else, and it is loads more fun the Brave New World, and satirical like Vonnegut, and humorous like Charles Portis and David Foster Wallace, and-- as Monty Python can attest-- no matter how many times you hear the word "newt," it's always funny.

1/2/2010

We survived our first ski trip with the kids-- including packing (snow pants, gloves, hats, long underwear, fleeces and lots of socks); a 12 degree day with high winds (we went to an indoor water park-- it was even pretty cold in there, but they had a cool tube slide and Alex got hit with the 500 hundred gallon water drum and it pulled his bathing suit down); their first ski lessons; three nights paired with the kids in double beds, and driving home in a blizzard-- but in the end it will all be worth it, because our kids will be proficient skiers and what could be better than that . . . they will addicted to a sport that is not only dangerous, expensive, and contingent on the weather, but also may well disappear with the advance of global warming.

A Very Contextual and Very Specific Resolution

Happy New Year . . . and, in the spirit of the future, I'd like to come clean about the past: that apt end of the year quote I posted yesterday was not said by Yogi Berra; I made it up, and it actually doesn't make sense at all, not even in a Yogi Berra sort of way (unlike the unerring logic of this Berra maxim: "Nobody goes to that place anymore-- it's too crowded") and so I'd like to apologize, and you'll be happy to know that I've made a New Year's Resolution and it is this: in 2010, I pledge to try my best not to invent quotations and speciously attribute them Yogi Berra, thus denigrating his good name.

Yogi Guru

Another perfect sentence not written by me, and an apt one to end the year on-- this one is attributed to the timeless quipster Yogi Berra: "I'll tell you about the future tomorrow."

A Sentence in Which Dave Does Not Plagiarize

Here's a perfect sentence that I wish I could claim as my own (and honestly, if I had flat out plagiarized it, you probably wouldn't have known better, and the guy who said it-- film producer Samuel Goldwyn-- is dead, so I very well likely could have gotten away with, but I've decided to do the right thing and give credit where credit is due) and so here it is: "Anybody who goes to see a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined."

Remaindered

Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder is only worth reading if you like movies like Adaptation: on the surface, the book is a compelling read, and it's hard to predict the twists and turns produced by the narrator's damaged mind, and it's got a great droll British sense of humor about it . . . but as you read it, you will start to wonder if the book is not actually about the events it delineates, but instead about fiction itself, and reading specifically, and this might ruin any enjoyment you get from the very strange story that the narrator tells about his mysterious incident and the large "settlement" that he receives because of it; I'll give it seven and a half million pounds out of a total of eight and a half million.

No Idle Eskimos

It takes a long time to build an igloo.

Canker Diet

Your body works in mysterious ways: just before break I wished that I could lose a few pounds because I knew of the holiday gluttony ahead, but of course, I didn't act on this wish-- I just hoped it would come true, and, in a way, it did, because I got several horrifically painful canker sores under my tongue and was unable to eat anything but yogurt and noodles (you should have seen the spread of cookies, cake, cupcakes with bright red hyper-sugared icing, and candy that I ate NONE of, despite being within arm's reach of these goodies for several periods-- normally I would have DESTROYED a table full of food like that) and so I lost five pounds (which I'm sure I've gained back by now, but still, at least I'm breaking even).

R.I.P. Celebrity Hailing From Edison

We were discussing the death of Brittany Murphy in the English office the other day-- she was raised in Edison, New Jersey-- and the impact a celebrity's death has on people, and I decided that there is no particular celebrity, no matter how much I appreciate their art, that would make me sincerely grieve if they kicked it-- unless I happened to be friends with them (and I am not friends with any celebrities) and while I might pre-emptively miss the future films, music, paintings, cartoons, and/or books they were going to produce, but usually, if I already like a celebrity, their best years are behind them (and, as I wrote earlier, it might actually pique my interest in them: David Foster Wallace's suicide didn't make me sad, but it did make me read 680 pages of Infinite Jest).

Merry Buy-A-Bunch-of-Shit-We-Don't-Needmas

In the spirit of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, I promise to reduce my cynicism by 80% by the year 2050, but until then: Merry Christmas and may the New Year bring even greater tidings of energy use and materialism . . . perhaps this will be the year when our economy gets humming again and we start consuming an even greater amount of the earth's resources.

What Does This Album SOUND Like?

Just a taste of some of the worst album art of the year, as chosen by Pitchfork-- if you have an appetite for more, go here.

Dave Fishes For Compliments (and Catches Flak)

So here's what happens when you fish for compliments: the other day when I went to the doctor's office for a physical and some vaccinations, the doctor noticed the gross skin flap growing above my eye, and before I knew it, I had agreed to let him stick a Novocaine needle in my eyelid and snip off the flap-- and, despite my anxiety, this minor surgery went quite well-- minimal bleeding and hardly a bruise-- so the next morning, when I walked into the English office, I asked the teachers in there if they noticed anything different about my appearance-- forgetting that I hadn't shaved for a few days and I hadn't had time to wet my hair that morning and I hadn't showered since the morning before-- and my friend Stacey said, "Catherine kicked you out of the house, and you slept in the car!" and someone else said, "You're growing a beard," and someone else said, "You're not combing your hair ever again" and after everyone had a good laugh at my expense, I had to point out that the skin flap was gone . . . and then Stacey confessed that she felt a pang of regret for a moment after her witty bon mot, but then she remembered that one Friday when she was dressed casually, and I told her it looked like she was getting ready to do some work in her shed (or maybe I told her she looked like a mechanic, I can't remember) but once she remembered that, she didn't feel bad any longer.

Dave Is Ambitious (For a Moment)

While I was shooting baskets at the gym, I decided on a radical plan of action: I would gradually become a LEFTY . . . I would start doing EVERYTHING left-handed and I would research handedness and keep an account of my journey from right-handedness to left-handedness and the effect it had on my personality,  my brain and my coordination (and perhaps it would even lead to me reverse aging, it might have a "fountain of youth" effect) and then I would write a fascinating non-fiction book about handedness in general and my own quest to reverse my brain's predilection, but after a few minutes of shooting baskets left-handed the ambition went away, which is probably why I only write only one sentence a day-- mainly with my right-hand.

Rhetorical Inoculation

I got into a debate with a student about vaccines the other day in class (because I mentioned I was getting my swine flu and tetanus shot) and I became a bit passionate about the topic, which is always embarrassing-- I try to remain as neutral as possible about most things-- but I ended up asking the class to raise their hands if they were for polio and the death of millions of children, and then I asked the class who was against polio and the death of millions of children-- but I got my just desserts, as my arm really hurts where I got my tetanus shot (but at least I have no chance of getting lock-jaw).

The Radical Elvis

I finished my first Slavoj Zizek book the other day, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, and now I need to read seven other books to figure out what he was talking about (I guess, like most other humans, I need to brush up on my Lacanian and Kantian semiotics) but though his ideas are radical, he's also pretty fun to read in the brief moments you understand him (he's been called "the Elvis of cultural theory") and his main point is that the world global system is not actually capitalism, because every time it melts down, tons of state money is poured into it, and the title indicates how unified we are in this-- he illustrates that the language of post 9/11 (the tragedy) when the nation was unified against terrorism is similar to the language used when the nation bailed out the banks (the farce)-- George Bush, Obama, and corporate America were all on-board-- and we are quicker to galvanize in order to save Wall Street than we are to confront dire environmental and poverty problems . . . and that to combat this attitude there needs to be a radical and violent shift left, because the left is not the left, and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is not even a threat, and he sees this as true democracy, but realizes that no democracy allows power to the people until they are divided into the liberal and hedonistic intellectuals, the fundamentalist populists, and the outcasts (who resort to religion and gangs and such) and once these people are at odds with one another and have no common space to meet and cooperate, then the government and corporations and rulers-- the hegemony, he calls it-- can get down to business without much conflict from the populous . . . or that's what I got from it.

Half Moon + Half Moon = Full Moon

Just when I'm about to kill my son Alex (his teacher sent a note home because he mooned some kids in the hallway . . . he thought it would be funny . . . and on top of this, lately he's a had a bad attitude and he's been fighting with his brother non-stop) he figures out how the commutative property of addition operates, all on his own-- it's like he knows when he needs to do something really cute or clever to avoid being thrown into the wilderness.

Sexism and Spiders

I was really the woman of the house Monday night: I cooked dinner for both my wife and the kids (Catherine was at physical therapy) and I dealt with Alex's bathroom issues and, worst of all, I killed a giant hairy wolf spider which appeared in the middle of the playroom . . . when Catherine got home she was so pleased to have missed it all.

Dave Can Text!

I had to call my father's secretary to tell her my e-mail address so she could send me a document to edit for him, but when I called she said, "I'm at the dentist, could you text it to me" and I was able to say, proudly, YES I CAN.

First World Problems

Ian woke me up at three in the morning because one of his Spiderman socks slipped off while he was sleeping and his foot was cold.

Bored? Broke? I Have a Solution . . .

The unemployment numbers created by this recession are scary, but I feel better when I remind myself that as long as people keep having unprotected sex, my fellow teachers and I will always have work (and when you're out of a job, what else is as cheap and fun as unprotected sex?)

Magical Parenting Moment . . . Apocalyptic Duet Edition

One of those magic moments with my son that makes all the fecal accidents, loss of sleep, stubbed toes on stray toys, time, money, and struggles with car seats worth it: I was playing that old song "End of the World" (why does the sun go on shining . . . why does the sea rush to shore . . . don't they know, it's the end of the world because you don't love me any more-- bonus points if you can name who originally sang it) and the song is slow enough and the lyrics are simple enough that Alex started singing along while he was playing with his Legos and after two repetitions he had the lyrics memorized (remember when your brain actually worked?) and so he came over next to me (I was reading the lyrics and chords on the computer in the kitchen) and started singing along, so I turned on the iMac's microphone on the and captured an impromptu duet with him . . . but I hope he doesn't start singing the song at school because it is really, really a bleak tune.

Paradoxical Economic Rambling

I should not be the one to point this out, but no one else has: there is an ironic paradox inherent in this economic meltdown because the very thing our government has encouraged and subsidized-- home ownership (how is it subsidized? tax write-offs for property taxes and mortgage payments, tax breaks for capital gains on primary real estate . . . how is it encouraged? the Bush and Clinton administrations pushed banks to offer loans to higher risk applicants and allowed them to offer complex mortgage products and then allowed mortgages to be bundled into tranched funds so everyone could get in on the mortgage funds) has now collapsed, but this was the thing that the was supposed to be the safest way to achieve the American Dream, buy a house and pay for it, and so now that it has collapsed and the foreclosure rate is high and the demand for housing is low because the market is flooded because so many people need to unload mortgages they can't afford because of high unemployment which was caused by the subprime loans to begin with, and we won't pull out of the recession quickly because we are a nation of homeowners, and in comparative studies, nations with lower home ownership weather recessions better because their workforce is more dynamic and liquid, and not locked into areas without work because they can't sell their houses, but since so many of us are home owners who can't afford our homes but can't move to find work because we can't sell our homes, the crisis is feeding itself but I'm not sure why an English teacher is pointing this out, although maybe it is because I can think about the crisis in a more detached manner because my job is relatively safe.

Absolutely

On the way into Highland Park, we drive past the VFW and there are two old Howitzer cannons in front of the building and we pass these things often enough that my four-year-old son Ian took notice of them, but I had no idea what he was imagining until the other day, when he asked me, "Daddy, are those guns there to protect the planet?"

Dave Finally Comprehends His Own Blog Title

Although I'm an English teacher, I'm pretty slow on the uptake when it comes to puns and symbolism (it took me years to figure out that the Geico lizard was a gecko . . . get it? Geico . . . gecko . . . they sound similar) and so I just realized the ironic pun in the title of my blog: I have effectively sentenced myself to write exactly one sentence per day for the rest of my life.

Right Back To It

I knew our two-day respite from the kids was officially over once we started loading them into the car-- I had to turn off the Howard Stern Show before the boys heard something they might repeat, and, once again, found myself struggling with my fucking nemesis . . . Ian's car seat, the belt never threads through cleanly and it constantly has to be pulled back in to release the mechanism that allows it to stretch long enough to reach the seat belt socket, which is difficult to reach because you're leaning over a child and the car seat, so even though I turned the Howard Stern off, the kids still heard things they shouldn't have-- but instead of coming from the satellite radio, they came from my mouth (and then to really cement our return to reality, Ian peed in his bed).

Trip to Tuckerton

Things we saw on our weekend trip to Tuckerton (without the kids): three bald eagles, the Saturday bluegrass jam at Albert Hall (highly recommended-- for five dollars you get to watch hours of bluegrass music, mainly played by really old Piney dudes who have been gathering for decades . . . lots of banjo and fiddle and mandolin and songs about old times and adultery-- you'd never know you were in New Jersey) Batsto Village-- a restored village in the middle of the Pine Barrens that once produced bog iron and glass-- Allen's Clam bar which has the best clams casino I've ever had, the Pine Barrens themselves, which are huge, the largest tract of forest on the East Coast from Boston to Richmond, again, you'd never know you were in New Jersey; things we didn't see: a Pine Barrens tree frog (too cold) and the Jersey Devil (too fictional).

It Tastes Better If It's Secret

So if you are anything like me (clueless) then you probably didn't know this, but I occasionally learn things from my students, and so I will pass on my new, hip, knowledge: Jamba Juice has a "secret menu" containing items with salacious, unhealthy names such as "Dirty Orgasm" and "Thank You Jesus" and "Fruity Pebbles" and "Penis Shooter" and "Pineapple Anus" (actually I made the last one up, but the rest are real) and while the employees have the recipes for all of these, they will not mention them or answer any questions about them-- but they will make them for you if you ask . . . I'm not sure if you have to whisper and I'll probably never be brave enough to order one of these, but it's still a great marketing campaign .

It's Hard to Pee Standing Up

This morning I observed how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree: my son Alex came out of our bathroom and said proudly, "I got all the pee in the toilet" but then he couldn't leave his story at that, and so he elaborated . . . "well, actually, I was getting some on the side so then I pulled it over a little so it was hitting the water but then it was going too low, so I had to move it up a little higher, and THEN I got it all in," and, just when I thought the tale was complete, he said, "and guess what?"-- which has become his signature phrase-- "I didn't flush!"

Dave = Greatest American (Modern) Hero

My wife called me "her hero" because I figured out that our wireless featureless Apple Magic Mouse (which looks like a space alien's slipper) can be configured to "right click" even though there's no "right click" button-- it just knows when you click on it over to the right (just as it knows to move the cursor when you twitch your finger, it's pretty amazing) but even though the mouse is quite cool, the deflation that feats of heroism have suffered in these modern times is pretty sad . . . imagine her reaction if I slew a fire-breathing dragon that was trying to incinerate our new kitchen (I'm thinking she would still call me "her hero" but there would also be sexual favors and back rubs awarded for the deed).

12/5/2009

For the past six years I have saved every piece of photo-copied paper possible in my classroom; the students give me back every article, poem, story, and question sheet that they haven't destroyed and then I file them so I can use them the next year, and I use a LOT of outside sources (because I teach several electives that really don't have a text plus I bring in anything new that I've read) so I've got several file drawers full of stuff that I recycle year to year, and I have done this without praise or thanks, and I have saved the high school money on paper and ink and saved the taxpayers of East Brunswick money and I do this without being asked and without telling anyone (except my readers) because I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees.

Hey Now . . . The Dream Is Over

During my Sunday morning soccer game, tempers ran a little high and two players started bickering over a foul, but a cooler head prevailed: a local youth coach told the two men who were arguing, who were both pushing forty, "Hey guys, the dream is over," and since then, these words have proved inspirational to me: whenever I get frustrated because Greasetruck isn't producing any music, or my kids are acting extra-annoying, or I've taught a lousy lesson, or I've written a cruddy sentence, or I've gone for a particularly slow run, or I'm angry because I haven't invented anything remotely cool or useful . . . I just remember, "the dream is over," and that I'm not going to be rich and famous or a rock star or a four minute miler or father brilliant prodigal geniuses or invent anything like Stretch Armstrong or illustrate my own long running syndicated cartoon strip, because those dreams are over BUT I do own a house (sort of, or I own a mortgage!) and I have fathered two kids (and their dreams-- which seem to be centered around professional wrestling and RC car racing-- are still alive) and I have held a job and paid taxes for many years, so I have helped innumerable poor and unemployed people, contributed to the maintenance of National and State Parks, and even helped build loads of weapons for military misadventures in the Middle East . . . which I never, in my wildest imagination, dreamed of doing at all.

12/3/2009

One of my students said her Jewish grandmother's advice about boys was this: "Goyim are for practice," and though Goyim is pejorative, it still sounds like fun to be practiced upon in this manner.

12/2/2009

Almost lost my five year old son Alex in a Darwin Award-esque accident: he said, "Look Dad!" and with a lollipop in his mouth, tried to stand on two soccer balls, one foot on each ball, and did a face plant, nearly impaling himself with the pop . . . and so, like any rational parent, I have banned all lollipops from my house until the children are old enough to drive to the store and by them on their own.

12/1/2009

Apparently people think I am causing my wife hypothermia because I keep our heat on 65 degrees; yesterday was her birthday and TWO people gave her a "Snuggie," which is pretty much a blanket with sleeves (but luckily one is leopard skin, so now she has one for upstairs . . . we don't even turn the heat on in the bedroom, it's on a different zone . . . and one for downstairs.)

Ian And Frank Sinatra Will Survive Manchuria

My four year old son Ian is very stubborn, and although this is trying, it will come in handy if anyone ever tries to brainwash him; last weekend, while we were waiting for our Mexican food at Aby's in Matawan (I mention this only because I created such a good Mexican joke about the locale: what's a Matawan? Nothing . . . but somebody stole my taco) and I played some word games with the boys to kill time-- I made them say "post" and "boast" and "host" and then I asked, "What do you put in a toaster?" . . . Alex fell for it and said, "toast" but Ian calmly said, "bread," and then I pointed to several white objects and asked them to name the color and they said "white" several times and then I asked, "What do cows drink?" and Alex fell for this one too and said, "milk" but again Ian refused to be tricked by my silliness and he looked at me and staidly said, "water."

Market Panic! Buy! Buy! Buy! Sell! Sell! Sell!

Michael Lewis's new book Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity is fun to read from the sidelines (especially if all your money is in your new kitchen addition, so while there may be some abstract money lost in the housing market, you don't feel it because you're eating at a big table surrounded by windows) but the lesson is that though hind-sight is 20/20, no one really understood exactly why Black Monday or the Foreign Credit Crunch or the Dot.com Bust or The SubPrime Mortgage Crisis happened in real time (except maybe John Paulson) and even if you did understand it, and you wanted to hedge your bets and weather the storm, other people in the herd that mirrored your position could cause a market run anyway-- and if you don't feel like reading the book, which is edited by Michael Lewis and contains articles written by a wide variety of analysts (including himself and Dave Barry) then you could probably reach the same understanding by watching the episode of Thirty Rock where Tracy Jordan, who is being interviewed by Larry King, causes a financial crisis all by his lonesome self.

11/28/2009

Nothing makes me happier than the canned pumpkin shortage-- I hope this is the first of many retaliatory measures Mother Nature levies against our materialistic culture, and I commend her for her timing, as it is especially effective when these apocalyptic omens occur around the crassly consumptive holiday season . . . I would suggest to her that she also bring a cankerous blight that decimates mistletoe and nog.

Klosterman and I Agree About Madmen

It took me a day and a half to ingest Chuck Klosterman's new book Eating the Dinosaur, and though there were some new ideas for me to devour-- on Kurt Kobain vs. David Koresh and ABBA and Ralph Sampson and Garth Brooks and laugh tracks and the inability of Ralph Nader to lie and why this is a problem in politics and the paradoxical identity of football (which appears to be the most conservative sport-- think Brett Favre and Vince Lombardi-- but is actually the most dynamic and liberal in nature . . . as it has evolved from the forward pass to radios in quarterbacks helmets, from rugby-esque to the read option and the spread offense, etc.) but the scary and entrancing and ultimately annoying bulk of the book is about things that I already love, such as the time travel movie Primer and Werner Herzog and Erroll Morris and the Unabomber Manifesto and Stephen King and Arrested Development and David Foster Wallace and Weezer and Madmen and this is ultimately annoying because he feels the same way as me about these things (and many more) but his ideas about them are more clever than mine and they are better articulated, because he's a professional pop-culture critic, so while on the one hand I am fascinated by what he is saying, on the other, I'm annoyed that I didn't think of it myself-- it's about Weezer, for Christ's sake, not the human genome!-- and for me this was most acute in his essay entitled "It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened" where he dissects a press release from Pepsi and then makes some comparisons to Don Draper and Madmen and he transcribes and analyzes Don's monologue about the Kodak carousel and nostalgia-- and this is my favorite moment in TV history . . . it's the end of season one of the show, and no one else appreciated it at my workplace, but at least Klosterman did-- but then it made me wonder about this whole other idea, which is: is Klosterman just predicting what the faux cool nerdy hipster types who also like athletics like to read and watch and listen to, and are we that easy to predict and thus he writes about those things because he knows this is what will sell?-- it crossed my mind for an instant, but if that's so then the joke is on him, because he has embraced these things so fully and thought about them so deeply that whether he's joking or not, he is sincere.

How Fat Is Funny?

Saw another great Patrice O'Neal show the other night, and although there was no brawl like last year, he did kick out a table full of cops for heckling-- we thought it was a joke, until then they filed out the exit, but O'Neal's girth raises another point, and this also came up during my Shakespeare class while we were discussing the humor of Falstaff: how fat is funny these days?-- I've noticed a slimming of the fat funny guy-- remember the grossly obese funny men of the past? John Candy and Fat Albert and Chris Farley and Sam Kinison and Natalie from The Facts of Life, of course, Falstaff were all obscenely fat, but Jack Black is really just plump compared to these guys, and though Patrice O'Neal can hold his own with the old school mesomorphs, you don't see as many really, really fat comics and--check out the pictures and judge for yourself-- I think Santa Claus has slimmed down over the years as well.

Let's Build a Time Machine and Listen to Past Dave Swear a Lot

I shudder to think what Past-Dave would say about Cell Phone, iMac, and Facebook Dave.

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.