I Cleverly Trick Myself

While trying to use some reverse psychology on my kids, I outsmarted myself; Alex and Ian are close enough in size that they wear the same size pajamas, which is convenient because we only need one drawer with a bunch of pajamas in it, but inconvenient because of Garrett Hardin's "the tragedy of the commons," and so the other night when Ian claimed he wanted to wear the "Hulk" pajamas which Alex had already worn the night before and therefore claimed, I attempted to solve the conflict with a nifty turn of logic-- I told Ian that it was better if Alex wore the pajamas because then he could see the Hulk image on them, while Alex would be wearing the pajamas and thus would be unable to get a really good look at them-- and-- absurdly -- Ian bought this line of bullshit and stopped crying, but my logic was so clever that I actually convinced Alex (who is six now!) as well, and so Alex insisted that Ian wear the Hulk pajamas so that he could get a better look at them and after a bunch of bickering over this absurdity, I was finally able to pull Alex aside and communicate to him that this was a trick to solve the problem, but I'm not sure if I was able to convince him that I was originally using reverse psychology on Ian, and I have learned my lesson and next time I will simply confiscate the pajamas and no one will wear them.

3/5/10

So the other day Catherine was already home when I got home from school, which is a rare event once soccer season is over (she had a half day because of parent conferences) and so she witnessed my "secret meal," which I call pandedunchium . . . it happens at 2:45 and I pretty much eat anything in the house that isn't in the freezer section; Catherine was worried that I might have trouble eating dinner when she saw me dump out a Tupperware of leftover sausage into a pan, heat it, put it on a roll, and wolf it down before moving on to apple slices coated with peanut butter but, for once, she was sooooooo wrong.

Books Are Better With Pictures

If you're looking for a novel that tackles big themes-- art and design, love and alienation, fate and meaning-- but you need some pictures to help you, then I highly recommend Asterios Polyp, a graphic novel by Davud Mazzucchelli; five Platonic solids out of five.

3/3/10

The Hurt Locker takes place in Baghdad-- but I was able to recognize where they filmed it, Amman . . . when we lived in Damascus, we would travel there for a taste of the modern world-- and the film is an intense, apolitical character study about a real man, Staff Sergeant William James, who understands what he is cut out to do in this life and then just does it, and makes the rest of us (the soldiers in the movie included) feel like pussies; I don't even like the shock when you lick a battery to see if there's still juice in it . . . 365 days (before rotation) out of 365 days (before rotation).

Birthday Slant Rhyme

Today is our day:
me, Seuss, and Bon Jovi,
and I am the youngest,
Though I just turned forty.

2/28/10

Alex and Ian found a lady-bug in the kitchen (possibly the same one that crawled on my wife's face in the night?) and Ian convinced Alex that he could translate what the lady-bug was saying into English.

2/27/10

I love paradoxes and here is a great one from The Strong Horse, Lee Smith's new book on Middle East politics: "after 9/11, the schizophrenic nature of Saudi policy at the same time became plain: while members of the Saudi royal family relied on U.S. military might to protect them from foreign enemies, their domestic security depended on their ability to redirect the political furies of domestic rivals onto those same Americans who protected them," and so the end result is 9/11, because the Saudis, though beholden to America (for security of resources, diplomacy with Israel, protection from the Shi'ites, safety on the Suez Canal and in the Persian Gulf) still needs to direct the profoundly Sunni Al Qaeda's rage away from the region . . . and this time America was the victim . . . and the same sort of thing is going on in Iraq, where the Iraqi people, especially the minorities, need American support, but to preserve their honor and to attract a following and possibly garner power in the region, they need to fight against America-- Smith's thesis is that the region is still far too tribal to be ready for democracy, and that it is hard for Americans to even understand the mentality at play there, which I witnessed first hand when we invaded Iraq and one of my nicest, smartest, most diligent students in Damascus said her mother told her, "If I didn't have two daughters, I would go to Iraq and kill Americans, " and this is a woman who sent her two daughters to the "American" school to learn liberal values-- but still, when it comes to honor, though Saddam was a bad man, he was still a Sunni strong man and no one wanted to see him fall (and the Syrians I talked to pretty much hated the Kuwaitis because they were rich sell-outs, so they didn't really mind when Saddam invaded Kuwait, I could go on and on about this, especially the Druze, the Maronites, the Sunnis, and the Shi'ites in Lebanon, but, mainly, you should definitely read this book!)

2/26/10

WARNING: we watched Gremlins the other night with the kids, and though it's a little violent, they loved it . . . in this age of digital animation, those green puppets aren't very scary, BUT, and I totally forgot about this, Kate (Phoebe Cates) does recount a terrible little story, about how her father, dressed as Santa Claus, broke his neck coming down their chimney on Christmas, and she ends the story by saying, "and that's how I learned there's no such thing as Santa Claus," and I'm wondering how closely my kids were listening, because they didn't say a thing about it after she said it (and it happened too fast to grab the remote and fast forward through it-- which probably would have drawn more attention to it, anyway-- but maybe my kids are already smart enough to know that Christmas is all about playing the game, and pretending to believe in Santa so you get a bunch of gifts).

2/25/10

I just started Lee Smith's new book on Middle East politics called The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations; he is refuting the thesis that anti-Americanism in the Arab world is a product of government propaganda and an opinion of a few terrorists and dictators, and that it is more endemic in the culture, which is still very tribal at the core-- and this reminds me of a time, probably in 2002, when we were in the Western Desert between Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, on our way to Amman in a service taxi, and we stopped for gas at a godforsaken station and while we were browsing candy bars, a guy asked my wife, "You like bin Laden?" and then showed her his cell phone screen: on it there was a simple cartoon of a plane hitting the World Trade Center followed by a laughing Osama face.

2/24/10

Alex coined a word the other night; he said I should "buffle" someone with my newly shaven head, because it was "spiky and dangerous," and I corrected him and said, "You mean butt someone?" but then I realized he was taking the word "buffalo" and making it into a verb; I like it and I'm going to use it.

2/23/10

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a bit long for a thriller, but every time it slowed down, it was for a good reason-- and it's moody Swedish setting and byzantine layers make it more than a genre book . . .it's far better than The Da Vinci Code, though it shares some of it's themes: I give it nine dead and mangled cats out of ten (also, there's something compelling about reading an author's last works-- Stieg Larsson, Swedish magazine editor and expert on right wing and Nazi organizations, wrote this trilogy of novels and then dropped dead of a heart attack at age fifty, before he could enjoy his international fame . . . why does that make the book better?)

Sweet Sweet Cup Holder

I'm proud of the fact that I've been driving the same car since 1994 (a Jeep Cherokee Sport-- solid V6 engine and no power windows or locks or anything to break) but sometimes I dream of when the chassis will finally rust out and die because then I'll get a car with doors that always open, a car with an iPod dock . . . a car with a cup holder (that's right, I don't have a cup-holder-- there is a designated sneaker for holding hot coffee if there's no passenger-- otherwise the passenger is the cup-holder . . . but I am wondering: why is this? had the cup been yet invented in 1994? or was there once a cup-holder and I can't remember?)

2/21/10

Our Hamilton Beach food processor has these settings: Pulse, Grate, Quick Clean, Grind, Stir, Beat, Aerate, Shred, Puree, Blend, Crumb, Liquefy, Chop, Frappe, Mix, Hi, and Lo; but no matter which button I pressed, it just made a loud noise and didn't really chop my Poblano peppers and cilantro (I was making Rick Bayless green chorizo) so I stuck the knife in to nudge some chunks into the whizzing blade and peered into the blender to see what the problem was and then, just as the blade whacked the knife, it dawned on me how stupid I was being-- so I closed it up and shook it for a while and then it finally chopped the stuff up (real time update! my wife just walked in and told me that it's not a "food processor," it's a "blender," and that's why I was having so much trouble . . . you learn something new every day).

2/20/10

If you don't check the text messages on your cell phone for a long time, then when you finally do-- they tell a little story, and you are both the protagonist and the villain.

2/19/10

Note to self: penicillin gives me a rash.

2/18/10

I loved the new Coen brothers movie, A Serious Man, for the first half hour, but then, once the theme dawned on me, it became harder to enjoy, but certainly engaging to watch-- and the ending seemed cryptic for a moment, almost like the end of The Blair Witch Project, but then the reality of the awful truth became apparent: four transistor radios out of five.

2/17/10

Ian groggily greeted me 6:24 Monday morning with this declaration, "Pirates play chess."

2/16/10

If there were any kind of cosmic justice, I wouldn't have had to endure A Gazillion Bubbles this weekend, since I took Alex to see One Man Star Wars two weeks ago-- but it was family day at the State Theater and my wife got a ticket for me . . . the show lived up to its billing, there were lots of bubbles and lasers and loud music, and though it was torture, it did give me an idea for my one man kid-friendly theater show: it is called A Gazillion Pointy Plastic Toys and it features a multi-level stage full of pointy plastic toys and a couple of staircases, and I just wander around the stage, stepping on toys with my bare feet, cursing, stubbing my toes, and tripping on the stairs while screaming, "Who left Legos on the stairs!" and then I ask for young volunteers to come up on stage and I beat them (I described the show to my friend's kids at lunch after the show and they said,"We'd pay to see that!")

Slightly Better Than Having Your Heart Ripped Out On A Ziggurat

Sea Isle City Polar Plunge Recap: a good turn-out, and everyone who was on time plunged, except our photographer Celine; the plungers were Mel, Ed, Chantal, Keith, Stacy, Ed, John, Mose, Terry, Catherine, me-- and everyone agreed that they would do it again, but the anticipation was nerve-wracking (although beer and tequila helped), since we were all novice plungers and had no idea of what to expect . . . and what we didn't expect was that thousands of spectators lined the fences and probably close to a thousand brave souls were plunging, and as Mel described it, it was like some sort of Stonehenge ritual, or a human sacrifice, total mob mentality, everyone jumping and screaming in preparation to dunk themselves into the 36 degree water (and the scenery was pretty good, plenty of cute girls in bikinis) and though the water was very cold, and immediately after I dove in, I couldn't get my legs to work-- I wanted to run out of the water but my body wouldn't run-- but I felt warm enough once I walked onto the beach and the only thing that really hurt was my toes-- the approach to the water was pandemonium, I held Catherine's hand and once we were waist deep, I let her go and yelled, "Turn Back!" like it was a life or death situation (which it may have been) and then we thought we lost Mose in the crowd because he didn't have his glasses on and couldn't see anything, but he turned up and we went and watched LeCompt play a four and half hour set at an insanely packed Springfield Bar and then ate at Welshies and passed out at the condo-- we slept thirteen in it; hopefully we will do it again next year and get enough people for two condos, I never would have thought jumping in the ocean when there was snow on the beach could be so much fun.

2/14/10

Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger are with us no longer, but their legacy is: like Beck, they both championed the loser-- Salinger gave a voice to ostracized loser Holden Caulfield's sensitive and precocious teenage alienation and Zinn gave a voice to the losers of history, the enslaved, the indigenous, the female, and the impoverished-- and if success is measured by the acceptance of these paradigm-busting perspectives, then their success is astoundingly significant . . . but has the pendulum swung too far . . . is there not something to be said for the Stradlaters of the world, the winners . . . is it not best, as Conan says, "to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women," or as Chevy Chase says in The Three Amigos, "we will rape the horses and ride off on the women!"-- is there something so wrong with being a winner, enslaving the defeated, selling their children, destroying their culture, taking their women, developing their land, and not feeling a bit guilty about it-- what I am saying is this: Salinger and Zinn took all the fun out of kicking some loser butt.

2/13/10

This very well could be the best moment of the rest of your life-- the moment that your thoughts are most lucid and your body is most responsive, the moment that your experience is in perfect coordination with your wisdom, the moment that your recall and your factual knowledge are at their optimum ratio, the moment when you have several things to look forward to and nothing to dread . . . and now that moment is over, and you spent it reading this sentence.

Damned Child Locks!

After a fantastic day of snowboarding yesterday, Terry, Kim, Stacy and I hopped in my Subaru to head home, but on the way out of town I spotted the Shawnee General Store and stopped to get a cup of coffee; Terry was riding shotgun, and he got out as well, but Kim was eating animal crackers and Stacy was texting Ed, so they didn't get out and we went in and browsed what they had and ended up talking to the proprietor for a bit (he grew up in New Brunswick and was a Rutgers football fan) and then, finally, we went back to the car and Stacy and Kim were laughing when we opened the door, because we had locked them in (child locks on the back doors) and Stacy had even gone so far as to text Terry a message (we are locked in the car) but he didn't have his phone, and oddly enough, though we felt bad that they were trapped in the car for the duration, we never let them go into the store or asked if they wanted to-- we just got back in and took off (although I did share my chocolate bar-- Stacy took a piece, and then Terry took a piece, which made no sense, because he actually got to go into the store).

Poop and Sensitivity

On the same day that my six year old son Alex wrote and illustrated a book called My Family (which had a page for every person in the family: Daddy, Mom, Grand-dad, Uncle Eddie, and even my brother Chris, who died several years ago in a car accident) on this very same day that he made my wife cry with this book, and on the same day that my five year old son Ian illustrated his own book-- a book full of scary monsters drawn with loving care and detail . . . on this very same day of creativity and sensitivity, on this same day my children would also-- while my wife was printing photos to put in Alex's aforementioned wonderful book-- these same wonderful boys would come across a couple of old diapers, diapers they were out of long enough to remember them humorously and reminiscently, and in a fit of depraved nostalgia, put the diapers on, simultaneously defecate and urinate in them, laugh hysterically, and then toss the evidence of this scatological prank into the bathroom waste basket, for me to discover when I went to check on them-- because they were so quiet; at the top of the stairs I smelled something awful and wondered what it could be and finally-- with no help from the giggling perpetrators-- found the soiled diapers stuffed into the bathroom waste basket . . . all on the very same day.

Surprise! You Have Strep!

Some people say everything happens for a reason, and though I don't believe them, it is fun to pretend that this might be true; so the reason I got strep throat and spent Saturday in a delirious fever state and could not attend the big surprise party that night (we were part of the "plan" to execute the surprise, and perhaps one of the reasons I got strep is that I hate surprise parties-- they are stressful and I don't like keeping secrets, and what is the ultimate goal? to give the recipient a heart attack?) is because this was a fitting way to finish reading James Ellroy's trilogy of alternate history that he began with American Tabloid (the JFK assassination) and finished with Blood's A Rover . . . so in my strep-addled state-- which mirrored Dwight Holly and Don Crutchfield's mania, all of us coming in and out of consciousness, I read several hundred pages of document inserts, obtuse diaries, rogue cops, RED agents, cover-ups, cut-outs, torture, black bagging, Haitian voodoo, men with machetes and wings, emerald worship, an undercover cop with the Bent, J. Edgar Hoover's paranoia, homosexuality and racism, Tricky Dick Nixon's abrasiveness, Sonny Liston doing morphine suppositories, Tiger Kab, Klan Kamps, Black militant groups pushing heroin and knife fighting and shooting children, a peeper "detective" biting the head off a rat to break a voodoo curse, Trujillo vs. Papa Doc, fruit squeezes, right wing strong-arming, left wing radicalization, Redd Foxx snorting coke, document heists, betrayal, backstabbing, perversion, hate tracts, money laundering, voodoo porn, and, of course, loads of conspiracy . . . a fitting end to this for both Ellroy and me; it is a good read despite the conceit of the diaries, I give it four "perfect kidney shots" out of five.

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).