3/25/10

There is nothing more serene to me than running barefoot on the beach with my iPod, or that's how it used to be, but I think I will be more anxious in the future: last week a South Carolina man was jogging with headphones on a Hilton Head beach, and he was struck in the back by a small airplane that was making an emergency landing, and, of course, the plane killed him instantly-- and-- this is the awful part-- he was probably just trying to burn some calories before eating cake, because it was his daughter's third birthday . . . so look both ways, and then look out behind you as well..

3/24/10

I rarely post videos, but I'm sure that this is the most important film since Citizen Kane, and it inspired the kids and me to build a Rube Goldberg contraption, though ours pales in comparison to this; we had a battery powered Thomas the Train ride out of Alex's room and then nudge a Matchbox car on orange track so that the car raced down the stairs and jumped into a Folgers can strung to a balloon wedged between the banister, which pulled a string that raised another piece of track heading into the living room, so that a little car zipped down that track, and hit a Lego lever on a hinge, which pulled a string attached to a train switch, so that the train engine that was going round and round the whole time, veered onto another track and made its way towards a card house, which it knocked down . . . and we got it to work (and here is the video to prove it!)

3/23/10

On St. Patrick's Day, my son Alex had some questions about Ireland, and so I showed him a map and put on some Irish music (Horslips) and the next thing I knew, I was plunged into my personal nightmare-- Alex heard the music and decided he wanted to learn to play the flute, and asked if he could take flute lessons . . . and fans of my blogging know how I feel about the flute in general and Jethro Tull in particular . . . but what could I say except "sure," and as long as no one reminds him, I'm sure he'll forget about it.

We've Got Computers . . . Let's Use Them!

Because of all the flooding, I forgot to mention just how much I hate daylight savings time-- it's not just the darkness in the morning, and the fact that it's difficult enough to teach high school students at 7:26 in the morning without throwing a monkey wrench into the schedule-- those things are bad enough-- but the thing that really gets me is that we allow the government to control time, and-- for once-- I'm not just complaining, I actually have a solution: since it's the digital age and we've built all these tiny computers and placed them in everything from toasters to clock radios, why not have Daylight Saving Month-- if we subtracted two minutes a day for a month, we wouldn't miss them a bit, and we'd accomplish the same goal without inconveniencing the working population (because if you're retired, then who gives a shit?)

3/21/10

If you can stomach it, you should read The Good Soldiers, David Finkel's account of his time with battalion 2-16 during "the surge" in Iraq-- and if you can't stomach it, you better learn to.

The Seven Ages of Friendship (Or Six . . . Whatever)

The older you get, the longer it takes to become friends with an acquaintance: kindergarteners at the park become friends in minutes . . . in elementary school all it takes is proximity . . . in middle school you need to have a common interest . . . high school students need charisma and patience in order to infiltrate a clique . . . in college friendship is ritualized into fraternity pledging and such, and now, as an adult with a job and kids, it seems as if it takes years to get to know someone new (and you pretty much need to work with them or have kids in common or play in an adult sports league or belong to a historical reenactment society together or something drastic like that).

3/19/10

It's a little embarrassing, but I can't stop listening to the new Beach House album; it's called "Teen Dream" and the name fits, it's hazy dreamy ethereal pop, but it is really really good . . . if you are confident in your manhood, give it a listen (and here is a better review than this).

3/18/10

Chop Shop takes you to a fantastic world, yet it feels completely natural . . . it begins with day laborers hustling for jobs-- is it Bolivia? Turkey? Mexico?-- and then it takes you to the auto parts bazaar, some kind of Middle Eastern soukh for cars . . . but it's much closer to home, this is Queens, New York-- the industrialized area near Shea Stadium, full of unauthorized auto parts shops . . . and you follow a true hustler, 12 year old Ale, and his 16 year old sister, as they navigate this tiny universe, living together in a plywood room inside an auto paint shop . . . a must see: four stolen hubcaps out of four.

Stuck

I grabbed Anneli Rufus's new book Stuck: Why We Can't (or Won't) Move On on an impulse because it has the same title as a new Greasetruck song, and it has essentially the same theme; the reviews on Amazon run the gamut-- some claim she is unsubstantiated and opinionated and other claim that her perspectives are brilliant; I'm somewhere in the middle but I did love reading the book because there was so much to think about-- you end up debating yourself about the choices you have made and the conflict between how stuck you really are and how stuck you perceive yourself (often because of the media) to be-- and essentially, her mantra is "get over it," and I fully agree with this, she rails against the whining and blamelessness and infinite wishing and choice of our society (and I love her take on American Idol, she thinks America is obsessed with the show, because in a land where we tell people,"Anyone can be anything they want, follow your dreams," Simon is a breath of reality, which is what we yearn for but are afraid to tell people-- essentially, you will never achieve your dream because you don't have the skill) and perhaps I like her book because I am essentially happy stuck in my situation: steady job, beautiful wife, healthy (albeit annoying) kids, nice kitchen, one sentence blog, and Greasetruck-- who could ask for more?

3/16/10

Everyone is grouchy at work because of contract negotiations and expected budget cuts, and we wear buttons that say "No Contract, still working, always caring" but after what happened last week, the buttons need to be amended to "No contract, still cleaning up menstrual fluid, always caring"-- that is correct, after a student noticed something red and shiny on a desk seat and correctly identified the fluid (though the teacher, who knew the student was right, intelligently and curtly denied what it was) and so the teacher had to teach her lesson with the fluid in the corner of her eye, and then, once the students had left, she bravely wiped it up-- certain (as only a woman would know) that it was the blood of the unspoken cycle, and the worst thing is, the ensuing discussion (which I had to endure while eating a turkey London broil sandwich smothered in BBQ sauce) brought to light that OTHER female teachers had cleaned up similar "spills."

Points Are Everything (and Nothing)

Odd combination of events: high school play, high winds, and fairly high flooding . . . and a new English office chart and "points" game that rewards people for attending social events (this was prompted by the aforementioned chart, a colorful and much disputed bar graph of who goes out the most-- I won the "most social with kids" category, which might not be something to be proud of . . . and this ensuing points game reminds me of a contest between the second and third floor of our fraternity . . . also something I'm not proud of) and so on Saturday night Terry and I were meeting at Sandy's for food and then attending the school play, but it was rainy and windy and once I hit East Brunswick, all the power was out, so I had an especially fast but scary drive down Ryder's Lane-- all the lights were dark but you couldn't predict when someone on a cross street was going to pop out or try to make a left, and we couldn't eat because all the restaurants were closed and the high school was blacked out as well, so we tried to get to Stacey and Ed's party in South Amboy, but we got stuck n 45 minutes of traffic because Bordentown road was flooded out and by this time I was claustrophobic and hungry and angry and had to urinate, but we made it back to the Cambridge in Spotswood for beer and food and then there was much texting about who was receiving "points" for which event, and how many English teachers it took to warrant points-- because then Eric and Liz showed up and it was a party . . . four English teachers at the Cambridge, as opposed to the two English teachers at Stacey's place . . . so does our stormy gathering trump Stacy's party because we couldn't get there . . . and where will this chart lead, to what depths of socialization, and if it will end up with everyone forming factions and eventually hating one another . . . only time will tell.

3/14/10

Getting a massage is my favorite form of entertainment, not only because it feels good, but also because it is entertainment without negative externalities-- there is no pollution, or carbon fuel use-- I am contributing to the economy but not consuming anything, it relieves stress so I am nicer to my wife and kids and students, and, most importantly, there is no nagging or quid pro quo involved when you pay for a massage, unlike when you get one from your spouse.

Why Don't People Aske Me About This More Often?

Yesterday, when the teacher I share a wall with asked me to come in and say a few words about the singularity, this made me increibly happy . . . because no one EVER asks me to say a few words on the singularity and if there's one thing in the world that I like to say a few words about, it's the singularity . . . the singularity and Moore's Law and the possibility of intelligent machines in our near future and Ray Kurzweil and the possibility of downloading one's self into a virtual universe and the odd paradox that we are most likely living in a virtual universe because if the computer exists then in some real universe the singularity has already been achieved and everyone has a tiny populated Matrix-like simulated universe on their desk-top-- and what are the chances that you were in that original universe where the original computer was invented?-- there's a much better chance that you are a virtual person inhabiting a Matrix-like virtual universe in one of the billions of model universe nested within the one and original universe, but does my wife ever ask me to say a few words about this?-- never, nor do my co-workers or my friends or my children . . . so this was a very exciting day for me.

3/12/10

I am beginning to think that Hamlet is a little like Neo, from the film The Matrix; Hamlet is somehow subconsciously aware that he is in a play called Hamlet, he realizes that there is a larger reality than the word he inhabits, and this makes him so much larger than any other character int he play--and so he tries to direct the play's action, tone, and content, and eventually he realizes that forces beyond him (Shakespeare? God? Morpheus?) control his fate-- that he is embedded in some kind of five act program.

3/11/10

Thank God the good playground is a block away from our house, as this spares me the humiliation of having to organize "play dates" for my children.

Super Freaky

Superfreakonomics is just as entertaining as Levitt and Dubner's first book, but it's a bit more controversial-- amidst its "economic" analysis, it touches on the WHO's assessment of penis size in India, the dangers of drunk walking (better to drive), the declining price of oral sex, why you don't have to worry about global warming, why you don't have to worry about buckling your toddlers in car seats, and the first recorded case of monkey prostitution . . . and like Freakonomics, it is too short, but I think that is intended; hopefully, they will write another: nine big ass volcanoes out of ten.

Hyperion

There's nothing more fun (for an English teacher) than reading the same book at the same time as someone else, especially if it's obscure-- and so it was with some regret that I finished Hyperion, Dan Simmon's 1989 Hugo Award winning science-fiction novel, which in Canterbury Tales fashion (each character tells a story) recounts the pilgrimage of a soldier, a detective, a priest, a scholar, a poet, and a diplomat to the remote planet Hyperion, home of the Lord of Pain, otherwise known as the Shrike, a three meter tale robotic many bladed creature which lives outside of time and may have been created in the future by humans or AI computers, and comes back into the past where it has spawned religious cults, inter-galactic mythology and speculation, and, of course, fear . . . and I'm sure there was nothing worse than being trapped in the English office listening to me and Mike talk about the intricacies of the plot . . . it reminds me of the old days when Celine and I would discuss Battle Star Galactica until people started screaming bloody murder.

3/8/10

The French movie Cache (Hidden) is riveting and infuriating, you have to see but it will drive you crazy-- it will make you paranoid, it will make you confused, it will make you think harder than you usually have to think while watching a movie (but Michael Haneke's direction-- he won the award for it at Cannes in 2005-- and Juliette Binoche's acting make it well worth the wild ride) . . . and watch the last scene carefully, it reveals something . . . what? I don't really know, but I still loved it: nine bloody roosters our of ten.

Pregnant Pause

Sometimes, when I've been away from my kids for a few hours, and I see someone's cute little baby, I think to myself: I should get Catherine pregnant tonight . . . but once I get home and spend a few hours with my children, that thought slowly fades away.

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.