5/21/10

I bought a kid's electric guitar for Ian at a garage sale, and put two coated strings on it-- my theory being, when you teach kids chess you just use a couple pieces at a time, and when you teach kids soccer, you start small sided-- so I would start slow with the guitar, and I put a strap on it and gave him a guitar stand so that it is his guitar, up in his room, and I showed him how to alternate pick and told him if he practiced for a month, I would get him a little amplifier (which is a terrible idea, considering he's going to be five in a month and still doesn't know how to tell time, so he'll be waking us up at 5:15 with it) and he put it on and practiced several times, which was impressive, and then we put them to bed and watched an episode of Madmen and when we went upstairs, Catherine called me into his room-- he was sleeping with his guitar.

One Way to Earn a Buck

Last Saturday after my work-out at the gym I went to pick up my kids from the Kids Klub supervised play area, and the girl-- a new girl-- said that my kids "earned a dollar" and she really wanted me to take this dollar and split it between Alex and Ian but I refused, of course . . . but she insisted that they deserved it for some game they were playing and I just wanted to get out of there so I said fine, I'd make change in the car, but as we were walking across the parking lot Alex told me the whole story: he was drawing on the computer and Ian was pestering him so much that he punched Ian in the eye and they got into some kind of hysterical fight and she essentially paid them to be good, so I made them march back in and tell the lady that they didn't deserve the dollar and then give the dollar back, which they did (while crying hysterically) and this truly makes me wonder just what the fuck is going on with my kids when I'm not watching.

5/19/10

So at my work-place it has become something of an honor to appear in a Sentence of Dave, when someone says or does something interesting or unusual, occasionally they turn to me and say, "That should be in a sentence," and I always say, "Yes it should!" because what they don't realize it that when you write a sentence every single day, you are often short on material . . . so when Stacey said to Audrey, "You're still using that pen?" and she said, "Yes, it won't dry up-- I told my class it was like the miracle of Hanukkah, you know, when the oil that was only supposed to light the flame in the menorah for one night lit the temple for eight nights . . ." and then she turned to me and said, "Now that should be in a sentence," and now it is.

More World Cup Analysis at Gheorghe!

If you didn't get enough World Cup analysis in my first post, then you can read Part II today over at Gheorghe: The Blog-- it's even longer and equally as absurd as my first effort.

5/18/10

At work the other day Stacey was not looking so good and I said, "hey, you don't look so good" and she said, "yeah, I feel terrible, I'm sick" and then-- before my filter kicked in-- I said, "Well don't get me sick!" but then I apologized and told her that was rude and said I hoped she felt better soon.

Campbell's Law and The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Diane Ravitch's book The Death and Life of the Great American School System asserts two ideas, and supports them with comprehensive detail: 1) a market system is fine if you want to create consumers, but it does not work for public schools-- as they are one of the last places where community, democracy, and local citizens can have an influence-- and 2) using testing as a measure of accountability for teachers and schools is illogical (she cites Campbell's law-- "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor") because it is essentially putting the cart before the horse; Ravitch speaks from a position of great perspective, she worked in the administrations of George Bush Sr., Clinton, and George W. and she is one of the most credible educational historians in America; book is something of a reflection on how she fell for some of these fads before she fully analyzed the evidence, and her change of heart is in notable opposition to President Obama's continuation of Bush's war on our education system . . . a must read if you have kids: ten charter schools out of a possible ten.

Shouldn't Canadian Geese Live in Canada?

I thought I was going for a relaxing bike ride on the towpath, and in some respects it was-- I saw lots of wildlife: a muskrat, a scarlet tanager, several goldfinches, a heron, and some turtles-- but also had a run in with several Canadian geese, their chicks have just hatched and their nests are right on the side of the path, so the adults-- in order to protect their young-- would block the path when I approached, and so I had to whip stones at them and shove my bike at them and hit them with sticks in order to get them out of the way . . . I saw one jogger do an about face and head back the way she came, her pleasant run truncated by an ornery bird.

You Are Special!

David Shenk's new book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong gives an overview of the newest research on nature, nurture and talent-- he is covering some of the same ground as Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers and Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code-- but he has new examples and goes more in depth about genetics, which is far more plastic than what was once though (even Lamarckian at times . . . the section on epigenetics is really interesting) and in the end the lesson is this: if you want to do something, don't worry about if you have an innate talent for it, just start practicing, but make sure you practice, often, obsessively, and under the best tutelage you can . . . and if this happens, you don't have to worry too much about genes . . . if you want to read more, especially on the sporting aspects of the book, head to here to my post at Gheorghe: The Blog.

5/14/10

So if you're a fan of this blog, you know that I invented the word "entertaintment" a few weeks ago, although I simply coined the word, I didn't actually use it-- but my dream came true, while we were talking about "sexting" and how it's not for guys, especially with the kind of angle you'd get on a cell phone held down low and Stacy blurted out my new word . . . she said, "That's entertaintment!" and I was so pleased.

5/13/10

Yesterday, WRSU played "Living After Midnight" by Judas Priest . . . the lyrics are so much better now that I know Rob Halford is gay.

5/12/10

My work is over at Gheorghe today; I finally completed my completely biased, totally definitive, and not so comprehensive 2010 World Cup Preview . . . you might find it enlightening, even if you don't like soccer.

5/11/10

Alex and Ian invented a game called "Hear the Car" and it is a great example of the power of your senses: one player closes their eyes and the other one chucks the Matchbox car as far as he can (they were playing on the playground) and then the player opens his eyes and runs and finds the car . . . and you can do it every time, even if it doesn't hit metal, even if it just rustles in the grass-- our ears are remarkable (I played a few rounds.)

Jamming Econo

The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner, is in a class of its own; it is a history of economic thought from medieval times through Keynes and Schumpeter and it includes all the greats-- Adam Smith , Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill and the Utopians (which is a great name for a band) David Ricardo, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx and crew-- and Heilbroner has done all the reading, so for each man, he presents you with an overview, a few entertaining and telling anecdotes, some pithy quotations, and a logical summary of their theory and how accurate it was . . . and his conclusion is that all these men were prescient and discovered something new about the economic workings of their own world and were able to predict into the near future, but as times and technology changed, their theories fell by the wayside (David Ricardo and globalization) and Heilbroner wonders if it will ever be possible to make such predictions again, as he sees the world now as a combination of economics and politics that is well near impossible to unravel.

Some People LIKE to Drive

Daniel H. Pink's book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us certainly explains this blog and Gheorghe and Greasetruck; it summarizes the counter-intuitive evidence that we are not motivated by greater extrinsic rewards (these kinds of rewards are addictive, counter-productive, and are essentially a dead end) but instead we are driven by the intrinsic value of what we are doing . . . and he cites numerous examples of how people will work harder on something they choose over something they are paid to do . . . it's easy enough to see this through the passion people have for their hobbies-- runners don't consider running "work," people do crossword puzzles for fun, and I don't consider writing this blog a job (it took me a year to realize the pun on "sentence of dave") so then the book tackles the tougher problem of how to make work and school more like an avocation than a vocation: Steve Martin, in Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner says, "It's fine when your hobbies get in the way of work, but when they get in the way of each other, that's a problem."

5/8/10

Once in a while I get focused and read an entire book in one day, but it's got to be an easy read with a nice font and some pictures, and Nancy G. Heller's slender book Why a Painting is Like a Pizza: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art fit the bill-- it sheds some light on Mondrian and those ridiculous white canvasses and weird installations and Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) and though I don't buy everything she says, it's a nice tour through post-modernism: one urinal out of a possible fish.

If It's So Stupid, Then Why Did I Have A Nightmare?

Paranormal Activity is very Blair Witch and I will say this: it is scary-- it even made me a have a nightmare, but as a movie it's kind of repetitive and the characters are even more illogical than most archetypal horror movie characters (typical thought process: Hey! I heard something growling upstairs . . . let's go check it out! without any sort of weapon . . . while holding this camera) and the movie ends predictably and rather lamely (unlike the The Blair Witch Project, which has one of the best endings in cinema history) so if you're in the mood to sit tensely, it's fine, but it's not going to leave you with much to think about: four Ouija boards out of five (I used Ouija Boards because I wanted to see if I could spell "Ouija" correctly and I did!)

5/6/10

Someone brought in a bunch of cheesecake on Friday, and I didn't want to each a bunch of cheesecake and Stacy didn't want to eat a bunch of cheesecake . . . so Stacy gave me twenty dollars to hold, and if she ate any cheesecake, then I wouldn't return it, and I gave her twenty dollars and the deal was the same, but then we thought we'd better involve an unbiased third party . . . so we gave the money to Liz to hold in escrow, and it worked like a charm-- neither of us caved-- and it appears to be a brilliant strategy for eating healthy . . . unless, of course, you do break down and eat a slice of cheesecake, because then you're not going to pay twenty dollars for one slice, so to cut your losses you'll probably go berserk and eat five slices of cheesecake so that they only cost you four dollars per slice.

I Cave to Peer Pressure

I could never imagine that people would be so rabid about something as mundane as sinus irrigation, but when I was suffering some sinus problems last week, I had a wide variety of people-- teachers, students, old, young, male female-- recommend the Neti Pot, which is a little magical lamp that you fill with water mixed with a packet of salt and other magical stuff, and then you insert the bulb of the lamp into your nostril, lean over the sink, and pour . . . and like magic, water pours out your other nostril, after circulating through your brain and cleaning out your synapses-- and it worked, it actually worked!

The #1 Benefit to Growing Old

One of the few nice things about growing old is that my feet don't smell as bad as they did when I was a kid . . . but maybe that's because my sense of smell is deteriorating.

5/3/10

A good day skim-boarding at the beach for young and old on Saturday: Alex had his first real success, he's now strong enough to chuck the board and brave enough to jump on it with both feet-- he was "in the zone" for over an hour until the tide got to low-- and my recently rehabilitated knee (the knee cap popped out of the groove while playing soccer) held up as well, and a high school kid with a much cooler skim-board than me and a wet-suit gave me some pointers and told me I needed a much larger board (he did not add "because you are fat" . . . he was very polite).

The Netflix Team Tackles A Difficult Project

I'm slightly embarrassed that this was the movie that I had the "Netflix team" working their damnedest on so that I could receive it in a timely manner . . . perhaps if it was an obscure Jean-Luc Godard film I wouldn't feel so bad . . . but I am trying to develop an appreciation of our neighbors to the North, so I need access to the great works of Canadian culture:

"Dear David,

Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day was not available from your local shipping center; fortunately, it was available from a shipping center in another part of the country; it's on its way and should arrive within 3 to 5 days; you'll notice we also sent the next available DVD from your Queue to enjoy while Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day makes its way to you--

The Netflix Team."

5/1/10

Somalian extremist dilemma: do the pros of banning the bra outweigh the cons of banning music?

Ask Mom . . . Cinema Edition

I recently saw two relatively difficult kids' movies: Oceans, which is a visual treat (especially the blanket octopus and the night- time feeding scenes) but contains no real story or theme . . . and my kids have obviously taken after their father in the theater-- they feel everyone around them is entitled to their thoughts (that is definitely a lobster, definitely . . . that fish is poisonous, I know it is . . . that's a great white shark . . . that's a black tip shark . . . that's a hammerhead shark . . . that's a lantern fish . . . etc.) and we also saw Where the Wild Things Are, which is quite symbolic and way over my head, but I did recognize that the movie had something to do with emotions (and the monsters' faces are especially expressive) and if you need more explanation, you can ask my wife, who actually got everything . . . but Alex, Ian and I were a little lost.

4/28/10

Whether you blog about it or not, history (and stupidity) repeats itself; last night I lay awake wondering if I was itchy because I had come in contact with poison ivy, but then I remembered something I had recently written, something I had written just three months ago, something concise and informative: "Note to self-- penicillin gives me a rash"-- apparently, though I wrote this note to my self, I didn't actually take note of it, and now I've got blotches on my arms and legs (I was going to deal with the itching and keep taking the penicillin just to avoid making phone calls to the dentist and pharmacy, but my wife said that was ridiculous and so I'm picking up an alternative on my way home.)

4/27/10

Apparently, the evolutionary trait "do whatever the fuck you want even if it's asinine and dangerous" is more useful to a young boy's survival than the trait "respond when your name is called."

4/26/10

The boys and I spent Rutgers Day on College Avenue instead of going over to Ag Field Day, and I highly recommend this if you hate crowds and like shade-- we packed so many free events into four and a half hours that both kids fell asleep in the jogging stroller on the walk home: the highlight was a stage fighting demonstration conducted by some energetic and "angry" Mason Gross students, but they didn't do it on a stage, they did it on the lawn outside of the GSE, so though there was no "objective correlative" to the scene, it looked more realistic because of the setting-- it was ostensibly a clown fight, but then some stooges in the crowd dressed in civilian clothes-- a guy and his girlfriend, which made it even better-- started brawling as well, and a guy died from a knife wound six inches away from Alex, and during the whole fight Alex and Ian kept saying, "Now they're really fighting . . . I think this is real now . . . this isn't fake anymore . . . those clowns are fake, but those two, that is real, TOTALLY real."

4/25/10

Sunday 5:51 AM: Ian yells, "I need you to wipe my butt!"

4/24/10

I don't think I actually need to define this, your imagination will serve you better, but here is a new word . . . perhaps you can try to work it into conversation this week: entertaintment.

4/23/10

We shouldn't have found this so amazing, and the fact that we did is a clear illustration of how technology has fragmented our culture: my friend Stacey and I both thought it was the coolest thing when we realized that we both watched the Tyson documentary on the same night at the same time . . . remember when this was always the case?

4/22/10

Alex, who just turned six, is onto us: at dinner the other night he slanted his eyes and gave my wife his most skeptical look and said, "How did the tooth fairy know to bring me money last night, there was no tooth under my pillow because I dropped it down the water fountain at school and the only person I told was you . . . unless the tooth fairy is you!" and then he planned a stake-out with Ian to verify that the tooth-fairy exists . . . the death of Santa is next.

I Can See This (Sort Of)

One of my students bravely revealed that when she was young, she thought that the disc-shaped jellyfish that often wash up on the Jersey Shore were breast implants.

The Styrofoam Glider and the Miracle Punt

The next installment in a series of daring arboreal adventures: you might remember last year when I pulled a a giant limb down with a football tied to a rope (I included the photo if you've forgotten) and now, once again, I have conquered another neighborhood tree-- this time (ironically just after we watched a Peanuts episode about the Wright Brothers, in which, as usual, Charlie Brown has a mishap with a kite) we were flying a giant Styrofoam glider and after Alex and Ian took a few turns, I wanted to show them how far I could throw it, so I wound up and winged it, just as the wind gusted, and it shot straight up and into the limbs of a tall sweet gum tree, sixty feet up (we were launching from a hill) but I brought the soccer ball to the park and, after twenty tries or so, I punted it loose . . . but then it got stuck in the same tree in nearly the same spot the next day, but miraculously, the next morning, it fell to the ground, unharmed, and though we finally broke it yesterday, we certainly got our seven dollars worth.

4/19/10

The eponymous Tyson documentary is surprisingly moving, sincere and candid . . . plus you get to see all his fantastic knock-outs, plus you get to hear him lisp the words "skull-duggery" and extra-curricular" in the same sentence: two bloody ears out of two.

4/18/10

How many calls does it take from the dentist's receptionist before you schedule an appointment?

Special Bonus Column!

Special bonus here . . . it is my new advice column over at Gheorghe: Ask the Dungeonmaster (and now there's a special double bonus over there-- Ask Matthew Clemmens-- Catherine is out, Ian is napping and Alex is making paper airplanes, so I've had a prolific Saturday).

4/17/10

After school, Alex and Ian immediately got up to something upstairs, I heard lots of banging and whispering, but no crying, so enjoyed the quiet time, and then Alex yelled, "Come upstairs!" and I did, and found a note taped to his door, with phrases like, "Your ridl is it's big and in my rom" and "look undr stuf, plees, for your kloow . . . frame nobde" and some of the letters were backwards and it really looked like an authentic lunatic kidnapper ransom note.

4/16/10

Ian begins each new day in the same way . . . he yells down the stairs, in his high pitched voice, to whomever might be listening: "Do I need new underwear?!?!"

Bibulous Bombast

Sometimes, after I have a few drinks, I like to sit down and start a sentence even though I don't know where it's going to end up, and any time I do this, it is a waste of everyone's time, so I always promise myself I'll never do it again, but like all promises made when sober-- promises never to dip tobacco again or eat fatcats or have more than six beers in a sitting or post blog entries with a buzz-- the pledge fades in comparison to the glow of alcohol, and so, once again, I have posted a rambling sentence with little or no literary purpose . . . something I won't be particularly proud of ten years from now, but still, it does capture a moment, minutia from a typical day, and perhaps that is worth something in itself . . . or not.

Stumbling Around the Internet

I usually don't post clips, and this is the sort of thing that I think is incredibly addictive, dangerous, and dehumanizing-- and in the end I will have to remove it from my Firefox browser, but I recently downloaded an application called StumbleUpon . . . you check off some preferences and then the engine there sends you to random things that you might like on the internet-- a Wikipedia article, a YouTube clip, a news article, a website-- and by checking thumbs up or thumbs down, the engine learns your preferences the more you "stumble," and the places it has sent me have been generally entertaining and sometimes completely engaging, which scares me, I don't want to sit down and get sent all over the internet until my eyes are glazed when I could have been playing with my kids or composing a new Greasetruck song-- so I think I will use it for one more week and then if I post another thing that I've found on it, I want someone to come and kill me.

4/13/10

Compare/contrast: Thursday night versus Friday night . . . Thursday night I met some friends for half price beers at Charlie Browns and the furniture was out so we sat outside and watched people walk by on the street and though some of the conversation scared the shit out of me (I recently hurt my knee and when two guys traded war stories about knee surgery and double Achilles ruptures, it made me really nervous . . . maybe because I've just turned forty and I'm wondering how long I have left with the soccer and the basketball) it was generally a relaxing evening . . . Friday night, Alex had a birthday party from six to eight PM (who schedules a kid's birthday party on Friday night? and my kids go to bed at 7:30 sharp!) and Catherine had a graduate class so I had to take him and we forgot the present, and Alex had a bit of an accident in his pants when we were at the softball game but didn't tell me until we got to the "Jumping Jungle" and before all the jumping began he gave his friend Trevor a bloody lip with an air hockey paddle and during the jumping and sliding the music was loud enough to rattle my fillings and during cake I had to chastise Alex for licking lemonade off the table (though a mom told me I should never discipline a boy at a birthday party, but that's ridiculous, you shouldn't be licking a table, even if you're six and when I tried to make some small talk and told her how my kids were generally uncivilized at the dinner table she suggested that we "mix it up" and eat on the floor or wear a funny hat . . . seriously, that's what she told me) and then we drove home and Alex fell dead asleep in the car but I had to wake him and give him a shower because he was disgusting from his accident and jumping jungle sweat and that is the last night party he is going to until he learns to drive (and once he learns to drive, he's going to drive ME to and from night parties).

Forty . . . Is the Magic Number

Do not doubt the power of the universal language--mathematics--when verbal communication is poor: I asked the Indian man at the Raceway station to fill up my car with regular, and he said "Forty regular," and it took me a second but then I realized he said "Forty" and I didn't want forty, I wanted a "fill up" so I said, "Not forty-- fill it up, fill it up" and he said, "Okay, fill up" and I said, "Yes, fill up" and then he filled it up, and miraculously, my tank took exactly forty dollars worth of gas to fill and when I handed him the money we both laughed and laughed at the elegance of the coincidence.

4/11/10

Two days ago at dinner, we caught Alex in a private moment-- he had taken two peas and placed one of them on the edge of his plate and the other on the table, and he was voicing an intense conversation between them . . . "You come over here" . . . "I'm not going over there, not yet, anyway" . . . "No, go ahead come down" . . . "No, I like it up here, it's cold and weird down there," and it went for an uncomfortably long time, and he never noticed we were watching him and I'm starting to worry that he's going to have trouble getting a prom date in high school.

Swedish Mysteries

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo inspired me to read another Swedish detective story-- this one, called Sidetracked, by the world famous Henning Mankell, pits melancholy sleuth Kurt Wallander against a serial killer that murders his carefully chosen victims with an axe-- this sounds over the top, but the tone is more like The Wire, slow and careful . . . it took three hundred pages until someone fired a gun; my favorite mundane detail about Wallander is that he doesn't really like soccer, but he tries his best to find interest in the World Cup just to get along with his colleagues, but really he can't understand how people could be worried about such frivolity when there is evil lurking in his once provincial town: fourteen mopeds out of fifteen.

Mini-Wolfe

Adam Haslett's debut novel, Union Atlantic, is a mini Tom Wolfe novel-- like Bonfire of the Vanities or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or A Man in Full or Charlotte Simmons, it opens the door to a world with which most people are unfamiliar and lets us all the way in, and though there were paragraphs on short selling and margins and future contracts and the Fed that took every brain cell for me to understand (I had to remember everything I learned from reading House of Cards and The Big Short) the book was also a page turner with excellent scenes and characters, ranging from the Persian Gulf to a batty old history teacher and her two dogs (who she imagined spoke to her in the voices of Cotton Mather and Malcolm X) to the lives of the rich slacker high school kids in Finden, the town Haslett chooses for a most current conflict to occur.

4/8/10

Our kids are champion car travelers, they did the eight hours back from the beach without a complaint-- yet they are often terrible when inside the house (or in any contained area except the car), which is why I'm thinking of getting a couple of car seats for indoors, so when they're getting wild, I'll just strap them in.

4/7/10

There is nothing like a Circus Peanut: the color, the texture, the taste . . . and if you want to read more, head over to G:TB for the First Annual Circus Peanut Diorama Contest (a response to the Washington Post's Peeps Diorama Contest . . . my entry, which I call "P-Day," is above, and right now, since I am the only entry, I am winning . . . the complete rules are at G:TB).

4/6/10

Rice Krispies wouldn't snap, crackle and pop . . . if corn weren't a subsidized crop.

4/5/10

Hot Tub Time Machine is very funny and also very very vulgar . . . and what made it even funnier for Catherine and I is that once the credits were rolling, we noticed that the couple behind us had decided to bring their three year old daughter and eleven year old son to see it (they passed up Clash of the Titans and Diary of a Wimpy Kid and How to Train a Dragon) and though we didn't agree with their parental permissiveness, we had to admire their perseverance, as they stuck it out despite the film's constant use of the f- word, abundant and gratuitous nudity, frequent rape and fellatio jokes, and obtuse 80's allusions; although, I don't recommend it for the kids, we both laughed a lot . . . I give the film four out of a possible five Walkmen (Walkmans? Sony claims the plural is Walkman Personal Stereos).

Pomp and Circumcision

I have been elected by the student body to give the graduation speech this year, and I am a bit nervous as I'll be speaking to a very large crowd (800 students, their families, many teachers and administrators, etc.) and so I'm working on a strong opening to my speech . . . and here is idea number one: "Greetings, I would like to thank all the parents in attendance today-- I am so glad that eighteen years and nine months ago you had unprotected sex."

4/3/10

Does Surfer Blood sound too much like Weezer for its own good?

Hypothetical Legos, Real Fisticuffs

It must be in the genes: Alex and Ian sit down together on the couch to look at the new Lego catalog, which sounds pretty innocuous, but within minutes they are embroiled in a fierce debate which ended in a fist fight . . . they were arguing about the hypothetical purchase of a Lego set and the hypothetical division of the hypothetically purchased Lego figures in the hypothetical set and the hypothetical superpowers of the hypothetical figures in the hypothetical set; they almost sounded like squabbling nations (and, by the way, yesterday's two sentence post was an April Fool's Joke-- anyone who writes more than one sentence a day is a complete idiot).

4/1/10

I'm feeling constrained by this format, I think it's time for me to spread my wings and fly. I think I need to try something new.

3/31/10

Does anyone actually get Andy Capp?-- and I'm not talking about his Hot Fries, which are delicious, I'm talking about the comic strip, which, to me, has always been as indecipherable as a Kandinsky painting.

3/30/10

While I can only commend Sean Penn for going to Haiti and lending a hand, I also think he may have lost himself in his "role" as a humanitarian; I heard him on NPR and he said, "This isn't a good place for children and there aren't nearly enough tents and we're really in trouble once the rainy season comes" and by his use of the pronoun "we" instead of "they," I'm wondering if he's so identified with the Haitians that he has forgotten that he can summon a fleet of helicopters to take him back to Hollywood whenever he desires.

Date Night With . . .

Once in a while it's fun to have a date night: an intimate dinner at a rustic spot (Sandy's diner) and then something special in the theater (the school play) and finally drinks out in a bay-side town (South Amboy) and then . . . well, you know what happens next . . . Terry gets in his car to head back to Helmetta and I get in mine and go home to see my wife (who was hanging out with her lady friends-- it's not like I deserted her to go on a date with Terry, and though the school play was actually quite entertaining-- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum-- they had the heat on and it was that warm day and so it was 120 degrees inside, my socks were soaked with sweat, so we bailed slightly before the first act ended, and met up with a bar crawl in South Amboy, the land of a million bars and ate a world renowned Munck-ee Bar chicken quesadilla).

Probably Better Not to Know

Alex tossed a shield bug in the toilet, but Ian (who STILL refuses to let us use live worms as fishing bait) rescued the drowning bug, not thinking twice about fishing him from the toilet water with his bare hands, and the only reason I found out about this daring and bacteria-laden rescue is because Alex offhandedly mentioned that he had tossed said bug in the toilet-- they were both pretty nonchalant about the incident-- and their nonchalance made me wonder how many other bugs Ian had saved from being flushed-- as he's always walking around with a bug in his hands . . . and so I did a little investigative reporting; I interrogated Alex and Ian about this matter, and they immediately-- without shame or disgust-- admitted that Ian often rescues bugs from the toilet.

Take a Deep Breath . . .

We started watching the second season of Breaking Bad, and it is just as excellent and intense as the first-- if you like to sit tensely wiithout breathing or moving for forty five minutes, this is the show for you.

3/26/10

Here is a great picture of last week's flood and what it did to the park a block from our house-- if the ocean levels do rise as predicted, we will have bay front property.

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).