A Hard Habit to Break

One of the purposes of this blog is to foster and promote human rights across the globe, and so I must implore any of my readers that are witch-doctors, or truck with witch-doctors, to please stop killing albinos and selling their body parts for use in magical potions . . . I know it's hard to abort a well-planned kidnapping and I know albino body-parts fetch a good price on the open market, but if you could substitute black rhinoceros horn or Bengal tiger kidney in your recipe, instead of albino body parts, you would be doing people of no color a great favor.

I Do Not Heed My Own Advice

Recently, I advised my readers that it is easier to invite everyone, but then, while on vacation at the beach, I neglected to follow this advice, and did not invite a particular guy to Guy's Night Out (and I asked my wife if she mentioned Guy's Night Out to this guy's girl-friend when she was out with her, and my wife said she did NOT mention Guy's Night Out so I thought this was a safe play) but then, in the fashion of Curb Your Enthusiasm, we ran into the uninvited guy and his girl-friend and all their kids while we were waiting in line at Mike's Dock and it was apparent, both by our state of inebriation and the fact that we were without wife and kids, that we were having a Guy's Night Out, and the guy made it clear that he knew we were having a Guy's Night Out and that we should have told him about it, which was pretty awkward, and all I could think of as a reply was, "It was kind of slow to develop," and so in the future I will follow my own advice.

Am I Liable? Or Just Unreliable?

I've just walked out of the ocean with my son Ian, and I'm looking up the beach to where my other son Alex is sitting, wrapped in a towel eating a snack . . . and it's low tide, so Alex is a good hundred feet away from me . . . and then, without warning, sand fills the air over my son Alex's head and a micro-burst of wind, some rogue convection cell, crashes through our beach set-up and rips two umbrellas from the ground and whips MY umbrella high up into the air . . . and when I say high up, I mean really high-up . . . it flies over the life guard stand and it continues to go straight up until it's fifty feet in the air and for a moment it hovers and it's like Mary Poppins should be attached, but then it starts to plummet and people are holding their heads and ducking and screaming (Connell said it was like when a dragon swoops down and scares all the townsfolk) and it finally crashes into the ocean-- along with one of our beach towels which also got swept up in this miniature tornado, and they are both less than ten feet from where Ian and I are standing, and so we go retrieve them (but if the umbrella would have impaled someone, I think I would have walked the other way, because I don't want to get jailed for involuntary manslaughter because of shoddy umbrella installation . . . you don't garner much respect with the inmates for that crime) and our beach area was devastated, our belongings were scattered everywhere and Nicky was crying, unhurt but scared, but here is the strange part . . . the burst of wind did absolutely no damage to any of the surrounding beach equipment, just to our little area: weird.

Modern Life: An Aphorism

There is magnificent irony in searching for the best parking spot at the gym.

That Was Easy

I locked myself out last week because I reminded my mother-in-law to be more vigilant about locking the side door that leads to her apartment in the basement . . . there's been a few break-ins in our neighborhood . . . but this was fortuitous and I recommend that you lock yourself out on purpose and then see how long it takes to break into your own home;  it took me three minutes to figure out that if I lifted the screen on the side window, I could then slide up the unlocked window and reach over and flip the dead-bolt on the side door, and thus get in without climbing anything, breaking any windows, or using any fancy equipment (skeleton keys, lasers, glass cutters, plastic explosives, genetically modified super-termites, etc.) so now I have a good idea of how secure my house is . . . and if you're thinking of robbing me now because you want to steal my new skim-board, you'll have to figure out a different way in, because now that window is locked.

You're Telling ME to Wear Sneakers?

So I walk into LA Fitness and the mousy girl working the desk-- if she had handles I could have dead-lifted her-- tells me I can't work out while wearing sandals . . . though I've been working out at LA Fitness for five years now while wearing sandals, as they are convenient foot-wear if you also want to swim or shower after you lift (plus I have a problem getting socks on my feet when it's humid, probably due to their hairiness) but she's insisting that I can't wear an "open toed shoe" while I lift weights, so I ask her about Crocs-- which are not technically open-toed-- and she considers this back-talk and says, "You want support when you work-out, so wear sneakers . . . okay?" and I'm about to get into the whole barefoot running thing and how I DON'T want support when I work out and how I often shoot baskets on their court barefoot, but I decide it's not worth it . . . and, finally, she did allow me on the floor with my sandals . . . but I had to promise that next time I would wear sneakers . . . and now I'm seriously considering getting some of those Vibram Five Fingers minimalist running shoes just to fuck with her.

A Short Review for a Long Movie

Avatar is a Disney movie for adults: thematically simple, visually stunning, full of melodramatic cheesy music which nearly ruins the entire film, and an absurdly happy ending . . . three hammerhead rhinoceros thingies out of a possible four.

Live From Sea Isle City . . . Another Embarrassing Moment in a Long Line of Them

Sunday night we went to see LeCompt, the best bar band in the universe, at the Springfield Inn, the best dive bar in the universe (cash only) and during "Born to Run," Mike LeCompt got on the bar and pointed the microphone at the girls in front of me, ostensibly to get one of them to sing the ONE TWO THREE FOUR, but then I realized he wasn't pointing the microphone at them, he was pointing the microphone at me, and so I took the natural course of action and started backing away, but he was relentless with his pointing, and then Ed gave me a firm push from behind and I stepped up and yelled, "ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!" in my best Bruce voice (which was pretty good because of the amount of drinking we had been doing) and then the girls in front of me high-fived me and twenty minutes later another guy congratulated me on my ability to count to four, and they were all sincere in their accolades, which I found ridiculous and I wanted to tell them that I was half-way through The Recognitions by William Gaddis, one of the densest works of literature known to Western culture and that counting to four wasn't much of an accomplishment, but The Springfield Inn didn't seem like the place to bring this up (and then on the way out, to add further insult, when we complimented LeCompt on another great show . . . they did a fantastic cover of David Bowie's "Starman" . . . LeCompt told me it was okay that I couldn't figure out what to do with the microphone for a while . . . he said, "It's alright man, I have ADD too").

Alex: 1 Dad: 0

While I was in the midst of one of my typical anti-Halloween diatribes, my wife sided with the boys and reminded me that I liked trick-or-treating for candy when I was a kid, and then Alex chimed in-- rather sagaciously for a six year old-- and told me something that I often forget:  "You weren't born a grown-up, Dad."

A Prison Film More Thought Provoking Than The Longest Yard

Jacques Audiard's movie A Prophet makes you work as hard as the Malik-- the Arab the protagonist-- who is thrown in jail at the start of the film and has to commit a brutal murder in order to curry favor with Luciani . . . the Corsican godfather . . . and this killing is as hard for him to execute as it is for the viewer to watch, but, like Michael Corleone of The Godfather and Tom Reagan of Miller's Crossing, Malik "sees all the angles," and though you may not see what he's planning (my wife and I didn't) and Malik certainly isn't going to reveal it-- he's as taciturn as they come-- that is what makes the film great, you are forced to contemplate how you would play all the angles, or at least speculate what tactics Malik has on his mind as he navigates the Corsican nationalists, the Italian mafia, the brotherhood of Muslims, and the various gypsies, lowlifes and drug dealers . . . a must see flick if you don't mind a little violence:  ten cups of instant coffee out of a possible ten.

Feeling Happy? Here's The Cure.

If you're feeling really happy . . . too happy for your own good, then you might want to read the graphic novel Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story: it's a depiction of when the Christian Phalangist massacred Palestinians while they were under the aegis of the Israeli Army . . . Ariel Sharon allegedly knew what was happening but did nothing to stop the slaughter, and the next time I'm feeling a bit too happy I'm going to watch the animated film that Ari Folman and David Polonsky made of this event, but I don't think it will be in the near future.

Summer Can't Last Forever . . . Or Not In My House

I must remember to wake up early . . . I must remember to wake up early . . . because if I don't . . . if I get up when everyone else gets up and I have to immediately start socializing with my family, then I can be a stubborn grouch-- and this also might be a result of a long, hot summer and a lot of "quality time" with my wife and kids-- and so last week while we were packing for a trip to the Philly Zoo, I got in a full blown argument with my wife about which water bottle to bring . . . but now I'm getting up again at 5:30 AM so I can get some alone time every morning before I have to deal with the other people that live in my house, and I'm behaving in a much more civil fashion.

Communication: Második rész

Now that there are so many myriad ways to communicate with fellow humans, you need to know which method each person prefers-- some people only respond to texts, some people will get right back to you on e-mail, there are Facebook people and Skype people and blog folks and chatters and old fashioned phone call people and communication whores who somehow manage everything at once . . . and if you don't know a person's preferred method, you may never communicate with them-- so I guess my question is this:  are texters only communicating with other texters while the old fashioned phone call people are sticking to their own and the Facebook people are partying down over there (unbeknowst to us bloggers) and the technorati are Skyping or doing something even cooler than that, is this causing some sort of communications clique effect . . . are we herding together because of technological choices and only communicating with people of the same type?

Communications Shakedown

Several members of my family have a long history of calling and leaving messages on our answering machine that contain no specific information other than "call me back," and I think this is a strategy to entice my wife and I to call back to find out what the actual message is . . . but we're not falling for it.

I Review a New Apple Product: The iGod Touched

My metamorphosis is complete, I am an Apple convert . . . read my product review of the new iGod Touched over at Gheorghe: The Blog . . . I promise you riches beyond the temporal.

Jeff from Curb is Funny

During a round of golf, Larry's agent Jeff Greene angrily counsels Larry's dopey cousin on how much information you should divulge to your wife:  "I don't tell my wife anything!  I'm at the office right now, not playing golf . . . the only time I tell her I'm playing golf is when I'm with another woman!"

8/16/10 It's Easier to Invite Everyone . . .

Larry David did an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" about the awkwardness of the invitation: Larry can't mention that he's invited to the Greene's dinner party (but of course he does mention it to Marty, who is NOT invited . . . and then Larry gets angry because he's not invited to dinner at a restaurant . . . and his friends are dining on him because he was the one that got Ted Danson the gift certificate, but Larry's friends claim that they didn't invite him because then he would be giving the gift to himself) and this theme manifested itself right in front of me the other night in New Brunswick . . . we were out with a large group of people and one couple revealed they had gotten an invite to someone's beach house (a drunken and late invite, but an invite nonetheless) but no one else had gotten an invite recently-- although one person had gotten the broad promise of a later invite a month before . . . so this was funny enough to discuss, but technology has taken awkwardness to a new and more immediate level . . . everyone started bombarding the non-inviter with texts about the lack of an invitation, until she finally confessed (in text format) that she was a "bad inviter," which leads to my motto of the day:  it's easier to invite everyone, as most people won't be able to make it anyway.

8/15/10 Some Movies Are 3-D!

I took the kids to the 11:05 matinee the other day and it cost twenty seven dollars, which I thought was outrageous, until they handed me a pair of 3-D glasses, and then I realized that Toy Story 3 would be my first 3-D movie (besides some movie with fish I saw many years ago at an Imax theater) and it went beyond all expectations . . . the movie was fantastic, especially the set-up at the Sunnyside Daycare Center (Lotso the Bear is a tough motherfucker and his story, told by Chuckles, a creepy sad clown toy, is priceless) and the metro-sexual Ken jokes are worth the price of admission alone: ten disembodied potato-head eyes out of ten.

Bonus Post at Gheorghe: The Blog

I found an excellent essay about world class athletes at kottke.org and I wrote a response over at G:TB . . . if you have time to read several sentences today, check it out (sorry-- that's a lot of hyper-links).

Sadly, The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree

We went camping with old friends in Vermont last weekend and it was like driving to Fall . . . it was COLD at night (low forties) so we were able to do a serious hike with the boys and after some early complaints they performed admirably-- it was the first time we really climbed a steep rocky trail to a peak with them . . . the little summit is called Cantilever Rock and you can scramble out onto a giant boulder with a huge skinny shaft of rock balanced overhead and see all the way to Lake Champlain . . . but just because the boys hiked to the top doesn't mean that they are now self-sufficient or any more mature than they were before the hike; for example, later in the afternoon, I had to stop Alex from barrel rolling down a steep rocky, tree filled hill to what would have been certain death, and while I was mumbling under my breath about his insane choices, my friend Rob said to me, "Just like you at Forsgate," and I had a quick flashback to our last high school golf match,  and what I thought was a fitting farewell: I barrel rolled off the monumental sand trap/cliff on the ninth hole (facing the clubhouse of course) and plunged, whirling away, and several of my team mates followed me (I think, or maybe they didn't) and my coach was very, very angry and embarrassed and I am sure he was mumbling the same sort of things I was mumbling and that was when I was SEVENTEEN years old so it's just going to get worse and I've got to prepare for it.

8/13/10 An Invention Just for You . . . You're Welcome!

I don't do charity work for the homeless or volunteer at the local food pantry, but I do consider this blog and the ideas that I give the on-line universe as my form of community service-- and if you doubt me, let me remind you about conceptual gifts such as this, this, and this-- and so I just came up with a new one, and more power to the person who reads this and follows through with the patenting and production of this invention I am donating to the internet . . . all I want is the ability to say, "You saw it here first" . . . so here it is:  everyone hates putting away laundry-- it's difficult enough to DO the laundry and once you're done there's never any motivation and energy left to actually put away the clothes-- so you make a dresser with laundry basket style drawers, so once you've put your laundry into the baskets, you're done-- you just slide the laundry basket drawers into your dresser and go back to your busy life and once you've worn all the clothes in your drawer, then slide it out, fill it with clothes from the hamper and do some laundry . . . knowing that when it's complete you can put it in your basket and effortlessly slip the drawer shaped basket right into your dresser.

8/12/10 A Comedic Epiphany

This sounds impossible, but my son Ian figured out how to "fart with his neck," as he so eloquently phrased it . . . he raises his shoulders to his ears and creates the suction that is normally generated with the classic "cupped hand under the armpit" fart, but this way he can produce fart sounds when his hands are occupied (and he has found that this only works when the humidity level is over 75%).

A Fishy Meal

A few weeks ago, we were eating cod from Costco-- each fillet is frozen in its own plastic pouch-- when Catherine discovered a long pink worm in her piece, and this skeeved her out so much that she refused eat any of the other pieces of that batch of cod, but though she wouldn't eat the fish herself, she had no problem feeding it to our kids . . . who ate it without a problem . . . and someday, if the internet doesn't implode on itself when the singularity arrives, Alex and Ian will read this and either laugh or decide to seek revenge.

8/10/10 A Horticultural Surprise

It's rare that something actually lives up to its expectations, but my wife's butterfly bush almost always has a butterfly on it.

8/9/10 Nap Etiquette

I waited until the air-conditioning repair guys went to lunch before I took a nap on the couch; it's embarrassing to sleep in the daytime in front of people who are working with their hands.

Huey, Willie, and Bill

The classic novel All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren, is ostensibly the fictionalized story of Huey Long, the amoral populist Louisiana demagogue known as the "kingfish" . . . Warren embodies him in Willie Stark, known to his men as "the boss," and the novel delves deeply into the corrupt politics of the South and into the paradoxical soul of "the boss"-- he wants to do good for the poor, but he's got to get his hands dirty to do so (Stark is also reminiscent of Bill Clinton-- the arc of their ascent and their rhetorical strengths are similar) but really the book is about the narrator, Jack Burden-- he is an advisor to Willie Stark-- and how Jack grapples with the forces of history and slowly moves from believing in a detached deterministic universe (his Great Twitch theory) to finally believing in something larger (and there's also a scene right out of Star Wars: in between the philosophizing and politics, there's quite a bit of melodrama . . . a tour de force and a great read: ten sugar cubes out of ten).

8/7/10 Are You Average?

The average Facebook user has 130 friends . . . but how many of these people would you lend money to . . . or invite to a party at your house . . . or trust to take care of your dog/ gerbil/ kids . . . or allow to drive your car?

8/6/10 Larry David is Funny

Two throwaway bits from the first episode of Season 7 of Curb Your Enthusiasm that I loved: 1) Larry calls the apricot a "low percentage fruit . . . only one in thirty is any good" 2) Larry is informed that the neighbors have been talking about recent burglaries in the neighborhood, and he is far more paranoid about talking to the neighbors than the robberies . . . "the burglars want your stuff and the neighbors want your time; I'd rather lose my stuff than my time."

A Political Thought Experiment

If we could divide our nation into two, and all the Red State Conservatives lived on one side and the Blue State Liberals lived on the other, and you had to choose where you were going to live and you couldn't switch . . . would you live on the unregulated, low taxation, abortion is illegal, few social services, health care for those with jobs, non-unionized, lobbyist empowered, large gap between rich and poor, underfunded public education Red side or the high taxation, plenty of social services, abortion is legal, marijuana is legal, universal health care, unionized, regulated markets and financial institutions, pro-public education Blue side?

Just Say Your Sorry!

Another tip from social scientist Dan Ariely:  saying "sorry" really does have a beneficial effect . . . Ariely proved this by setting up a simple experiment where the technician running the experiment takes a cell-phone call in the middle of questioning the subject-- and rudely ignores him for a time-- but later the subject has a chance to exact "revenge" when the technician over-pays him for his efforts; if the technician did NOT take the cell phone call, then the subject usually gave back the overpayment, but the times the technician took the call, the subject usually exacted pecuniary revenge for  the rudeness . . . unless the technician said, "Sorry, I shouldn't have taken that call" afterward . . . but, of course, if Ariely simply watched this scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (when Lancelot storms the wedding and kills the best man and many other guests, but ends up getting along smashingly with the King because he apologizes for his violent actions) the he wouldn't have had to go through all the trouble of running the experiment.

Bonus at Gheorghe:The Blog . . . The Internet is for Corn-Hole

If you want to learn more about corn-hole performance during Outer Banks Fishing Trip XXVII, check this post out . . . you will also learn about the true purpose of the internet.

OBFT XVII

Highlights (and lowlights) of the Outer Banks Fishing Trip XXVII . . . worst water ever, cold and full of sea lice and jellyfish, which led to the most corn-hole playing ever, my right hamstring and back muscles actually started to get sore from tossing those beanbags . . . after a sound beating by the Bill/Whit corn-hole dynasty, Jerry and Chris go inside and Google "how to toss a corn-hole beanbag" and then return minutes later and drub the dynasty . . . Bruce a.k.a. "Windy Buttocks" gives an extemporaneous wind report off the deck of the Martha Wood . . . T.J. tries to leap the chair, although "leap" probably isn't the correct word . . . a fantastic sit-com called "T.J. and the Weave" also featuring "Jerry" . . . two guys with mustaches . . . Lacey the bartender is pregnant so we do the math (and also try to name the baby "Whitney" but she says it sounds too snobby) . . . a discussion of The Book of Mormon . . . Bruce tries to change seats at Tortuga's because of the "menu game" . . . the advent of the Tortuga's "bar crawl" and a cyber-method of persuading someone to pick them up . . . thanks again for another successful trip,Whit.

Bonus : A Pertinent SNL Skit

Here is a related SNL skit (thanks to Greg) that is almost as funny as the last sentence:  "How Much Ya Bench."

8/2/10 This Won't Help What People Think Of New Jersey

My friend Bruce runs Kittyhawk Kites down on the Outer Banks, and he often teaches hang-gliding lessons at Jockey's Ridge, and this was his unfortunate experience with a Jersey guy a few weeks ago:  the guy was built well, he certainly worked out, but he was having trouble flying the glider (actually, a lighter touch works much better) and not getting half the distance the rest of his group was getting, so Bruce took him aside and gave him a few pointers, and then when the guy walked back over to his friend, and Bruce clearly heard him say: "Yeah, so that guy knows a lot about hang-gliding, but how much can he bench?"

8/1/10 Family Life: A Portrait

A snapshot of our family life:  my lovely wife agreed to sugar-wax the disgusting patches of hair off my back, which really hurt, so my youngest son held my hand during the process, and while my wife ripped and teared away I told my other son that if I was a movie star, they'd depilate my entire body, which would really hurt and he said, "But do they let fat guys be movie stars?" and then he qualified it and said, "Not like you . . . even fatter, like THIS fat" and he mimicked being really fat with his hands and I said, "Sure, John Candy and John Belushi and Chris Farley and Jack Black were all fat movie stars," and he said, "Oh yeah, if you had a fat movie star you could paint him brown and he'd be like a piece of poop, that would be funny" and this image of painting someone like John Candy poop brown made us all laugh really hard (despite the fact that Catherine was dripping hot wax on my back and then yanking it off) and then Catherine said, "Our son is weird."

7/31/10 A Metaphor for a Large Dead Jellyfish

I followed a link about a "large dead jellyfish" that my friend sent out on Twitter-- I am a sucker for that sort of thing-- and found out that a large Lion's man jellyfish broke apart near a New Hampshire beach and stung nearly one hundred people, but what interested me more than the actual jellyfish was the metaphor that State Park Manager Ken Loughlin used to describe the size of the jellyfish:  he said it was the "size of a turkey platter," which grosses me out, because he's associating a delicious land animal with a giant aquatic sac of poison, and now when I think of Thanksgiving, I think of a giant seething jellyfish on a silver platter and I blame Ken Loughlin for this and I'm sure he's ruined Thanksgiving for everyone else who read that article . . . and so I think he should be fired-- or at least put on probation and have to do a hundred hours of dead jellyfish picking on the New Hampshire beaches.

7/30/10 A Musical Analogy

Brent Mason's instrumental "Hotwired" is the country analogue to Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption."

Ouch!

Last week I used the gift certificate my brother gave me for a massage-- it wasn't at the usual Asian place I go to, instead I went to a girl my brother knew from high school and she hurt me-- it was not relaxing at all-- and I feel like as I've gotten older I've built up a tolerance for deep tissue massage and I sort of pride myself on being able to take some pretty rough body work, but I had to say uncle a couple times to this chick, who was built like a power lifter and liked to stick her elbow deep into recesses in my back and buttocks until I cried like a little girl, and I know in the end it's worth it, after a day of being very sore, but I remember the days of going and getting a nice light oily rub and napping . . . and this sort of reminds me of eating spicy food, it starts as something fun and exotic, you use some hot sauce or order something a bit spicy for variety, but then suddenly your ordering things as hot as they come just to prove you can take it and then it's not about enjoying the food any more, it's about withstanding the pain . . . but I think I'll go back to her, she played cool bhangra music while she tortured me.

Spandex: Pros and Cons

These are the pros of wearing spandex under your shorts during a run on the beach: 

1) no chafing 

2) when you're finished running, you can strip off your shorts and put them high and dry on the sand, your iPod and condo keys safely tucked away in the pockets, and jump in the water wearing just the spandex . . . and then you can put your shorts back on for the walk home and enjoy the benefit of #1 . . . 

and there is only one con but it is a major one, if you happen to be an early riser and you are serenely walking down the beach, collecting shells or watching for porpoises, you might run into a hairy man coming out of the ocean, stuffed into a pair of slightly too small spandex shorts, like a sausage bursting from its casing, and that hairy man would be me . . . but sorry early risers: there's no way I'm risking chafing.

Bonus at Gheorghe: The Blog!

I've just created a new Oscar category over at Gheorghe: The Blog . . . if you've got the time, check it out.

7/27/10 An Antagonistic Encounter with a NAVY Seal . . . or maybe not.

After dinner, I was waiting outside a sushi place with a friend when an SUV whipped around the corner of the parking lot and nearly hit a middle-aged guy walking across the road, and the middle aged guy yelled "Asshole!" at the SUV and the driver of the SUV yelled "Suck my dick!" and the middle aged guy yelled "It's too small!" and the driver, a young guy got out and started advancing toward the older guy and my friend Mike said, "Get back in your car" and we did what teachers do-- we positioned ourselves in between the two parties-- and the driver's friend entered the scene now, with an unlit cigarette in his mouth (flipped the wrong way)  and the young guy looked at my friend Mike, who's pretty big, and said, "Where did you guys come from?" and Mike said, "Get back in your car" and then the strange thing happened-- the young driver opened his wallet and flashed a card or something and said, "You're lucky I didn't kick all your asses! I'm a NAVY Seal" and then he jumped back in his car and drove away . . . but he was sort of pear shaped for a young guy and he didn't really look like a Navy SEAL at all . . . and then the middle aged guy, who had walked into the restaurant, poked his head out and said, "Thanks guys" and then the other two guys we were with, who were in the bathroom and missed everything (isn't that always the case?) came outside and we got to tell them the whole story (and I thank Mike for sending me the details for this sentence, because I missed the beginning of the exchange because I was just sort of spacing out).

Bonus Explanation!

I was out late last night and very hungover when I wrote this morning's sentence, so it doesn't make much sense but I've tried to do a better job of it over here-- I apologize for the low quality content I produced this AM . . . but hey, it's not like I'm getting paid for this . . .

A Rock and Roll Coincidence

I won't wax poetically about the inimitable LeCompt, as I've already given them enough praise (I believe I've called them the "best bar band in the universe") but last night, after a frantic and late entrance -- they had already played an afternoon gig in Philly-- they started with a mellow and weird psychedelic set, and while they were playing "Down By the River" I told my cousin that my kids liked this song because they were intrigued as to why the narrator "shot his baby," and I then told my cousin that I had been playing "Space Oddity" to my kids on my guitar because they liked the space theme and then-- and it couldn't have been ten seconds after I said this-- LeCompt launched into an amazing cover of "Space Oddity" . . . which is pretty coincidental, because nobody covers "Space Oddity," but they did it, complete with space vocals and guitar, but I didn't make too much of this very strange coincidence because I once read something by a statistician who pointed out that the very fact that we are alive and process stimuli every second-- which adds up to a million events a month or so- and the fact that we are constantly on the lookout for patterns means that we will discover a one in a million coincidence fairly often, but it is foolish to assign meaning to it because that means we must also assign meaning to all the non-coincidences that happen to us-- all the songs I've mentioned that bands don't suddenly start playing moments later . . . and while this does ruin the fun, it doesn't mean I still can't enjoy the coincidence (and sorry the sentence is late today, but it was a late night).

7/25/10 Everyone is Hot!

Dan Ariely used data from the website Hot or Not to see if people who were "aesthetically challenged" actually had different standards of what was "hot," and he found out that they don't, but that's not important-- what is important is that there is some serious "hotness inflation" on that site, kind of like grade inflation in high school . . . everyone is an "8" . . . and I mean everyone, warts and all, and now I think I'm going to put my photo on there so I can be an "8" too . . . I urge you to go there and see what I'm talking about.

This is Scary

One more idea from The Upside of Irrationality (sorry) that I can't stop thinking about-- this is an explanation of emotions and their influence on decision making, and Ariely explains it like this, we all know that our emotions can have an influence on our short-term decision making, you get stuck in traffic and it makes you irate, so you end up yelling at your kids about making noise in the car . . . but Ariely explains how this can lead to long-term influence . . . because though you usually don't remember your emotions from last week (how did you feel last Wednesday at noon?) you do remember your previous decisions and actions, and you generally think that your own behavior was rational and so you often repeat behaviors that happened in the past (this can be good, as well: you have a good day at work and get flowers for your wife in your ebullient mood, and then the week after, you just get her flowers because you are now the kind of guy who randomly gets his wife flowers-- you don't remember the good emotion that caused the initial decision, you just remember the decision) and so suddenly, because of some ephemeral emotions that you thought were short lived and only put you in a good or bad mood for a few minutes, the way you live your life is altered for good.

A Psychological Tactic

This tactic is from Dan Ariely's new book The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home and it is based upon the psychological fact that people will enjoy something pleasurably more if there is an interruption-- whether it is getting a massage or watching television, a break inserted in there when you are no longer receiving the pleasurable stimulus makes you appreciate it again once the break is over . . . and so TiVo actually makes television watching less pleasurable, because resuming your favorite show after some annoying commercials makes you treasure the show even more-- and so the next time you and your wife/lover/mistress are doing something fun, sitting in a hot-tub drinking beer or relaxing on the beach watching the waves or simply watching TV, offer to get up and get your wife/lover/mistress something they want; this is the beauty of the tactic, you will appear to be unselfish because you've interrupted your pleasant activity to get them another drink or a snack or something, but actually you will be increasing your perception of pleasure because when you get back to the pleasurable activity, you will enjoy it more . . . mwooohahahahah (that is how you phonetically spell an evil laugh . . . I also recommend Ariely's other book, Predictably Irrational).

7/22/10 Ask the Oil Spill

Head over to Gheorghe: The Blog to hear what the BP oil spill has to say for itself . . . you won't regret it.

7/21/10 A Poll About Coffee

My wife wants me to poll ten people and see if they know that Taster's Choice is instant coffee . . . I did NOT know this and the other morning I thought we were out of coffee (we weren't, I just couldn't see it in the fridge) an so I rummaged around and found a canister of Taster's Choice and so I put it into the coffee maker, though the consistency was a little weird, and it made some very very strong coffee and it also formed a thick sludge in the filter and machine . . . a sludge that I imagine is similar to what the shrimp are eating right now in the Gulf . . . and Catherine thinks I should have known that Taster's Choice is instant coffee, which is coffee that disintegrates right into your cup, but I don't watch TV and I've never made instant coffee before and I'm not so sure that everyone in America knows what this stuff is, as my wife claims . . . so any information on the public knowledge of this product is greatly appreciated.

7/20/10 The David Blaine

In their hit "Crank Dat," Soulja Boy introduced me to the "superman," a sexual technique you might like to try with your ho, and now a new hip-hip album has furthered my sexual education and taught me another fun thing you can do to your ho . . . I learned this one from Big Boi's awesome solo effort, "Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty" and the technique is called "The David Blaine" and this is how it works: you are making love to your ho from behind and you get someone from your posse that is similar to you in both physique and looks to somehow swap places with you while you are in the act, without your ho noticing the switch (it probably works better if she is high on the rock) and then you go outside while your body double keeps up the love-making and you bang on the window until your ho notices you and marvels at your magical David Blaine-like powers.

What The $%#$ Is The Matter With Kansas?

In his book What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Thomas Frank explains the nifty trick conservative Republicans have pulled off in the reddest of red states . . . and many other places in the mid-West: the poorest people, those most hurt by laissez faire capitalism, those most in need of social services and good public schools and a higher minimum wage and unionization, those that would most benefit from environmental reforms and public parks and regulation of big-business . . . those people happily vote against this time after time because the Republicans have made the elections about authenticity and brand loyalty and morality-- these people are voting for a higher cause, whether it is the anti-abortion crusade or gun rights or small government or home-schooling or the encroachment of "liberal intellectual values" into their square way of life . . . and the beauty of this is that these battles will never be won, and the Republicans have somehow inserted Adam Smith's "invisible hand" into this pantheon revered issues and the great paradox of this is that the very laissez-faire free-wheeling capitalism that the conservatives vote for produces the insipid entertainment culture that they rail against and the more they place themselves in the hands of privatized America, the more they will be offended, insulted, and outraged and the more they will fall into the hands of the very party that does them no good . . . or no good financially, but the point of the book is that sometimes people want to do better morally and emotionally, it might be more valuable to be indignant and poor than content and middle class; there's much more in here but it's a well argued take from an ex-conservative that lives in Kansas, I highly recommend it although it will probably piss you off (if you're a Northeastern liberal . . . if you're a economically disadvantaged red state conservative and you're reading this blog then the universe is a strange place and this book might explain why you have voted against your best interests for the last thirty years).

Malleable Friends

 Adam Elliott's charming but dark (both in color and theme) claymation masterpiece Mary and Max will definitely make you laugh and maybe even make you cry-- though not as much as this movie; it's the story of the oddest of friends, an awkward Australian girl and her accidental pen-pal: an obese New Yorker with Asperger's (voiced by Philip Seymour-Hoffman) and the film has a novelistic sense of time . . . you journey through love, death, betrayal, suicide, alcoholism, neglect, and obsession and though it's all made of clay, you forget that soon enough: five cans of condensed milk out of five.

7/17/10 The New (and Improved) Sherlock Holmes?

Guy Ritchie's new Sherlock Holmes is entertaining as an action movie, and it also works as a super-hero buddy flick (complete with homosexual overtones between Holmes and Watson that rival Batman and Robin's weird relationship) but it fails as a mystery-- the clues are so obscure, obtuse, and fleeting that only Holmes can make sense of them, in rapid fire montages that illustrate his brilliant consciousness . . . so I will give it four pig carcasses out of a possible four, but only one pipe out of ten.

7/16/10 Mapplethorpe meets Reagonomics

Sometimes Adam Smith's "invisible" hand forms a fist and shoves itself where the sun of capitalism never shines.

Wrong Book For The Setting

You probably don't want to be reading Jon Jeter's book Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced the Working People while you are vacationing in Cape Cod, as it isn't exactly beach reading-- the book is about how globalization and the World Bank has created a transnational underclass, and Jeter, the Washington Post bureau chief for South Africa and South America, tells specific tales of Argentinian garbage-pickers, Uruguayan prostitutes, Zambian capitalists (who earn pennies a day), a South African woman fighting to afford newly privatized clean water and electricity, and a Brazilian cab driver working round the clock to feed his family that will make you feel guilty about living in America (even during a recession) and you certainly don't want these stories, facts, and figures in your head when you eat over your aunt's house (a stunning place on the Oyster River in Chatham) and the discussion turns political . . . it's better to stay out of it when more conservative relatives talk about "redistribution of wealth" as if that is an awful, evil thing, because you don't want to sound like an autistic socialist, which is exactly what you'll sound like if you start citing distribution of wealth ratios in various countries . . . in other words, the income for the wealthiest ten percent of the population as compared to the poorest ten percent of the population-- so I wisely kept my mouth shut, but here are the statistics Jeter cites:  in Brazil the wealthiest ten percent make 51 times more than the poorest ten percent, in South Africa the ratio is 33:1, in the United States-- which has the biggest disparity of any developed nation-- it is 15:1, and in socialized Sweden it is 6 to1.

7/14/10 A Warning

It is scary to think you might end up like your parents, but it is even scarier to think that you already are like your parents-- you just don't realize it.

7/13/10 A Literary Analogy

I Read Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night while I was on vacation and I liked it much better than The Great Gatsby, and the best way to explain this is an analogy:  The Great Gatsby is like Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men: it is artistic and archetypal and thematic and and lean and memorable and literary . . . Tender is the Night is like Cannery Row: it is ragged and specific and autobiographical in spots and rambling and not as focused-- chronologically or thematically-- and looser and more fun . . . Fitzgerald has time to write lines like "she crossed and recrossed her knees frequently in the manner of tall restless virgins" and though The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men will forever be taught in school because they are symbolic and unforgettable, Tender is the Night and Cannery Row are better books, denser and more engaging and easier to get lost in.

I'm Back! And Dumber Than Ever!

I inadvertently made my wife quit caffeine cold turkey on our vacation last week, although she did not know she was quitting . . . here is how it happened: I always get up early and so on vacation I'm in charge of figuring out the foreign coffee maker and making the coffee-- and aside from one small flood-- I was successful, but I didn't realize the green bag of coffee was decaf (for my father, at home we don't have any decaf coffee so I can't make this mistake) and it took Catherine three days of migraine head-aches to figure out my error . . . but in the end I think she'll thank me, because now she knows if she needs to quit, she can do it . . . aside from the head-aches (and if you want a full analysis of our vacation, I've written my first installment of The Battle of the Beaches: The Jersey Shore vs. Cape Cod over on Gheorghe: The Blog).

7/11/10

My brother found it extremely amusing that my father, slightly overwhelmed by the expansive menu at Aroma (a delicious Thai restaurant) asked the waiter this question about the Grilled Duck: "The Grilled Duck?  Is that duck . . . grilled?"

7/10/10

Fooled you again . . . I'm sure I didn't step foot inside the Chatham Library all vacation . . . I'm probably collecting shells with my kids right now on an idyllic beach, drunk, surrounded by bikini clad Swedish volleyball players; I wrote all the sentences ahead of time . . . sorry for my behavior, but tomorrow fresh sentences will begin again.

7/9/10

Just kidding about yesterday's sentence . . . I wrote it at the Chatham Library, a lovely red brick pile set back from main street and framed by huge old oak trees; it is such a charming old building that the internet terminals seem incongruous inside, anachronistic, as if the future invaded the past . . . and the dusty shelves of old books and the ancient maps of the Nantucket Sound on the walls make me yearn for a past time, when information had a physical component, when you had to riffle the pages of a dusty book to learn what you needed, or unroll a map, or pull a newspaper from a wooden spool, or search among cards in a monolithic wooden cabinet . . . but those days are gone, of course, and how long will libraries like this one be necessary?

7/8/10

I am on vacation in Cape Cod right now, and I have no access to a computer . . . so I am writing this sentence with my mind-- I am letting my thoughts flow in binary code and telepathically transmitting them to the internet (along with my Google password . . . trivia question: why is George Costanza's ATM password Bosco?) and the words are appearing right in front of your eyes, or maybe, if things are going according to my plan, you aren't even looking at a screen right now . . . maybe my thoughts are transmitting straight into your brain, and you just think you are looking at a computer monitor or your Blackberry or iPad or iPhone or other tiny device, but you're really not looking at anything at all, and if this is the case, then very very soon, I will be taking over the world, and, luckily, you will be in my monkey-sphere of power and influence, because you are a fan of Sentence of Dave, and so, for you, everything is going to be just fine.

A Sentence Where The Title of the Sentence is Longer than the Sentence Itself (But Not as Long a Title as a "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening")

Last night, I dreamed I came face to face with a mountain lion.

7/6/10

It's sad when you try to take your children to your childhood bait and tackle shop, and in its place you find a new business called NJ Bail Bonds . . . but it does remind me of when I learned what a bail bond is, which is the exact same time everyone my age learned what a bail bond is: right after watching The Bad News Bears when you asked your parents-- what is Chico's Bail Bonds?

7/5/10 The World Cup Causes Me Trouble: A One Sentence Memoir

Though I had an extremely long day of World Cup Imbibing (10 AM to Midnight) the day before Ian's kiddie birthday party, I thought I recovered nicely-- I got up early from Stacey and Ed's place in South Amboy and drove Stacey's stick shift car (not my forte) to Helmetta so I could get my car, and I was still home before 7 AM, and I immediately starting doing whatever my wife asked me to do-- I picked up the cake and balloons and juice boxes and other ingredients, I cleaned the kiddie pool, I straightened the back yard, and I attempted to fill water balloons-- but by the time the party rolled around I was dragging a bit, and I guess I wasn't as involved as I should have been, and mainly I talked to my friend Dom about a new book he was reading that sounded interesting (Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced the Working People) but any time Catherine asked for help I helped her and then later in the day when we were at the pool I jokingly mentioned to a friend that I had "failed" at Ian's kiddie party and she said, "Let me guess what happened . . . one of the parents there was a friend of yours that you hadn't talked to in a while and instead of helping your wife, who was running around like a madwoman, you sat and talked to your friend and had to be reminded by your wife to help out," and I said, "That's remarkably accurate, how did you know?" and she said, "Because my husband did the same thing and I said to him, 'Look asshole, if you want to talk to your fucking friend, then you call him up like an adult and you go meet him in a god-damned bar like a grown-up but right now you're going to help me with this party'" and I should mention that this is a friend who rarely uses profanity.

7/4/10

So we put our digital camera on a tripod the other day and made a stop motion Lego movie . . . the plot was very simple:  two cars drove at each other and then crashed, resulting in a pile of Legos, but we were able to screw up every aspect of the film;  there are fingers in several shots, it's choppy, the crash looks awful, the lighting switches because we used the flash on some pictures and not on others, and we were too far away for it to look very good . . . so when you go on  YouTube and watch a decent Lego movie, understand that it took A LOT of skill.

7/3/10

It is 8:30 AM and the boys and I are returning from the park, and Alex is talking a mile a minute about his remote controlled car, and Ian is trailing behind us, saying: "You know what?  You know what?  You know what?" in his high-pitched squawk, and Alex finally takes a breath, so I say to Ian: "What?" and he says, "Boats can explode."

7/2/10

Freedom is when your wife tells you exactly what to do.

A Really LONG Sentence About a Really BIG SHORT

I just finished the new Michael Lewis book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, and I've probably got a three day window to explain what a "synthetic sub-prime mortgage bond-backed C.D.O." is-- but I guarantee no one will ask me this (thus the purpose of the blog) and I can also explain tranches (both senior and mezzanine) and credit default swaps and the corruption in the AAA ratings of these bonds and lots of other good stuff . . . I had to read many paragraphs two or three times, but Lewis intersperses financial analysis with the story of a group of investors that were "in the know" and it's these characters that propel the plot of the book: caustic and gritty insider Steve Eisman-- who was on a mission to get back at all the people who foisted the terrible no-doc sub-prime mortgages on the working poor--and the one eyed medical doctor with Asperger's, Dr. Steve Burry, who became obsessed with sub-prime mortgage bonds and CDO's and actually read the prospectuses and realized that the whole trillion dollar house of cards was bound to collapse, even if the housing market didn't fall, even if it just stopped rising as quickly as it did in the years past, and then there's the "garage band" hedge fund started by Jamie Mai and Charles Hedley to short the housing bond market, and that helps explain just how difficult it is for regular people to invest in the same markets that the big brokerages firms are controlling; I've read a few good books on this theme, including House of Cards and The Black Swan (and also Michael Lewis's last collection of essays Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity) but this new book really explains the exponential nature of this dilemma . . . we all know some wacky mortgages were issued (and some with good intentions, the initial reason for a greater variety of mortgage types was to allow people with weaker credit to purchase homes, in the hopes that they would then be able to save money in the form of real estate) and I think everyone knows now that the bonds that were based on slices of these mortgages failed, but Lewis really gets into how CDO's multiplied these loans exponentially into more and more nested products which only contained more of themselves, and how the ratings agencies saw this as "diversification" even though many of these funds contained pieces of each other and even though they were ALL based on the price of housing (unlike earlier derivatives, which were based on a wide variety of weird loans: credit cards, airplane leases, etc.) and he explained just how opaque this market was, and how "inside" and how difficult it was to even obtain the shorts (the credit default swaps) on these products, and how even after housing prices started to fall and everyone was defaulting on their mortgages, the insurance on these CDO's still didn't sky-rocket in price because the funds were being propped up even though the reality beneath them was caving in-- and it makes you feel really out of the loop as a regular person, even rich people didn't have access to these markets (but we all had access to the information!) and the ending is sad in a way, because everyone involved in the crash walked away with money, even the investors who went long with the sub-prime loans, everyone got paid and the government bailed out the banks and brokerages (except Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers) and though we, the people, couldn't get in on the party, we will pay for the clean-up (at least with the oil spill, though we are paying for the clean-up, we've been in on the party, driving around like lunatics all our life).

Portugal vs. Spain: A Riotously Good Time in Newark

A single sentence can't do our soccer pilgrimage to Newark justice,  so head over to Gheorghe:The Blog to read my photo essay about our trip:  I promise you drama, tension, a celebrity sighting, crack, riots, technology, and a flaming sausage.

6/29/10

Though I doubted their skinny bodies could remain buoyant for a full length of the Rutgers pool, both my boys proved me wrong and passed their deep water tests last week-- so now they have complete freedom in the pool and are allowed to jump off the diving board-- which Ian did seventy or eighty times in a row, including a few "360's" . . . a term which he learned from another boy while in line, so it's going to be a more pleasant summer than the last one, when the boys could swim, but not so well, so they always looked like they were on the verge of drowning, which makes it really hard to look away from them and at the page of whatever book you are reading (and I have banned them from the kiddie pool, which they like to fool around in when they get cold in the big pool, because they are now big enough to be considered the annoying kids who the parents of actual toddlers hate because they fear for their toddlers lives when the big kids invade the kiddie pool, and this is nice as well, because now I don't have to look for them in two bodies of water, only one).

Hose of Plenty

It has been pointed out that perhaps Americans have TOO much of everything; that there is such a thing as too much "plenty" in the "land of plenty," and that all this choice and plenty doesn't necessarily lead to happiness-- we never make the top ten in any of the "happiest countries" surveys, though impoverished places like Guatemala and Nigeria are always high on the list, and even Mexico-- while in the midst of a violent drug cartel war-- was ranked as the second happiest place in the world in a University of Michigan study-- and nowhere is this paradox of plenty leading to misery more evident than on the nozzle of my garden hose, as there are NINE settings, count them: 1) fan 2) cone 3) shower 4) center 5) jet 6) mist 7) soaker 8) flat 9) angle . . . and no matter which one I use my shorts always get soaked and there is no difference between angle and cone and fan . . . and "soaker" should just be called "leaking" and I am sure that in El Salvador (another happy country) they just put their thumb over the end of the hose to control the spray.

Likeable But Forgettable

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is cute and funny, and the "graphic nudity" at the start and finish of the movie-- that's the explanation next to the R rating-- made me laugh and made sense (which is rare for graphic nudity) but the film never really pushes the premise (that it's hard to get over the love of your life when you are vacationing at the same resort as her, and she's there with an ultra-cool rock star . . . and you are there all alone) and I am afraid-- though I love Judd Apatow and crew-- that Forgetting Sarah Marshall will be rather easy to forget.

Rock Which Town? And When?

I was listening a rockabilly program on Princeton college radio (WPRB) and the DJ was playing classic stuff by Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran and Bill Haley, but then he played "Rock This Town" by The Stray Cats-- which is in some ways indiscernible from the other, older music-- though it is from 1982 . . . and my post-modern dilemma is this:  "Rock This Town," which I consider somehow disingenuous and satirical because it is from my youth, a period of punk-rock, synth-pop, and Men Without Hats-- and though The Stray Cats made great music, there was an element of parody in their dress, their musical style and their lyrics . . . but they sounded like they were from the '50's, and now the song is so old (and regarded as one of the 500 most important songs of all time by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) that it has become classic, so "classic" that the DJ didn't point out the difference between "Rock this Town" and the other "authentic" songs he was playing, and I know this shouldn't bother me and maybe it's because it makes me feel old, that I can make the distinction between an eighties band and real rockabilly and it's so far in the past that no one else seems to know or care . . . but it is scary that the eighties are the same amount of years from the fifties as they are from the present.

Keeping It Yogi

Here's a real quotation said by a real administrator at our end of the year meeting, I think it does Yogi Berra proud: In order for things to happen, a lot of things have to get done (and this is so much better than my bogus Yogi Berra quotation but not nearly as good as my sincere apology for my phony Yogi Berra quotation).

Free Thesis

This sentence might end up being an essay over at Gheorghe: The Blog some day, but for now it is just a thesis that anyone is free to steal: sports have "sweet spots" of entertainment and aesthetic value, and once the players get too big or too skilled, it's no longer much fun to watch-- college basketball is excellent viewing, there's lots of strategy and different ways to move the ball around and manufacture points, but once you get to the NBA, the best is method is the most boring one-- it's not worth passing too much when your athletes are so big and so quick and so strong and can shoot from so far away . . . women's tennis is fun to watch because of the extended rallies but men's tennis is a bore because the points are over so quickly-- and I appreciate the fact that they can serve 140 million miles an hour, it's just not fun to watch . . . high school football isn't so great, college is good, and the pros are fantastic because it's the highest level of warfare possible . . . major league baseball is the only level even tolerable for most people . . . and nothing is more aesthetically pleasing than the World Cup . . . especially when the US team makes you really, really, really earn your entertainment (and nothing was more absurd than seven grown men and one grown woman jumping up and down screaming and high-fiving over the Donovan goal yesterday . . . it might actually require slightly more energy to watch the US team play than it does to actually play on the US team).

6/23/10

I don't swerve when squirrels run out in front of my car;  I don't go out of my way to hit squirrels, nor do I accelerate, but I also make no attempt to NOT hit squirrels (perhaps this is because of my battle with the squirrels in my attic, which fans of this blog might remember).

6/22/10 Wish Me Luck . . . or Hope I Bomb: It's Your Choice.

As a special perk for fans of Sentence of Dave, I have posted the commencement speech that I will deliver later in the day at the Sovereign Bank Arena . . . so you get a sneak preview-- and if you read it and think it's totally stupid and you know my cell phone, please text me a better speech, but I need to have it before 11:30 AM!

6/21/10 It's a Girl!!

I think if my wife and I were to have another child (which we are NOT) and it was a girl, then a pretty name would be Vuvuzela.