I Discover Something Strange

Two weeks ago I was taking a walk by the lake near my parents' house and the trail was blocked by some fallen trees, which I climbed over and then I had to traverse a little dirt hill over a log and duck my head under a branch and then I turned a corner and-- suddenly . . . almost magically-- I was inside a little fort of downed trees and there was a low slung house hidden in this fort, about two feet high with a shingled roof and steps down to a dug out door, probably four feet down into the earth, so if you were inside the house, the ceiling might have been at the height of a grown man, and there was a little basement style window set in the wood walls but no light was on (which I pointed out to my wife as proof that no one was home, but she countered with this statement: "It's not like the house has electricity!" and I must admit that she's right) and when I first saw the house I was listening to a creepy techno song by Daft Punk from the new Tron soundtrack and I didn't have the common sense to take off my headphones, and so I kept thinking someone was behind me and I left the fort fairly quickly and started to walk back to my car, but then I turned around and went back, I felt a weird and anxious need to check it out more, though it reminded me of the final scene of The Blair Witch Project (or a meth-lab or the Unabomber's cabin) and so walked back-- with my headphones still blasting-- and I took one more good look: there were several bicycles and an assortment of bike parts within the confines of the fort and a rusty boat hull attached to the roof with a bike lock and there was a padlock on the solid looking wood door; finally, I got out of there, but I still feel compelled to go back and check it out again so if I disappear without a trace, you know where to start the search.

I Retire From Professional Sports

I have always been a Giants fan, but after yesterday's epic fourth quarter meltdown (why did Matt Dodge punt it to DeSean Jackson?) I have decided to stop watching professional sports altogether, and only watch sports movies, where the team you are rooting for either wins the big game (Hoosiers, Invictus, and almost every other sports movie) or if they do lose the big game (Rocky and The Bad News Bears) then they learn a valuable lesson . . . but there's no way I can watch another event where the plot summary is this: a team led by a dog-torturer persists against all odds in the fourth quarter because of heroic play by the aforementioned dog-torturer . . . that's an absurdly unsatisfying twist with no clear theme, moral or lesson . . . and I hope it's not a resurrection of this Absurd Miracle, which was a harbinger of hard times ahead.

The Wit of the Staircase

 Bill Bryson, in his new book At Home: A Short History of Private Life , gives several pages of startling statistics on the most dangerous place in the house (and the second leading cause of accidental death in the United States, behind car accidents but ahead of shark bites, flesh-eating viruses, and impalement) and if you guessed the kitchen or the bathroom, you are wrong . .. the most dangerous spot in your house is the stairs (and if you've seen the excellent documentary series The Staircase then you may have known this already) but I find this paradoxical because having stairs in your house is good for your heart and heart disease is the leading killer among men and women in the United States . . . so do you live in a ranch and miss out on the benefits of walking up and down stairs every day . . . or do you risk mishaps and live dangerously . . . I don't know the answer, but mainly what I wish is that we had an English word for this French phrase: 'esprit d'escalier, which generated the plot of a fantastic Seinfeld episode.

Greg Gillis is Girl Talk is Music

The greatest sequence in mash-up history begins at 1:24 in Girl Talk's rather profane song "Smash Your Head," when Biggie Smalls raps "Juicy" over Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," but that was only one moment (although all of Night Ripper is fantastic) and it seemed to me that this frantically looped and layered mash-up genre would be impossible to continue in an original, coherent, and listenable sense but Greg Gillis has done it again with his new album, "All Day," which is longer, more accessible, full of identifiable hooks and beats and lyrics and layers, amidst loads of clever and cleverly dirty hip-hop samples . . . and for a while I couldn't figure out what it all meant, all these samples twisted and distorted and smashed together in perfect rhythm and harmony, but on my tenth listen it hit me . . . Girl Talk means this: humans like music, lots of music, we remember it in pieces, we like it in fragments, and-- and this is in no way an insult-- maybe all the genres of popular music that we like-- from country, to hip-hop, to dance, to pop, to punk, to metal-- are more similar than we think.

Some Modicum Of Fame

So perhaps I had my fifteen minutes of fame last week; I was watching the Jets/New England game with some friends and I brought up the documentary American Teen and one of the guys said, "Oh yeah, I just read something about that," and then he thought for a moment and concluded, "on your blog," and I thought this was pretty cool, but not as cool as when a female co-worker, who is pretty hip and is my age-- so we're not talking about some young, naive student teacher here-- prefaced a story about her children with the phrase "I think this is sentence-worthy," which means that I think it's good enough to appear on your blog-- and the story certainly was sentence-worthy (it was about how her husband had to leave their four year old twins unattended in the audience of a soccer banquet while he spoke about his team, so he read them the riot act about being good, but when he looked out at them in the audience, they were touching tongues . . . not tongue kissing and not being terribly bad, but, nonetheless, sticking their tongues out-- ostensibly to measure them-- and touching them tongue-tip to tongue-tip, and apparently it's really hard to give a speech while watching your twin boys do this) but what I'm more interested in is the fact that when people speak to me now, they are trying to say something so entertaining that I feel compelled to use it on the blog, which is really nice because there are times when people bore me, so if there's some incentive to be more entertaining around me because of the modicum of fame that this blog creates, then I am all for it.

What Do George Washington and Cleopatra Have in Common?

In his new book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Bill Bryson points out that the paints that the colonial Americans used weren't muted as we would expect--  the time when George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were decorating Mount Vernon and Monticello coincided with the advent of bright pigments, and so to show off how rich you were (remembering that houses were lit with candles) you wanted walls as bright as possible-- and when Mount Vernon began restoring the interiors to their original colors, people were appalled, and Bryson says that now Washington and Jefferson "come across as having the decorative instincts of hippies," and this reminds me of when I was in Egypt, traveling down the Nile and touring the many ancient, eroded and sun-bleached temples covered in faded hieroglyphics, and then got to enter Nefertari's tomb in the Valley of the Queens and see the perfectly preserved hieroglyphics, which were brightly painted and detailed, and, of course, had the same revelation: the place looked like a hippy trip-out den, far from my dusty  imaginings of ancient Egypt . . . will historians eventually have the same epiphany about fashions from the 1980's?

Considering We Don't Have Cable, Where Does He Get This Stuff?

On the car ride to Coco (the delicious Malaysian restaurant down Route 27), my six year old son Alex entertained us with an I Am Legend themed monologue: first he explained to his younger brother the devastation that nuclear bombs would cause if there was a war between spies, but that he had a plan: he would escape death by hiding under water and when he came out of the water there wouldn't be many animals left, except rats and he would have to eat the rats for a while, but luckily, but they would "evolve into other things that would get tastier and tastier."

Bonus: A Gheorghe-mas Song at G:TB

I received a request to write a "Gheorghe-mas Song" over at Gheorghe: The Blog (we do The 12 Days of Gheorghe-mas there every year) and this was an assignment I couldn't refuse, especially because I could express some of my Xmas Anger in the lyrics: so check it out, if you dare.

At Home With Bill Bryson . . . A Short History?

Bill Bryson's new book At Home: A Short History of Private Life is certainly not short . . . I can't imagine the amount of research that went into it (nor can I imagine how he gets away without citing anything in the actual body of the book) and it is a treasure trove of information about how people lived throughout history, written in impeccable prose that makes you forget how tangential the topics often become; here are some of my favorite bits:

1) Thomas Jefferson bought 20,000 bottles of wine over one eight year period;

2) in the 1700's, English country clergymen subsidized by taxes and tithes had relatively few religious obligations-- and no one went to church-- and so in their spare time they produced an impressive array of intellectual accomplishments including my one of my favorite books-- The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy-- and other notable works such as An Essay on the Principle of Population (Thomas Malthus) and Bayes's Theorem (Thomas Bayes) until the The Church of England finally cracked down on them;

3) the ignorance of the female anatomy among medical men in Victorian England was so profound that Mary Toft, an illiterate rabbit breeder, convinced medical authorities that she was giving birth to live rabbits and perpetuated the hoax for a time before she admitted the fraud;
4) the baseball box score was invented by Henry Chadwick and "K" is short for "struck," which ends with a "K"

5) the treatment of working class children was abominably poor in nineteenth century England and this is exemplified by the fact that the founding of the Society of Preventing Cruelty to Animals preceded the founding of the parallel organization for children by sixty years;

6) in the 1790's it was all the rage to wear artificial moles, called mouches, and at the height of this mania, people's faces looked as if they were covered with flies, and in the 1780's it became "briefly fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made of mouse skin,"

7) I have pushed the boundaries of the sentence to its limit here, but the book is excellent, detailed, and long and deserves such a lengthy treatment . . . and in the end it reminds you that we live in wonderful times, as Bryson's main theme is that for most of history, the poor lived in horrible conditions with death looming around every corner of their dwellings, and the rich often lived absurdly, governed by bizarre styles, fashions, and social rules . . . and they didn't escape death, disease, unhygienic conditions, and general discomfort either . . . so-- if you can-- enjoy a hot shower and some clean water and a warm, lice free bed tonight with the knowledge that this wasn't always the case, but also knowing that all this convenience comes at a price-- it takes a citizen of Tanzania a year to produce the carbon emissions that the average American produces in twenty-eight hours.

Kids Misbehaving? F#$@ Santa Claus. Just Have Them Watch Shutter Island

If Santa Claus doesn't motivate your children to behave well, and instead of positive reinforcement, you wish to try positive punishment, then I recommend showing them the new Martin Scorcese film Shutter Island . . . and if your kids are anything like me, then they will think it's going to be a fun film-noir romp on a spooky island full of evil experiments and old Nazis, but that's not what it's about at all; it is actually about insanity and filicide . . . the movie may scare your children into being good for a couple of years, but it may also scare you: it is also an extremely disturbing and tragic; I told my wife that it was rather unrealistic and that a mother would never do that to her children, but she reminded me of this news story and this news story and I had to admit that she had me, and then I was even more disturbed and depressed and so I give this movie 8 million rats out of a possible 10 million, but with this caveat: DO NOT watch this movie if you are looking for a good time!

Did I Ever Really See Dark City?

I watched Dark City on Blu-Ray the other night . . . possibly for the second time . . . it's a science-fiction film directed by Alex Proyas that is strangely similar to The Matrix (though it was released a year before in 1998) but more interesting than this comparison is the fact that I felt as if I was living parallel with the movie while watching it-- the movie begins with a naked man in a room (Rufus Sewell) with a murdered call-girl, and he has no memory of what happened to the girl or of the last three weeks of his life and he has only very dim memories of his past, and he slowly realizes-- as he makes his way through his very dark city, that aliens are manipulating not only his memories but the actual world he is living in; the movie is excellent and really looks spectacular on Blu-Ray, but I could only vaguely remember watching it in the past, and not when or where, and then Catherine came home and she couldn't remember watching it with me, and I rarely watch movies alone and it's not on my Netflix history nor have I rated it and there were only certain things that I remembered . . . like Shell Beach . . . and so I am wondering if I never really saw the movie at all, and if Kiefer Sutherland inserted it into my brain with one of his steam-punk memory injections, but now that I've got it recorded here on this blog, I'll be able to refer back to this post and foil the aliens that have been manipulating my brain (and there are the usual internet theories about how The Matrix stole from Dark City, but I find this highly unlikely, since the script for The Matrix was finished when they were shooting Dark City, and as one nut pointed out, all these ideas originated with the movie Tron . . . but at that point you might as well say that all of these type films-- ranging from The Game and The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense all the way to Bladerunner-- are an allegory for Plato's cave and forget who stole what from whom and just enjoy the special effects).

I Share A Personal Paradox

I like breaking rules, but I don't like getting in trouble.

A Candid Answer To A Pressing Question

A lot of youngsters want to know what people did before the existence of the internet and cell-phones and Facebook and texting, and I'll tell you what we did: we lit things on fire.

I Am Tested On My Promised Yule-Tide Cheer

Soon after I promised my wife and students that I would exhibit more Christmas spirit, I was sorely tested on my pledge-- and I would like to think that I passed with flying colors: first, when I went to my parents to pick up my children, my mom roped me into setting up their new plastic tree . . . which I did with minimal grumbling (and without mention of the environmental hazards of PVC, dioxin, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride, and lead poisoning) but my mom did not like the new tree once it was erected, so I then disassembled the new tree, fit it back into the box, put the box in her car so she could return it, and lugged the old plastic tree up from the basement and assembled that one; second, after surviving that ordeal without a meltdown, I then returned home to find my wife struggling with a string of lights-- she had wound them around the porch and shrubs only to find that when she plugged them in, they did not all light, and I counseled her to simply buy some new lights and-- so I wouldn't lose my patience and melt down-- I used a scissors to remove the non-working strands and tossed them in the garbage, and then when the new string of lights my wife purchased did not all light, I removed each tiny bulb in the string until I hit upon the dead bulb and I replaced that one with a live bulb, fixing the entire string, and again, I did this with minimal grumbling so Santa Claus better bring me a lot of good loot this year because I deserve it.

This Is Why KitKat Is Spelled With A "K"

I was showing my son Ian how the name "KitKat" utilizes the double "K" sound when his older brother Alex reminded us that "Cat" is usually spelled with a "C" but in this instance, the candy-makers spelled it with a "K" to ensure that you knew you weren't "eating a dead chocolate-covered hairless cat."

Christmas Rant #2,894,987

Some of my students were appalled the other day when I revealed my Grinch-like attitude towards Christmas; I don't remember what set me off, but it always happens, the littlest reminder can send me on a long rant about wrapping paper and Christmas trees and the environment, about how Santa Claus has defeated Jesus and how awful music has defeated them both, about consumption, materialism, and the pressure to buy everyone some sort of unnecessary object, etcetera . . . and I'm not allowed to mention these feelings anywhere else-- I try to keep them from my kids and my wife will punch me in the face if I mention them to her and no one in the English office needs to hear these opinion again so I end up preaching to a captive audience . . . but my students have convinced me to have a better attitude and I even promised to help Catherine with the lights and I'm going to try to buy non-material gifts, although I did have a great idea for a personalized gift that doesn't waste any resources or cause any extra pollution: I present all of my loved ones with a personalized list of Dewey Decimal numbers that refer to books I think they would like to read . . . e.g. I might give myself Dewey Decimal number 813.54 21.

What Is The Opposite Of Nostalgia?

At times Nanette Burstein's documentary American Teen seems staged, and it times it seems like Mean Girls, but eventually the film makes you remember just how dramatic high school really is-- the romance and sports and college application process and cliques-- and just how heavy the future and the past (i.e. parents) weigh on the American teen; perhaps the scenes that appear to be contrived are actually just awkward, painful, and melodramatic, and from the perspective of age, they feel too raw and ugly to be real . . . you'll have to watch it and judge for yourself, but beware of the feelings this movie will dredge up: nostalgia and it's ugly counterpart, regret.

The Carousel is a Merry-Go-Round

After watching the first season of Madmen, I made the claim that the scene when Don Draper renames the Kodak wheel slide projector the "carousel" is the greatest moment in TV history-- but I am prone to hyperbole-- so it was a pleasant surprise when my friend who called me "insane" when I originally made the claim, said that he recently heard Dennis Miller interview Jon Hamm, and Miller expressed the same sentiment about that carousel moment . . . but I think Dennis Miller is kind of annoying . . . so I'm changing my greatest moment in TV history to when the cast of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia did a live performance of "The Nightman Cometh."

A Dismissal More Paradoxical Than Rhetorical

During a heated and chaotic debate in my English class, a student tried to introduce the results of a psychological study but she was rebuffed by this statement: "All psychologists are crazy!"

A Tutorial on How To Emulate David Foster Wallace

I have taken the first post of Sentence of Dave, "I am shopping for a new digital camera because my wife has a habit of leaving things on the roof of our car," and followed the instructions I found on kottke.org called Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace and here is the Wallacized result: "I am going shopping for a shiny new camera--a shiny new digital camera to replace our shiny old perfectly good digital camera-- because-- and this has happened before-- my lovely and beautiful spouse has a predilection for delicately balancing things between the roof and the billeted struts of our car, such as her keys, a hot cup of coffee, a memory stick full of MP3 and RTF files, and a Styrofoam container of left-over Chow Fun, and then blithely driving away, the aforementioned thing precariously perched until she changes her speed rapidly enough and the object's momentum pitches it forward or backward onto the pavement, where it is destroyed by other vehicles," and I recommend that you take one of your sentences and try it; you'd be surprised how easy it is to be obscure and convoluted (and some fans of this blog might say-- and they might be right-- that I have drifted in the direction of David Foster Wallace . . . my earlier posts were certainly more concise and perhaps this exercise will send me back on the path of precision and austerity . . . or perhaps not).

Ian Admits Defeat

My five year old son Ian has some cute verbal peccadilloes: he says "usually" instead of "actually" as a transition (e.g. usually, I have to pee right now . . . usually, I'll have a cookie instead of licorice) and when we play chess and he inevitably starts to lose badly-- he's great at setting up the pieces and moving them correctly, but he gives away a lot of material in suicidal attacks-- then his eyes fill with tears and he says-- repeatedly-- "I'm done for, I'm done for," which makes me wonder if this is good for him mentally . . . but there's no way I'm going to let him win . . . I handicap him three or four strong pieces, but he still has no end game, so I tell him all the suffering and defeat will be worth it in the end, because, maybe, someday (like my friend Rob) he'll be President of the Chess Club (see the image above for the kind of babes you can pull as a high-ranking chess club official).

In Retrospect, This Will Be The Moment When We Lost Control of Them

My son Alex was eating at his usual lethargic pace-- everyone was long finished with dinner and he had barely started-- so I said to his younger brother Ian, "Let's go see if we can stream The Life of Mammals on Netflix," which I hoped would motivate Alex to finish his dinner, but instead he went into hysterics and Ian, feeling bad for his brother, whispered to him that he was going to stall the video by going to the bathroom for a really long time (Catherine overheard this plan and told me and we thought it was cute that he was actually doing something to help his older brother) but after Ian got out of the bathroom Alex still wasn't done with dinner and Ian was ready to watch the video but he couldn't find the piece of Halloween candy that he had selected so he coerced me into helping him look for it and I couldn't find it either, which was ridiculous, because he was just holding it and I said to him "You're driving me crazy! Where did you put it?" and finally he found it under a pillow on our little saddle stool-- which is a really weird place to leave your candy-- and it wasn't until later (with help from my wife) that I realized that this ruse, the candy-losing ruse, was also part of his stalling plan, but Ian was such a good actor that I didn't realize that I was actually falling for his plan . . . and the next morning when I asked him about it, he confessed that it was all a ruse (although he did not use the word ruse) and I am sure that when we look back, this will be the moment that we lost control.

Pain Free? Ha!

If you are annoyed that I my last few posts have been reviews of movies and books and not the usual displays of my stupidity, I am sorry, but I haven't been on my normal peregrinations because I pulled my soleus muscle with ten minutes left of my last adult league soccer game-- this is after surviving two and a half months of coaching two teams, playing pick-up on Sundays, and playing Wednesday nights in the adult league-- so it's rather annoying that this little muscle chose the waning minutes of the semi-finals in which to snap (we were tied 1-1 when my soleus went "pop," but minutes before our youngest player pulled his hamstring and our star had to leave at the half to pick up his wife at the airport, so I was covering two for two slower and older players in the center, and after I went down the opposing team scored two goals and knocked us out . . . there's always next year, if this thing ever heals) and everyone has a different opinion on how to fix this muscle-- stretch it, don't stretch it, use it, lie in bed for a week, massage, don't touch it, be careful of your Achilles tendon, if your Achilles is taut don't worry about it-- but I'm trying some exercises from a book a friend recommended, called Pain Free by Pete Egoscu, but the weird thing is that I ordered the book before I got injured, simply because of my friend's description-- the stretches and exercises in it sounded helpful-- and the book arrived the day before my play-off game . . . like a postal premonition . . . very creepy . . . so I will be keeping a close on other omens and harbingers that appear in my mail.

Tarsem Singh's The Fall: Keeping It Real

Tarsem Singh's visually rich movie The Fall is The Princess Bride on acid . . . on acid, steroids, meta-amphetamines, crack, psilocybin, and-- most significantly-- morphine; it is morphine that fuels the double plot of this frame tale, set in the 1920's in a hospital where a depressed, desperate, and seriously injured stunt-man tells fantastic stories to a little girl in order to persuade her to steal morphine pills for him . . . something else the movie has in common with The Princess Bride is that it uses no digital effects to produce its wonders: Singh traveled the world (the film is shot in 28 different countries) to find the exotica in the film: the intricate forts and castles, the sweeping deserts, the scenic islands and floating palaces, the labyrinthine villages, barren mountains, and verdant jungles are all real . . . you can look them up on Orbitz and go visit them; despite all this spectacular imagery, the story isn't as touching or enthralling as that of The Princess Bride, but the movie is worth watching simply for the images . . . I give it nine swimming elephants out of a possible ten.

Ghetto Kite

Sometimes you need to step back and think about what things look like from the outside; last week my son Alex woke up with a mission: to build a kite from scratch using a "Harry Potter" plastic bag as the body; he used a toilet paper roll and some cardboard discs he cut from a pizza box as the spool, wound it with twine, built a frame with sticks from the backyard and, as luck would have it, the next afternoon was a blustery one, so we went to the park-- my son Ian with his store bought fish kite and my son Alex with his home-made plastic bag kite-- but Alex's sticks immediately blew off the "body" of his kite and he was left pulling a black plastic bag on a string (he could get it five feet off the ground if he ran fast enough) while Ian was having a blast swerving and diving his fish kite in the wind . . . and when I took a moment to assess the scene, I realized we looked like a family that could only afford one kite, so that the pariah of the family had to fly a ghetto kite with a toilet paper spool, but the funny thing was, Alex was quite content dragging around his ghetto kite because he made it himself.

These Are A Few Of William Gibson's Favorite Things

Science fiction writer William Gibson once said, "The future is already here-- it's just unevenly distributed," and the characters in his new novel zero history definitely live in the positive agglomeration of the futuristic present . . . rhenium darts, penguin shaped floating surveillance drones, and ekranoplans are all de rigueur in this universe; in fact, things, especially fashionable things linked to the military, play a more important role than people in the book, which makes the novel hard to follow . . . the people are bystanders to the fashion, technology, intrigue, and marketing that surrounds them . . . and, appropriately, people in the book are constantly "Googling" things because they are beyond their ken, and they are worried that their knowledge of these secret, obscure, often technological things might be ersatz, and meanwhile, in my less futuristic present, I was Googling things in the book as well, to see if they were real or not: I'm glad I finished the book, I've read everything William Gibson has written and I don't want to stop now, but this is the weakest effort in the "present-future" trilogy (the other two are Pattern Recognition and Spook Country).

What Is the Plural of Barf?

Get Him to the Greek is the first movie I watched on my new Blu-Ray player, and it's worth watching the first half in beautiful Blu-Ray clarity, as Jonah Hill does a fantastic job portraying a regular guy who has partied beyond his means; he looks and acts the part of a hungover, sleep-deprived man perfectly-- and this is because of his assignment: a very funny Sean Combs has given Hill the responsibility of getting rock star Aldous Snow (from Forgetting Sarah Marshall) to a concert in Los Angeles-- and despite multiple barfings, Hill accomplishes this, and then the movie goes seriously downhill . . . it's like director Nicholas Stoller forgets what kind of movie this is and decides to suddenly make Aldous Snow into a Character in a Film about Conflict and Relationships and Emotion, even though all I wanted to see was more high-definition yakking: six Jeffreys out of a possible ten.

Two Trippy Kids Movies (With No Singing!)

I give my kid-friendly thumbs up to both Ponyo and Secret of Kells-- they are animated in the old-school style and contain no musical numbers; Ponyo is the usual from Hayao Miyakzaki . . . a trippy story about an adventurous boy who falls in love with a gold-fish princess, with environmental overtones, and watching The Secret of Kells-- an Irish/French/Belgian collaboration-- is like walking through a medieval illuminated manuscript (the animation looks like the The Book of Kells) and the mood is equally as trippy as Ponyo and there is an equally adventurous orphan boy who ventures outside the walls of his monastery home to collect ink-berries for a George Carlin-esque monk who is trying to illuminate the most beautiful manuscript ever made, but outside the walls of the monastery lie pagan gods and Vikings, and both are equally scary . . . the Vikings are something out of Pink Floyd's The Wall and his battle against the dark pagan god Crom Cruach is spooky and epic; I enjoyed both of these as much as my children and you've got to see The Secret of Kells on Blu-Ray, the detail in the animation is fantastic (I think I am becoming a Blu-Ray snob).

Go Ahead and Squash It

 One of my students confessed to having killed a praying mantis when she was young-- and she referred to this bug-slaughter as "committing a felony"-- and I can remember hearing the same thing when I was a kid: that it is against the law to kill a praying mantis, but according to the myth-busting website snopes.com, this is an urban legend . . . so if one of those large green alien-headed critters surprises you while you're on the john and you smash it with a magazine, you don't have to chop the body into little pieces and sneak it down to the Pine Barrens for a a clandestine burial.

Emo Can Be Funny

A student told me this joke last week: 

"How many emo kids does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Who cares, let them cry in the dark,"

and I laughed, but I'm still not sure what exactly defines "emo," and if you ask, you get answers like this Wikipedia article: i.e. rambling, imprecise, and always mentioning the band Dashboard Confessional and the sub-genre "screamo" . . . but I suppose this is excellent for jokes, because if you can't define "emo," then it is fair game to make fun of it and use it as the butt of a joke because no one will claim to be offended by the term-- but if anyone has a concise definition, please share.

My Son Alex Explains His Consciousness

My six year old son Alex called me "Mave" the other day-- Mave is a girl in his class that also played on our soccer team-- and then explained his error in a Joycean monologue: "I have all these names smooshed together up there . . . kids in my class and kids at school and kids from soccer all up front, and you and mom in the back, and whichever one is next just spills out."

Graphs, Maps, and Trees! Oh My!

Franco Moretti's book Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History takes a novel approach to literary criticism: instead of analyzing individual novels, he looks at genres as a whole and uses charts and graphs like these to illustrate his points . . . one of his more interesting charts show the development of clues in detective fiction and how this trait was revolutionary and evolutionary in its birth, growth, competition, and survival, but what interests me is another evolutionary metaphor he uses; he mentions Richard Dawkins' idea that "there are many ways of being alive, but many more ways of being dead" and Moretti shows this with detective fiction and those authors that couldn't figure out how to create and place "decodable" clues in their stories-- these stories became "extinct," and this brings me to my worries about this blog: there are more ways for a blog to die than there are for a blog to flourish, but perhaps if I pursue what Moretti calls the "third voice," that voice that is "intermediate and almost neutral in tone between character and narrator: the composed, slightly resigned voice of the well-socialized individual," then perhaps, against the better judgment of the Narrator, who often wonders what comprises the actual aim of his writing, but wishes to remain artistically and intellectually active, and wishes to fend off early-onset Alzheimer's, boredom, ennui and malaise, and so continues this semi-literary foray in the backwaters of the internet, come hell or high water, critical commentary, and even-- worst of all-- total silence, then perhaps the Narrator will be able to forge ahead into unknown realms, one sentence at a time.

Diane Ravitch Speaks About Education

This Diane Ravitch lecture is rather long and dry (like Diane Ravitch's excellent and comprehensive book, The Life and Death of the Great American School System, which I summarize here) but she summarily refutes the claims of Governor Christie's favorite documentary, Waiting for Superman, and she exposes some of the myths behind data based teacher evaluations, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, unions, market-driven school reform, and tenure . . . I highly recommend the book, but if you don't care enough about our nation's educational system to read an entire book-- which I completely understand, because it's almost Black Friday and you probably need to start reading the circulars-- then you can use this clip (she starts speaking ten minutes in) as a guide, albeit an ersatz one.

I Act In The Same Manner As My Six Year Old Son

I recently reported how my fanged son (he lost his two front teeth) gets distracted any time he sees a reflective surface because he is fascinated with his own image, and now I must inform you that I am equally narcissistic: mysteriously, we found Webcams in our classrooms last week, and once the neighboring teacher showed me how to use mine, I became obsessed with it: I used it to check my nose for boogers during class (always a concern of educators) and I used it to create "infinity" by pointing it at the monitor and then placed parts of my fingers and face in the infinite regression of screens and then, once the kids left, I took out my guitar, strapped it on, and pointed the camera in such a way that I could see my hands and my face, and then played for while mesmerized by how my hands moved on the guitar's neck and how my facial expressions corresponded to what I was playing.

Gran Torino: This Is How The Engine Runs

The characters in Clint Eastwood's film Gran Torino are unrealistic caricatures-- Walt's grand-kids are overly obnoxious, his children are calloused and cold, the gangsters are insensibly cruel, and his neighbors are extraordinarily foreign-- and while I questioned the realism at times during the movie, I now realize the exaggerated characterization is intentional: these people make you just as angry as Walt, which is the purpose of the film, because then you start to feel like Clint Eastwood and want to be tough like Clint Eastwood, because there's no other way to be in a world that is so hard and mean . . . and the movie moves like clockwork, or more like a train-wreck, there's no stopping or pausing, but upon reflection, when it's over, and you hear Clint Eastwood's voice singing the final song, and you remember that Clint Eastwood is 81 years old and has been acting, directing, composing, and producing film for more years than most of us have been alive, and you start to wonder: is Clint Eastwood really that tough? . . . can he really use tools? . . . can he actually fix a sink? . . . can he stare down gangsters a quarter his age? . . . and you realize that though the answer is probably "no" to all of these, it doesn't matter because he looks the part (especially on Blu-ray!) and so I give this film nine push lawn-mowers out of a possible ten.

I See The Future and It Is Yellow

Ian had a couple of night-time peeing accidents just before our trip to Washington D.C.-- he is a very sound sleeper-- and we were worried that after a long day of sight-seeing, he would be unable to wake up to urinate and thus cause major grief with the hotel staff, so we convinced him to wear a pull-up diaper at night . . . I told him that even some adults need to wear diapers and this logic worked like a charm . . . in fact he repeated this to Alex several times, "Even some grown-ups wear diapers!" and he put his diaper on without resistance or shame . . . and this worries me: fifteen years in the future he'll be the one suggesting to his friends that they have a "Depends Party."

Sometimes It Is Good To Vent Your Anger

I skimmed this insane article and it seems that Play Doh really is non-toxic and edible (although there is a petroleum based lubricant in it . . . it could also serve as a laxative) and so I am wondering why  Hasbro makes the Play Doh container more difficult to open than a bottle of Percocet; I have strong guitar playing fingers and the colorful plastic tops still cut a deep ravine into my calloused fingers . . . so how are my children ever supposed to be ever to take initiative and become sculptors if they can't open the containers? . . . and while I am on this theme: why did Didier Boursin write a book for children titled Origami Paper Airplanes which-- if you would like to comprehend the instructions and actually complete one of the airplanes-- requires that you have a PhD in geometry and an extensive technical vocabulary (including the understanding of such terms as "mountain fold" and "water-bomb base" and "pleat fold") when he knew it was going to be placed in a elementary school library? . . . I think it might be easier to let my kids play with matches.

Another Awkward Moment in A Long Line of Them

As a teacher, you hope that you are forewarned certain things about your students, or else incidents like this and this are going to happen; one of the things that requires a warning is if your student has a twin . . . but I was not warned, and so when I saw one of my particularly clever students on the stairway, and was excited that she had coincidentally used the word "anthropomorphize" in her essay-- because this was a word that came up in class that day and she was the only student who knew what it meant-- I yelled this non sequitur to her: "Anthropomorphize! You used it in your essay! That's funny!" but I did not realize that this was NOT my student, but her twin (because, as smart as my student is, she did not warn me she has a twin, so I blame her for this awkward moment) and so her twin gave me a weird look of non-recognition-- a look that said, "Why are you yelling sesquipedalian words at me, creeper?" and then she gave me the cold shoulder and continued up the stairs . . . but we sorted it out later in the day and now I am on my guard for doppelgangers.

I Apologize to Educators Everywhere . . . But Honestly, What Do You Expect From A Greasetruck Song?

Apparently, biology teachers are showing my animated video "Amoeba Love" in class, thinking it's a cute way to illustrate binary fission, but-- unfortunately for them-- they get a "priceless" surprise at "00:27" . . . and though I know it's not people at my school showing this (Thank God) because we can't stream YouTube videos, I would still like to apologize to all the other educators who were surprised by the direction the song goes (warning! completely inoffensive cartoon depiction of genitalia!) but you have to understand the kind of mental place I was in when I animated this song: it was a snow day and both my children were napping and I had only two hours to record a song and animate the corresponding video and, to my chagrin, in the days previous I had come to the frank realization that I was not going to be a great animator, despite learning to use some pirated animation software, because I can't draw, and so I decided that the only subject I could animate was an amoeba . . . and now things have come to their logical end, my amoeba video has asexually reproduced its digital footprint on the internet and returned to visit me in a place I never expected: my profession . . . and in the end, I think any discomfort I have caused to our nation's biology teachers is probably outweighed by the joy I have given to countless students (and judging by the comments, this has happened more than once, and in more than one classroom . . . for more on this, visit Gheorghe: The Blog).

Bonus: Daryl Bem Owes My Fraternity A Citation!

If you are interested in scientific studies on clairvoyance and a stunning revelation on the true origins of the "genius" Daryl Bem's supposedly seminal paranormal experimentation, head over to my post at Gheorghe: The Blog.

We Convince Ourselves That We Are Improving

My adult league soccer team remained undefeated after a hard fought 1-1 tie on last Monday night, and we convinced ourselves that we were improving with every game, but we all know that this is a bald-faced lie and that any improvement in play pales in comparison to the looming unstoppable juggernaut of our collective ages . . . old age is advancing upon us like a glacier that may occasionally recede a foot or two, but then inexorably slides forward, cold and massive, destroying all in its path, tearing up trees, moving mountains, carving holes into the earth, pushing a moraine of boulders, dead trees and stone and grinding the green and youth from our bones; the team felt the glacier Wednesday night, when we finally lost our first game to a younger and faster team (but I was in Washington D.C., so there is a certain satisfaction, despite the loss, that I wasn't there and therefore, was not to blame . . . or, in another sense, was to blame since perhaps we needed me there to win . . . either way, I am still undefeated, even if the team is not).

It's Hard To Get Angry When I Would Do The Same Thing

My six-year-old son Alex recently lost his two front teeth and while this has caused him no problems at meal-time (he can still eat an apple) we have run into an unexpected distraction; unlike Count Dracula, our fanged child can see his reflection, and it amuses him so much that if he catches a glimpse of himself in anything reflective-- tinted glass on the Metro, the window across from him at the dinner table, a store mirror, the side of a polished car-- then he starts laughing demonically and making various vampirical faces until we drag him away.

Arcimboldo is the Winner!

During our whirlwind four day tour of Washington DC, our kids walked us into the ground: we visited the Baltimore Aquarium, The Lincoln Memorial, The Air-Space Museum, The Museum of the American Indian (best cafeteria on The Mall!), The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Smithsonian Castle, The Museum of Natural History, The National Geographic Museum, The National Zoo and the Washington National Cathedral, but our favorite thing might have been a serendipitously discovered exhibit of "surrealist" Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo's major works in the National Gallery; he was the official portraitist of Maximilian II, despite the fact that his portraits are totally bizarre amalgamations of objects piled together as visual puns . . . they are completely arresting, and our family favorite, Water, is both a Renaissance bestiary of fish and sea life, as well as a surreal collection of puns weirder than any Dali painting.

Comment Away . . . You Might Become Slightly Famous

I was poking around the software that monitors visitors that come to this blog, and I noticed that several people had googled the words "residual glee" and ended up at Sentence of Dave, but I did not remember writing those words and it turns out I didn't write those words-- my friend Eric (who is an award winning writer) wrote those words in a comment, and somehow that comment became the top search entry on Google for the phrase "residual glee," and although this only lasted for a few hours, it's still weird to think that you could write a comment on my third-rate blog and end up tops on Google-- something companies pay marketing firms loads of money to accomplish-- and now, what is even stranger (and more meta) is that Eric's post about his comment is now the top search when you type "residual glee" into Google (and, also, on an unrelated note: I think Residual Glee would make a good name for an indie band).

Dueling Definitions

Kevin Kelly juxtaposes two definitions in his new book What Technology Wants; the first is Alan Kay's: "Technology is anything invented after you were born," and the second is Danny Hillis's: "Technology is something that doesn't quite work yet," and the first definition makes me think of that awesome yellow first down line that appears on the television screen during football games, and the second definition makes me think of FoxTrax, television's failed attempt to animate a glowing hockey puck.

A One Sentence Summary of the New Testament

While we were standing in front of an impressive bas-relief tableau of Christ on the Cross in the Washington National Cathedral, my five year old son Ian told me: "They killed Jesus because he was too nice."

Warning: This Post May Contain Toilet Humor

One of the original motifs of this blog is how much I cherish when my wife screws up, but this doesn't happen very often (thus the cherishing) and last week was a memorable one, so enjoy it: I was fast asleep when Catherine woke me up to tell me that Ian had left some bloody stool in the toilet and she got me out of bed to look at said stool and it did seem bloody, but red blood, which I knew wasn't internal bleeding, and after a quick internet search we determined he either had hemorrhoids or anal fissures, neither of which was life threatening, so I went back to sleep, but then Catherine woke me up again at 4:00 AM to tell me that it wasn't bloody stool at all, it was old vitamins leaking red dye-- she had cleaned the hall closet out earlier that day and had forgotten she tossed them into the toilet.

Almost Forgot To Post!

Just arrived home and this is all I have to say: I was in Chevy Chase and you weren't.

Invictus is Pretty Good . . . But It's No Ruck and Maul

Clint Eastwood's movie Invictus is just as much about rugby as it is about Nelson Mandela, and although the film doesn't try to explain the rules of the game or make a coherent narrative out of game play (which was smart . . . and if you watch highlights of the actual Springbok/All-Black Final, you'll see the film does a fantastic job of capturing the look and feel of rugby, including the "haka," New Zealand's pre-game Maori war dance) it is a sports movie first and foremost . . . about two underdogs, the inspirational Mandela, who survived a twenty seven year training camp breaking rocks on Robben Island, and the Springboks, a mainly white team (with a token black), upon who Mandela bestows the responsibility of bringing honor and reconciliation to South Africa . . . it is well filmed and well-acted but it definitely sticks to the sports genre: nearly every scene is inspirational in some way, and-- as I am a sucker for sports movies-- it had me near tears multiple times (even a scene of the team running in the early morning before the big game got me choked up . . . but show me a movie where some mom dies of cancer with her kids around her deathbed and it has no effect) but it still portrays the characters with a hagiographic sheen that will make the movie ultimately forgettable . . . unlike The Wrestler, a film that I will never forget . . . and all this rugby and film discussion reminds me of "Ruck and Maul," a rugby screen-play that Whitney and I wrote many years ago which was certainly closer in theme to The Wrestler than Invictus . . . perhaps now is the time to pull it back out and pitch it.

F#@%* The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

I'm going to give Guy Deutscher's new book Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages a perfect ten gender-neutral pronouns out of ten; first of all, I love how worked up Deutscher gets about things like linguistic relativity-- otherwise known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis-- which is the idea that the "character" of a language somehow indicates the philosophy of the culture that uses it (and he quotes from the American Journal Philosophy Today . . . "if English thought is in some ways more open to ambiguity and lack of system, it might be attributed in part to the relative variability and looseness of English syntax," and then he comes down heavy on this idea; here is Deutscher's rebuttal: "It might. . .  It might also be attributable to the irregular shape of hot cross buns. More appropriately, however, it should be attributed to the habit of English language journals to allow the likes of Mr. Harvey free range. . . ") and Deutscher also refutes the venerated Stephen Pinker in several places, but the main reason I like the book is it really does live up to its title in some very specific ways: you learn about the Guugu Yimithirr, a tribe who use no egocentric directions (right/left/behind you/in front of you) and instead only refer to the directions of the compass-- as in: "Can you pass the butter to the North?" and they learn this from an early age because that's the only way to speak, so they always know which way everything is facing-- whether they are in a dark room with no windows or recounting a story several years later, and they do not rely on the sun, they use other clues (and the children master this long before our kids master left and right!) and Deutscher also explains how nouns with gender (as in Spanish and Italian and French) have an influence on our associations about the object and he also answers that age old question: "Do you see the same blue that I see?" or at least he sort of answers it, and the answer is that you might see it slightly differently if you don't have a word for green . . . if you have a word for green then greens are greener, and if you don't then you might refer to the sea as "wine-dark," like Homer did, but what is important is that it is the language influencing the sensory perceptions and not vice-versa . . . if you start making generalizations in the other direction then he's going to go Sapir-Whorf on your ass!

My Time Is Near

The English Department has been hosting some creative parties lately: we had a Minute to Win It Party at my house (this was all Catherine, but still, the party was in the place that I live) and Liz and Eric hosted a Who Can Write The Scariest Story Party (and the stories were quite good and I feel bad for Stacy, who created a beautiful multimedia Case File, which was handed to me to read, but the complexity of the different documents-- fake newspaper articles, photos of a severed hand and a dead cat, an IM conversation, a medical report, etc.-- made me go into an over-stimulated coma, and so Liz had to take it from me, and I probably would have voted for it, if it hadn't stressed me out so much . . . and I couldn't figure out who wrote the other stories and I thought my story was well disguised but someone remarked that only Dave would have the main character eaten by a "series of animals" but I was glad I pulled a vote because the competition was stiff) and Jeryl Anne is hosting a Chili Cook-Off in a couple of weeks and this makes me think that I need to strike while the iron is hot . . . I need to organize my two great party ideas, which I have offered to the world free of charge, and which have been roundly ignored: I am talking about, of course, my YouTube and Survivor Parties, which I once again, offer to the on-line universe, free of charge, and which I expect to see implemented by close friends in the very near future.

My Attention Span is Wack

I didn't make it through The Wackness but that doesn't mean it's a bad movie, it's just a little slow and melancholy and repetitive for my taste, but the '90s hip-hop soundtrack is fantastic (think De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest and Biggie Smalls) and the dialogue replicates and parodies a time when everyone was trying to infuse some rapper chic into their lexicon, leading to the moment when the cool rich indie girl Stephanie gives the dope smoking and dope dealing main character, Luke Shapiro, some advice about how to live life: "I just look at the dopeness . . . but you, it's like you just look at the wackness, you know?"

Denial Ain't A River in Egypt

Most of us are happily in denial (I forget about my receding hairline each and every day, but a look in the mirror shocks me back to reality . . . the hair I had on my head in college has migrated to my chest and back) but here's an example from the new Slavoj Zizek book that will make you feel better about your own mild delusions; the Shindo Renmei, a Japanese terrorist organization that existed in the 1940's in Sao Paolo Brazil, refused to believe the news that Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, and used violence against those that did believe, but, of course, as Zizek points out, "they knew that their denial of Japan's surrender was false, but they nonetheless refused to believe in Japanese surrender" and I am sure they got plenty of other people that knew that the news was factual to believe otherwise, because when the alternative is a violent death, what's wrong with a little denial?

Zizekian Aphorisms

I started watching Michael Moore's documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, but it seemed anecdotal in its evidence, without any real theory behind it (although I did like when Vizzini from The Princess Bride-- "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"-- talks about how the American free-market has evolved into something far different than what Adam Smith envisioned) but if you want to tackle something a bit meatier, try Slovenian super-brain Slavoj Zizek's Living in the End Times; here are two of his thoughts on modern capitalist society: "However once we accept that the economy is always a political economy, a site of political struggle-- in other words that its de-politicization, its status as a neutral sphere of 'servicing the goods,' is in itself always already the outcome of a political struggle-- then the prospect of repoliticization of the economy . . . is opened up," and "Today, since workers can increasingly be replaced by machines or by outsourcing the entire productive process, striking-- where it occurs at all-- is more a protest act addressed primarily to the general public rather than owners or managers, its goal being simply to maintain jobs by making the public aware of the terrifying predicament that awaits the workers if they lose their jobs."

High Concept Check-Out

The burly cashier at Stop and Shop told the dude in front of me that his total, $8.68, was a "palindrome," and that sometimes-- once in a rare while-- the total and the change are both palindromes . . . and I should point out that this guy is coaching a youth soccer team; the last time I ran into him he told me there are two kinds of bars: 1) the kind where you look for trouble 2) the kind where you don't look for trouble; he is a font of wisdom.

A Sacrifice I Will Make For My Children

For the next ten years I am going to exclusively listen to jazz and classical music-- no rock or punk-- so that my kids have the opportunity to disparage my lame and antiquated ways, and so that they have something to rebel against . . . you can't really enjoy Black Flag and The Misfits and AC/DC if your dad likes them too.

Ali's Favorite Story About Dave

Here is Ali's contribution to the incredibly popular recurring series I like to call Your Favorite Story About Dave (Fit to Print on a Relatively Tame Blog): we have to travel back to what I call pre-Sentence of Dave . . . it was summer vacation and I was pushing my six month old son Alex from Highland Park to New Brunswick, where I was meeting my wife and brother for lunch, but on the way I saw my friend's grandmother and she wanted to get a closer look at the baby, so I took Alex out of the stroller so she could hold him, and then we blithely continued on our way up Third Avenue and along Route 27 towards the bridge to New Brunswick-- it was sunny so I put up the little awning on the stroller and Alex was quiet, watching the traffic, and I was in that oblivious zone of serenity that you occasionally enjoy as a new parent when your child is content and needs nothing-- when something at my feet startled me-- someone had left a doll on the sidewalk, and I ran over the doll with the stroller and nearly stepped on it, and who would leave a doll on the sidewalk like that?-- but, unfortunately, it wasn't a doll, it was my son Alex, I forgot to strap him back into the stroller after I showed him to my friend's grandmother, and he had slid down the front of the stroller, but my vision was blocked by the awning, so not only did he slide out of the stroller onto the pavement, but he also endured a mild crushing, and after I recognized that this was my son and not a doll, I picked him up to assess the damage: he had skinned knees, and skinned hands and arms, and a skinned nose, and he was crying, but the injuries were all superficial (and superficially ugly) and I didn't have a cell phone and I didn't know what to do, so I pushed him to the restaurant, and I got some odd looks on the way there, but I knew that the only person who would know what to do was my wife, and she was at Makeda, so that's where I went, and I entered in a frantic state but my wife cleaned him up and he stopped bleeding and crying and we ended up having a fairly pleasant lunch.

Paradoxical Activity

When we begin Hamlet in my English classes, I like to assume the role of the skeptical scholar Horatio; I force my students to ask me if I believe in ghosts-- "Go ahead . . . ask me if I believe in ghosts . . . ask me!"-- and when they comply, just to humor me, I chastise them and reply angrily: "Of course I don't believe in ghosts! I'm a teacher! A man of logic and reason! Not a purveyor of fantasy and superstition!" and in a sense there's a grain of truth to my schtick, as is evident here, but an old student pointed out an apparent contradiction in my outspoken doubt of all things spooky: the fact that I found this movie incredibly scary suggests that my words may not accurately reflect my subconscious.

No Surprise Ending Here

This article makes the new anti-addiction drug sound pretty great (no urge! no craving!) but what happens when the addictive people who need to take this anti-addiction drug get addicted to their anti-addiction drug?

Where Good Ideas Come From: Steven Johnson

It took someone far smarter than me-- the polymath Steven Johnson-- to explain what I am doing here at Sentence of Dave . . . though you would never guess, I am actually continuing a 17th and 18th century intellectual tradition . . . seriously . . . in Johnson's new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, he discusses the English Enlightenment habit of keeping a "commonplace book" full of inspirational quotations, desultory thoughts, reactions to one's reading, opinions on current events, and a "vast miscellany of hunches," and most of the commonplace book keepers (such as Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Joseph Priestley, and John Locke) attempted to index their varied writings . . . but none of their indexing efforts worked as well as the internet, which Johnson believes has the right balance of organization and chaotic tension to spur new thoughts . . . and Johnson uses various "long view" examples-- including an awesome four squared grid categorizing two hundred major inventions from antiquity until now-- to show that good ideas often take a long time to form, with help from lots of different people and events, some serendipity, and often without the constraints of patents and corporations, and without the need for a single solitary genius who sees far beyond all others of his time; on the last page of his book he advises us to "go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."

I Realize I Have Learned Nothing

Note to self: do not eat a salmon burger before a night soccer game (and you'd think I'd have learned my lesson about heavy meals before athletic events in college, when I went to the Wendy's SuperBar before an intramural football game and stuffed my belly full of tacos and pudding, and then got burned play after play by a tall wide receiver who probably ate a banana or a granola bar or something  like that before the game, and waited until after the game to have a celebratory meal) but though our adult league game was a grueling battle-- I nearly puked-- we lucked out with a Diego Maradona "Hand of God" style goal in the waning minutes for the tie . . . and so we remain undefeated at 5-0-1.

Governor Christie Needs to Read His Shakespeare

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the characters are bound to each other both by their inherent status and by the contracts they enter-- this is what generates the conflict in the play (Shylock cannot escape his status as a vilified minority so he clings to his contract for a pound of Antonio's flesh; Antonio maintains his status as the merchant of Venice despite forfeiture, yet he will not break contract because Venice thrives on business, Bassanio has the status of a gentleman so Portia enters into the marriage contract with him despite his insolvency; Portia is bound by an odd contract to her dead father; Shylock's daughter Jessica would like to erase her status as a Jew by entering a marriage contract with Lorenzo; etc.) and whenever I teach the kids this, I start to apply the terms of status and contract to the world around me (the status of being someone's teacher is a an excellent one-- no matter how smart, famous, and powerful my students become in the future, I will always be able to say to them, "I taught you everything you know," and this is similar to the status of "coach," as no matter how far my players go in soccer, I can always say, "I got them started") and so here is my new application of the terms: the reason Governor Christie has incited so much anger and rage among the teachers of New Jersey is because he ignored (and sometimes assaulted) the status of being a teacher-- which is the reason most people teach: to be a respected individual in the community, to make a permanent connection with generations of students, and to feel as though you are doing something positive with your career . . . it's certainly not for the money-- so when he said teachers were using students like "drug mules" and that schools grant tenure to anyone "still breathing", and then immediately turned to financial and contractual issues, teachers took incredible offense, and, predictably, like Shylock, when they were robbed of any status, they clung to their contracts and refused a pay freeze . . . perhaps if he were more diplomatic with teachers about their status in the community, they would be willing to cooperate with him . . . but apparently he hasn't read his Shakespeare.

Stacey's Favorite Story About Dave

We recently reviewed Terry's Favorite Story About Dave, and today we will tackle Stacey's Favorite Story About Dave, and this story occurred P.S.D. (Pre-Sentence of Dave) so it may a be a new one for some readers but it is essential knowledge if you want to understand The Persona of Dave, so pay close attention: after swimming a set of grueling sprints in the LA Fitness pool, I stumbled out of the water, grabbed my towel and headed for the shower-- but in my oxygen deprived state, my brain on auto-pilot, I mistook the first shower-head I saw for the privacy of the Men's Locker Room, whipped off my bathing suit and started rinsing off . . . but, to my chagrin, I wasn't even near the Men's Locker Room, I was in the public shower in the window-surrounded pool area . . . stark naked and visible from the fitness floor as well as the outside world, but thank God a dude rounded the corner from the Men's Locker Room, and his odd expression alerted me that I was doing something very wrong; I snapped back into reality, grabbed my towel, wrapped it around my recently exposed genitalia, and ran to the safety Men's Locker Room-- blushing and humiliated-- and ducked into a curtained shower . . . how I mistook the pool shower, with its lack of curtains, for a locker room shower still boggles my mind, as does the fact that if a woman emerged from the hallway, fresh from the sanctity of the Women's Locker Room, she would have strolled into a hairy naked man in the pre-swim rinsing shower and I would have lost my gym membership and perhaps my job as well.

Dave's Key to A Happy Marriage

The key to a happy marriage is this: when you hear your wife pull into the driveway, get off the couch, race to the kitchen, and start doing the dishes . . . so that when she walks in the house and says "Hello?" then you can say to her, sincerely: "Hey, hon, I'm here in the kitchen . . . doing the dishes."

A One Sentence Review of a 562 Page Book

John Franzen swings for the fences with his new novel Freedom, and in a sense his Tom Wolfe-esque survey of America-- through the eyes of a disaffected athlete/housewife, an angry environmentalist, and a holier-than-thou indie rock star-- is spot on; he lampoons, ridicules, and skewers pretty much everything about modern language, relationships, liberalism, conservatism, sex, and-- of course-- freedom . . . it's a very, very long version of the REM song "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" but the book needs an editor, it eventually folds back unto itself and becomes repetitive and Franzen pushes a narrative trick too far, but even though I skimmed the last hundred pages, there is a wonderful set piece at the end about song-birds and feral cats and I will give the novel eight cerulean warblers our of a possible ten, for its realism, its scope, and its archetypal characters that invite you to compare your own modern philosophy to theirs . . . but I should warn you, although there's a bit of a pay-off at the end, most of the book is mired in an existential irony that will make you question the significance of your life, and perhaps the significance of any human life on this wonderful green planet we inhabit.

Is This A Joke?

A Jordanian, an Indian, a Cop, a Slovakian Chemist, a Sicilian, and Red Headed White Guy walk into a bar . . . but it's not a joke; it is my adult league soccer team out for beers after a 10-3 win: improbably, we are now 5-0.

Kids These Days

So I'm eating lunch in the English office and this kid walks in without knocking-- which is totally unacceptable-- and he picks up this huge oblong case with a handle and a faux-alligator skin exterior, and I say to him: "Hey, what is that? An accordion?" and he says: "Yeah, it's an accordion," and he walks out without complimenting me on my correct guess, and-- in my eyes-- not acknowledging my guess was even ruder than not knocking on the office door because there could have been anything in that case, it could have been a type-writer or a set of silverware or a geode collection . . . but I guess that's how it is with the kids these days . . . or maybe that's how it is with accordion players these days.

Listen to Uncle Genghis

In Imperial Grunts, a fairly positive review of American special forces around the world, Robert Kaplan does remind us that we could have avoided our misadventures in Iraq if we would have remembered what Genghis Khan said: "Conquering a country while mounted is easy, but dismounting and building a nation is difficult."

Sometimes My Wife is Retarded Like Me

My wife had a long stressful day at work on Monday (she went to the wrong school for her work shop, and then when she finally found it, it turned out to be boring and useless) and then we had to coach our K/1 soccer team (and they were especially insane, perhaps because it was Columbus Day and they didn't attend school) and then she dumped the silverware all over the floor, and then-- despite her long and stressful day-- she set up at the kitchen table and started grading papers-- and after a few minutes, I asked her what she was doing with the chicken and she said she was going to have it for dinner and then five minutes later her mistake dawned on me, and I asked her if she thought she had put the chicken in the oven and she said, "Don't tell me I left it on top of the stove," and I said, "You left it on top of the stove," and she said, "Dammit, can you put it in the oven for me?' and I did and I was glad to do it because once in a while it's nice to see her act as retarded as me.

Fifty Percent Canine/ Fifty Percent Feline

In the early chapters of Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, Guy Deutscher contrasts the difficulty children have obtaining the names for colors with their powerful pattern recognition algorithms . . . they may have trouble discerning the difference between blue and green but they never mix up a car and a boat, or a dog and a cat; this makes me recall a particular example from our adventures in Syria, we were staying in a hotel at the foot of the largest, most impregnable, and best preserved crusader castle in the world, the Krak des Chevaliers, and, once darkness fell, a weird, keening screaming began echoing in the hills-- it sounded like hordes of frightened children-- and when we asked one of the hotel employees what produced the wails, he said, "the chucker . . . it is half dog and . . . . . . . half cat," and though I loved imagining these cryptic and impossible creatures, we later learned they were jackals.

A Wheelbarrow?

Last Friday was one of my strangest afternoons as a soccer coach: though the sun had been out for days, our field was still a mess-- there was standing water full of goose-shit all along the near sideline-- but luckily there was a pile of sand near the goal . . . so all we needed was a way to carry the sand over to the puddles so we could fill them in; I asked my players what we could use to move the sand and one of them suggested "a wheel barrow," which I told him was a great way to move sand, but unfortunately, we didn't have a wheel barrow (and honestly, would I have even asked that question if I had a wheel barrow?) but then in a flash of coaching brilliance I realized I had enough orange practice cones to give every player two, and so we formed a cone brigade and filled the puddles fairly quickly, but apparently this wasn't the best way to warm up for the game because we gave up three goals in the first half (we were playing into a strong wind and trying to score on the muddy side of the field and they had a big fast kid with a mustache, but that's still no excuse for giving up three goals) and then we gave up a fourth goal early in the second half and I was getting ready to call it a day when we finally knocked one in . . . but 4-1 in soccer is still pretty much insurmountable (even with some wind) but then one of my players literally ran a ball into the goal with his chest and our kids realized that they could score and so we knocked in two more to tie it up, and had the ball on their goal line twice in the last minute, and you've never seen kids so happy about a tie.

Terry Recalls the Best Story About Dave

Like all people, I am both intrigued and apprehensive about how others perceive me, and so-- during an office conversation on the interplay of genetics and socialization in establishing gender roles-- Terry asked to the new teacher: "You want to know the best story about Dave?" and though she didn't seem to want to know The Best Story About Dave, it was intriguing to me, because I didn't know The Best Story About Dave, and so I asked Terry to enlighten me (and I was hoping it was one of my great teaching moments or when I saved that crippled kid from the rampant bear) but unfortunately it was one of my more embarrassing moments (in a long string of them) but the point of this sentence is not to recount this embarrassing incident-- an incident that Terry had a particularly good view of, so that he saw my face when I screwed it into the grimace of an angry three-year old-- the point of this sentence is that Terry said, "And that was pre-Sentence of Dave, so you should write a sentence about us talking about what happened so you can tell the story," and I agreed that it was a good idea, just the sort of content that I put on the Sentence of Dave, but the incident was not pre-Sentence of Dave . . . it was post-Sentence of Dave and here it is.

Some Kids Just Don't Get My Brilliance

Last week I was teaching my students the importance of beginning their college essay with an engaging opening, and I decided to illustrate this with a contrary example; I began my class with an elaborately planned weak opening: I drew an inscrutable diagram on the board, gave vague advice, asked nebulous questions, ignored students when they answered, sorted a folder, took an awkwardly long drink of water, asked a student for an example and then while they read it I rummaged through my cabinet looking for a non-existent hand-out, complained about how late the Giants game went, asked the class if anyone had gum, took a piece of aforementioned gum that a student proffered and took my time unwrapping and chewing it, sat down in my chair and took my glasses off and rubbed my face, stuck my finger in my ear and then looked at the wax while a kid was trying to talk to me, and then-- finally-- started laughing and told them what I had been doing and had them connect the way they felt during my weak opening to how a reader might feel when reading the start of their narratives (they were especially cluttered, vague and weak) and I was quite proud of my brilliance and my convincing acting skills until one girl said, "I really didn't notice anything different than normal."

Sometimes Music Makes You Feel Guilty

Ian has learned how to work a CD player and loves to listen to music, and so I gave him my CD collection (which is housed in one of those giant black books full of plastic CD sleeves) and, of course, he found GodWeenSatan: The Oneness and played "You Fucked Up" and I had to confiscate that one; during his explorations, he had a musical epiphany-- he came into the kitchen and told me, "Different songs make you feel different ways," and then he left the room several times to queue up particular songs, and for each he reported back to me on how they made him feel: "This song makes you feel cool . . . and this song makes you feel sad . . . and this song makes you feel like you did something really bad."

Ian Likes to Move Around . . . A Lot

I did not go to Back to School Night for my kids (since I go to school every day, I don't have to attend) but Catherine reported that Ian's kindergarten teacher likes to teach using music and movement . . . and Catherine was early, so she had a few private words with Ian's teacher, and Ian's teacher euphemistically told Catherine, "Ian really likes to move around a LOT . . . I like to have the kids learn with movement, but Ian really likes to move around . . . a LOT," and this sounds a bit ominous as far as Ian's behavior goes, but-- as I pointed out earlier-- I'm trying not to think about what goes on in that building (although my wife did advise Ian to stop illustrating the demise of Jenny Jump at school so he doesn't get sent to psychological services).

Cold Weather: An Ode

I like it when the weather turns cold because then I feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of our house.

The Usual From Zizek

I am making my way through Slovenian super-brain Slavoj Zizek's new book Living in End Times, and interspersed amongst the neo-Marxist philosophy are aphoristic gems such as "religious idealists usually claim that, whether true or not, religion can make otherwise bad people do good things; from recent experience, we should rather stick to Steve Weinberg's claim that while without religion good people would do good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things," and then Zizek notes the violence inherent in the New Testament and he cites plenty of scripture to back this up; there are too many passages to cite them all, but here's an example from Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" and another from Matthew: "Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword . . . for I came to set man against his father, and a daughter against her mother-in-law and a man's enemies will be the members of his household . . . he who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" and this makes me want to read the New Testament again and see exactly what's going on in there.

I Am Not Vacationing in Colombia Any Time Soon

The ESPN documentary The Two Escobars traces the rise and fall of the Colombian national soccer team and drug king-pin Pablo Escobar; it is easy to see how both Escobars come to be venerated in a country without rule of law or government service, the poor will take money from anyone who will provide it, and soccer is their diversion; for an update on this country and what America is doing there, read Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground; it is typical Kaplan, he gets down and dirty in places few journalists dare to travel, and he has the connections to meet the most important (if not the most highly ranked) people and the interviewing skills to get them to talk: in Colombia, he's embedded with the U.S. Army Special forces that are training President Uribe's Colombian Army to combat FARC, narco-terrorists, kidnappers, and the jungle cocaine lords that have replaced Pablo Escobar, and it is a frustrating job because their ROE (Rules of Engagement) prohibit taking initiative . . . they can only fight if someone attacks them, but these salty Green Berets are ready and willing to sustain casualties in order to lead by example; fortunately or unfortunately, our government isn't as ready or willing as they are, and so the hyper-competent American forces have to watch the not so competent Colombian forces they have trained try to accomplish the impossible: bring order to a fragmented, bosky, mountainous and inordinately poor and corrupt land.

Boot Tasting

As I was getting home from work last week, I caught the tail end of a message from the school nurse . . . something about my son Ian being bitten in school, and so I picked up the phone and the nurse told me what happened: my son Ian had gotten into a scuffle with another student and that student bit Ian on the foot . . . but Ian was wearing a rubber rain boot . . . so there was no harm done, either to my son's foot or his rain boot, but there must be some law where the school has to call if a child is bitten or something . . . and perhaps Ian has a little crush on the nurse because he was down there the next day as well because he got hit in the face with a jump rope handle . . . when asked about the boot incident Ian simply said, "he tasted my boot," and that confuses things further . . . is that a euphemism for something else? . . . did the other kindergartener actually want to see what Ian's boot tasted like? . . . and I'm thinking it is best not to think too hard about what goes on in that building.