For Once In My Life, I'd Love To Be On The Inside

The first half of Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job  is a clear review of the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis-- the film explains collateral debt obligations, synthetic mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, highly leveraged banking, banking deregulation, the merging of investment and traditional banking, and sub-prime mortgages . . . if you haven't done your reading, it's a good primer on these subjects, and there is some excellent footage of Iceland as well-- but the second half of the film spirals into less focused frustration and anger (despite some inspirational and slightly cheesy narration by Matt Damon) and the big players either refuse to be interviewed (Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke) or hem and haw under aggressive questioning, which is satisfying in one sense, but really doesn't help to explain anything, and then the film explores high salaries and bonuses for Wall Street traders and the culture of excess-- there's some rather pointless gossipy chat with a high-end escort who serviced numerous Wall Street employees . . . but, honestly, as long as the system gets fixed, I could care less how the traders spend their money; despite these flaws, the movie is certainly a must see and I'm going to teach it to my students during the business ethics unit (I'll use it instead of the Enron documentary-- The Smartest Guys in the Room-- which, though it's a bit dated, has better music and a more insular and resolved story . . . though it also gets a bit off topic when it rather gratuitously explores Enron exec Lou Pi's fascination with strippers . . . I guess when you've got a documentary with a lot of numbers, you need to throw in some T&A) and another advantage of Inside Job is that it is relatively non-partisan: the film also criticizes the Obama administration for appointing the usual suspects to fix the problem (Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers) and the film claims that Obama's new banking regulations lack teeth, and as far as I know the facts are fairly accurate . . . or as accurate as you can be when you try to make a movie about something as complicated as this. 

Costanza-esque

I don't know about you, but when I say, "I'm really hungry, does anyone have any food?" and a colleague says, "Oh no! I just threw a Pop Tart into the trash!" then I go into the trash and fish out that Pop Tart (which was still protected by it's foil wrapper) and eat it, because otherwise it would be eaten by rats in Edgeboro Landfill, and who wants to be defeated by a rodent?

An Analysis of My Netflix Queue

My Netflix queue has swollen to 233 films, and though I'm never going to view these films, they do reveal quite a bit about about my hopes, dreams, personality, and aspirations . . . and if you head over to Gheorghe: The Blog, you can read a Close Reading of the list.

I Am A Bad-ass

I was going to take my kids to the pet store and let them each choose a fish for our new fish tank, but they get into a fist-fight while getting into the car (they were arguing about who was going to get in and who was going to have to walk around the car and get in on the opposite side) and so I said I wasn't taking them as a consequence for fighting about something so stupid, and instead I made them pick up sticks and bark in the backyard (and the worst part is that I was looking forward to going to the pet store and getting some new fish, so I had to punish myself as well as them, but as I indicated, I am a bad-ass parent who will not back down when it comes to fish).

The Giving Ski

I was gung-ho on teaching my two boys to ski this season (for purely selfish reasons . . . I love to snowboard and this gives me an excuse to go) and after several days of ski school and some hairy trips down the mountain trying to help them while on my snowboard, I am proud to say that they can ski, and now that they've learned, there's part of me that wishes they would unlearn, because as a parent it is petrifying to see your progeny hurtle down an icy mountain, when you know that they don't make good decisions anywhere (moments before we drove from the hotel over to Windham, I watched my older son-- who is seven and should know better-- trying to stuff a rectangular Lego box into the round hole of a ruck sack, and he was jamming it in long ways and it was stuck, and he couldn't figure out to turn the box on it's side and slide it in) but I guess it's like anything else you give your children, like the ability to ride a bike, you imagine that it will create wonderful scenes of family unity, but instead they take the skill and use it to wreak havoc and chaos . . . perhaps I should have taught them to play tennis, how much havoc can you cause with a tennis ball?

Humble Buffet

I shouldn't be reading heralded economist Ha-Joon Chang's book  23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, because I'm trying to keep my happiness index up and thinking about economics never leads to greater happiness, but it's frustrating when politicians are saying their hands are tied about budget cuts, yet they won't consider raising taxes on the rich (or even renewing a current tax on the rich!) despite the fact that the rich in America earned their money just as much because of the American system as because of their wits-- as Chang puts it: there's no such thing as a free market; every market is regulated and stipulated by its context and the rich are beholden to that system for their wealth . . . but don't listen to me, listen to Warren Buffet, who said: 'I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned . . . if you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil . . . I will be struggling thirty years later . . . I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well-- disproportionately well."

I May Have Given These Words of Wisdom to My Students

The difficult thing about family vacations is that you're out in public, so you can't hit your kids.

You Make The Call

The United States spends 1.1 percent of the budget on foreign aid, the lowest percentage of any wealthy country besides South Korea . . . yet in absolute terms the 39.4 billion dollars that we donate to other countries for humanitarian, economic, and security concerns is the largest absolute amount allocated by any single country-- so the question is: are we stingy or are we generous?

Olfactory Query

My five year old son Ian asked a fair question last week: "Can you smell over the phone?" and-- considering the smell of most people's breath in the morning-- it's a lucky thing that the answer is "no."

El Cambio es Bueno

Hola, mi nombre es Juan, y aquí es una frase excelente para que usted pueda disfrutar, y me gustaría dar las gracias a David por la externalización de algunos de sus trabajos para mí, y le aseguro la calidad de este blog no van a sufrir a pesar del hecho de que yo va a hacer la mayor parte de la escritura ahora.

In Afghanistan, Happiness is a Warm Poppy

Eric Weiner's book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World won't give you any definitive answers about how or where to find happiness, but it is an incisive and entertaining tour of how some cultures reach contentedness: in the Netherlands the method is tolerance; in Switzerland it is democracy, cleanliness, nosiness, boredom, and stability; in Bhutan, Weiner is advised to think about death five minutes a day . . . but this is also a country where they feed marijuana to pigs because it makes the "pigs hungry and therefore fat"; in Qatar easy money does not bring happiness; and in Moldova, comparing oneself to the Swiss and other Europeans makes Moldovans sad; in Iceland, darkness, failure, generous state-subsidized health care and unemployment benefits, and binge-drinking make for good times; in Thailand, it is best to think less; in Britain, muddling along is good enough (especially if you live in Slough); in India, to be happy you need to embrace the mysticism and the chaos, the wealth and the poverty, the yin and the yang, the thing and the anti-thing; and in America, sometimes in our search for happiness we forget what actually makes us happy, friends and family, and focus too much on money and materialism, so the next time you are unhappy, don't go shopping, go out binge drinking with your friends and then muddle along through your next day of work without thinking.

Saxondale: A Show To Watch When Your Wife Goes Out

As a rule, I never watch television alone (unless it's a sporting event, because then I feel like I'm with the crowd at the event) but the exception is made for Steve Coogan shows-- generally my wife and I have similar taste, but Steve Coogan is where we agree to disagree (although we both watched Hamlet 2 in its entirety, and while I can't really recommend the movie, the final play is pretty funny, especially the big musical number "Rock Me Sexy Jesus") and I already knew this from past events: for example, I loved "Knowing You Knowing Me," the fake talk show hosted by Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) but my wife didn't find it all that funny, and now Coogan's new show, Saxondale, is beyond the pale in its alienation of the fairer sex; Tommy Saxondale (Coogan) is an ex-roadie-- he toured with all the huge rock bands in the '70's, except Led Zeppelin, which is his life's biggest regret-- but now he's an aging rocker who lives in the suburbs and runs a pest control "business" (he employs one other person) and loves his muscle car (a Mustang) as much as his chubby live-in anarchist girlfriend Magz-- though he still has anger issues about his ex-wife and the general decline of his coolness . . . and I can identify with this: these day I can't really stomach listening to Deep Purple and Jethro Tull any longer-- I've outgrown them and so has Tommy (to be honest, I've always hated Jethro Tull) but I still love jokes and references about them and all the other bands and the muscle cars and I can relate to Tommy's confrontation with his age and his inability to rock-out any more, but my wife could care less, and I can kind of see why . . .  so this will be a show to watch when she goes out with the ladies.

Best Intentions

When I first started teaching, I thought I was going to be one of those teachers who rewarded kids with candy, and so I bought a bag of Hershey's miniatures and put it in my desk, but then I ate them all during my off period (it's really hard not to eat while grading essays) before I could dole them out as rewards, and instead now I'm the kind of teacher that scrawls "Metaphor Contest Champion" on a piece of scrap paper and hands it the winner, who then says: "This isn't even a whole piece of paper . . . it's got a chunk torn out of it!"

Literary Psychoanalysis

I am more like Hamlet and my wife is more like Fortinbras . . . and this works out well.

Are You An Orchid or a Dandelion?

 The most powerful essay in The Best American Science Writing of 2010 is called "The Orchid Children," and the author, David Dobbs, explains a metaphor that has recently cropped up in psychology-- that of "orchid children" and "dandelion children"-- the orchid children being those that have a genetic disposition to certain negative behaviors including depression and ADHD, while the dandelion children do not-- and the research is being done particularly with regards to ADHD and a particular "risk allele," but the findings that are explaining these alleles in an evolutionary sense and turning behavioral science on its head is the fact that these "orchid children" with the shorter allele and proclivity towards ADHD, also have the potential-- when raised in a secure and fruitful environment-- to excel beyond the "normal" weedy children . . . the dandelion children are more stable, and they generally don't exhibit the negative behaviors however they are raised, but the "orchid" children are a genetic risk: they are more sensitive to their environment, positive or negative . . . when they are given positive interventions (I'm not going to describe all the experiments but Dobbs does) they have a greater increase of success; the author bravely gets his alleles sequenced and finds out what he knew-- he's an orchid-- but he doesn't want to know about his kids, it's enough for him to be aware that when he "takes his son trolling for salmon, or listens to his younger brother's labyrinthine elaborations of his dreams," that he is "flipping little switches that can help them light up," but I suspect that my kids might be dandelions, and I think I'm one too-- we all remain remarkably consistent in our habits and our behavior, and we all pay very little attention to our environment, and honestly, despite the amount of time I spend with them, my kids rarely pay attention to me . . . I try to flip some switches, but I think I may just sound like the parents in Peanuts to them.

It's Really Hard To Eradicate Weeds

The sixth season of Weeds will grow on you, unlike the previous season, where the show nearly withered and died--  it's a return to its earlier, earthier form, mainly because Mary-Louise Parker is in nearly every cramped and dirty scene, and she is the soil that holds the straggling, weedy, and dysfunctional Botwin family together as well as the dramatic, photosynthetic, flourishing center of the show (Kevin Nealon is funny but he doesn't have the roots to hold the show together and neither can any of the other actors and actresses . . . Parker is the pro)-- and their wild road trip comes to a perfect conclusion, as fitting as the end of that unweeded garden in Elsinore, where things rank and gross must finally decay and die. . . but then I learned, that like a perennial, the show has been renewed for a seventh season, and my question is: how?

People Ruin Everything

More from The Best American Science Writing of 2010: Elizabeth Kolbert, in her essay "The Sixth Extinction?" points out that whenever people come to town, all the cool creatures are wiped out; the mastodons, mammoths, giant beavers, dire wolves, short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, toxodons, and saber tooth tigers died out just after we came to the Americas . . . the giant wombats, giant tortoises (as big as a VW Beetle!) and giant ten foot tall kangaroos died out soon after we colonized to Australia; this pattern holds true for New Zealand, Hawaii, and pretty much everywhere else-- the big and cool looking stuff can't survive in the places we colonize, but this is happening with smaller creatures as well-- there is a great die off of amphibians happening right now, notably the Colombian golden frog (which is technically a toad) and bat populations are also rapidly declining-- and Kolbert explains (and demonstrates) that this is probably caused by a chytrid fungus spread by humanity called Bd (actually it's called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, but by the time you finish saying that, another species has gone extinct) but, luckily, some species are not affected, including the hardy salamanders that we discovered in the woods near the litter strewn banks of the polluted Raritan River, but it does make me worry that we might have to stop visiting our "Jersey tough" amphibians.

Did Banksy Create Rebecca Black?

Despite writing this blog, I remain fairly isolated from what's being passed around on the internet-- and I'm sad to report that I learned about this song on NPR-- but even though I was the 38, 945, 234th person to watch the YouTube video of Rebecca Black's "Friday," I think I have something valuable to say about the song (which was written and "created" by Ark Music Factory, supposedly the brainchild of Patrice Wilson and Clarence Jey) and it is this: the lyrics are so unlyrical, the theme is so banal, the music is so auto-tuned, and the video is so literal that this kind of satirical "fun fun fun" could only have been the work of the arch-prankster and super-cool street artist Banksy . . . and I have to admit that the song is very catchy, which is impressive, since it doesn't rhyme, makes no attempt to have a unique voice, coins no new catchy phrase, and contains lyrics about how the days of the week are ordered and eating breakfast cereal . . . unless that line is a veiled marijuana reference: "waking up in the morning . . . gotta have my bowl" . . . only Banksy knows for sure, but this has to be a practical joke on par with the creation of Thierry Guetta (and right now, twenty minutes after I wrote the previous sentence, I still can't get the song out of my head . . . so perhaps "Friday" is brilliant in its stupidity . . . so derivative that it parodies itself . . . Rebecca Black, you are a super-genius in the same realm as Mr. Brainwash!)

The Influence of Digital Media on My Caloric Intake

On the rare occasion that we eat at my favorite Mexican restaurant-- Tortuga's Mexican Village in Princeton-- I usually order a tamale and a chorizo burrito, but Saturday night I got a tamale and a chorizo taco-- and the taco was tasty but not as large as the burrito . . . and I did this for the taco count, of course, but maybe the taco count, which in one sense is an exercise in gluttony, will actually make me eat fewer calories in 2011, because, as I mentioned earlier, tacos are smaller than burritos.

Sometimes, You've Got To Do What You've Got To Do (Despite the Stupid Name)

I put it off for a week, because it's absurd and embarrassing and it has a stupid name and nothing feels more foolish, but in the end, it had to be done, and as usual it cleared up the problem . . . if you're congested, nothing works better than the Neti Pot.

The Bright Side

If you believe Hugh Everett's "many worlds interpretation" of quantum physics, then you believe there are an infinite number of parallel universes and that in this multiverse, every alternative history and future exists, so-- though the odds are 1 in 18.5 quintillion . . . or perhaps a bit less, depending on your strategy and how you calculate-- somewhere in one of these universes, you have filled out a perfect bracket . . . so don't despair, look on the bright side (but seriously, Syracuse, Texas, and Pitt? . . . for a brief and shining moment I was in such good shape . . . second place in a 100 plus person pool).

Test Your Child For The ACTN3 Gene and Muscle Type!

Steven Pinker, in his essay "My Genome, My Self," explains that many of the "dystopian fears" raised by personal genome sequencing (think of the movie Gattaca) are absurd because of the complexity and "probabilistic nature" of genes-- especially in light of the various studies explaining how the influence of a particular gene is contingent on the environment, thousands of other genes in your genome-- both known and unknown-- and how we can never account for the myriad combination and influence of genes, random mutations, environment, and "other" that make an individual; Pinker ends the essay with this example: when parents and coaches learned about the ACTN3 gene and muscle type, they started swabbing kids' cheeks for saliva so they could genetically screen them for a proclivity for fast-twitch musculature, and then steer these kids towards football and sprinting . . . but Carl Foster, one of the scientists who uncovered the ACTN3 association, had a more elegant way to "discover" kids with more fast twitch muscles: "Just line them up with their classmates for a race and see which ones are the fastest" . . . the swab will find some of the kids who may have a predilection for fast twitch musculature, but the race will find all of them.

Does This Guy Look 80% Bald?

I'm wading through The Best American Science Writing of 2010 and overarching theme of the collection is this: things are complicated . . . and in Steven Pinker's essay "My Genome, My Self," this slowly becomes apparent, as he analyzes the "genetic report card" he received from the personal genetic sequencing company 23andMe-- some of his genes validate reality: he has the gene for blue eyes and he actually has blue eyes . . . some don't: he has genes that make it highly likely that he will be bald, but he sports a billowing Jew-fro . . . some point at his heritage (Askenazi Jew) and some point towards percentages: the reports says he has a 12 percent chance of getting prostrate cancer . . . but most of what he had sequenced, like the genes for height, which is highly heritable, will barely have any effect (the dozen genes for height only account for 2% of the variation of height among humans-- the rest of the difference is caused by unknown factors) and may mean nothing in his life or everything, depending on all the other genes that weren't sequences, any unusual genes he has that are extremely rare, factors in the environment, and random mutation and affect-- and when Pinker philosophizes on why there is so much variety in humanity because of all these factors, when evolution doesn't require this much uniqueness for survival, he brings up the fact that if there's too much of any one type of personality, then there is a benefit to being different-- if everyone is nice, then it pays to be mean, but once there are enough mean people, they counter-act each other and it is the band of communal folks that will survive-- and he uses a proverb to remind us of the value of variety in a species: "The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

My Vegetable Love Should Grow Vaster Than Empires

The prices at the vegetable market on Route 1 are better than the prices at Stop and Shop, but you have to be more discerning with your selections because the produce is not as consistent as the produce at the grocery store . . . and I find myself following the same inane pattern when assessing what I will purchase: for instance, say that I am browsing strawberries . . . I look at a carton and check the bottom for mold, and then I compare the ripeness to another carton and then I compare that carton to another one and then I compare the best carton so far to yet another random carton, but by this time I have completely forgotten what the first and second cartons looked like, nor do I remember where I put them down, so I usually just select the last carton I picked up, put it in the basket, and move along . . . only to repeat the same idiotic process with the next item on the list (and don't even get me started with avocados . . . I give each a perfunctory squeeze, but I don't even know what my criteria are for selecting one avocado instead of another-- I just take some time before I choose because I don't want to appear naive to the other shoppers).

All Searches Lead to the Sentence of Dave

Here are some of the Google search entries that led people to this humble little corner of the internet: emo, giant wasps, japanese emo, testicular elephantitis, gay roller blade hockey, elephantitis face, child safety, punch a colleague, large swine pig, DAVE IN BACKYARD MONSTER, a pig dick, bubble, awkward dave, marla olmstead now, alan moore banksy, eddie izzard, orfanato, fish and fin sentence, emo light bulb, and bubbles making . . . and being the "go to" sight for these obscure topics makes me very proud, but not as proud as cornering the market on the phrase "residual glee."

Instant Fish

There are certain things you shouldn't buy used-- condoms, fuzzy toilet seat covers, handkerchiefs, and enema kits-- but as for everything else, it might be worth it to take the risk and check Craigslist . . . my son Alex asked for a fish tank for his birthday and when you add up the price of the tank and all the gadgets you need, the set-up is pretty expensive, so I took a ride to Avenel and bought a tank from a very nice dude named Sooraj-- and for eighty dollars he gave me everything: 29 gallon tank, hood, filter, heater, pump, gravel, live plants, net, siphon, plastic plants, thermometer, a castle, food, chemicals, and even his fish . . . he dismantled it all in front of me, very methodically, and placed everything into bags and buckets, and then I brought it home, set it up in an hour, and so far the fish survived the trip and water change . . . so my advice is this: at some point in their life, just about everyone has a fish tank, and at some point, just about everyone decides that the last thing they want in their life is a fish tank, so if you want a fish-tank, get a used one.

A Question Most Americans Are Afraid To Ask

How many plastic cups does a family of four actually need?-- and I am guessing the answer is NOT twenty-nine, which is how many we have . . . and I am thinking that this number is not particularly unusual . . . so what is your count?

Seven For Seven

Although it might be a bit early to invite a comparison to the greatest streak in professional sporting history-- Joe DiMaggio's magnificent run of 56 straight games with a base hit-- I would still like to make it known that the last seven times I have gone searching for salamanders with my sons in our secret salamander spot, we have been successful in finding this elusive amphibian, and our streak stretches back to last spring, when we found the spot: last Thursday we found three salamanders-- not that it matters how many we found . . . all it takes is one salamander to keep the streak alive-- and Friday afternoon we found a nest of them under a large chunk of concrete, and Saturday we found a few more, and Sunday we only found one . . . and I can already feel the pressure mounting: what will happen on our next search?

More Alan Moore

Although I couldn't make it through Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I loved The Saga of the Swamp Thing . . . the art is fantastic and the content is surprisingly philosophical: though it uses some possibly specious science about memory transfer from cannibalistic planarians . . . the results of the real experiment, which haven't been reproduced consistently, claim that if you train flatworms to run through a maze for food, and then have other flatworms who have never run the maze eat the flatworms that have run the maze, then the cannibalistic flatworms will gain the ability to run the maze without having to experience the maze-- but who cares if the science works-- Moore uses this conceit to explain that his Swamp Thing is not "Alec Holland somehow transformed into a plant" it is "a plant that thought it was Alec Holland"-- he uses the swamp thing to investigate one of the great philosophical conundrums-- if your exact (or even inexact) consciousness was reproduced-- digitally or botanically or with giant gears or whatever-- and this new thing believes it is you and thinks as you do, despite being a facsimile of you, then is it you?-- and who is the real you?-- what if you are given a drug that allows brain cells to regenerate and your brain is split in half and each side regrows in a different host-- then which is really you? or if you were to replace your brain bit by bit with identical circuits, then is the final robot still you, or when did you switch from being you to being an android? or if you teleport and your molecules are disassembled and then reassembled with identical but different molecules in another location, did you die?-- and is the thing that is reassembled just another facsimile of you with a very short break in consciousness . . . and this is the sort of existential question that The Saga of the Swamp Thing investigates . . . it is about a botanical consciousness coming to grips with what it really is (though the philosophy is interrupted by one odd page of the Justice League deciding that they can't do anything about Wood-rue, the Floronic Man, who is enlisting the world's plants to destroy all animals, including man . . . but he is quickly defeated by the simple logic that plants need animals to produce carbon dioxide-- the respiration cycle, and then it's back to the existential crisis) and in the end The Swamp Thing comes to terms with what he is, and the fact that he is not Alec Holland . . . that he is a plant with consciousness and as Fall approaches he has strange fears and anxieties because he is linked to the cycle of the seasons just as many plants are, and at the very end, there's a great frame of him walking into the swamp, holding hands with an autistic kid, explaining how he's afraid of fire and the kid replies, "That's good , it makes me feel better, I mean, if even monsters get scared sometimes, then it isn't so bad, is it?"

Brevity is a Warm Gun

 If you like your assassins hot and your hookers hotter, then The American is the film for you.

Highland Park's Charter School Controversy Goes National

Wednesday, The New York Times printed an article called "The Promise and Costs of Charters," which focuses on the Hebrew language charter school debate happening in my town, and the article is very similar to the editorial I wrote on the same subject, both in tone and logic, so I am assuming that this Peter Applebome character got all his ideas from me, but I'm not going to force him to confess, because I got all my ideas from Banksy (actually, I got a lot of my ideas from Diane Ravitch, but it sounds cooler to say I got all my ideas from Banksy).

American Dreaming

  American Dreaming by The Density

I have often expressed my disdain for dreams and their significance, but when I opened my mind to their artistic and lyrical potential . . . and when I let some of my colleagues open their minds, I ended up with this song-- I promise you that there's something in here for everyone (and I 'd like to thank Shakespeare, Biggie Smalls, Rage Against the Machine, Martin Luther King, Steve Carrell, Bob Dylan, Tracy Morgan, and-- of course-- any of my colleagues who willingly lent their voice to this half-baked project).

The Town is Riddled With Holes

You may have looked at the title of this post and thought to yourself, That's a mixed metaphor and doesn't make much sense, and if you did think this, then do NOT watch the new Ben Affleck film The Town, because this movie is far stupider than my title . . . the film is about a crack team of bank robbers in Charlestown, a neighborhood in Boston, which the film claims is the bank robbery capitol of the universe, but apparently this is not true and there are lots of ominous helicopter shots of "the town," but it's not an ominous looking place-- lovely brick buildings and the picturesque Bunker Hill Monument-- and the movie does a piss-poor job characterizing the setting (despite the Boston accents) so I'm not sure what the purpose of those shots were for, except to spend money, and anyway, this crack team of bank robbers, who wear really cool and inventive masks-- even cooler masks than the gang in Point Break-- they decide to keep robbing banks despite the fact that the FBI is on to them and despite the fact that the "crazy one,"doesn't want to go back to jail, and then Ben Affleck decides he will also fall in love with the bank manager girl they abducted in the last robbery and that she won't recognize any of their voices and despite the fact that the FBI is watching both him and the bank manager girl, he thinks that they should run away together and this won't look suspicious at all, and for some reason we're supposed to sympathize with Ben Affleck and dislike Jon Hamm, though Jon Hamm is just doing his job, which is to catch armed robbers-- and Jon Hamm, who I love as Don Draper, should stick to that show, he's much better at keeping his mouth shut and being cryptic than actually playing an active role-- and these FBI people just can't seem to find any evidence to put away these guys that they know are the crack team of bank robbers and when they get to the bank manager girl and find out about the relationship, then they make her call Ben Affleck while they are listening in, but they all stand in the window with her while she makes the call, so Ben Affleck can see what's going on-- and I'm sure this is some breach of protocol (why does she have to make the call from her apartment anyway?) and in the big shoot out, where the guys impersonate cops but don't shave off their cool stubble and facial hair, people are spraying sub-machine gun fire everywhere, at close range, but oddly, only the fat minor character get shot and killed . . . and at this point I was still watching just to see how stupid it would get . . . and it gets even stupider, so after these guys finish robbing Fenway Park and the other minor character essentially sacrifices his life so the plot can move forward and then things work out pretty well and the bank manager girl is able to make an anonymous donation in the name of someone she didn't know without the inept FBI finding out and Ben Affleck grows more facial hair in the very end and this movie is monumentally cheesy and bad and I'm not sure how it got this good review or even a decent review because it was just awful.

Gut Reaction (Another Awkward Moment of Dave)

In no way do I mean to belittle this awful, tragic story, but when a colleague (young and female) pulled this headline  up on the computer in the English office and asked me if had heard about it, I took a moment to read it, took another moment to comprehend it, and then my jaw literally dropped . . . the headline evoked such pathos in me, and-- perhaps because my emotions were so sincere and passionate . . . or perhaps because I imbibed a goodly amount of beer the night before-- I inadvertently let out a loud burp . . . and the timing of the burp seemed to indicate that this was my commentary on the story, and so my young, female colleague said, "That's your reaction to this? You burp in my face?" which was complete hyperbole because the burp was not "in her face," as I was a good five feet away from her face, but still, my reaction probably seemed gauche, but it was actually heartfelt (heartburnfelt?) and happened because the story was so moving, but next time I read about something awful, I will keep my mouth shut (although, as usual, the awkwardness was worth the sentence).

41 Candles

It's become de rigeur in my family to forget to wish me "Happy Birthday" on the morning of . . . as my son's birthday is the day before, so we usually combine celebrations . . . one year my wife called me at school, nearly crying because she forgot . . . one year we both forgot . . . and the year Alex was born there was obviously no remembering . . . but this year I tried to gently remind my wife . . . I asked her if she read my blog and she said yes, but obviously this wasn't enough to make her remember and then I asked her if I need to pick up fish for this, but that didn't do it either, but, finally, she remembered . . . it was so early in the morning that I don't remember exactly how, and so I didn't have to receive a tearful call at school, and then, oddly, when I got to school, ALL my students remembered my birthday, which I may have mentioned once when I was teaching them the "Birthday Problem," . . . someone made me cupcakes and everyone wished me "Happy Birthday," including a random student in the class next door . . . I poked my head through the hole in the folding wall to ask Kevin something and a girl said, "Happy Birthday," and I said, "Do I know you?" and when she was pressed on how she knew it was my birthday, she said, "I just heard"and I think the kids were so zealous in their wishes because they know I hate holidays, parties, and any break in the educational routine, but they also knew that I would be unable to refuse home-made cupcakes on my birthday and I would have to distribute them to the class, or I would look like a total grouch.

I'd Like To Have My Face Digitally Scrubbed

There is an obvious irony to The Social Network: the guy who created the modern template for friendship doesn't really have any friends, but if you want a film about the ramifications of on-line life, this movie comes up short; on the plus side,  Jesse Eisenberg does a great job portraying a geeky nerd and Justin Timberlake does a great job portraying a cool nerd and Armie Hammer does a great job portraying the Winklevoss twins-- another actor had his face "digitally scrubbed" so that Hammer could be in two places at once-- and he steals the show . . . the twins are villains in the '80's style . . . reminiscent of Drago and The Shoot, with a dose of Yuppie blood, and the digital effect is so well-done that my wife and I had no idea they were played by the same actor while we were watching the film.

V For Paranoia

When I read Alan Moore's Watchmen, I thought to myself: I should write the script for a graphic novel, it would be awesome if someone turned my words into really cool pictures . . . but then I got a look at the actual script for Watchmen and thought better of this idea (here is the link to the script and though you have to download a PDF to see it, it is worth it to see the nearly insane attention to detail Moore takes for each frame of the graphic novel . . . you'd think someone with this kind of visual acuity would want to see the film version) and if you want more of Moore's insanity, read V for Vendetta, which isn't as dense as Watchmen, but has a clearer story-line, and if you want to get a feel for the tone of the book, read the introductions: the first is by David Lloyd, the illustrator, and he recounts an anecdote in a pub . . . he is sitting, drinking his pint, and the TV is blaring one insipid "cheeky and cheery" sit-com after another, and then a sports quiz program, but when the news comes on, the bartender shuts the TV off, and Lloyd finishes ominously: "V for Vendetta is for people who don't switch off the news," and then comes Moore's introduction, in which he predicts that Margaret Thatcher will create concentration camps for AIDS victims (it is 1988) and he describes vans with cameras on top, and police and their horses wearing black visors, and he says that England has turned "cold and mean-spirited," and he's getting his seven year old daughter out of there (although according to the internet, he's still living in Northern England, twenty three years later) and while I think the two of them are paranoid nut-bags, I also think you need people like this, predicting the worst, to remind us of what Arthur Koestler called the darkness at noon, so while I prefer to live blithely and unaware, someday Moore will be able to say: I told you so.

Treading Water in the Shallows

Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brain is well argued and frightening, and the opposition from some corners is simply because there's not much we can do about the ubiquity of the internet-- and near the start of the book he uses the Wallace Stevens poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" to remind us of the value of deep reading, but if you read the poem here, then I feel like his point is proven . . . that reading on the internet is nothing like reading a book (look at the size and color of the font of the poem vs. everything else on that page) and Carr uses plenty of established research to prove his thesis that reading an actual book is an excellent way to take ideas and information from short term memory and enter them into long-term memory . . . that the only way to do this is laborious and information enters our brain "thimbleful by thimbleful," and if things happen too fast, because of hyper-links, F shaped skimming, Twitter and e-mail interruptions, etc. then there will be "cognitive overload" and we can't translate new knowledge into memories or schemas . . . and he also refutes the idea that storing knowledge on the internet means we can free out brains for other uses; in fact, paradoxically, the opposite is true, the more you have in your brain, the easier it is to remember other things and the easier it is to read and think (our brains are not computers and the ROM analogy does not work) . . . but the internet is difficult to escape, so all I can recommend is that you shut it down once in a while, kick your kids out of the house-- armed with knives and matches so they don't return for a long while, and then crack open a book (made of paper-- as the Kindle is aiming towards the same interruption-laden style of reading, with hyper-links, discussions on passages, Facebook style commenting, etc.)

Tacos Trump Enchiladas

My wife suggested enchiladas for my birthday meal and I agreed heartily, but then she asked, "Do enchiladas count as tacos?" and I told her that if I was going to do things honestly, then they did not, so instead she made fish tacos (which I also love) and I ate five, which really ups my 2011 Taco Count, but now I'm in a weird world where I am eating more tacos just because I am counting how many tacos I am eating . . . and I know this applies to something statistical in the real world, but I'm too full to make the connection.

34 Years To Go! (For An Average American Male)

Today is my birthday,
me and the Seuss--
I'm now forty-one,
and still feeling loose,
but if life is a train,
I'm near the caboose.

Who Is The Biggest Loser?

At work, a number of my colleagues are participating in a Biggest Loser Diet Contest-- they all put money into a pot and the person that loses the most weight (determined by a percentage of the original starting weight) wins all the money-- and I'm not sure how I feel about this because some of my co-workers are starting to look really good . . . which is nice-- it's nice to be surrounded by slender, sexy, and attractive co-workers-- but there's part of me that hopes everyone comes out of this contest so ravenous that they eat until they are grossly overweight, because it's also nice to be surrounded by people fatter than you are . . . it's good for your self-esteem (in fact, women don't need to be anorexically skinny to be happy with their body, they just have to have a lower BMI than their mate) so I guess whichever way the scale tips, I'm a winner . . . or a loser, depending on how you look at it.

I'd Better Pace Myself

Governor Christie promises he will pay into the state pension fund if a number of his demands are met (that's how collective bargaining works now in New Jersey) and one of his prerequisites is to raise the retirement age for teachers to sixty-five . . . and while I realize that 65 might be a typical retirement age in the private sector, it is not what was promised if you dedicated your life to education-- when I started teaching, the retirement age for teachers was fifty-five: it was one of the alluring things about the career-- and although the age has been raised periodically for new hires, it hasn't changed if you were "grand-fathered in," but the new proposal states that anyone with less than 25 years teaching experience must work until they are 65 before they can receive their pension, and I understand that the Governor is trying to balance the budget, but I am not sure that he's thought about the ramifications of this proposal:

1) Though it won't be so bad for this generation of kids, the next generation of children will rarely have the joy of a new, young teacher, idealistic and fresh out of college . . . instead they will be taught by old, bitter and wilted hags and crones, eking out those last few years before retirement and the big sleep . . .

2) It will be extremely difficult for new teachers to get jobs, because the old teachers won't be able to retire . . . and teaching is a young person's job-- it requires an incredible amount of energy and endurance-- so health care and logistical costs will sky-rocket because old teachers will be taking loads of sick days and using far more health care than young teachers . . .

3) The only time students will get a new, fresh, young idealistic teacher is when their old teacher dies, and this will inevitably happen in front of students, and the psychic toll this exacts on our population-- the collective trauma our youth will share, that they all have seen a teacher fall over in the middle of class, croak out a last bit of wisdom, and then die in front of them-- will off-set any budgetary benefits from the proposal;

4) On the plus side, this makes the rest of my life very easy to figure out . . . I don't have to worry about thinking about early retirement . . . what I might do with myself, where I might want to live . . . I will be in the same spot for the next twenty-five years, doing the same job, watching my colleagues grow old and wrinkled, living in the same house in the same town . . . and enjoying a higher quality of living that the vast majority of the humans on the planet . . . and there's something comforting in that, as long as I pace myself.

Costco on a Weekday! This Is How It Feels!

I went to Costco after school last week, and it was surprisingly satisfying . . . it wasn't crowded so I didn't have my usual panic attack (if I go with my wife on the weekend, I normally have to leave and go sit in the car) and instead I got this wonderfully primal feeling, a manly feeling, as I wandered through the cavernous space of goods, grabbing thing for my family, providing for my family . . . I felt like an ancient hunter/gatherer . . . hunting and gathering and occasionally stopping to eat a sample (the samples were crucial to this good feeling as they kept my blood sugar at a reasonable level) and when I got home with large packages of salmon and sausage and fruit and granola, I felt as if I had had wandered the earth and brought back a cornucopia for my family to eat and we would live to see another day, and possibly even another generation, as long as I could continue to forage with such a high rate of efficiency and variety.

Ian's Forecast

It's gonna rain babies.

Banksy and Alan Moore Should Hang Out

Banksy, the acclaimed and aggressively anonymous street artist, was invited to the Oscars for his debut film Exit Through The Gift Shop but the Academy Awards denied his request to show up in disguise, and so Banksy says he will not be attending, which is more in character for him since he "does not agree with the concept of award ceremonies," though he is "prepared to make an exception" for awards which he is nominated . . . and my suggestion is that instead of trying to crash the ceremony in some covertly overt way, instead Banksy should hang out with Alan Moore on Oscar night and not watch the Oscars and not watch Watchmen and not watch anything at all, but instead have a serious discussion on the gullibility and naivete of the sort of people who like to look at things, like art and movies and award ceremonies, and how instead of looking at things, these people should make things that other people like to look at, like stencils and comic books, unless these people are Thierry Guerra, who maybe shouldn't be making art at all-- because Guerra makes terribly, derivative and kitschy crap-- unless Guerra is a creation of Bansky, and then his art is doubly ironic, and therefore significant.

Fins Are For Fish

When I am swimming laps in the pool at the gym, I pace myself against the swimmer in the adjacent lane, and I am a decent swimmer so unless the person is excellent, I can usually  keep up with them, but nothing is more annoying than struggling to catch up with a swimmer that appears to be swimming at a leisurely pace, only to find that that they are wearing fins . . . I feel like these people need to wear little flags on their goggles that protrude above the water and read "I Cheat," so that you know they are swimming faster than they normally can.

No One Understands My Brilliance

It is very frustrating when you have a sudden and fantastic synaptic burst that results in a brilliant idea, and it goes unappreciated; for example, my son Alex was given an assignment for "Hundred Day"-- a day that simultaneously celebrates the number one hundred and the one-hundredth day of school--  he was instructed to attach one hundred objects to a large sheet of oak-tag in some creative manner, and we were brainstorming ideas and I came up with this one: he could use green marker to make the oak tag into a dollar bill and then glue one hundred pennies around the border or in some other pattern on the bill . . . so the project would not only fulfill the "Hundred Day" requirements, but it would also be a model of how many pennies are in a dollar: it would be creative, aesthetic, and educational on several levels, but Alex spurned my idea and instead glued a bunch of colored beans into a stupid and ugly spiral pattern, and I will never forgive him for this.

The Bar is Raised at the 2011 Plunge

The bar was raised in numerous ways at this year's Sea Isle City Polar Plunge: 1) Due to more people on Friday night and more members of LeCompt present for the pre-plunge gig, Friday night partying was more intense and lasted far later into the night than last year-- we closed the Springfield Inn (and for the second time, I "sang" the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! count out of the bridge of "Born to Run," and I thought this was a very odd coincidence, since this happened in the summer as well, but Connell said he locked eyes with LeCompt and sent him a telepathic message to shove the microphone in my face again and, unbeknowst to me, Dom was behind me pointing at my head to help Connel's telepathy . . . and I was glad that on Saturday this was not repeated for the third time, because I do not want my claim to fame to be that I am the 1-2-3-4 guy) 2) due to warmish (though very windy) weather and an ocean temperature near forty degrees, one plunge into the sea was not enough to prove your manhood . . . I was lured back in by Ed, who went in once but didn't dive under and get his hair wet, and decided he had to do the full dunk (and I didn't realize he was very drunk and I didn't want to seem less macho than him) and I was glad I did a second plunge and was feeling quite tough, but then Mose outdid everyone with a third full submersion 3) pre-plunge inebriation was at a record level perhaps because we are veterans now so we weren't nervous about the effects of very cold water on the body but mainly due to the twenty-something crew and the twenty-something at heart couple (Mel and Ed) 4) the bar was raised on plunge style . . . Catherine and Lynn plunged with polar bear hats and one of the youngsters plunged in a bat girl costume and  another dressed as The Joker 5) LeCompt's guest guitarist raised the bar on insanely great guitar shredding and the Springfield raised the bar on how crowded it could get . . . the town itself was packed because of the unseasonable weather, so lots of money for Autism 6) I raised the bar on humor so high that the hung-over people Saturday morning couldn't even process the brilliance of my joke and I had to repeat it when some fresh people showed up later in the day . . . I told everyone that I went to the registration tent and that we had the wrong weekend . . . this wasn't Polar Plunge Weekend, it was Bi-Polar Plunge Weekend, and that it was really crazy out there . . . and instead of laughing and complimenting my A-list material, everyone just stared at me blankly, but the second time around a few people chuckled . . . it's hard to explain, I guess it's one of those jokes where you had to be there, and even if you were there it wasn't very funny . . . so I guess you had to be me to appreciate it.

Clay Shirky, You Are My Nemesis!

I am reading War and Peace for the second time right now-- and that's not counting the time I read six hundred pages and and then quit, so really it's my third time reading the first half-- and it is even more absorbing and epic than ever (partly because of the new and excellent translation and partly because now I recognize all the insanely long Russian names) but according to internet theorist and "digital media scholar" Clay Shirky, this is not possible . . . because he infamously wrote in 2008: "No one reads War and Peace . . . it's too long, and not so interesting," and people have "increasingly decided that Tolstoy's sacred work isn't actually worth the time it takes to read it," and although I know that Shirky was probably grandstanding when he wrote that and isn't actually that stupid, I'm going to treat him literally and challenge him to a Tolstoy era duel . . . our weapons will be appropriate-- I will fight with a copy of War and Peace, which at 1200 pages is hefty enough to cave in the soft skull of an academic, and he can defend himself with his lap-top . . . so Clay Shirky, I will be waiting by the "smoker's gate" after school today and every day until you arrive, with my weapon in hand-- which I can also read while I wait (one of the benefits of a large book) . . . this library isn't big enough for the both of us.

I Can Neither Read Nor Cook

I learned something about couscous the other day: I was trying to time dinner so that everything was ready exactly when my wife and kids got back from swim lessons, and so I followed the instructions on the couscous box and prepped the mixture ahead of time so that it would be ready to cook at a moment's notice . . . I mixed the flavor packet and the couscous and 1 1/4 cups of water and left that on the stove while I chopped up stuff for salad and then when I went to boil the water, I found that the couscous had absorbed soaked it all up, though the stove wasn't on, and when Catherine got home I told her what I had discovered: that you need to cook couscous right away or it absorbs all the cold water, and she said, "It says to add the couscous to boiling water," and I disagreed, but we checked the box and she was right . . . I must have read the instructions wrong, which is weird because I'm an English teacher.

The Damned United is Damned Good

The movie The Damned United, which portrays Brian Clough-- England's most celebrated, enigmatic, abrasive and outspoken soccer coach-- is probably much more fun to watch as a clueless American . . . I have heard Clough's name mentioned by my British friends, but I didn't know his story: his great and bitter rivalry with Don Revie; his ups and downs with the brains of the operation, Peter Taylor; and the saga of his coaching career . . . the film also contains excellent archival soccer footage and lots of kitsch from the late sixties and seventies: cars, uniforms, wall-paper and style: ten footballers out of a perfect eleven.

I Use Probability to Solve A Marital Mystery

Once again, I discovered my gym bag in the closet upside-down, and I was not the one who did this-- because I never put my gym-bag away, nor do I ever zip it shut-- but my wife often throws it into the closet and if it lands upside-down, then my gym equipment falls out of the bag:  my goggles and socks and deodorant, etc.-- and though I noted this with frustration for years, it finally dawned on me . . . perhaps my wife was throwing the gym bag into the closet upside-down because she hated the fact that I always left it out, unzipped, with it's bowels exposed . . . because if she was just tossing it into the closet without any passive-aggressive anger, then 50% of the time it would land right-side up and 50% of the time it would land upside-down, but the gym bag ALWAYS seemed to land upside-down and, as I said, this had been happening for years so I had a decent sample size to evaluate, so I approached my wife about this and after a moment of denial she admitted that perhaps it did end up upside-down more than probability might dictate and that perhaps she was angry about my habit of leaving it out all the time, and so I told her I would try to put it away, and she promised not to throw it into the closet upside-down and the moral is: the key to a good marriage is clear communication and a grasp of basic probability.

I Am A Winner (And I Didn't Even Know It)

Each year San Jose State University sponsors the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where entrants are challenged to write the worst beginning sentence to a novel . . . and I usually get my Creative Writing students to enter and I send a sentence of two myself, and I last week Googled myself (you've got to Google yourself every once in a while, right?) and, although I was never informed of this great honor, I found one of my entries in the Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions but if you don't want to read through them all-- though I recommend this because they are funny-- I have copied it here for your convenience: As always, that morning he awoke to the melodious sound of a stream of water cascading into a still pool, punctuated by several ominous silences-- and he could judge, by the length of the silences and the volume of the cascade, just how much of his three-year-old son's urine he would have to wade through to get to the sink.

Louie

Though the Seinfeld gang led pathetic and shallow lives, they could always turn to each other for camaraderie-- even at the end in their jail cell-- and Larry David's misadventures in Curb Your Enthusiasm are even more awkward and painful, but at the end of the day, Larry still has Cheryl and Jeff by his side (until Cheryl leaves him) but in Louis C.K.'s hysterically funny and sincerely sad and depressing FX comedy Louie, Louie has no one except his young daughters-- and they tend to add to his anxiety rather than assuage it-- and aside from them, there are no other recurring characters that appear in every episode . . . Louie faces his depression alone, whether it be during the opening theme when he joylessly inhales a slice of pizza; or on stage doing his stand-up, which seems to be the only happy time in his life; or on his various adventures in New York . . . and he is doing the show on the cheap, so FX has given him carte blanche to do what he wants, so the show goes from clever to bawdy to surreal, often in one twenty minute episode: ten gallons of ice cream out of ten.

My Son Wisely Keeps His Mouth Shut

My six year old son Alex expressed his skepticism over the clairvoyance of Punxsutawny Phil, and he also expressed his disdain for his first grade classmates who believed in Phil's meteorological predictions, but he told me that he didn't say anything derogatory to those classmates about their irrational beliefs . . . and I told him that was a wise decision.

My Lips Save the Day . . . Now Who Will Be My Valentine?

Sunday morning, while playing indoor soccer, I hit a slick patch on the gym floor and my feet slid backwards and into the air, and it happened so quickly that I didn't have time to brace my fall, and so I fell on my lips, which really hurt . . . but good thing I have such juicy and luscious lips or I might have suffered a broken tooth.

My Use of Mathematics Makes A Young Lady Weep

In my composition class, one of the options for the classification and division essay is an assignment I stole from Bess Ward, a science professor at Princeton (I found this in a book by Natalie Angier called The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Basics of Science) and her idea is to take something you worry about and do a risk-assessment on it . . . for example, you eat two cans of tuna a week and you want to figure out if this is actually dangerous so you do the math-- you figure out how much mercury is in each can and you multiply this by what you eat and check the EPA web-site and see if you are consuming a dangerous amount of mercury . . . so first I ask the students to list specific things they worry about . . . and they list things such as: shark attack, tanning too much, not getting into college, dying alone, being eaten by spiders, smoking etc.-- and then I have them classify them into three categories-- Innocuous, Worth Consternation, and Red Alert!-- and then I have them switch so someone can constructively criticize their logic . . . and here I offer some statistics and mathematical strategies they can use when assessing the risk of their various worries . . . for instance, the odds of an American being killed by a shark is 1 in 264 million . . . so maybe you don't need to worry about that as much as drowning or being hit by lightning; so after the class has done this and I'm walking around inspecting lists, I notice a pair of worries that would be instructive for the class, so I ask the student if I can use her list (and this is a student who mentioned when we started this that it might bring up some serious emotions and anxieties) and she says sure (I've had this student in several classes) and so I proceed to explain to the class that the girl's fear of dying in a plane crash isn't statistically likely (over 10 million flights and no fatalities last year) but that her fear of "her college boyfriend leaving her" might be something worth worrying over because there was probably a far greater chance of a high school relationship disintegrating than the hull of a Boeing . . . and I guess my logic was so convincing that it upset her and she broke into tears and needed to take a walk to compose herself . . . but she was laughing about it by the end of class, and because of my previous track record of invented scenarios, the other students thought it was some kind of pre-arranged set-up . . . but I told them it was NOT and I will be more careful with my razor sharp logic in the future.

Zombies Vs. Men In Tights

Last weekend, I consumed 11 volumes of Walking Dead comic books (but now I am back on track with the new translation of War and Peace) and I am completely addicted . . .the plots are inventive, surprising, and very, very dark . . . and I was pleasantly surprised as to how appealing a zombie apocalypse is to think about: it's not like the typical superhero scenarios of good versus evil-- where you contemplate what sort of hero the world needs and what sort of actions that hero needs to implement; The Walking Dead  forces you to ruminate on survival scenarios, about how far you would go to continue living and to protect your wife and kids-- it reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in that sense, but the series is much more fun to read because of the pictures-- unlike Watchmen, they are easy to digest . . . sometimes my eyes would race through an entire page and then I would go back and read the text to see exactly what happened-- and each volume has a serialized pulp feel and ends with a cliffhanger or major event, without ever being especially campy or cheesy: ten lurkers out of ten.

Retreat!

Last Saturday, during the freezing rain storm, Alex and Ian built an elaborate fort in the living room: they covered a card table with an afghan, surrounded their make-shift tent with walls of large pillows, and made beds with camping pads and sleeping bags inside; their plan was to sleep in it Saturday night-- Alex even went so far as to bring clothing down for the next morning, so he wouldn't have to bother climbing the stairs-- and they stocked their fortress with books and flash-lights and other necessary toys so they could entertain themselves . . .  I turned the downstairs bathroom light on so they could get their bearings in the dark, but it was a windy night, and twenty minutes after lights out, we heard footsteps on the stairs and Alex told us that both of them decided-- mutually-- that they would rather sleep upstairs, although neither mentioned why they retreated so rapidly and I didn't press them on it . . . perhaps they will be braver next time.

I Am Calling Out Alan Moore (Despite His Scary Beard)

I have mentioned that I can't really understand why fans of the graphic novel Watchmen despise Zach Snyder's movie version . . . I think it's a good rendition of that universe, and after seeing Snyder's previous movie, 300, which is an adaptation of the eponymous Frank Miller graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae, I find the film Watchmen even more impressive . . . because 300 is one of the cheesiest movies ever made (despite some cool battle gore and monstrous humanoid warriors) but I guess some people will never be happy with the film version of anything, such as the counter-cultural icon Alan Moore himself, who wrote Watchmen; Moore claims he has never watched any of the Hollywood film adaptations of his creations . . . this includes V for Vendetta and From Hell and Constantine and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I am calling bullshit on this . . . I think he has seen them and he's not admitting it . . . a man of his intellectual stature and creative powers would be overcome with curiosity about how his art withstood the transformation into film, and despite his hatred for Hollywood blockbusters and all the vapidness they represent, he must have seen a bit of at least one of these films . . . at least a trailer or a YouTube clip or something . . . so Alan Moore, confess, you were curious and you checked out one or more of these movies . . . it's okay, your fans will forgive you.

Plastic Bag Saves the Day!

I was suffering the embarrassment of an "invalid magnetic strip" at the grocery store-- for both my ATM card and my credit card-- and the cashier suggested I encase the card in a plastic bag and then slide it through the machine, and this trick worked . . . though when I asked why, she had no answer for me (better to ask this guy) and so the irony is that although I brought my own reusable cloth bags in order to save the environment (even though they may kill me because of the high lead content) it was a good thing that they had those environmentally awful plastic bags, or I wouldn't have been able to pay.

I Am Relieved

While walking to a friend's house I thought of a brilliant way to parody the hit Cee Lo Green song "F*ck You" . . . instead of the profane chorus, I would sing Frak You and make the lyrics all about Battlestar Galactica, and so I started composing lyrics as I walked-- "I see you flying round space with the girl I love and I'm like Frak You!" . . . and if you were a Cylon, you'd still be my one, I'd keep you on the ship . . ." -- but when I got to my friend's house, I quickly checked YouTube to make sure no one had thought of this idea, and someone had; the parody isn't great, but it's funny enough and it has muppets at Comic-Con, and to be honest, I was sort of relieved that the parody existed already, because it saved me a great deal of time and effort that I would have spent on something pretty absurd (although considering the song I did recently produce, it's not like I spent my time on something better).

I Share Two Dreams (But For For Good Reason!)

I usually stop listening when someone begins describing a dream, as descriptions of dreams are usually incoherent, fragmented and torturous-- unless, of course, the dream is mine-- so please bear with me, I promise it will be worth it:  last week I had two vivid dreams: one where someone rudely stole my swimming lane at the gym and the other where I was rescuing drowning children in a flood at a playground . . . and both dreams had something in common besides water . . . in both, after the event happened, I went to the computer and started composing a sentence about the dream, but I was still dreaming this, so I was composing the sentence in a dream state, thinking what a great sentence it would be for the blog, when the event wasn't actually real, and both times, when I awoke, for a moment I thought I had a good idea for a sentence, but then I realized that it was only a dream . . . and though the dreams did provide fodder for this particular meta-sentence, they also may be telling me that I need to quit writing this blog and take up a more mindless hobby.

If You've Got The Winter Blues, Unbroken Is The Cure

When I am about to complain about things that really aren't serious enough to warrant complaint-- such as this ridiculously ugly winter-- certain stories prevent me from unnecessarily bitching, stories of people that have coped with far, far worse situations than I could ever imagine; inspirational tales of overcoming pain and anguish and hardship and suffering and loss . . . such as the story of Dieter Dengler's escape from a Laotian internment camp (retold by Werner Herzog in the movie Rescue Dawn) and the story of the American quadriplegic rugby team (documented in the film Murderball . . . if my students complain about an assignment, I put this movie in for a few minutes and then ask them if they actually have anything to complain about) and the story of Michael Oher (told by Michael Lewis in his book The Blind Side) and the story of Johan Otter and his daughter, Jenna, who survived a brutal attack by a grizzly bear and, though both were severely injured, they cheerfully tell the tale, glad they survived . . . and now I will add the Unbroken, the story of Louie Zamperini to this list; Zamperini was a wild Italian-American youth who channeled his frenetic energy into running, and who could have become the fastest miler in the world (and run a sub-four minute mile before Roger Bannister) if he didn't have to go to war and fight the Japanese . . . and his epic war story of ocean survival, torture, internment camp starvation and misery, and post-traumatic stress seems to be beyond what a human could actually endure . . . Laura Hillenbrand's book makes you root for the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the atomic bomb, for anything to end the torture that the POW's suffered at the hands of the Japanese (disturbing statistic: 1% of American POW's died in Nazi and Italian internment camps . . . 37% of American POW's died in Japanese camps) and Hillenbrand's writing is extensively researched and full of sensational details, yet she manages to give the narrative a novelistic feel-- you are with Louie every step of the way, during his bombing missions over the Pacific, when he and his raft-mates contemplate resorting to "the custom of the sea," his daily battles with The Bird, and his mental and spiritual battles with loss of dignity: ten shark livers out of a possible ten.

Can Someone Do A Study?

I know this is hard to measure statistically, but I think there has been a marked increase in people who take the wrong exit, realize this moments too late, stop on the exit ramp, and then go in reverse-- against traffic--  in an insane attempt to rectify their mistake, when they could simply drive a few hundred yards down the road and do a U-turn.

The Future of Anxiety?

In the '50's we worried about Communism and in the '60's we worried about Civil Rights and in the '70's it was the environment and in the '80's we worried about nuclear war (remember The Day After?) and in the '90's it was AIDS and in 2000 it was terrorism; these were all serious issues, but I hope in the coming decade we will choose something more entertaining to worry about . . . such as angry poltergeists or giant ants from the center of the earth or Ice 9 because, as George Lang says in Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner: "Worry is like interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due."

Once Again, I Unleash My Super-Potent Rhetorical Forces

You may be aware of my super-potent rhetorical powers, and I have been forced to use them once again; this time I have unleashed a rhetorical tornado upon Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, in an attempt to get him to move the Super Bowl to Saturday (and also to make it a home game for the team with the best record) and you can read my extremely persuasive missive over at Gheorghe: The Blog-- and I guarantee you will be moved to my opinion on the matter.

Despite My Disappointment, Zack Snyder Probably Made a Good Decision (But What Do I Know?)

My wife and I watched Zack Snyder's epic treatment of the graphic novel Watchmen, and I assumed that my wife would need my help with the plot-- because she didn't read the graphic novel-- but, oddly, she was able to follow the film without my insight, which leads me to believe that Zach Snyder did a good job for the lay person, and I also think he did a good job for people familiar with the graphic novel-- but don't say this to Watchmen fanatics . . . for some reason they hate the movie, but I can't figure out why-- as in my humble opinion, the movie looks like a comic book and feels like the world of the Watchmen and Malin Akerman, the chick who plays Laurie Jupiter, is about as super-heroic looking as it gets (she's a hotter version of Linda Carter) and Dr. Manhattan, glowing radioactively and sporting a swinging blue tally-wacker, blends naturally into the scenes, which are more like sequences of loosely connected tableaux, but they do the trick and get across the plot . . . and though I was disappointed that the ending varied from the graphic novel, the movie ending is probably more elegant and requires less explanation and back-story, and so, in retrospect, after my initial disappointment of not getting to see a giant octopoid faux-alien transported into downtown Manhattan, I agree that the new ending makes more sense . . . and I give the movie nine blood covered smiley faces out of a possible ten.

I Appreciate Those With A Sense of Style

I had to return a pair of jeans to Kohls on Saturday (I am less fat than my wife thought . . . a 36'' waist is too big) and and this errand made me remember why I generally dress like a hobo: buying a piece of clothing is insanely difficult . . . I wanted to exchange the jeans for a similar pair a size smaller, but they didn't have any that were exactly the same in the smaller size and because the price was different, I had to go to customer service, and she suggested I try the "kiosk" and order on-line-- but this was too difficult as you had to enter your address, credit, and shipping information by selecting letters with a key-pad (and I had already been three places to find some indoor soccer shoes, so I was shopped out) and so I finally elected to get store credit and try my luck on the racks, and I soon found myself lost in piles of 569's and 505's and 520's and 560's . . . and each number had different variations in style-- Loose Fit, Relaxed Fit, Slim Fit, Comfort Fit, Relaxed Straight Fit, Flamboyant Fit-- and also variations in color: distressed, faded, black, blue, blue with weird gold thread . . . which leads to billions of permutations of jeans . . . I tried on ONE of these billions of permutations and got fed up and left the store . . . and so now I see just how difficult it is to have style (unless you're rich and pay a stylist to pick out clothes for you, like Ralph does for Howard Stern) and although I will never have the patience to have style and I will continue to dress like a hobo rather than repeat shopping experiences like this . . . I now truly appreciate what it takes to dress well.

An Unexpected (And Possibly Rude) Request

While I was handing cash to the gas station attendant at Raceway, he made a strange request . . . he said, "Do you have any extra?" and I was confused-- it was very early in the morning-- until I saw that he was looking into the back of my Jeep, where I still had a bag of soccer balls from the fall season, and it took me a second to realize he was asking if I could spare a ball for him, because obviously I had too many balls for one man (despite the fact that a cheap soccer ball costs one quarter the price of a tank of gas) and once I understood his request, I answered: "They're not mine, they're the school's soccer balls," and this seemed to satisfy him . . . but I think this a breach of etiquette . . . when you are paying money for something, the person you are paying shouldn't ask you for some of your stuff, right?

Watchmen Makes You Earn It

I finally finished Watchmen, the heralded graphic novel that treats super-heroes as realistically as a Henry James novel treats consciousness, and it was an engrossing read-- it requires total commitment to get through a page-- the level of detail in the frames is astounding, the shifting genres are always perfect in tone, and the plot is dense and complex . . . and if you suffer through the cold, dark, corrupt world-- including the comic book within the Watchmen universe, the tale of the Black Freighter-- then there is a reward at the end: some traditional comic book fun . . . I can't wait to see how they did it in the film version.

Kids Those Days . . .

Don't expect new book reviews any time soon, as I am re-reading War and Peace . . . super-translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky came out with a new translation a few years ago, and even though I'm familiar with the characters, the first scene, at Anna Pavlovna's soiree, is still brutal: full of French dialogue and explanatory footnotes, historical references, and loads of characters with long Russian names, but if you survive, then Tolstoy rewards you with something more exciting-- a night of drinking and debauchery, including a drinking challenge (Dolokhov chugs an entire bottle of rum while sitting on a ledge) and a prank . . . after the party the Dolokhov, Pierre, and Anatole tie a policeman to the back of a tame bear and toss the pair into the river, so that the policeman flails about while the bear swims . . . and that sets the bar pretty high for drunken idiocy . . . I've never done anything THAT stupid and I doubt my kids will either, so if they ever commit any drunken shenanigans, I'll take a deep breath and remember to compare it to the bear and the policeman.

The Kids Are All Right (Not The Kids Are Alright)

I had a hard time separating the title of this film from the catchy chorus of the similarly named Who song . . . but it only took a moment of viewing before my wife and I were settled into the sun-soaked world of Southern California (the light reminded me of Sideways) and a fairly traditional family drama-- despite a lesbian marriage and a sperm donor; Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, and Annette Bening are such good actors that every beat works; the film is by turns, funny, awkward, dramatic, poignant, and in the end-- despite its hippie sensibility-- traditional: Annette Bening indignantly and rightfully defends her family from an "interloper" . . . nine heirloom tomatoes out of ten.

This Is the Reaction I Expect!

I received a voice-message at work on Tuesday, which is usually something bad-- and the computerized voice said that the message was "80 seconds long," which is a pretty long message, so I was expecting the worst  . . . an irate parent or an administrator reminding me of something important I had forgotten, but from the first moment of the message I knew this was going to be different; it was a woman calling to express her rapturous adulation for my editorial opposing charter schools (which had just appeared in the local paper) and it was so impassioned that it made me blush, there were times when she seemed to be at a loss for words, nearly swooning with emotion toward my "cogency," and to confirm my suspicions about the tone, I let a few other people listen to the message (I've been known, on occasion, to misinterpret the female tone of voice) and they all agreed that I was correct in my inference . . . and I can't reproduce the commentary from the other teachers here because this is a family friendly blog, but you can imagine what went on (and I should point out that the woman-- who no longer has any students in the school-- left her phone number, though she said I didn't have to call her back) and, though it made me a bit uncomfortable, I think I'd like more of these messages, so if you read something wonderful that I've written, this is the reaction I will now expect of you.