There Must Be Some Misunderstanding
Sunday morning, after a long day of imbibing on a bachelor-party-camping-trip, I misread a sign on Route 18-- and the magnitude of my misread might indicate just how long a day of imbibing it was . . . and my only excuse for my egregious comprehension error is that I read the sign through a tree and so perhaps the branches made me parse the words the way I did; the sign was for a store called "Carpets and More," but I read it as "Car Pets and More," and spent several seconds puzzling over what kind of pet would live in a car and why anyone would want to have a pet that they kept solely in their car . . . and then, finally, my consciousness snapped back to normal and I realized that my brain was broken and would probably never recover (and as a side-note, I have hit the unfortunate age of the two day hangover).
This Meal Isn't Big Enough For The Both Of Us
I may have to duke it out with my five year old son at dinner, if my 2011 Taco Count is going to proceed unimpeded-- he ate three tacos Monday night, as did Catherine-- and there are only twelve in a packet, so I had to make do with a soft taco in order to eat a seventh . . . eventually our kitchen is going to be a two taco package town.
The Right Decision Is Not Always Fun
I asked my wife if I could show this YouTube video to our children, and she said that it isn't nice to laugh at other people's pain . . . but I think in this one instance (and maybe this one as well) it is okay to do so.
You Thought You Were A Nerd . . .
High school students of the world-- if you ever wondered what goes inside the English office once the door closes and the teachers are no longer with the students, you might be disappointed, or you might find the answer strangely satisfying: Lego Sporcle!
Thus Endeth The Streak
We went down swinging, but-- tragically-- our salamander streak is over . . . I lifted up every rock, cement block, and rotten log in the Meadows, but even though it was a damp night, we had no luck-- just ants, centipedes, worms, and a giant hairy spider, and this makes me wonder: Where the f-%# did all the salamanders go? . . . it makes no sense, we found them by the dozens earlier this spring, but now they have vanished . . . and, to add insult to injury, my kids stepped in dog-shit and-- defying the laws of dog-shit physics-- they managed to transfer the dog-shit from their Crocs all up and down their skinny bare legs . . . and now that our run is done, I can honestly say that our attempt to match The Yankee Clipper is certainly a reminder of just how stupendous his streak really is.
Clutch Lifting
As far as our salamander streak was concerned, it was the bottom of the ninth, with two out and two strikes-- we had lifted up every log and rock in our secret salamander spot, but because of the previous week's dry weather, the ground wasn't as damp as usual . . . and the patches under the rocks, logs, and concrete were full of ants, termites, centipedes, black beetles, and fat worms . . . but no salamanders; both my children had given up (after asking me if we could "forget" this trip) but as we exited the woods, I gave the last (or first, depending on your perspective) log a quick check, and underneath was one scrawny red-striped salamander . . . a "Texas leaguer," but a hit nonetheless, and so though we are still forty-five shy of DiMaggio's magic number, our streak rolls on.
No Principles=Happiness
Last week, I received a phone call from my wife and she told me she was at the gas station and had been waiting for ten minutes but hadn't gotten any service-- she said she even tried to pump the gas herself but you needed some sort of code to do that in New Jersey-- and so she was pretty irate and then she said, "Oh here he comes," and I heard her ask for "thirty dollars of regular, cash," and then I didn't hear from her for a while-- a long while, because she was supposed to come home and cook some pasta for the kids while I went and retrieved them from the trampoline in our neighbor's backyard, but when I got home from that errand, she was nowhere to be found, which was annoying, because now we had to rush to eat, and then my cell-phone rang again and it was her and she said, "I'm still at the gas station, I'm waiting for the police," and then she told me why: the attendant had filled her tank, despite the fact that she asked for thirty dollars cash, and she didn't have any more cash and she refused to pay the extra twelve dollars or give the attendant her credit card because it was his mistake, so he threatened to to call the police on her because she wouldn't pay the full 42 dollars and he wrote down her license number, so she turned the tables on him, and she called the police on him, for threatening her and writing down her license for no reason, and eventually the police came and sided with her (she was in Edison, and she is an Edison teacher after all, and the attendant admitted his mistake, and after trying to negotiate-- "you pay six and I pay six"-- he told her that he was very poor and that the manager made him pay for mistakes such as this out of his salary, and so then my wife got out of her car and gave the manager a piece of her mind, and said that if he made the attendant pay for the mistake she was going to tell all her friends to boycott this particular Raceway) but of course my advice to her before she told me the whole story was, "Just pay the twelve dollars and get out of there! Come home to your husband and children! We need you!" but my wife said that she had to stay and fight the good fight because it was a "matter of principle," and she was emboldened by the fact that an old man at the station told her: "They did the same thing to my wife last week!" and so she felt she was standing up for everyone who had suffered over-charging at this station and had to set things straight and after it was all over I asked her a stupid (but sincere) question: "How did you call the police? How did you know the number?" and she said, "I dialed 911."
He Thinks He's So Smart
We were watching The Black Cauldron and it was getting near the end and the plot was tense and my five year old son was worried, but my seven year old son reassured him and said, "Three things have to happen or this isn't Disney . . . Gurgi has to come back to life, Taran and Eilonwy have to get home, and they have to find Hen-Wen, the magic pig," and like clockwork, in the waning minutes, these three things came true and Ian was relieved and Alex felt very clever . . . so I'm going to throw in Old Yeller next weekend and really blow his mind.
Back By Popular Demand! More Ha-Joon Chang Analogies!
Some analogies are so bad they're stupid; some analogies are so bad they're funny; and-- of course-- some analogies make a lot of sense, and help you to understand something complex in simpler terms . . . and in Ha-Joon Chang's book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, he uses a couple of metaphors to summarize his comprehensive data on free market history: 1) he accuses rich countries of what Friedrich List called "kicking away the ladder," which means that they arrive at economic stability and wealth through complex and strategic protectionism, tariffs, regulation of foreign investment, regulation on imports and exports, and subsidies-- but then once these these nations (and he uses America, Britain, and his home country of North Korea as his prime examples) have reached a position of economic power, they use institutions such as the WTO and the IMF, treaties, embargoes, copyright law, and tariffs to force impoverished nations into adopting extreme free market policies despite the fact that these countries are not ready to compete in a free market . . . and so, the rich nations use the ladder to climb, and then kick it away when poor countries want to use the same method 2) Chang's second metaphor about the irrationality of the current free market ideology centers around his six year old son, Jin-Gyu, who he ironically claims is "living in an economic bubble . . . over-protected," and so he "needs to be exposed to competition" . . . in other words, he should get a job-- he could be a successful shoe-shine boy or street hawker and learn the value of hard work-- but, of course, we don't do this to our children, we protect them for many years from the competitions of the free market until they can develop intellect enough to take part in the competition for the best jobs . . . and he compares this absurdity to how "free trade economists claim that developing country producers need to be exposed to as much competition right now, so that they have the incentive to raise productivity in order to survive . . . protection by contrast, only creates complacency and sloth," and Chang points out that this "infant industry argument," was proposed by the inventor of another great economic metaphor-- Adam Smith-- who claimed that an "invisible hand" guided the free market to efficiency, but even Adam Smith understood that free markets and protectionism need to exist in concert, not opposition.
Winter's Bone: Not Nearly As Depressing As The Blurb
Netflix describes Winter's Bone as an "unflinching noir drama set deep in the Ozarks," and because of that depressing description, I kept moving it down my queue . . . avoiding it, though I had heard great things . . . but it wasn't depressing at all, in fact, seventeen year old Ree Dolly's quest for her meth-cooking dad-- who she needs to find (dead or alive) in order to save her homestead from the bail bondsman-- reminded me more of Lord of the Rings than Deliverance . . . the film is an an odyssey through the backwoods of the Ozarks, and instead of having to outwit Polyphemus, Ree has to out-fox Fat Milton: ten pots of deer stew out of ten.
It's Hard To Take Notice of Things When Sugar Is Involved
Apparently, if there is a pile of neatly packaged Ghirardelli seven layer brownies (two to a sandwich bag) sitting on the counter, then they are not intended for me to consume-- but I didn't notice the packaging style when I ate the first bag, because I thought that there were two brownies left over from my wife's book club party the night before, but then when I went back and found another bag with two brownies in it, sitting in a pile of similar bags, I should have realized that they might be for something other than random consumption . . . but I was in a sugar frenzy and the thought didn't even cross my mind . . . and then once I finished the fourth brownie I got all hyper and went to the park with the kids and played sports for two hours and forgot all about the oddly packaged leftovers until my wife-- typically amazed by my stupidity-- told me they were for the International Day bake sale (but no worries, I am going to pay for them).
Why Did I Read This?
I thought I should read something more literary before returning to the juvenile pleasures of George R.R. Martin, and so I tackled and finished Stewart O'Nan's Wish You Were Here, a 514 page account of the Maxwell family's last visit to their lake house in Chautauga, New York . . . the patriarch of the family has died and his wife Emily doesn't have the time, money, or patience to take care of their family vacation cottage, and her children aren't financially capable of taking over the deed . . . and so, in the span of a week, the novel shows all nine Maxwells-- who are definitely "lost souls" since Henry died, "swimming in the fish bowl" of the little cottage, as they literally run "over the same old ground" and find "the same old fears," and though a certain synopsis might sound exciting and full of conflict: let's stuff a failed artist, a recently divorced, often stoned recovering alcoholic mom, her hot and boy-crazy teenage daughter, a frustrated photographer, his shy teenage daughter who has an incestuous lesbian crush on her cousin, a kleptomaniac kid, a wacky retired teacher, and a cranky widow in a small space, and throw a ominous kidnapping into the background . . . but the reality that O'Nan is trying to capture is different . . . everyone is on good behavior and overwhelmed by nostalgia and essentially lost in their own heads and Lise sums up the theme: "She wondered what her life would look like in a book . . . now that was a depressing idea . . . she thought that her life was average and nothing to be ashamed of . . . the world wasn't as magical as people liked to believe . . . that was why they read books to escape it," but-- of course-- a book like this isn't an escape from reality, it's a portrait of it, and I am glad I am through with it and can return to a book where "wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside" because it is getting near summer, after all, and soon enough I'll be living O'Nan's reality, so I'm not sure why I forced myself to read about it.
My Deepest Sympathies
Just as Christians feel pity for all the people who died before the coming of Christ, and wonder about their fate in the after-life, I feel pity for all those who died before the invention of Blu-ray, and never got to watch The Fall in HD.
Wait A Minute . . . Who Is An Idiot?
We were playing the "Can You Help Me Figure Out Who I Just Had A Conversation With" game in the English Office the other day, and we were really getting close to figuring out who I had just talked to in the stairwell about Busch Gardens, were were closing in and everyone was doing their best to help me solve the puzzle, and then the light-bulb went off in my brain and I said, dramatically, to get everyone's attention, "Wait a minute," and then I asked my question, a question-- that if anyone knew the answer-- would crack the case, a question so incisive and clever that someone wrote it on the whiteboard . . . and here is what I asked: "Who spoke at graduation last year?" and my friend Liz stared at me for a long awkward moment . . . then realized that I was earnest and waiting for a serious answer, and finally said: "You did!"
Which Weeds Are Getting Whacked?
My wife took a look at out neighbor's freshly mowed lawn and asked an excellent question: Are dandelions being selected for-- are they surviving-- because of their ability to withstand lawn-mowing? and judging by the number that survived the mower, they are . . . perhaps the dandelions with the stronger, more flexible and whippier stems are surviving and these traits are becoming more pronounced in suburban dandelions . . . and I'm not sure how you could measure this-- you either need pre-lawnmower dandelion DNA or access to some wild strain of dandelion and then you could do some measurements on the tensile strength of the stems . . . or run an experiment with the wild strain and see if over generations the stems change . . . but maybe there is a more elegant solution: so I will ask Quora and see.
How To Use The New Explosions In The Sky Album
Get up early, don some big old-school headphones, put on "Take Care, Take Care, Take Care" and wander around the park before anyone else is there (it might also be good to listen to while roller-blading, but I haven't tried yet).
Another Free Idea . . . And I Did The Hard Part
So our on-line digital experience is becoming more and more concise; web-pages are difficult to wade through, blogs have consolidated some of this information into manageable nuggets, Facebook pared things down more, and Twitter seemed to be the end result: with its 140 character limit, brevity truly is the soul of wit . . . but I think there's room for one more application, one more level down on the communication ladder, and I call it GRUNT! and this platform will allow you to send a three second sound with a short title to your followers: perhaps you would GRUNT! the sound "yee-ha!" with the title "Bin Laden is Dead!" or "blah" with the title "Monday Morning" or "yum" attached to a local restaurant, and, of course, there's no way text can do these sounds justice-- as the expressive of a sound is infinite and unlimited-- and a GRUNT! conveys an amazing amount of information in a short space (and also don't require much literacy) and so I think this is the future of communication . . . now I've done the hard part in this process and thought of the idea . . . all you need to do is raise the capital, write the code, design the web-pages, market the application, and run the company.
The Black Swan: Happy Mother's Day
My review of The Black Swan is appropriately schizophrenic-- I watched the movie in two parts and I found the first hour grueling and painful-- the plot is typical sports melodrama (the meek but hardworking underdog gets her chance to shine) and typical sports melodrama is the only melodrama that gets to me emotionally (Hoosiers, Rudy, King of Kong, Rocky, etc.), and so I was really rooting for Natalie Portman's character, hoping that her hard work and dedication to her sport would pay off (the images and sounds of her battered feet really got to me, maybe because I've been playing soccer with a broken toe the past couple of weeks and can empathize) and so Nina's complete lack of joy for her art-- her obsessiveness and isolation and her mental disintegration-- was really depressing (unlike Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which is also a depressing sports movie, but Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei are disintegrating physically, and that's never as bad as disintegrating mentally, and in the end The Wrestler feels oddly triumphant as each character learns to cope with their physical decay) but I got over the hump in the second half of The Black Swan . . . I learned to "stop worrying and love the bomb" . . . and enjoy how the film turns the corner and becomes a full fledged horror film (and Portman turns into a full-fledged black swan) so if you're watching the movie and you want to quit, stick with it until it gets really macabre . . . and maybe you can explain to me exactly what happens to Winona Ryder's character in the hospital (enjoy the cheesy irony of Winona Ryder chastising Portman for filching her stuff) and though it almost needs two separate ratings for the two halves, I'll average it out to 8 tutus out of a possible 10.
The Last of the Dialers?
I can still recall the home phone number of a few of my childhood friends (several days ago, my wife needed to call the father of one of my old friends and I was instantly able to produce the phone number from memory) and this leads to my two questions of the day . . . and these questions may only apply to people of my generation and older:
1) Can you remember any phone numbers from your youth?
2) Will ours be the last generation that can do this?
More Difficult Than Fermat's Last Theorem
How do you get all of the tomato paste out of the little can?
Quora!
So I'm thinking of writing an epic science-fiction novel that is set in a number of giant self-sustaining bio-dome type structures dotted about the ruins of earth-- the people inside are waiting for the earth's ecosystem to regenerate from some cataclysm--and during the wait (which will be thousands of years) the various self-sustaining pods evolve different economic systems and this leads to a variety of debates, conflicts, and decisions about how to use the resources in each pod, and also how trade works between the pods-- it would be science-fiction of economics and conservation and so-- for preliminary research for this book that I will certainly never even attempt to write-- I posed this question to Quora: Is it more cost effective to eat the chicken or is it better to keep the chicken alive and eat its eggs? and people have already given me some logical answers . . . for free!-- so I suggest you create an account and ask questions for research you will never use but are mildly curious about.
Am I An Umbrellist?
Watch Your Language
Last week, during the annual Poetry Festival at my high school, acclaimed poet BJ Ward spoke to my creative writing class about being sensitive to language-- he deconstructed the Pledge of Allegiance and wondered why the students were required to repeat it every morning if it was actually a pledge . . . a serious promise that is eternal . . . e.g. I have pledged to eat more tacos in 2011-- and since his presentation, I have been more alert to the words around me; for example, I noticed a Watch Children sign in Ward's hometown of Edison, and I wondered why they couldn't add the preposition "for" into the statement . . . Watch For Children isn't as ominous and ambiguous Watch Children, which could be advice from one pedophile to another, or a paranoid warning from a wary old person.
Breaking News! Bin Laden Will Cause Baby Boom!
Mark my words, the death of Osama Bin Laden will cause a mini-baby boom in the United States . . . hearing the story of the triumphant Black Ops mission and the resultant execution of the world's most wanted terrorist will make American males feel potent, virile, and masculine . . . and there is no better patriotic expression of potency, virility, and masculinity than impregnating your wife (except perhaps shooting a hand-gun while riding a jet-ski) and though Americans surely realize this event is only a symbolic end to an abstractly defined, on-going war, they will still view the world as a safer place for children now that Bin Laden is dead; the combined aphrodisiac of military success and optimism for our country's future will lead to some groovy, unprotected love-making . . . so can someone remind me to check the average birth rates next February (which is generally a month with comparatively less births than other months) to see if this half-baked thesis pans out?
A Useful Analogy (Hindsight is 20/20)
Ha-Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, makes a case for increased government regulation of the financial sector, despite the logic that "the government does not know better than those whose actions are regulated by it . . . the government cannot know someone's situation as well as the individual or firm concerned" and so "government officials cannot improve upon the decisions made by the economic agents," but he explains that regulations often work not because the government "knows better," but because the regulations limit complexity, and of course this applies to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, where the financial instruments and derivatives were more complex than the experts and investors could predict, and Chang makes this useful comparison: when a company invents a new drug it cannot be sold immediately . . . first the drug needs to be rigorously tested on carefully monitored patients because the interactions of a new drug in the human body are complex and unpredictable, and it will take a while to tell if the new drug has more positive benefits than its side effects . . . and, of course, this was not done before we sold unregulated sub-prime mortgages, packaged them into mortgage backed securities, packaged those into collateralized debt obligations, and insured those with credit default swaps . . . and it turns out the side-effects of this financial treatment are nausea, irritability, unemployment, mental confusion, erectile dysfunction, depression, problems sleeping, constipation, diarrhea, kidney failure, hostility, hallucinations, canker sores, foreclosures, and panic attacks.
Survival in the Busch
Despite a perfect storm of things that annoy me: crowds, lines, motion sickness, lack of food . . . I survived our first day in a real amusement park (we've been to Knoebels, but that doesn't count) and I didn't even get that grouchy . . . maybe it was because of the lousy weather, which kept the lines to a minimum, or maybe it was because my wife and kids enjoyed the park so much-- they love all the rides, no matter how scary: Alex was just tall enough to go on "The Loch Ness Monster," and he did it twice, and Catherine went on every roller-coaster in the park . . . I am a pathetic coward, but I did manage to conquer the log flume twice without puking (although I felt downright queasy on the flight simulator "Europe in the Air," which is pathetic) and I really enjoyed the "Pet Shenanigans" show-- it was like a Tom and Jerry cartoon with real cats and dogs-- and the seats stayed perfectly still.
A Vacation Highlight
After a day at Jamestown, a day at Yorktown, and several days in Colonial Williamsburg (we definitely witnessed 10-12 hours of historical reenactment) I am fairly confident that my kids know we fought the British in the Revolutionary War (although I'm not sure they know that the British are English) and I must admit that the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has done an impressive job at re-creating these places, but my favorite part of our vacation was our hike through York River State Park-- we collected numerous fossils from the river bank-- and I lifted rotting log and saw a small snake I've never seen before: after some research, my best guess is that it is either an Eastern Worm Snake or an Eastern Smooth Earth Snake and it looked like the snake in the picture above.
One of These Pictures Has Nothing To Do With Brisket
So I learned some valuable gastronomical information on our family vacation at Colonial Williamsburg; a colonial farmer on The Palace Green (or a guy pretending to be a colonial farmer on the pretend Palace Green) was grazing a large colonial cow (or perhaps it was a guy pretending to be a colonial cow) and this large, shaggy colonial cow had a giant, football shaped goiter-like sack hanging in a pouch of loose skin below its neck, and this bulbous mass was so large and disgusting that I felt compelled to ask the colonial farmer about it, and he told me "That's the brisket," so if you like brisket and eat it often, then I suggest you take a look at the picture of the actual cow below the post (and not the sanitized graphic of a cow pictured above) so you have an idea of what you are really chewing on.
Several Monumental Firsts
Catherine told me she "didn't like me very much" the night before we left for Spring Break, for an odd reason . . . because I did something I rarely do: I put something away where it belonged . . . she claimed this was "the first time I ever put anything away in my life" which is hyperbole if I ever heard it, although I did admit to her that I made a mistake-- the portable sump pump was on the floor in the study (the portable sump pump we put in the basement shower when there is torrential rain) and it was right in the middle of the room and I nearly tripped over it which is probably why I acted the way I did-- despite the fact that it was raining buckets-- I put the pump away in the storage area under the house, which is only accessible from a small door on the outside of the house, not thinking that my mother-in-law would want to set it up in the basement because of the storm-- so Catherine was pretty angry when she had to walk out into the rain to retrieve it (I was already in bed) and, also due to the storm, this was also the first time that I packed the car in the dark at 4:30 AM on Saturday morning, instead of getting things set up the night before, and so I put the kids' bikes on top of the car in one of those big latch-on sacks and I put our bikes on the back of the car on a latch-on bike rack and I remind you that I did this all in the dark and so it's no surprise that I was only 50% successful . . . a few miles down the Turnpike a woman drove up alongside of our car and made a repeated pointing motion at our roof . . . we stopped to investigate and realized that I never actually latched the sack with the bikes to the roof, I skipped that step and just tied the belts loosely around the roof rack (which I do at the end so they don't make that annoying flapping sound) so it was lucky that woman noticed the sack coming loose or in a few miles some unlucky driver would have gotten hit in the windshield with a sack of bikes.
Those Chauvinist Pixar Bastards
My creative writing students were naming kids movies and then suggesting appropriate morals for each film-- practicing their inductive reasoning-- and a student said the moral of Up is this: You can't have a real adventure until your wife dies (he admitted that he didn't create this moral himself-- he read it on-line-- but it is still an excellent use of an on-line resource in the classroom).
George R.R. Martin: Fantasy Without Whimsy
For the second time in as many months, I took on a novel with two things I despise-- a map and an appendix-- but George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones was so highly recommended by everyone who read it that I had to give it a shot, and unlike Dune, which I couldn't quite finish, I read all 676 pages of Martin's first volume of his epic Song of Fire and Ice series (and even referred to the map and the appendix several times!) and though I felt a bit childish at the start . . . I'm forty-one years old and usually reading books like this, not sword and sorcery stories . . . I very well may read the next volume (A Clash of Kings) and I will definitely check out the big-budget HBO series inspired by the first book; I will admit that I started the book trying to find reasons to hate it, but the form drew me in: short, exciting and strategic chapters, each told from a different character's point of view, following Elmore Leonard's philosophy of "leaving out all the parts that people skip," with the pacing of a J.K. Rowling book, but sophisticated and very adult content (thus the need for the appendix) and far more entertaining and action-packed than the slow paced but similar Tolkien books and with one other extremely important improvement: no elves (I hate elves and anything else that smacks of whimsy, and a A Game of Thrones is definitely the least whimsical of fantasy novels).
Tetris to Impress
For the second time in my life, I have impressed my children: I completed the most difficult level (9.5) on Gameboy Tetris so the boys could witness the victory song of the "five fiddlers" and the Congratulatory Space Shuttle Launch; Alex was so moved by my performance that he said we should "write it on my gravestone when I die."
Nuts Sparring By The Fire
The charming Hotel Vienna of Windham, New York boasts a lovely breakfast room where they serve fresh baked cheese and raspberry danishes and croissants for you to eat before you ski, and they have large family style tables and even a fireplace, and I felt serene and relaxed while eating aforementioned danishes, contemplating a day of snowboarding with the family, while the other families around us did the same, and once our children finished their breakfast they asked if they could sit in front of the fire, and I said, "Of course," happy to be able to finish my coffee and Alex sat in the Adirondack style chair right in front of the fire and Ian sat just to his right and within minutes they were in a fist-fight over the chair that was right in front of the fire and I had to break them up and I couldn't beat them both senseless because there were these other peaceful families eating yogurt and granola and drinking tea surrounding us and observing us, and so I calmly and logically talked it out with them, and we agreed that they could take turns in the seat directly in front of the fire but that didn't work so well either because once Ian got his turn the good seat, he bonked his chair over and nudged Alex further away and tried to control both armrests and they got into another fight and I had to remove them from the quaint breakfast room and drag them back to the hotel room, where we proceeded to get dressed so we could enjoy a relaxing day on Windham Mountain.
How Smooth Is Smoov?
On the walk home from a very late night out, which began at the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, where we watched JB Smoov of Larry David fame do his especially bawdy form of minimalist prop comedy (he "birthed" himself through a white t-shirt, had sexual intercourse with a chair for a LONG time, and used a microphone and the cord as phallus and ejaculate) we got into a debate on how much he would tailor his material if he was playing to A) an all white crowd or B) an all African American crowd . . . and this was precipitated by this observation: the Stress Factory employees seated all the African Americans up front, and JB Smoov worked his rapport with them more often than with the other folks in the crowd-- now we don't know if this was intentional or just a coincidence, but it was apparent . . . and if anyone has seen JB in hypothetical crowd situation A or B, please leave a description of his act in the comments.
This Could Be The Idea That Allows You To Retire in Style
This weird hair discussion at G:TB reminds me of an idea a friend and I had about making a documentary where we interviewed people about the strange and rapid growth of unsightly body hair-- that crazy white hair that sprouts in the middle of your forehead or the curly gray hair that grows in your ear in the span of a nap-- and the "money shot" would be a time lapse segment of one of these hairs actually sprouting during the night, it would take thousands of hour of film to capture this, and it would be analogous to getting footage of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot . . . so does anyone have some venture capital they want to invest?
Small Pleasures
There's a certain joy in kicking a ball-- it's a similar pleasure to throwing something and hitting the thing you wanted-- but there's the added satisfaction that you did it with your foot . . . and my five year old son Ian understands this: the other day he spent a great deal of time and concentration trying to punt a soccer ball over the tennis court fence, which is an impressive feat for a forty pound child, and then once he accomplished it, he tried to do it again and again . . . and this reminds me of one of my favorite kicks of all time; it took place in our fraternity "pit," a carpeted area with benches and a television-- I was putzing around with a soccer ball-- and Kenny Bloom borrowed Brian Fogg's motorcycle helmet, sat on the bench, put on the helmet, and said to me, "Kick it at my head!" and I complied and I hit it hard and clean and perfect and it hit the helmet and snapped Kenny's head back and knocked the helmet clean off his head, and he looked at me, stunned, and said, "Remind me never to do that again."
I Am Put In My Place
For a Friday diversion, I like to create a "Life Quiz" for my students: ten general knowledge questions that I think they should know (my last quiz consisted of these questions-- 1) What was the first permanent English settlement in North America? 2) How many strings do the cello, violin, and bass guitar all have? 3) What is the vernal equinox? 4) Who said, "In the future, everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame? 5)What does a seismograph measure? 6) What does a Geiger Counter measure? 7) To what country is the platypus indigenous? 8) In Greek mythology, who was mesmerized by his own image in the pond? 9) What planet is Superman from? 10) Who holds the record in Major League Baseball for most consecutive games with at least one hit?) and, for some reason, the students find this fun-- perhaps because it isn't graded and I encourage them to challenge someone each time we have a quiz . . . and I find the quizzes fun as well because I make them up from my head to insure that they are "common knowledge" and I get to reveal all the answers and feel smart as I explain them, and I try the quizzes out on the other teachers, who often do quite well, but rarely go ten for ten, and then I feel smart because I knew all the answers-- but last Friday, after I tested the teachers, another teacher pulled out her fun Friday activity, a logic puzzle in this vein, that included an incomprehensible little chart to "help" you with the information and aid you in getting a solution, and she started in on the puzzle and Stacy did as well, and before long they were filling in the chart and making insane statements like "You know the Fuentes can't be Munoz because there is no appointment before 5 PM, so that only leaves California because we eliminated Michigan because Lukas isn't until 6 PM" and while I tried my best to join in, I was essentially just copying off them and not understanding one bit of the method, even when I did fill in the chart, and it wasn't fun for me at all and really lowered my self-esteem and it makes me feel bad for the kids who don't get any answers correct on the "Life Quizzes," but I guess you can't be good at everything (unless you're Einstein) and maybe I need to start with something simpler, like an easy Sodoku and work my way up to full blown logical thinking, which was certainly never my strong point, and why I was known as "The Poor Man's Galileo" in college.
Zombie Priorities
If you haven't seen the AMC series The Walking Dead, then by all means do so-- it's not just about zombies, in fact, the zombie gore is secondary to the human drama (despite the fact that the zombies eat a horse in the second episode) and the true theme is not supernatural at all, but more about how humans respond and adapt to a new and stressful situation, but before you watch the series, you should get your priorities straight and read the comic books first: Robert Kirkman has taken Rick and his son Carl to such a dark place that I don't think the television series can follow, and-- I assure you-- reading the comics doesn't spoil the plot of the series: in fact, if you read the comics first then it is more stressful to watch the series because you'll be constantly expecting things to happen and they won't . . . and though there are differences in plot, the theme of both works are the same-- both rely on the fact that they are an open ended series of episodes, not a graphic novel or a movie, or even a series like Lost, where the apocalypse will be solved and resolved, instead, the only resolution will be death, but they question how people might live along the way, in a world irrevocably destroyed, a world where there is no solution to the problem . . . the zombies will not be vanquished . . . and judging by the end of season one of the AMC series, they understand this and are going to stay true to the comic books in this regard . . . but what do I know?
You Learn Something New Every Day
So I always assumed that everyone who has seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail finds the film at least moderately funny, but this is not true, and, in fact, there's a sort of reverse-Dane Cook Effect going on here . . . some people consider the film horribly unfunny . . . and think it is for nerds and hipsters to share with one another; I learned this in class the other day, when some of my students and the neighboring teacher banded together against the Python fans in a pointless debate (because it is impossible to convince someone that something is funny . . . you see it's funny because he is no longer a newt . . . you see it's funny because they forgot to hide inside the Trojan Rabbit . . . you see it's funny because he forgot to say "three" and "four") but I can assure you that when I was watching the movie repeatedly with my dirt-bag high school friends, we were certainly not cool enough to be hip or smart enough to be nerdy . . . and so-- as a rare fan of both Dane Cook and Monty Python-- I urge you not to make hasty generalizations about taste in comedy and character.
I Can See Why People Are Pissed But . . .
Ha Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, explains how in a quest to curb inflation, the free market package known neo-liberal policy, emphasizes greater capital mobility (rich people can move large amounts of money quickly so they can make a killing on arbitrage and investment without penalty) and greater labor market flexibility (the ability to outsource, avoid unions and labor regulations, and essentially make jobs insecure) and these policies are wonderful for those who hold large liquid financial assets and like to move them quickly to avoid having them degraded by inflation and this also allows for large companies to be restructured quickly, but it doesn't help if you own a house or don't have loads of liquid assets or a large business, and the threat of some inflation essentially pales in comparison to job losses and foreclosures and economic instability, especially when people are stuck in houses they can't sell, so they can't take advantage of the greater flexibility companies have in moving jobs (my cousin who works at Pfizer says this is the "new normal," you can be laid off at any time) and because of this instability in the job market, people are pissed at teachers, cops, and firemen because we have a union and collectively bargain for our salaries and benefits (although legislation in New Jersey is trying to abrogate these rights) . . . essentially we have old time jobs that are stable . . . the kind of jobs most people in America don't have any longer . . . but instead of being pissed at us, why not be pissed at the neo-liberal policies that made this happen?
Overwhelmed By Sand
After a recommendation from a friend, I started in on a novel that has the four elements that I generally can't stomach: 1) a map 2) an appendix 3) a glossary 4) lots of made up words with apostrophes . . . I'm talking about "Science Fiction's Supreme Masterpiece" . . . yes, that's what it says on the cover, and like everything else in this book, it is said without irony . . . this is the blurb for Frank Herbert's Dune and, surprisingly, I made it through 400 pages of sand, the highly addictive life lengthening spice-drug melange, imperial plots for the aforementioned spice drug, wild religious prophesy among the Fremen, water reclaiming stillsuits, Sardaukaur, the coming of Muad'Dib, a ride on the maker (a sand worm), crys-knife fights, treachery, desert ecology, and all the rest . . . but I finally skimmed the last hundred pages or so, because-- despite the complexity of the world, the fantastic development of the characters . . . both in mind and lineage . . . and the well-paced and multifarious plot-- after four hundred pages of reading you deserve a joke or two, something funny or at least ironic, but like in the Bible and Lord of the Rings, the tone of Dune is epic, and during this epic and very dry time on Arrakis, nothing remotely humorous happens, nor should it I guess . . . this is a place so desiccated that when you die, they render your body for its water, and the pages and pages of sand finally wore me out (and from what I've heard, the movie is not so much fun to watch either).
I Had My Reasons (They Just Don't Make Sense)
I was nervous all day Tuesday, my mind turning over the possibility that my 1993 Jeep Cherokee would not pass inspection and I would finally have to spring for a new car, and so on the way to the inspection station, I alternately drove really fast, in order to blow out the catalytic converter, and very slow-- to test the brakes-- which might be a bit suspect, and I occasionally beeped my horn, which has been known to stick, and only beeps if you punch the upper lip of the device-- and I'm sure I was an odd sight, accelerating and braking down Fresh Ponds Road, occasionally tooting my horn, but luckily I didn't pass any police, and then when I got to the inspection station I learned that-- possibly due to budget cuts-- they don't employ very many people there . . . it's a ghost town and the only thing they inspect now are emissions (most cars have a chip, so they just plug a cord into the chip, but my car is so old that they had to hook up all these EKG monitor type devices to the outside and inside of the engine) and the gas cap for leaking fumes . . . they don't test the brakes or the doors or the blinkers and they don't even beep the horn, and so the positive thing is that I can legally drive the Jeep until 2013 but the negative thing is that I can legally drive the Jeep until 2013 (and God knows what other barely serviceable vehicles are passing inspection with flying colors, so be careful out there!)
Proud Parent
So Ian is taking art lessons from an artist up the street, and she's been quite impressed with his work-- he's the opposite of his older brother who would rather talk about his artistic visions, but can never work up the gumption and patience to render them well-- Ian is quiet and patient and methodical when he works, and he's willing to revise a line several times until he gets it exactly right; he also has the ability to look at a picture of something and draw it and capture it's essence-- when he draws a penguin, you know it's a penguin (and the same with a dolphin or a scorpion or whatever) and this makes me very Proud as a Parent, that my young son has some Talent, and maybe, if I am very lucky, he will go to a good Art School and really learn to draw and paint and also make abstract steel sculptures-- for the low, low price of 30 grand a year-- and become an Artist and live at home until he's thirty (or maybe forever, like Emily Dickinson).
The Exception
As a rule, I never lick anything that been sitting in my shed (mice live in there) but, if a soccer ball or basketball needs air, I don't think twice before inserting the pump needle into my mouth, no matter where the pump has been-- nestled among mouse droppings, on a shelf in a filthy garage, among the detritus on the floor of my car-- simply because of the instructions: "Moisten needle before inflating."
Just A Hypothesis
We all know the idea of a gateway drug-- some habit forming substance that might possibly lead to addiction to a harder drug-- but I pose this question: is coffee a gateway drug to speed? or is drinking coffee a "prophylactic drug," as opposed to a gateway drug, because your coffee addiction prevents you from needing speed . . . and I think you could use this logic for other substances as well, especially if the assumption is that reality is so screwy that most humans will need some sort of controlled substance to deal with it, and that there's very little possibility of zero drug usage (note the abject failure of various prohibitions on controlled substances) and so we shouldn't be worrying about the danger of "gateway drugs" and instead we should be trying to foster controlled and responsible usage of the least addictive and harmful of these substances.
The World Will Never Know
I wonder what kinds of fantastic and creative ideas I would come up with if my consciousness was not constantly being interrupted by my children (mainly my son Alex, who is apparently scared of silence and feels the need to constantly fill it with his half-baked thoughts, which isn't so far off from the premise of this blog, so I can't really chastise him for the habit, except when he says, "Daddy? Daddy? Daddy? Daddy?" even though I am looking at him-- eyebrows raised-- waiting for him to finish the thought, but he keeps repeating my name until I say, "Yes Alex?" and by that time he has usually forgotten what it was he wanted to say and I have forgotten about whatever I was thinking as well).
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
Humble Buffet
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 aquà es una frase excelente para que usted pueda disfrutar, y me gustarÃa dar las gracias a David por la externalización de algunos de sus trabajos para mÃ, 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
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