OBFT XVIII

I thought this would be the year I finally missed the annual Outer Banks Fishing Trip, but I was able to get from Cape Cod to Kill Devil Hills in a long evening of travel (and, ironically, I went from sunshine and warm water on the Cape to fog, rain, and cold water in North Carolina) and so my streak continues-- Rob, Whitney, and I are the only folks who are eighteen for eighteen-- and this usually guarantees you a bed (as we have a "bed lottery" based on how many years you have been on the trip, but without Cliff to organize the "bed lottery" it didn't happen . . . and because Jason, Craig and I showed up so late on Thursday, all the beds had been claimed and so I spent the weekend attempting to sleep on a variety of surfaces: the floor, couch cushions, under a table, a hammock, and a cot that opened like one of those cartoon bear traps) but despite the lack of sleep, it was still an excellent time; this list may only make sense to fishing trip attendees, but here are a few highlights and low-lights: 1) T.J. dealing (cards) 2) Johnny dealing with T.J.'s dealing 3) July Madness . . . I especially liked watching Whitney dutifully filling out "the notebook" while we all sat at the bar at Tortuga's 4) Saturday's staggering bill at Tortuga's 5) the "race" back from Tortuga's . . . Rob, McWhinney, Jerry, and I staggered the mile and a half home on the beach after consuming a staggering amount of food and beer . . . McWhinney runs away with it, Jerry resolutely takes second and Rob and I dog it and tie for third . . . thanks again Whit!

Two Uses For A Stand-up Paddle Board

 
Stand-up paddle boarding on the Oyster Pond in Chatham is an excellent way to sneak up on cormorants, herons, and kingfishers . . . or-- if you're my wife-- Harry Connick Jr.

If The Economy Is So Bad, Why Is Everyone Driving To Cape Cod?

When you wake up at 4:00 AM to drive to Cape Cod, you feel as if the universe owes you a traffic free ride . . . but the universe could care less about your earnest resolve and it will let cars accumulate on Route 25 despite your sidereal effort.

Syrian Memory #7

To show his devotion to God, St. Simeon the Stylite lived atop a fifty foot stone column for forty years . . . and if you visit this holy site, which is near the city of Aleppo, you can buy a St. Simeon Frisbee to celebrate his accomplishment.

Syrian Memory #6 (Catherine Screws Up)

We were lucky enough to accompany some US Embassy folks to the very high security "Austrian Position 16" in the Golan Heights-- though we had to pass through countless checkpoints and endure many extended radio conversations-- we were finally granted permission to go up the mountain and see the view: the post overlooks the Sea of Galilee and the Biblical farmland where Paul walked to see the promised land, you can also see an Israeli checkpoint and this is the area where the Druze-- members of a strange religion somewhere between Christianity and Islam-- negotiate cross-border marriages with megaphones to prevent inbreeding-- and on our way down the mountain, while I admired the fabulous mustaches that all the Druze men sported, Catherine realized that she left her jacket up at "Austrian Post 16," her nice Gore-Tex jacket that I bought her as a gift . . . and it took us six months to get that jacket back, finally a nice UN soldier from New Zealand got it to us when he was on leave in Damascus.

Syrian Memory #5

If you step on a land mine in the Golan Heights and hear that fatal "click," this is what you do: get someone to pile stones on your foot until you think there is enough weight to hold down the mechanism, and then cut your leg off at the knee and consider yourself lucky.

Syrian Memory #4 (Warning: This Is Gross)

While eating some pinkish chicken at a dodgy bar/dojo I contracted a parasite-- I won't go into details as to how the lab diagnosed that I contracted this parasite-- but the doctor was sure that giant intestinal round worms were living in my intestines . . . and according to Kara, our bio teacher, I should be quite proud that the little buggers made it to my intestines as full grown adults (8-9 inches long), as it is an arduous process: when you first swallow an ascuris,  it goes through the stomach and into the intestine and lays eggs, then these eggs hatch into larva, which molt and flow through the bloodstream to the lungs, and like salmon swimming upstream, the larva proceeds up the trachea, and then they are re-swallowed and they move through the stomach again, where they reside until you take a big pill, Zentel, and even after I took this big pill, things still weren't right, so I called the doctor and had this conversation: "I took the pill, doc, but . . ." and he said, "Remember, you injured your stomach and intestines, it will take a little while to return to normal . . . you are eating what I told you? Rice and bananas and tea?" and I said, "Yes, but how will I know when the worms are dead?" and he said, "You'll see them when they come out, of course . . . have a nice dinner."

Syrian Memory #3

We received two notes this week at school: note #1 was given to me in the middle of Public Speaking class and it said our school would be closing early as per orders of the US Embassy because of "demonstrations" in honor of Palestinian martyrs" . . . so we went to Kevin and Emmy's apartment and sat on their roof and drank beer and watched a mob of teenagers throw some stones at our school-- it was hardly a riot and the mob was also carrying text books and protractors . . . it was like getting school closed for a dusting of snow; note #2 was from the school nurse and it advised us that we should not eat at Station 1, our favorite schwarma joint, as ten cases of food poisoning had been reported in the past two weeks . . . so we will take that into consideration, but still, they do slice a tasty schwarma there . . . maybe it was a coincidence.

Syrian Memory #2

The Umayyad Mosque, the third holiest place in the Muslim religion (and the site has been a holy place for thousands of years: a temple to Haddad, and then Jupiter, A Greek Orthodox Church supposedly harboring the head of John the Baptist) is awe-inspiring-- fields of polished marble, walls of mosaics, and a monumental mosque housing a Shrine to Hussein (Mohammad's grandson) where Shiites were busy kissing a grate . . . the area was so holy that you couldn't wear your shoes, so I left my old stank Nikes in a pile of other shoes by the door, but when I returned, they had been stolen-- obviously the person who stole them didn't know that this was the third holiest place in the Muslim religion-- and then, conveniently, there was a youngster outside the gates of the mosque who took a quick look at the white man in his socks and immediately led me to the shoe souk-- where I'm sure he received a commission-- and his cousin sold me the crappiest pair of sandals in the Middle East.

Syrian Memory #1

While I am on vacation in Cape Cod and Kill Devil Hills, I have pre-loaded some thematic sentences for your reading pleasure . . . some of you might remember the long winded e-mail updates I sent out each week while Catherine and I were teaching in Syria; I have decided to revisit these in order to find the best moments and condense them into single sentences . . . so here is Syrian Memory #1: just after we arrived, my wife and I took public transportation to the ancient Christian village of Maalula, where the houses are nestled in the high desert mountains and painted a pleasant blue and where the people still speak the language of Christ, Aramaic-- and though I helped unload the vegetables from the van we did not receive a discount on our fare; we hiked above the town to visit the main attraction: the Shrine of St. Tekla-- here, supposedly, a woman converted to Christianity just before she was to be wed to a pagan man and she was flogged for this heresy, and then she fled and, miraculously, a beautiful gorge opened in the rocks to facilitate her escape and there is now a monastery at the foot of this gorge and inside the monastery are the typical relics and pictures and also a fountain where water drips into a basin and this water is supposed to relieve flatulence, and oddly, Catherine (who is never flatulent) drank from this fountain, but I did not . . . and in retrospect, this was my greatest regret from all our overseas adventures, that I didn't drink from that fountain, because sometimes, especially when I mix beer and ice cream, I wish I drank from that fountain.

More Style Over Substance

I couldn't really follow the plot of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and I'm not sure if you're supposed to-- it's a modern parody of Raymond Chandler's byzantine style-- and the narration is overly ironic and stylistic, but I will still recommend the movie if you are in my age bracket (forty-ish) because it's more like a get together of old friends . . . hanging out with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer is a blast, they are natural entertainers, and though their dialogue isn't terribly significant in regards to the plot, and though it's certainly not as clever as the insignificant dialogue in Pulp Fiction, it's still worth seeing how the two of them deliver it-- they are both old pros: three severed fingers out of five.

I Choose Style Over Substance

After reading six hundred pages of the second George R.R. Martin novel, A Clash of Kings, I have given up-- and while I admit that the plot is awesome and epic, I need a few adjectives when I am reading a novel . . . a little bit of style, and so instead I am wading through China Mieville's densely described genre-bending Perdido Street Station, a tale of bestial love in the city that is a veritable bestiary, New Crobuzon, and though the book has a map at the start, you don't need it . . . you can just groove on the freaky descriptions.

Memories Live In My Skull

The first compact disc I ever bought was The Cult's Sonic Temple-- I was a freshman in college and I didn't even own a CD player yet, so I had to travel from room to room to listen to tracks, but I knew that compact disks were the future and I didn't want to spend any more money on cassettes (if I were really smart, I would have stopped buying music altogether and listened to the radio until I could pirate stuff on the internet . . . think of the money I'd have saved)-- and though I was a little disappointed by Sonic Temple . . . it wasn't as good as Electric . . . I still held on to it, but the second compact disc I bought was called Positraction, by a band named Live Skull, and, with noisy, chaotic songs like "Circular Saw," and "Amputease," it was a little too disorganized for my tastes at the time-- and none of my friends liked it either-- so I sold it back to The Band Box and it remained in their used CD collection for my entire stay at William and Mary (and then I think Whitney bought it and gave it back to me so I may have the CD somewhere in my house) but I pretty much forgot about the existence of the band until I was reading Michael Azerrad's excellent book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 and I came across this sentence in the Sonic Youth section: "Why did Sonic Youth succeed when all of their peers-- bands like Live Skull, Rat At Rat R, and the Swans-- eventually fell by the wayside?" and so I went on Amazon and gave Live Skull a second chance and they are much easier to listen to now, since I've been listening to post-punk and post-rock and no wave for years and my ears are better attuned to pulling melody and order from dissonance.

Things You SHOULD Worry About

Matt Ridley has convinced me not to worry about global warming-- near the end of his book The Rational Optimist, he makes a strong case that though it is certainly occurring, the effects won't be as disastrous as the worst of the doomsayers believe-- and he says our time could be better spent on more tangible terrors: "the four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke, and malaria," and he even shows that from a more aesthetic, environmental view, global warming is not the cause of the loss of biodiversity on earth: "the threats to species are all too prosaic: habitat loss, pollution, invasive competitors, and hunting," and then he returns to his thesis, which he believes will eventually solve these problems . . . he says, "so long as human exchange and specialization are allowed to thrive somewhere, then culture evolves whether leaders help it or hinder it, and the result is that prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands". . . as long as ideas can "meet and mate, to have sex with each other."

How Did You Miss This, Ridley? Maybe Because You're a Limey.

Matt Ridley, in his new book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, does a fantastic job of debunking the prevailing pessimism from previous decades: "In the 1960s the population and explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics"; he runs through each of these plus many other apocalyptic scenarios predicted by scientists (DDT, mass extinction, deforestation, the evils of the railroad, cancer epidemics in children, etc.) and then he comprehensively illustrates that none of these panned out in the devastating manner that was predicted and that the average lifespan, amount of leisure time, freedom from disease, and living conditions have improved over time for all humans-- but then he ends with the "great pessimisms" of today: Africa and global warming and when he describes Botswana (an incredible success story on a generally impoverished continent) he explains that they-- like many African nations-- are saddled with this list of failures: 1) they are landlocked 2) they have poor roads 3) exploding birth rates 4) AIDS and other diseases 5) they have never fully recovered from the slave trade 6) they were once colonies 7) their most promising industry-- agriculture-- is stifled by price controls and trade barriers 8) there is ethnic strife 9) the windfalls of resource wealth serve only to corrupt democratic politicians . . . but despite these problems, Botswana succeeded because of its good institutions-- "people could own property without fear of confiscation by chiefs or thieves"-- and it was barely paid attention to "by colonial rule" and so had to develop its own policies, and as I was reading this I was waiting for Ridley to compare Botswana to America . . . if you look at that list of "problems," each and every one has a parallel to America when it was first developing, and the factors that allowed America to succeed-- good institutions and the fact that we were too far from Britain for them to really police us, also makes sense-- but Ridley never made this connection, perhaps because he is British (and I've yet to finish the final chapter and see what he has to say about global warming).

Who Would You Rather Not Be Sleeping With?

Season 3 of Breaking Bad and Season 4 of Madmen both use the same conceit to add tension, pain, and drama: an ex-wife that stays in the picture . . . but I'd prefer Skyler White as my ex, rather than Betty Draper . . . they're both cold, and they're both disappointed with their respective husbands, but at least Skyler is helping out with Walter's business (and if you've never seen Breaking Bad, you have time to catch up before the new seasons starts . . . the show is so good it's making me contemplate getting cable television).

I Learn Where I Stand

I've been recommending Malcolm Gladwell's books to my wife for years, and she's never read one-- but last week I saw her reading a copy of The Tipping Point . . . apparently if her friend Lynn mentions that a book is good, then she runs out and gets a copy, but I can recommend an author for the entirety of our marriage and this has no consequence.

Breaking News! Little Fins Make A Big Difference!

Apparently, I was not having alcohol induced vestibular problems while stand-up paddle boarding on the Raritan Friday morning . . . I took the board for a spin on Farrington Lake this morning, but I deflated it so I could snap the three little fins under the tail (the other morning I forgot to put them on, and you can't put them on once the board is inflated, so I figured: "How much do I need these little fins?" and the answer to that questions is: "A lot") and the board tracked much better and was far easier to paddle and ride and so the moral to the story is: little fins can make a big difference.

This Does Not Logically Follow That

Stand up paddle-boarding the morning after a late night of pool and darts at the Corner Tavern wasn't such a good idea . . . but the murky waters of the Raritan provided enough incentive to keep my balance-- despite hangover induced vestibular problems-- and so I did not fall in.

Some Information on The Information

Twenty years ago James Gleick's book Chaos yanked me from the morass of post-modern fiction into the world of deftly written science, and reading Gleick's new book, The Information, felt like a comprehensive review of my past twenty years of literary science reading-- all bundled into a tour-de-force history of information theory that starts with African drums and ends with the noosphere, with commentary seamlessly merged into the text from all the "characters" that I've learned to know and love:  Babbage and Turing, Dawkins and Shannon, Dennett and Hofstadter, Maxwell and his demon . . . who Thomas Pynchon famously used in his post-modern fiction, Heisenberg and Godel, Einstein and Von Neumann, and many more . . . but Gleick ends his book in a place that has outstripped what science has to offer, and so he relies on two of my favorite post-modern authors to conclude: Stanislaw Lem and Jorge Luis Borges . . . he uses Borges' metaphor for the universe, his story "The Library of Babel," to approximate where we might be headed: "The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms," but then Gleick ends with his own voice, more positive: "As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms . . . we walk the corridors . . . looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information."

Is This Sentence Correct? It Doesn't Matter Because You Can Dance To It.

Accuracy is only one strategy among many that an idea may use to survive.

I Respectfully Disagree

I like the premise of the blog 20th Century Motors and the author makes a compelling case as to why the hypothesis "College Basketball: Far Inferior To the NBA" is one of the "worst ideas in our culture," but he doesn't refute my Sweet Spot argument . . . it doesn't matter if they're the best athletes in the world: the court is too small for them and they are too skilled at shooting from distance for the game to look aesthetically pleasing; he also claims that Greg Gillis from Girl Talk is a "make believe musician" and again, his argument is clever, satirical and certainly holds water, but- once again-- he forgets aesthetics: Girl Talk is fun to listen to, a complex and layered distillation of the best of music from our time, and it reminds us that pop music isn't all that serious or complicated anyway.

Serendipity or Stupidity?

My wife has no idea how to start summer vacation, and so instead of swimming, reading, watching movies, and going out to lunch, she is painting multiple rooms in our house-- but she knows that not only am I useless at painting, but I also hate it-- and so she enlisted our friend's younger sister to help her; Rachel is a college student looking for some summer employment, and she's extremely artistic and so after the initial painting is done, she is going to paint bugs on Ian's walls (good thing he's not a regular LSD user!) and Star Wars Lego stuff on Alex's walls . . . but not only does she paint, she also does tattoos . . . and her older sister Liz, who is sort of like her agent, pointed out to me that she is a specialist in drawing the giant squid . . . which is the tattoo that I have always dreamed of, a giant squid and sperm whale locked in a great undersea battle . . . so is it fate that has brought us together-- long after my juvenile desire for this tattoo has faded-- or is it something more sinister?

Just Because You Can't Remember, Doesn't Mean It Was A Bad Idea

So although I have no memory of this brainstorming session-- it was after a long day of imbibing while building a deluxe adjustable basketball hoop with Whitney-- apparently, I suggested to a friend's girlfriend's younger sister that she do the Scopes Monkey Trial for her Peeps Diorama history assignment, and that she should do a "gummy evolutionary ladder" as an exhibit in the diorama . . . and when my friend T.J. sent me a picture of the diorama, I said I thought it was really funny and asked him where he found it, and he had to remind me that it was my idea (and my wife-- who was fairly sober because she was the "foreman" of the hoop construction-- verified that I did indeed suggest this to the student) and so here are some pictures of the beautiful and clever diorama of this event, including a miniature blackboard display showing the progression of gummy evolution: Gummy Lifesaver to Gummy Worm to Swedish Fish to Gummy Bear to Sour Patch Kid to Milk Chocolate Peep to Bunny Peep . . . and so I am proud to have contributed to this award winning diorama, although I certainly did the easiest part-- suggesting an idea for a diorama is like pitching a movie, a hell of a lot easier than actually filming one.

If This Were In A Movie, You'd Call BullSh*t

Though finding meaning in coincidences is an absurd past-time, as we are subjected to an enormous amount of stimuli every waking moment, and our brains are trained to look for patterns-- so if we occasionally didn't note coincidences, that would be extraordinarily strange . . . if the song you were just humming didn't start playing on the radio or if you never ran into the old friend the same day you found a photo of him or her in the drawer, then that would be an improbable life . . . but still, sometimes coincidences are bizarre enough that they border on the unbelievable (remember the opening to the film Magnolia?) and if you are a fan of this blog, then you might remember the Two Fox Event, but that pales in comparison to this more recent coincidence . . . which I will call The Three Turtles in Two Days Event: Friday, on my way to work, I nearly ran over a large painted turtle that was inexplicably trying to cross Fifth Avenue-- so I stopped the car, grabbed it, threw it in the driver's seat, and drove it home so my kids could check it out . . . we let it go in the lake later that day-- and then Saturday morning, I was riding my bike up Second Avenue and nearly ran over an Eastern box turtle-- which was also inexplicable trying to cross a busy road-- so I grabbed this turtle and rode home one handed (I did drop him once, but he seemed fine . . . it's nice to have a shell) and we went through the same routine . . . my kids played with him a bit and then we let him go near our secret salamander spot . . . and then later that day it was Ian's birthday party and as a special treat we hired a reptile guy, who brought many large reptiles, including a giant black and white tegu, an alligator, and, of course, the third turtle to temporarily reside in my yard in the span of two days.

This Is Getting Stupid

My adult league soccer team played the predominantly Jamaican team in the first round of the playoffs last week-- and, unfortunately, we pulled the early slot on an absurdly hot day . . . if you were a betting man, due to the conditions, you'd certainly have taken the Jamaicans over the old old fat men, but we held on for a 4-3 victory, and I've been limping around ever since-- my knee and calf are swollen (I think I popped my knee-cap out of the slot when I cleared a ball) and Terry couldn't even play because of his torn calf from the previous game (not to mention his possible broken jaw and hyper-extended arm) and I think I'm getting to the point where I need to choose another sport to play competitively . . . like darts or pie-eating . . . or stand-up paddle-boarding . . . and so I ordered an inflatable paddle-board from Amazon and I can't wait to take it out on the Raritan and use it at the shore . . . I figure this will be a safe and fun way to rehab my knee, but my friend Connell doesn't think so-- he thinks paddle-boarding on the Raritan will be more dangerous than soccer, as I will certainly contract dysentery from the murky water.

Even More Ha-Joon Chang Analogies!

In his book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang accuses wealthy countries and their financial institutions of historical revision, and comprehensively proves that it was not the free market led these countries to success-- and in his chapter on intellectual property law he cites the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, or the law that extended copyright protection to the life of author plus 70 years (it was originally 50) and Chang doesn't propose the removal of all copyright law, but he does point out that for developing nations to actually develop, they need to implement first world ideas and technology yet they cannot afford to abide by the same rules as nations that are already technologically developed, and so he uses an analogy to explain his perspective . . . and since I am the main content provider for people in need of summaries of Ha-Joon Chang analogies, I will paraphrase it here: Chang says the amount of copyright law a country needs is like the amount of salt the human body needs: no salt will kill you, and too much salt is very unhealthy, but a little bit is beneficial . . . and the life of the author plus 95 years, even if it means anyone can have their way with Minnie Mouse, is too much salt.

A Fast Review of the Past

If you want to see a deaf mute kill a gangster's trigger-man with a fly rod, or a gun moll betray a private dick, or Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas when they were young, then Out of the Past is the movie for you: nine trench-coats out of a possible ten.

Chang vs. Jeter vs. Ridley! To The Death!

Matt Ridley's new book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves reminds us that even though many people are professing the end of days because of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, high gas prices, a stagnant economy, rising food prices, and climate change, that people are still living better than at any other time in human history, and he argues that this is because of specialization and free-trade-- and credits David Ricardo for realizing this-- and this system of eschewing self-sufficiency and instead pursuing markets and trade enables ideas to mix and mate and reproduce, which leads to a higher quality of life for everyone involved, but sometimes he oversimplifies his thesis, especially when he makes over-arching statements like this: "The message from history is so blatantly obvious-- that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty-- that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise," and then Ridley claims that there is "not a single example" from history of a country opening its border and ending up poorer . . . which is the logical kiss of death; Ha Joon Chang provides comprehensive examples of when protectionism is necessary for a country to thrive, and John Jeter provides examples of countries who opened their borders to the forces of global markets and became impoverished . . . so I guess these guys need to arrange a time and a date and settle this debate out in the streets.

Irony, Hypocrisy, Christie

While the extensive media coverage of Governor Christie's use of the State Helicopter to go to his son's baseball game is bi-partisan politics at its worst-- we have far more important things to debate in New Jersey-- there is still a delicious irony to the fact that Christie actually said this on the record:  "People in New Jersey now feel as if there have become two classes of people in New Jersey: public employees who receive rich benefits, and those who pay for them," and, of course, if you call for a "shared sacrifice" to balance the State Budget, then you'd better be prepared to be called a hypocrite if you're not "walking the walk"-- but, considering his plump figure and the fact that he was driven in a limo the hundred yards from the helicopter to the ball field-- it is doubtful that Christie walks anywhere.

No Virginia . . . You Are An Idiot (Spoiler Alert!)

I overheard a conversation between my two sons while we were driving to Grounds for Sculpture; Ian-- who is six-- emphatically professed his disbelief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, and Alex-- who is seven-- agreed that they were all manifestations of "mommy and daddy," and I know that I am supposed to regret this moment and think: It's so sad that they've lost their innocence, their belief in make-believe and magic-- but what I actually thought was: Phew! Thank God my kids aren't idiots!

A Cinema Question

Are you supposed to cheer when Raymond Shaw shoots his Communist Red Queen mother at the end of The Manchurian Candidate?

Wonderful Images Day Two: Sperm Cake!

Nearly twenty year's ago at my friend Jason's first wedding, I ended my rambling, extemporaneous, and generally incoherent best-man's toast with a sperm joke-- my peroration was: As long as those little guys can swim!-- and the remark was received by the genteel Southern crowd as you might expect, and so I waited a decade for everyone to lighten up, and then tried a similar speech at Jason's second wedding-- but met with similar results-- but, finally-- no pun intended-- my time has come: Saturday evening at Liz and Eric's wedding, each table received a small wedding cake and a bag of frosting and we were told that we were in a "cake decorating contest," and that the winning cake would be the one cut and eaten by the bride and groom . . . and in my opinion, this is what every wedding needs, because after all the romantic stuff everyone is dying for a little friendly competition; it took my table a few moments to get on board with my plan, but once I took matters into my own hands and drew a giant red wriggling sperm on the pristine white icing, they had no choice but to follow suit-- and once they were in, they were all in . . . Audrey made wee mini-sperms for the sides of the cake, Laura drew a lovely smiley face on the featured sperm, Brady got blue Tic-Tacs from Rob so we could make the egg look more like an actual haploid reproductive cell, Jack and Terry wrote the caption "Life Begins" with crumbled chocolate cookies underneath the sperm and egg . . . and we eagerly pointed out the double meaning of the phrase to the bride and groom when we "campaigned" for our cake . . . and though there were some beautiful cakes, many with exquisite dragonflies on them-- the motif of the wedding-- the bride's mother (an art teacher) put in a good word for us and we we were announced the winners and took great pride in the fact that Liz and Soder cut our cake . . . and though I must be honest and report that there may have been some gloating over the fact that we won . . . perhaps we did not display the best "sportsmanship" after our victory, but, on the other hand, how often do you get to say: "I just won a cake decorating contest!"

A Wonderful Image Trumps An Annoying Event

Aside from this incident-- which doesn't count because it happened while I was running a high fever-- I hadn't received a traffic ticket in twenty years (this is partly because my father worked in corrections and so I could always drop his name and partly because I'm a fairly safe driver) but last week I received a letter from the East Brunswick Municipal Court and it had photographs proving that I "Failed to Observe a Traffic Signal," when I made a right onto Tices Lane off Route 18, but the fact of the matter is (I watched the video) that the light turned from yellow to red just as I was about to make the right, and though I should have come to a complete stop before I made the turn, I've never seen anyone actually do that, and no cop in their right mind would have pulled me over for this, but you can't talk to an automated camera . . . although maybe it would have been worth a try-- I could have waved my PBA card at it and said things like: "MAYBE YOU KNOW MY DAD? HE RAN ALL THE JAILS? HE TEACHES CRIMINAL LAW NOW? MAYBE YOU HAD HIM AS A TEACHER? PLEASE?" and when I explained to my five year old son Ian how the computerized traffic signal gave me a ticket because I didn't stop at a red light, he asked, "How did you get the ticket? Did it come twirling down?" and that image, of a computerized camera spitting out tickets from high above, so that they "twirl down" to the traffic offenders, is worth the 85 dollars I had to pay for my violation.

Bonus! An Important Topic That Requires Your Immediate Consideration

Bonus post today over at G:TB . . . you may feel secure in the fact that you've got your living will, your living trust, and your life insurance policies in order, but you still might not have considered this possibility . . .

Upset Victory

The last thing my friend Mario said to me as we stepped onto the field for our adult league soccer game last Wednesday was, "We will be slaughtered" and I agreed with him-- the team we were playing was comprised of fit, fast twenty-five year old kids, while our team is comprised of slow old men . . . and, to stack the deck against us more, we were missing several of our youngest, strongest, and fastest players, and so we only had one substitute . . . AND it was 95 degrees and humid-- but the soccer gods smiled on us, and our strategy of packing it back on defense and playing for the counter-attack worked and we ended up upsetting the youngsters 4-3 and I would tell you who scored the game winning goal, but my friend Terry says my sentences have gotten too long, so I'll end this one here.

Europe in the Air

It sucks when your seven year old son gets the joke and you don't: Alex told me he wished we could go back to Busch Gardens because he liked the ride Europe in the Air, and then he reminded me that it was "Europe-- the continent-- in the air," and not "Your up in the air," as he first thought-- and that he liked that the name meant both things . . . and I told him that I liked the joke as well, but what I didn't tell him was that, truth be told, I didn't realize the pun when we were at at Busch Gardens . . . and only got it long after the fact, with the help of a first grader.

Paradoxical Refuse

The bottom of one of our garbage cans has rotted out, which raises an interesting question: how do you dispose of a trash receptacle? (I have asked several people this puzzler, and no one has a solution . . . one person said she has actually spray-painted a message on one of her broken bins-- to alert the garbage men that she wanted to throw it away-- yet they still didn't remove it . . . but here are a few techniques that may work: my favorite is the recommendation to "disguise the trash can," by placing it inside a trash bag).

Another Use For Your Closet

Lately, my seven year old son Alex is on a roll . . . at dinner Tuesday night, he asked to be excused after eating only a couple bites of his ice cream (he had just earned back dessert status) which was strange because he has a sweet tooth and always finishes treats-- and after Alex left the table, Ian, a model of discretion for his five years, said to us, "You know what was weird? Alex had a handful of green beans," and I was impressed that he didn't outright squeal on his brother, instead he alerted us with some subtlety and sophistication, but it was enough of a hint for Catherine to chase Alex upstairs-- he said he was going to write his friend a birthday card-- and when she asked him about the green beans, he claimed that "he ate them," but upon further interrogation it turns out that he threw them in the back of his closet-- the second time in a week he's made an absurd choice for hiding contraband-- so Catherine made him fish them out and she told them that as punishment he had to eat them, but he claimed that they were "dusty," and so I washed them off with some cold water and once again . . . he's lost dessert for a week.

I'm Not A Professional Actor

So it must hard for my seven year old son Alex when his younger brother churns out super-cool looking drawings on a daily basis . . . when Alex draws something we try to encourage him, but I'm sure he can tell the difference between our feigned enthusiasm for his mundane scribbles and our unabashed adulation for Ian's boldly drawn creations . . . and so-- as a person who experienced growing up with someone talented (my brother was a piano prodigy)-- Alex might be better off if he quit drawing altogether and focused on some other skill.

I Was Thinking (That You Were Thinking)

I Was Thinking (That You Were Thinking) by The Density

A new song by The Density . . . this one explores the most awkward of moments: when you put yourself out there and admit to someone that you think they are groovy and special . . . they they reject you . . . you can read the lyrics over at G:TB, but the lyrics don't do the song justice . . . the real content is provided by Whitney, my colleagues at work, Jim Carrey, The Farrelly Brothers, The Coen Brothers, Lauren Holly, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Frances McDormand, and Steve Park and so I'd like to thank them for letting me splice, dice, and mangle their words . . . I appreciate it.

Busted!

My son Alex has had quite a week: first he confessed this lie, and then-- when he was on the way out the door for school on Thursday, my wife noticed a bulge in his sock, and when she asked him about it, he said it was "just bunched up," but upon further interrogation and a search, she found that he was attempting to smuggle "Now and Later" candies to school . . . and if he wasn't wearing shorts he might have gotten away with it (or if he would simply put them in his pocket, but he obviously knew he was doing something illicit and you don't put illicit stuff in your pockets, you put it in your socks).

Words Of Advice

Apparently, when your wife says, "I'm drawing a blank on what to get you for our anniversary," the proper response is not "We're getting each other gifts?" followed by "Do you want anything?"

Some Like It Hot (But They Are Idiots)

So the way I get my students to stop complaining about the heat (our classrooms are NOT air-conditioned, and they are poorly ventilated) is by complaining about it even more than they do . . . because I've stolen their gripe and added an unnecessary amount of hyperbole to it, their only recourse is to take the reverse position and so they eventually start encouraging me, they try to motivate me to finish class . . .they say things like:  there's only twenty minutes left-- you can make it . . . and I reply with statements like: THIS IS THE HOTTEST PLACE ON EARTH! MY ENTIRE BODY IS SOAKED WITH SWEAT! LET'S GO OUT IN THE COURTYARD, IT'S HOT BUT AT LEAST WE'LL BE OUTSIDE! I THINK I'M GOING TO PASS OUT! and the sight of a grown man behaving so childishly usually inspires them behave more maturely . . . and I just bought a wall thermometer at Home Depot, so now I'll be able to add a quantitative element to my complaints: IT'S 91 DEGREES IN HERE! THERE MUST BE A LAW THAT PROHIBITS THIS! WE NEED TO CALL OUR CONGRESSMAN! WE NEED TO ALERT THE AUTHORITIES ABOUT THIS! THIS IS A HEALTH HAZARD!

A Good Thriller You Probably Haven't Seen

For once, my wife gave me a task that was in my wheelhouse . . . . a task which I not only completed, but also enjoyed (unlike the time she assigned me the Christmas mission of buying her some sexy lingerie and I went to Victoria's Secret in the mall and saw the word "panties" and started blushing and then a cute girl asked if I needed help and I got nervous and ran out of the store and then got my friend Celine to go to the mall and pick out some things that Catherine would like and on Christmas when Catherine saw what Celine picked out, she was happy and amazed by my good taste and I told her Celine "helped me," but didn't tell her the truth: that I didn't even go on the mission . . . and I would have gotten away with it if another teacher hadn't spilled the beans and told my wife the whole sordid tale-- that Celine picked out the lingerie and showed it to all the women in the English department, so Catherine made me return the lingerie-- except for one item she couldn't part with-- and then she made me go buy lingerie all by myself as punishment . . . even though I thought it was pretty clever of me to complete the task in the fashion I did) because this task-- to use the internet to find a good movie-- was right up my alley . . . she said, "Find us a good movie to stream on Netflix," and so I went on-line and found some spectacular reviews for a thriller from 1991 called One False Move, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a violent drug dealer from Los Angeles and Bill Paxton as the small town Arkansas sheriff that collides with him and his violent companions . . . it's tense, graphic, ambiguous, and well-acted-- and you never know which direction it's going to take . . . is Dale "Hurricane" Dixon a heroic small town cop like Marge Gunderson in Fargo . . . or is he an inept yokel like Marshall Link Appleyard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . . . I'm still not sure of the answer, but I do know this: the film may be worth watching just for Billy Bob Thornton's hair: ten mullet pony-tails out of ten.

That Was Close

Alex came home with a bloody nose the other day and he told us that a certain wild kid punched him in the nose and that this wild kid was sent to the principal's office and that Alex was sent to the nurse, and Alex has talked about having altercations with this kid before, and so I sat him down and had a man-to-man talk with him about bullies and how he might have to punch this kid back-- right in the nose-- to make him stop bullying-- and then my father told Alex about how I beat up the neighborhood bully at the bus stop one morning (it was a scene right out of A Christmas Story) and Catherine was concerned that the school didn't contact us about the incident and questioned Alex about it and Alex said he reported it to the teacher who was watching the playground and he asked us not to write a note and that he would handle it himself-- which I could understand because you never want to be the kid that squeals to his mom-- but we were discussing it a couple of days later and Catherine told me she still wanted to alert Alex's teacher to the situation and Alex overheard us talking and started crying and said, "I have to tell you something," and then he told us: apparently, he made the whole story up . . . he had been picking his nose and it started bleeding and he didn't want to get in trouble for picking his nose so he made up the whole punch-in-the-nose-tale so he wouldn't get in trouble for picking his nose but then when he heard that Catherine was going to write a note to the teacher, he figured out that he was eventually going to get caught in his lie, so he came clean, and hopefully he learned a valuable lesson (he's got a week with no dessert as his punishment, but his punishment would have been worse if my wife wrote that note because then we would have been embarrassed for falsely accusing some kid of punching our son in the nose and that kind of thing can get real ugly).

Peacock Tail = 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Tail Fin

During an alcohol-fueled discussion on the evolution of the automobile with my friend Roman (who is also willing to discuss whether the ratio of pi is the same in base seven) we got stuck determining what parallels are accurate between a technological process and natural selection-- and whether perhaps a technological process exhibits Lamarckism-- and in the midst of this I stumbled on a super-excellent corollary to the analogy: outrageous tailfins-- which add no "survival" value to an automobile-- tailfins are not a product of typical technological selection of the automobile, where more efficient parts and better performing models are selected and the Edsel becomes extinct, but tailfins are instead a product of sexual selection . . . like the peacock's tail, they don't enable the organism to survive, but actually are detrimental to efficiency and exist solely for attractiveness, and this attractiveness requires more strength and metal and chrome and horsepower to lug the sexually selected trait around, so perhaps the organism with the largest trait is exceptionally fit, just because it can carry the trait around . . . and, similar to the peacock's tail, the evolution of the tailfin took on a life of its own and the tailfin got far larger than necessary, unless you're talking about attracting a mate, and then your traits can never be too big . . . and, of course, there's something aesthetically similar about the peacock's tail and the tailfin which makes me far more pleased than I should be about the fact that as far as the internet is concerned, no one else has ever come up with this analogy (so maybe the parallel doesn't hold water at all and I am insane, but I think this may be in the running for my best idea ever).

F- Tacos

The boys and I went to the delicious Mexican place in Princeton on Friday and I was going to get a taco to increase my 2011 Taco Count, but I didn't want a taco, I wanted a chorizo burrito and a chicken tamale-- smothered in mole sauce-- but I felt sort of guilty that I was squandering a chance to up the taco count, but then I got angry because the taco count was my own invention and why should I let something that I invented seep into my consciousness and affect my decisions . . . why should I be beholden to something that I jokingly created . . . especially since it was about satirizing New Year's resolutions . . . and if I wanted a tamale and a burrito then I was going to get a tamale and a burrito, especially since I was rarely in Princeton and I deserved a tamale and a chorizo burrito because I just did a scavenger hunt in the Princeton Art Museum with my children-- which was both fun and educational-- and so I deserved to order what I wanted because I was a good dad and there was no way I was going to let my life be controlled by tacos and some stupid number posted on my third rate blog . . . and so I said to myself, "I am not a number! I am more than a number (of tacos)!" and I ordered the tamale and the burrito and they were delicious.

A Brief But Inconclusive Tale of a Tail

So Connell, Roman, and I are walking back from the Park Pub late Thursday night and we pass by the laundromat next to the dollar store on Main Street and we glance into the laundromat and we all start laughing, as there is a brown-skinned man in very tight jockey briefs floating in the air and doing something to the ceiling . . . all we see is this white ass high above the dryers . . . and we were laughing so hard that we never debriefed each other on what we thought the guy was doing . . . I made up a little story in my head that went like this: the laundromat handy-man somehow got his clothes dirty and decided to wash them, but then while they were in the wash he realized that he had to fix something on the ceiling-- maybe a light or some gadget above the dryers-- and it was really late and he wanted to get home and so he clambered up there in his briefs . . . but when I told the story to my wife, she laughed and said, "He was standing on a table and painting-- he didn't want to get his clothes dirty," and when I asked her how she knew this, she said that Roman had gone to visit her mother in the hospital and told her the story and so she had heard it third-hand from my mother-in-law and yet she still understood more about it than me-- but of course I was in no state to make any logical deductions as it was 2 AM when I saw it-- and so I tried to confirm the painting hypothesis with Connell so I could give you, my faithful audience that demands and deserves veracity in all my prose, an accurate story but Connell does not remember any paintbrush or paint, although he does think the man-in-briefs was standing on a table (and not levitating, as I saw it) and so the reason why the man was up there in his briefs will forever remain a mystery, but one thing is for sure, if you pass by Lakewash Laundromat at the right time of night, you might see something that you don't fully understand, but it is something that you will never, ever forget.

Wild, Wild Life

So this is as wild as it gets for an aging 41 year old athlete: a 10 PM adult league soccer game (congratulations to Terry for his hat trick) followed by a night of drinking at the North Brunswick Pub . . . which was surprisingly crowded for late on a Wednesday night . . . or it was surprising to me, as I am in bed by 8:30 on most week nights.

A Stupid Use For Time Travel

Everyone has a favorite t-shirt that has succumbed to the ravages of time, but what if you could travel back to your past and bring back one shirt . . . which t-shirt would you resurrect? . . . for me, it's a dead heat between my original "Cult Electric" concert shirt-- the white one with the guns and roses on it (Vincent Chase wore it on Entourage . . . they must have gotten it from a vintage shop) and my official Middlesex County "Mosquito Control" shirt-- it was bright yellow with the obtuse Mosquito Control in block letters and it always elicited weird looks when I wore it around campus (I was lucky enough to have TWO friends that worked for the Mosquito Control, so I had several of these t-shirts-- one survived until the mid-90's and then finally disintegrated).

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?

Yesterday morning was rainy, and one of my male students proudly showed everyone his Sesame Street umbrella-- which I found shocking, as I would never be caught dead holding an umbrella-- they make me think of Mary Poppins and Singin' in the Rain, neither of which are particularly manly . . . and I am all man (except when I roller-blade) but I canvassed the class and found that most of the kids-- male and female-- were umbrella users, and quite a few had umbrellas on their person . . . and so I tried to explain my deep-seated emotions about umbrellas to them: first, if you don't use an umbrella, it's scary to walk by someone wielding an umbrella because you are in danger of getting your eye poked out by one of the vanes; second, an inattentive umbrella user might pour water on you; third, bad luck is certain to anyone who opens an umbrella indoors, yet kids find it irresistible, not only to open them, but also to twirl them; and fourth (and the root of my unbridled umbrellism) is that a man looks patently absurd while carrying one-- either opened or closed-- and he should either wear a hat or a hooded rain jacket and deal with the weather.

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.