Catherine's 40th Birthday Bar Crawl went wonderfully . . . and though we only crawled to three bars (Doll's Place, The Golden Rail, and The Corner Tavern) a good time was had by all-- plenty of conversation, beer, darts, pool, and fake mustaches and some first-timers got to experience the Rutgers Grease Trucks (who knew you could order a BLT?) and the only hitch in the evening was when we realized we had lost Johnny G. somewhere between eating grease-truck sandwiches and walking past the train station-- we assumed Johnny was with Marls and Sarah, trying to catch the last train . . . but when they came down from the platform there was no Johnny-- but after a cryptic text to Whitney, he was able to flag a cab down and beat us home-- and Whitney and Jenny had already broken into our house because they couldn't muster the energy to make the walk back and had also flagged down a cab . . . perhaps I will organize a bar crawl with more peregrinations for my 42nd Birthday, which is coming up in March: just enough time for me to recover this crawl.
Girls are Gross
Paul Feig-- who wrote the fantastically funny memoir Superstud: Or How I Became a 24 Year Old Virgin as well as numerous other excellent TV shows and films . . . including Freaks and Geeks-- entered a competition of his own creation with his new movie Bridesmaids . . . he obviously set out to out-raunch the typical male gross-out comedy-- with females-- and he certainly succeeds; the result is very funny but don't watch it the way I did, while eating a bowl of chocolate pudding, or you'll come close to retching.
New Tricks For an Old Dog
You can teach an old dog a new trick, but it's not fun to watch him learn it . . . in fact, it's downright painful, but after a tutorial from one of my 8th-grade players and close to a million awkward, ugly, and clumsy tries, I finally successfully completed the "around the world" soccer juggling move . . . I did it twice in one day and I haven't been able to do it since (mainly because my right knee is killing me, due to all the failed attempts).
Fear . . . That Wonderful Motivational Tool From the Past
Teaching is harder now than it once was-- educators have to be engaging instead of handy with the paddle.
Short Term Memory Problem
I rounded the corner yesterday morning and found my son Alex attempting to shove the bathroom door open, but Ian-- while in the act of defecating-- was pushing the door the opposite direction, an impressive feat while seated on the commode, and so I asked Alex why he felt the need to get into the bathroom while Ian was engaged in his morning constitutional and Alex said that he needed to brush his teeth and he couldn't wait "because he would forget to do it" and so I told Alex that it is a "rule of the world" that you never interrupt anyone in the act of defecation and the fact that he couldn't remember to brush his teeth in five minutes was his problem, and that he needed to work on his memory and not bother Ian, and Alex told me that he had a hard time remembering to brush his teeth because he had "so much to do, like get dressed and eat breakfast" and I guess that is a lot of things for a seven year old to think about, but I didn't have the heart to tell him that as he grows older, it will just keep getting worse and worse.
Taco Lunch With All The Fixin's Makes Dave Happy
Last week, with some help from my wife, I brought a complete left-over taco lunch to school, and I ate it at cafeteria duty; I think my fellow cafeteria monitors were impressed and jealous when I finally finished pulling out the array of small containers and plastic bags from my lunch cooler: taco shells, fresh home-made roasted tomatillo salsa, guacamole, yellow rice, taco meat (which I heated in the cafeteria microwave) and grated cheese; my Taco Count is up to 190 so I'm going to take it slow for the next month so I can eat my 200th taco as 2011 winds down . . . and my New Year's Resolution for 2012 is going to be more abstract and require a lot less less counting.
Happy Birthday Catherine (So Glad You're Not Barking Mad)
My lovely, charming, beautiful and-- most importantly-- sane and logical wife turns 40 today . . . and, after watching the new Errol Morris documentary Tabloid, which revisits the story of the "manacled Mormon" and his purported kidnapper and lover, Joyce McKinney, you will realize that the most important thing in a relationship is not the charming and beautiful part, but the sane and logical-- so if you want to appreciate your sane and logical significant other, then spend 90 minutes with Joyce McKinney, who was certainly beautiful and charming, and certainly had a strong and passionate love for a certain chubby Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson, but as for the sane and logical part . . . you'll have to be the judge; I won't reveal the rest of the story, but it has more plot twists than a John le Carre novel and Erroll Morris captures plenty of documentary gold along the way: five cloned dogs out of five.
Fat Man Laughing (A Bonus Sentence For A Sad Occasion)
Comic Patrice O'Neal died today at age 41 and I will miss him . . . but at least the memory of this altercation will be preserved forever (or as long as Google continues to host this blogging absurdity).
A Perfect Fiction
Though it is satire, this Onion article is so dead-on it deserves a Pulitzer (thanks Jen for passing it along . . . it certainly captures the true spirit of the holidays).
Jake Epping = Stephen King
I finished the new Stephen King novel-- all 849 pages-- in less than a week, and while at the start I thought it was going to be about how history would be different if JFK wasn't assassinated, it turns out that I was wrong-- the book is a love story!-- that's right, I read an 849 page love story, which is certainly a testament to the narrative ability of Stephen King, and not only is it a love story, but there's a lot of dancing as well . . . and anyone who has seen me dance knows that I find dancing far scarier than a killer car or a killer dog or a killer clown that lives in the sewers . . . so all I can say to the Master of Horror is job well done, because I couldn't put it down; this is the first King novel I've read since high school . . . I can clearly remember getting a hardcover copy of It for Christmas in 1986 and then wanting to hide from my family and read instead of participating in holiday togetherness . . . and I had the same feeling this Thanksgiving, though Catherine's brother was visiting and we had numerous social engagements, I did my best to keep my head buried in King's novel-- which is very appropriate because one of the novel's themes is that "the past is obdurate" and "the past harmonizes" and I certainly felt as if I was living in my own past, where I much preferred the company of a good Stephen King novel to the company of living breathing people . . . especially relatives . . . and not only that, like in the novel, I was in a race against time, but I didn't have the luxury of a time portal, and I had to have the book back to the library in three days time . . . but enough about that-- HERE COMES A SPOILER-- I've read a few reviews and most of them are very positive (except for some British lady who writes for the Star-Ledger and totally missed the point of the book . . . she thought King should have spent more time detailing the horrors of racism and segregation) but none of the reviews mentioned what I thought was pretty obvious: Jake Epping, the narrator, will become Stephen King once his adventures in time are concluded, as they are at the end of the novel-- like King, he almost ends up an English teacher, helping kids to love literature and learn to write, but, as King says, "life can turn on a dime" and Epping is torn from the past that might have been-- and I think it's Stephen King reminiscing about his love of the fifties-- and what he might have been had his life not "turned on a dime," had he not become the grisly horror writer we all know and love . . . Jake Epping finally returns to his own time-- realizing that you can't change the past, nor can you remain there forever-- but he also returns with half a novel about a small town, a string of serial murders, and the legend of a clown in the sewers . . . which, of course, meta-harmonizes very nicely with King's past and my own, so I think this will be the last thing I ever read by King, because-- as the novel clearly illustrates-- returning to the past is dangerous and can have unforeseen consequences . . . I lucked out this time, but next time things might turn horribly wrong.
Tradition=Work
One person's tradition is another person's chore (we always string Christmas lights around every tree on the property, it's a tradition! we always bake seventeen kinds of cookies for the holidays! we always get up at three in the morning on Black Friday and shop! it's a tradition . . . my ass, it's another job).
How To Deal With The Grandfather Paradox
Stephen King dismisses the "grandfather paradox" and other meta-logical nonsense (such as the craziness developed in the great but painful to untangle film Primer . . . if you want to read about time travel paradoxes, check out Chuck Klosterman's essay) because King has bigger fish to fry in new fantastic new novel 11/22/63 . . . such as what would happen to the universe if JFK had never been assassinated, and how far would a man go to prevent this event . . . so when the narrator is debating whether to become embroiled in the time travel plot, and he asks Al-- the diner owner who has access to the time portal which sends whoever walks through it back to the same sunny day in September of 1958 -- "Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?" Al simply stares at him, baffled, and replies, "Why the fuck would you do that?"
A Good Trade
Last Saturday morning-- like clockwork-- the cold weather worked its black magic on the driver-side door of my Jeep, and so once again-- if you want to drive-- you have to get into the car through the passenger side and then crawl across the center console to the driver's side (and, of course, Saturday morning, was the rare occasion when my wife was driving the Jeep because she had a work-shop for school and I had to cart the kids around all day to their various activities, but even though I offered the Subaru-- which has four working doors-- she gamely agreed to crawl across the console and drive the Jeep, because she didn't want me doing that nonsense all day with the kids in the car) and then-- miraculously-- ten minutes after she gamely got into the Jeep on the passenger side and crawled across the center console and drove away, she called me and yelled "Listen!" over the sound of music-- music!-- from the Jeep stereo! . . . which hadn't worked since before the summer, but I guess the cold weather taketh and the cold weather giveth, and I'll trade a driver side door for music any day of the week (and the fact of the matter is that Catherine might have actually fixed the stereo, because she took the face off the receiver and then put it back on, which I never did, and then it started working again).
An Ode to Thanksgiving
There are four major reasons why Thanksgiving is the best holiday: 1) no gift-giving 2) no compulsory decorating 3) cranberry sauce 4) football on TV during the daytime.
Lesson Two: How To Fix Stuff
My DVD drive was jammed shut at work on Monday, and so I tried to get it open by double clicking "eject" on the computer, but that didn't work, and so I used the object that first came to mind to pry the tray open-- despite the fact that there was a paper clip and a pair of scissors within reach-- but instead of these practical and dispensable items, I slid a key into the bay, and not just any key, my car ignition key-- which is rather delicate because it's nearly twenty years old-- though any of the other insignificant keys on my chain would have sufficed as a lever (not only that, I have a sturdy bottle opener on my key-chain, which would have been the perfect tool for this situation) but I chose none of these sane options, instead I chose the one object that I absolutely needed to be able to leave school that day . . . and I got my just desserts, the key snapped in the middle, leaving me holding a worthless stub of metal, but luckily we have a spare and my mother-in-law was able to drop it off so though I felt like an idiot, I learned a valuable lesson without too much inconvenience (and for those of you who don't have a spare key . . . and you know who you are: this should be reason enough to get one).
Lesson One: How To Look Cool in Front of The Young Folks
The Second Greatest Victory In My Life
While The Greatest Victory in my Life is the fact that I won a Cake Decorating Contest . . . because never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd get to say the words, "I won a Cake Decorating contest," my victory Friday night is a close second, as I took the prize money in Liz and Eric's Second Annual Scary Story Contest and the competition was stiff and spooky . . . for the complete story of the contest, and my prize-winning story, head over here . . . and don't read it alone (hopefully, as the week progresses, I will post up all the creepy tales, as they were super-excellent).
Fun and Self-Flagellation (This Kid Goes To 11)
My six year old son Ian has recently taken up a new habit-- he does it when he is being chased and needs to accelerate in order to escape being tagged or tackled: while he is running full-bore, he whacks himself in the butt-- with both hands-- in order to generate otherwise impossible speeds . . . and his logic-- which my seven year old son totally buys-- smacks of the Spinal Tap "these go to 11" scene.
Pimples: Then and Now
When I was a teenager, pimples were the bane of my existence-- high school was already socially taxing enough, without having to face the day with a pus-filled whitehead on your face-- but now I view pimples differently . . . on the rare occasion that I get one, I am pleased that my body still has enough oil to generate such a youthful excrescence . . . I think it must indicate that I'm well preserved and my body still has plenty of grease to lubricate the joints, and though this logic may be completely erroneous, I'm not going to bother to check and see if my diagnosis is credible.
Sometimes Life is Soulful and Beautiful Like a Glowing Bluebird
During season two of Bored to Death, when Jonathan gets involved in an "open relationship" with Stella and her old boyfriend, Warren-- a fat and obnoxious struggling comic-- and Warren says he needs "total darkness" to sleep or it "messes up his Circadian rhythms," the scene then quickly cuts to Jonathan's glowing blue canary nightlight, and this made me very happy and excited and I said to my wife, "It's the blue canary! From the They Might Be Giants song!" and the end of the episode confirmed this, because "Birdhouse in Your Soul" played over the credits . . . and then the next day, miraculously-- and I don't use that word lightly-- my son Alex was singing "Birdhouse in Your Soul" in the car and he told me that it was his favorite song and that he was singing it at school and his friend Gary had never heard it, and this made me very happy as well because generally Alex likes auto-tuned WPLJ dance crap . . . and then I realized that Alex had never actually heard the original recording, he had only heard me sing the song and play the song on the guitar, and this also made me very happy, both because my rendition of it was that pleasing to him, and because I could play him the super-excellent They Might Be Giants recording of the song, and so after soccer practice we listened to the song five or six time sin a row, and we all sang along-- Alex, Ian, and me-- and in twenty years, when I am able look back at this whole parenting thing, this might be one of the finest moments.
The Moon is Missing But I Can See Uranus
My son Alex's homework Monday night was to look at the moon and then both describe and sketch what he saw, but we couldn't see the moon from our house, and so we walked-- in the dark-- into the middle of a muddy field in the park to see if we could spot it there, but no luck, and we even tried again just before bed-- but still no luck-- and so I checked on the internet to make sure the moon wasn't in eclipse or orbiting Mars for a month or hiding in the giant gravity field of Uranus, but the internet informed me that in the Northern Hemisphere on November 14th the moon should have been big and gibbous, but we still couldn't find it, and so Alex had to write down that he couldn't find the moon and I am wondering if any other kids in his class were able to find the moon, or if they just cheated and pretended to find the moon, and I am also wondering: Where has the moon gone?
When Push Comes To Shove
The ostensible setting of Aravind Adiga's new novel Last Man in Tower is Mumbai, but the real setting is the ensemble cast of characters that live in Vishram Society's Tower A . . . and against this back-drop of people contemplating the most awkward and practical of subjects -- money and class in a country where both are on display constantly-- building developer Dharmen Shah squares off against retired physics teacher Yogesh "Masterji" Murthy . . . Shah has offered the residents of the building cooperative a generous buy-out so that he can knock their crumbling building down and build an elite apartment complex, and nearly everyone is happy to accept the windfall, but Murthy does not want to desert his home and the place where all his memories reside, and once he is pushed, he proves to be an immoveable object; the book is reminiscent of Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, but Adiga builds his pedestrian and generally comic conflict over real estate and money to tragically dramatic proportions-- he makes his social commentary into a page turner . . . the Indian Tom Wolfe . . . 20.2 million hammers out of a possible 20.4 million.
Two Things That Are Good To Know
We returned home from Disney on Saturday to find that something was wrong with our furnace (or to be precise, I should say our boiler . . . because a furnace heats air, but we have forced hot-water radiator heat in our house) and then we found out that PSE&G couldn't come until Monday and the PSE&G guy on the phone candidly and kindly admitted that if it was the pump-- which is what was acting strange-- then it wasn't covered anyway, and he said, "We'll fix it, but we're not cheap" and so we had to call our friend Rob the plumber and he was over with his buddy Keith that evening-- Saturday night-- and after hours of fiddling, they replaced the pump and fixed our ancient boiler (Rob called it "the Joe Paterno of boilers") and we had heat again . . . and they explained to me something about a "thermocouple" but I was so tired and kind of sick and I took NyQuil before I went to bed and when Catherine got home from her cousin's house and asked me what they had fixed, I couldn't string together anything coherent and I still don't know exactly what a "thermocouple" does and so I am thinking that the two most important things to know are not grand or theoretical or complex . . . they are the names of a good mechanic and a good plumber.
The Two Scariest Rides at Disney (If You Are Claustrophobic)
I went on all the rides at Disney last week, and this is a big deal for me, as even a merry-go-round can give me motion sickness, but I survived Space Mountain and Expedition Everest and Thunder Mountain and Splash Mountain and Mission Space and Test Track and Dinosaur and The Tower of Terror-- I didn't vomit or cry once-- and I'm glad I got to see my six year old son Ian and my wife ride these things . . . it made me proud how brave and unfazed they are . . . and I'm glad my son Alex takes after me: he admitted he closed his eyes on The Tower of Terror, just like his dad . . . but if you want to do something really scary then spend some time in the "holding pens" for Turtle Talk with Crush and It's Tough to Be A Bug . . . small spaces, low-ceilings, screaming children and worried parents . . . only you, my readers, know just how close I was to freaking out.
Krystina's Best Idea Ever
Once in a while, regular people come up with fantastic ideas-- ideas as brilliant and world-changing as Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity-- and I'd like to recount one of those times, and this particular moment is even more significant because the creator, a colleague of mine, is not known for her sense of humor (although I always find her funny) and her students generally consider her a "tough cookie," but her idea is as fantastically comedic as Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First" routine . . . and I'm not going to go into exactly how this idea was developed-- because it's one of those "you had to be there" conversations, and people were being denigrated and that's not the point of this post . . . the point of this post is to give you some thing funny that you can do to your friends-- and so the first thing you need is a friend who loves to be the expert . . . to give out information . . . to be a know-it-all, and the second thing you need is a straight face, because you are going to need to ask this person for some advice, advice in a category in which they deem themselves expert, and the third thing you are going to need is a pen and paper, because you are going to take notes on what your friend the expert says . . . or you are actually going to pretend to take notes on what your friend says, but actually you're going to write "F%$ You" on your sheet of note paper; and so once they're done explaining what restaurants you should eat at when you visit Trieste, or what funk bands are worth your time, or how you should discipline your Weimeratter, then you are going to say, "Did I get everything?" and you are going to say it sweetly, cordially, and with gratitude, and then you get to show your friend your note sheet and your friend is going to realize that you weren't listening to them at all-- and that instead you were writing "F(*& YOU" in really interesting hand-writing (with lots of underlining)-- and then you get to laugh and laugh and laugh . . . and it's not only funny to do it to an unassuming victim, it's actually fun to do to someone who knows what you're going to do . . . after Krystina shared her brilliant idea, I asked my friend Eric how to put tile down in a kitchen, and he knew full well I was going to write "F%$ You" on my notepad, but he still gamely described how to pull up linoleum and deal with asbestos, and we both still laughed and laughed when I asked him to check my notes and make sure I had gotten all his instructions.
Carousel of Torture
Although I highly recommend The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World-- for the maps and the descriptions of rides, attractions, food, and traffic patterns in the parks-- I also think the writers are completely insane, for one very good reason . . . give me a moment to explain: my parents offered to wait in the twenty minute line for The Haunted Mansion with my kids, giving my wife and I a few precious minutes of free time (our plan was to meet them back in Tomorrowland at the Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor, which would give Catherine and I time to grab a beer while we waited-- little did we know that The Magic Kingdom is a dry land after all) and since there was no beer to drink, we went on the PeopleMover and nearly fell asleep, and then, in our somnolent state, we ambled into an "audioanimatronic theater production" called "Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress," which begins with a scene in a kitchen in the early 1900's where a mustachioed man talks about the technology of the day, and then the theater rotates to another kitchen-- a few decades later-- and the same man talks about the technology, and there's some stuff going on in the wings, some youngsters with a desire to do their hair in beehives and dance, and a girl trying to lose weight with some kind of belt contraption, and then the ride went a bit haywire, and the mustachioed man-- who had the look of a third-rate porn star-- kept singing the same song over and over and someone made an announcement that we would soon be moving along and that the 26 and 1/2 minute show would take a bit longer . . . 26 and a half minutes? . . . and finally, we moved through a few more decades of "Progress" and then there was a hip, video-game playing grandma who actually said, "We smoked'em!" and then there was some special effects when the voice activated stove misheard Grandma's score and turned the oven to 550 degrees (what video game scores in the hundreds?) and smoke spewed from around the oven door, and then finally-- finally!-- the Carousel of Progress (which my usually sunny and optimistic wife named "The Carousel of Torture") let us back into the sunlight, yet the Unofficial Guide people-- who are generally accurate in their descriptions-- call the mustachioed porn star narrator "easy to identify with" and they say the attraction is a "great favorite among repeat visitors" and they include it on all their touring plans . . . and so I have two questions: What were they smoking when they went on this thing? and How does Disney put this ride next to Space Mountain?
Why? Why? Serendipitous Student Connections #4 . . . Discreet/ Discrete/ Lord of the Rings / Salad
A student asked me how to spell "discreet" and I asked her, "Which one?" and she gave me a confused look, and so I explained that "discreet" means subtle and prudent, but "discrete" means individually distinct, and she said, "They're nearly opposites! Why are they doing this to us?" and though she was vague with her angst, I understood her sentiment completely-- as students must perceive the English language specifically and education in general as a byzantine labyrinth with rules made up by some abstract and obtuse They that enjoys derivatives and vectors, homophones and homonyms, paradoxes and contradictions, gerunds and participles, the tiniest of minutia and the grandest of theories . . . and minutes later the same student, on a pedagogical roll, created a lovely and perspicacious analogy on what it's like to read Lord of the Rings (a certain English teacher demands this of students who would like a college recommendation from him) and I found her critique of Tolkien quite accurate: "Reading Lord of the Rings is like eating a big salad at a restaurant, you never get to the end of it."
The Family Fang: A Meta-Book For Meta-People
This book, like the Steve Coogan movie The Trip, probably requires two ratings; Kevin Wilson's new novel, The Family Fang, is not about vampires, but it's far scarier, because-- in a sense-- it's about all parents and what they do to their kids out of love . . . Caleb and Camille Fang are performance artists, and they perform their "pieces" without any rehearsal, in the real world, in order to "subvert normality' and create chaos . . . which is not all that unusual today, in the Age of YouTube, so Wilson wisely sets the stunts in the 1980's to avoid commentary on the present, and instead makes the book about Caleb and Camille's children, Buster and Annie . . . referred to as Child A and Child B; Camille and Caleb use Child A and Child B as props in their wild, unconventional, and unpredictable art . . . so not only is the book a satire on parenting-- with the children in an Artistic Operant Conditioning Chamber-- and Caleb and Camille the Skinnerian experimenters-- but the book also becomes commentary on art itself, and how parents consider their children the greatest work of art, and how artists will always have to compromise their art once they have children-- though Caleb and Camille try to refute their mentor, who told them to remain childless, as "Kids kill art," but the straw that breaks the camel's back is when Caleb and Camille secretly engineer an accident that forces Buster, the stage manager of the high school drama company, to play Romeo to his sister's Juliet . . . Buster refuses but his father persuades him, saying: "Think of the subtext, a play about forbidden love will now have the added layer of incest," and the show is stopped by the principal in the second act when Buster finally plants a kiss on his sister; the kids detach themselves from their parents once they learn the truth about this incident, but when Buster is shot by a potato gun and Annie's acting career hits the skids, they return home and unwittingly fall into their parent's final piece . . . and the book has a dramatic pay-off worthy of a regular novel, despite it's meta themes-- it turns into something of a mystery, but more in the vein of this show-- to conclude, it's a perfectly written book, but if you don't care about art or meta-art, then I'll give the book seven topless scenes out of ten . . . if you do care about art and meta-art, then this book is a perfect ten rest-stop abductions out of a possible eleven.
Can You Even Buy Pants in Florida?
I didn't bring any pants on our trip to Orlando-- just shorts-- despite the fact that I had space in my bag, because I thought we were headed to the tropics . . . but I was wrong, we were headed to the sub-tropics (still, I'm far more knowledgeable than my son Ian . . . when the plane touched down in Orlando he said, "So now we're in Canada?") and I have learned in the past few days that sometimes it gets kind of chilly in the sub-tropics, but it's worth being chilly to see the satisfaction on my wife's face . . . because I briefly tried to persuade her to not bring any pants, but-- wisely-- she ignored my advice, and brought plenty of pants (and she's gotten good use of them) and nothing makes a person happier than being able to say "I told you so," especially if it's about something trivial, like pants, and not something awful and awkward, like, "I told you not to have sex with your first cousin, and now look at that kid!"
The Best Ride of the Day at Disney's Hollywood Studios
Though I rode The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, I couldn't tell you if it's the best ride in the park (because after we saw the view of Disney Studios from the 13th floor, and then started free-falling and being winched back up-- repeatedly-- I curled into a ball and closed my eyes . . . although I do recollect that my butt levitated off the seat each free fall . . . my intelligent son Alex had the same reaction as me, but my wife and younger son Ian were unfazed, which leads me to think there is something wrong with their brains and inner ears) and although I was very impressed with the 3-D effects of Toy Story Mania, Star Tours, and Jim Henson's Muppet Vision and the real effects of the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular, they don't win the prize for best ride either (and neither does the ride out to Orlando International Airport to pick up my parents: because there are two, count them, two tolls on the tiny connector road called the Beachline Expressway) and so the prize for the best ride on that Sunday was the fourth quarter of the Giants/ New England game-- we caught it after the ride to the airport; four lead changes in the final fourteen minutes and a Giants victory with a one yard pass from Eli Manning to Jake Ballard with 15 seconds remaining to play . . . snapping a twenty game win streak at home for the Patriots . . . once again, though I tried to get out, the Giants have sucked me back in.
Serendipitous Student Connection #3 (Poison/ Needle/ Mick Jagger Knitting)
My students have been on a roll lately-- I've been teaching for nearly twenty years, and I thought I had heard it all-- but apparently I haven't. . . for example, I was doing a lesson on metaphors and cliches in my Creative Writing class the other day, and I always begin the lesson by asking the students to crumple some of their old assignments into paper balls and then I play Poison's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" and I instruct them to pelt me with paper every time they hear a cliche (and there are at least twenty . . . count them!) and they thoroughly enjoy whipping paper at me, and from a pedagogical standpoint, they are learning to respond with disgust to poor writing . . . oddly, I never get beaned all that much, because the nerdy kids sit up front, and they can rarely throw well, and the kids who can actually throw always sit in the back of the room, and it's hard to propel a crumpled paper ball that far; after that madness, I play a well written song with a flower metaphor, the song that is the exact opposite of "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," because it uses one metaphor to develop the tone, and specific details to evoke the metaphor . . . the song is The Rolling Stones "Dead Flowers," of course, and as I play it I ask comprehension questions, such as: "So what's the problem with this relationship?" and the kids figure out that the narrator and his "ragged company" don't really fit into the circle of society to which his girlfriend belongs-- her world of "silk upholstered chairs" and "Kentucky Derby days"-- and when I ask what it means to seek solace in a "basement room/ with a needle and a spoon/ and another girl to take my pain away," the kids usually know that the needle and the spoon are drug paraphernalia . . . but last week when I asked about this, a very sweet girl said in her kind and innocent voice, "Is he doing some sewing to forget about her?" and I got this great image of Mick Jagger knitting away with his grandmother in order to get over his unrequited love.
Serendipitous Student Connections #2 (Prank/ Revenge/ Merchant of Venice)
If you're a regular reader, then you are probably acquainted with my new recurring feature (Serendipitous Student Connections) but don't worry if you missed the first episode-- the premise is simple-- sometimes a kid says something in class that is so unexpected that it changes the entire course of the lesson . . . and this doesn't happen that often, because once you've been teaching a number of years, you can predict what most of the responses will be, but once in a while there is the example that surprises you and makes you see the literature in a different light; for instance, in my Shakespeare class, we recently finished 12th Night and are now in the midst of Merchant of Venice, and both these plays have themes of revenge in them (Malvolio's last line in 12th Night is: "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!" which is an odd-- but deserved-- note on which to end a comedy, and Merchant of Venice revolves around Shylock and his desire for a pound of flesh from his anti-Semite rival Antonio) and Shakespeare is smart enough not to choose sides and instead hold a mirror up to the dark side of human nature and the very real and rational desire for vengeance . . . and so when one of my students walked into class and said his life was starting to resemble Merchant of Venice, I knew that his example was going to be good-- this student is a soccer player and he played a prank on one of his soccer buddies: he had all this player's friends text the player a simple "Congratulations" message and then he created a very persuasive but completely fake web page that named his friend the MVP of the Middlesex County Soccer Tournament-- and his victim, like Malvolio, was a rule-following honorable soul who had played well enough to be deserving of such a title-- and because of this, the victim fell for the article hook, line, and sinker . . . and at this point my student realized that he had to tell the truth to his friend, before he started telling everyone about his "award," which was fictitiously created and digitally distributed on a fabricated web page . . . but when he told his buddy about the prank, he attempted to set the rules of revenge-- he knew his friend would have to seek revenge but he wanted to control exactly how his friend would punish him-- and this is exactly what happens in Merchant of Venice-- but of course it is difficult to dictate vengeance and emotions in contractual terms-- and so my student, who is much smaller than his victim, persuaded his victim that though he absolutely deserved revenge for this emotionally humiliating prank, that the revenge couldn't be physical (because the victim could easily beat up the perpetrator, he's a much larger kid) and had to be in the same genre as his prank-- emotional-- but I explained to him that in the milieu of vengeance, the rules are always broken . . . Osama bin Laden wanted to liberate Muslim holy sites and get revenge for American influence in Saudi Arabia so he blew up civilians in an office tower . . . and then the United States invaded and decimated two entire countries to exact our revenge against bin Laden . . . Whitney and I threw some apples at a door in our fraternity house and it started a cycle of revenge that ended in a friend nailing a dead raccoon to someone's door . . . and so the cycle of revenge is never predictable and never reasonable, and-- as Shakespeare illustrates-- sometimes it takes a woman to put an end to the silliness, because women never hold a grudge . . . right?
You're Getting Warmer
Some farcical conversation with my son Alex about what the Ark of the Covenant contains in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark: Alex: It wasn't God in there. Who's the guy who lives under the ground? The evil guy? Dad: Satan? Alex: No . . . Dad: Beelzebub? Alex: No . . . Dad: Mephistopheles? Alex: No . . . Dad: The Lord of the Flies? Alex: No . . . Dad: Lucifer? Alex: No . . . Dad: Hades? Alex: No . . . Dad: Pluto? Alex: Yeah . . . him. Maybe it was him in that box.
A Good Way To Spend All Hallow's Eve
After several hours of trick-or-treating in the cold with my kids, I retired to my bed to read Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez's graphic novel Locke and Key, and I can think of no better way to conclude a spooky holiday than this: the story is gripping, the art is mesmerizing, and Sam will inhabit your dreams . . . I wish I could have read it to my kids, but it's way too disturbing and violent: nine abandoned wells out of ten.
Serendipitous Student Connection #1 (Moth/ Snow/ Wife)
Sometimes a student says something so incisive that it completely changes the direction of a class discussion, and even the tone of an entire lesson; for instance, this week I taught Virginia Woolf's posthumously published suicide-note of an essay, "The Death of the Moth," and when we read the description of the moth's futile fluttering from one corner of the window to the next-- because it was trapped between the pane and the screen-- I asked the class who had done this before: shut a bug inside a window between the glass and the screen, and several kids raised their hands and admitted to this cowardly act, and we agreed that sometimes it is quicker, easier, and more convenient to isolate and ignore the problem of the bug instead of taking initiative and actually swatting, squishing, or removing it . . . but then one girl looked me squarely in the eye and said, "Why don't you just kill the bug? Why leave it in the window for later?" and I told her that is exactly what my wife would say in this instance, and that there were two kinds of people-- those that kill the bug immediately, and those who shut it in the window so it can suffer a slow death and be dealt with later . . . and then I told the class what happened on the weekend . . . we had an unusual October snowstorm and my wife instructed me to shovel the snow and then she got all dressed up in a tight dress and sexy boots and headed off to a baby shower and I took the kids sledding and when I got home, I was tired and wanted to watch the Giants game, and the sun was out, so instead of shoveling the driveway and the porch, I decided to let the sun melt the snow-- the same way you might let the sun dehydrate and fry the bug trapped in the window pane-- but the sun failed me, failed me miserably, and my lovely wife arrived home in her sexy boots to the same amount of snow that was there when she left and instead of reminding me to shovel it, she went ahead and shoveled the driveway and porch in her tight dress and sexy boots, and I think she did this so she could shovel even more guilt on me when she found me half-asleep on the couch, watching the football game . . because she's the kind of person who kills the bug-- she doesn't leave it trapped in the window for later-- but the real question here is: Why do women get all decked out for a baby shower?
Non-stalgia
I Uncover the Roots of My Ennui (And Use Other Annoying Words)
I know how obnoxious it is to complain, and I also know how obnoxious it is to use the word ennui (it's almost as obnoxious as using the word jejune, but not quite as obnoxious as using the word myriad . . . and then, of course, there is the word plethora . . . don't even get me started on that one) but last week in the English office, I had an epiphany (also a very annoying word) and realized why the fall is such a difficult time for me at work . . . it is because I can still remember the idylls of summer . . . the free time, the leisurely reading, the travel, the lack of a schedule, the swimming, the ocean . . . I'll stop before I cry . . . but once winter settles in, the memories of summer fade and I embrace the bleakness because I can't recall any other way to live.
Halloweenies
Just when I thought my kids were smart-- as they both received glowing academic reviews from their teachers at parent/teacher conferences-- I witnessed empirical evidence to the contrary . . . my wife and I took the kids pumpkin picking (in the snow!) and if you could have seen the distended, wobbly, asymmetrical pumpkins that my sons tried to persuade us to purchase, then you would certainly have doubted their intellectual capacity as well . . . in the end we had to convince them to abandon their stunted, misshapen choices and revise their pumpkin picking criteria . . . but, once we got the pumpkins home, they had more success as jack-o-lantern consultants, advising me how to carve each jack-o-lantern face, and-- you be the judge-- I think I did some kick-ass carving this year (I also added a bonus photo of the two incompetent pumpkin pickers, doing manual labor as punishment for their poor judgement).
One Movie: Three Ratings
I loved watching Steve Coogan's new road movie, The Trip, but it's tough for me to recommend it to anyone other than Steve Coogan fans; the conceit of this faux-documentary is that Coogan invites his not-so-close friend Steve Brydon-- a Welsh impressionist and actor-- on a journalism assignment in which they will review high-end dining in northern England, but Brydon is an ersatz replacement for Coogan's girlfriend, as they are having a "hiatus," and while much of the film is Coogan and Brydon improvising comedy and impressions, there is also dark undercurrent about age, success, sacrifice, and the value of family in the film . . . but much of it is self-referential Coogan nonsense (Ah-Haaaaaa!) which will only appeal to the Cooganophile . . . and so for Coogan fans I give this movie nine octaves out of ten; for Michael Caine fans I give it seven scallops out of ten; and for non-Cooganites, I give it five little men in a box out of a possible ten little men in a box.
Music Cures The Existential Blues
As I sit here grading papers and listening to Grant Green, I realize that my Jeep's broken car stereo-- which has not worked for several months now-- may be having severe implications on my mood . . . every morning, on my drive to work, I am alone with my shitty thoughts, my raspy voice, my tuneless whistling, and my lame drumming on the steering wheel-- which is no way to start the day-- but then, of course, this is how people spent most of their time before the technological revolution: listening to the sounds around them, or perhaps grunting and banging to break the silence, but usually alone with their shitty thoughts . . . so it's no wonder Hobbes described the life of man as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" . . . he needed an iPod.
What Balls May Come?
Some miracles bite you in the ass-- such as Moses parting the Red Sea or the Bills starting the season at 4 and 2 -- but others require a moment of reflection in order to appreciate their glory . . . and the miracle I am about to describe falls into the latter category (although some people, even upon reflection, did not appreciate the miraculous nature of the following events, leading them-- for my benefit-- to post a definition of the word "miracle" on the office cork-board); Sunday, at my weekly pick-up soccer game, my friend Mario returned a soccer ball that I had left behind several weeks ago-- a ball that I figured was as good as gone (I'm not very vigilant about keeping tabs on soccer balls, as I have so many floating around in my car) and then on Wednesday of the very same week-- at my weekly pick-up basketball game-- my friend Gene (who I hadn't seen since the summer) said, "Hey, I have the basketball you forgot in trunk of my car, the one you left in the summer" and I was pleased and surprised, pleased because I refused to buy a new basketball-- which makes no sense, since I didn't think I'd ever see the one I lost again . . . it was more as a punishment for being so stupid that I felt I should go without a ball-- and surprised that he'd kept the ball that long, and that he remembered to put it in his trunk for the game, just in case he saw me . . . and then it took me a day to realize the miraculous magnitude of the conjunction of these two events: that two balls-- both of which I had given up for lost-- were returned to me in the span of four days . . . certainly a minor miracle if there ever was one-- and now I am excited to see what other balls will be returned to me in the near future . . . because things like this usually happen in threes (although with balls, it might be more appropriate if they happened in twos).
Remembering Louie
Morning darkness, loads of essays, plantar fasciitis, weariness from coaching soccer, and general ennui with the constant routine were getting me down, until I remembered what Louie Zamperini had to endure . . . and how he had to endure it without Wikipedia Click-Olympics, Tetris, or Netflix . . . and now I feel better.
The Case of The Returned Kite
Dave Gives His Permission For You To Proceed
There is absolutely nothing wrong with screwing off the shaker top of a canister of rainbow jimmies and chugging a mouthful (or two).
Click-Olympics
Stacy introduced the English department to an engaging new game Friday afternoon; here's how it works: 1) everyone needs their own computer with internet access 2) everyone needs to agree on a starting point on Wikipedia-- such as "Beethoven" or "Goldie Hawn" or "lobster" or any of the other 3,772, 967 articles on the site-- and everyone playing needs to get that particular agreed upon Wikipedia page up on their screen 3) everyone needs to agree on a goal, the Wikipedia article that will end that round-- for our example we'll go from "Beethoven" to "bacon" 4) everyone should start the round at the same time, and then you may click on any hyper-link on Wikipedia in order to link your way from the "Beethoven" page to the "bacon" page . . . you may also use the "back" arrow on your browser, but that's it . . . the game is oddly compelling because you have to speculate several clicks in advance-- and once you head down a wrong path it's easy to get lost-- but it's surprising how quickly and elegantly you can get places; for instance, if you start on "Beethoven," you can click on "infectious hepatitis"-- which possibly caused Beethoven's death-- and from there you can access "The Center for Disease Control and Prevention" page and then "food borne pathogens" and then "cooking" and the "cooking" entry contains a picture and a link of some tasty looking "bacon wrapped corn" and if you've beaten everyone else to the page then voila, you have won a round of what I like to call "Wikipedia Click-Olympics."
Bossypants
Tina Fey's book Bossypants is exactly like an episode of 30 Rock . . . fast-paced, full of clever jokes, and over before you know it . . . the only downside to this formula is that it's tough to recall much from either an episode of 30 Rock (except Alec Baldwin's advice: "Never go with a hippie to a second location") or Fey's memoir (all I remember is that photo shoots are fun, her dad is a bad-ass, and once female comics get old, everyone considers them "batshit crazy") and though she's not quite as articulate as David Sedaris or as neurotically absurd as Woody Allen, she's certainly playing in that ballpark and there's nothing saccharine or forced about her humor . . . and I will also point out that in all my trips to the library-- and I'm not going to lie: I go to the library a lot-- this is the only time a librarian at the check-out desk commented about a book I was checking out (she told me the book is really great and Tina Fey is so smart and clever and recommended the audio book because Tina Fey reads it herself): nine scars out of ten.
If A Tree Falls, Marshall Curry Will Get the Shot . . . And Interview Everyone Who Saw It Fall
Once again, Marshall Curry has documented a fantastic story, covering all the angles in an even-handed and comprehensive manner in under ninety minutes . . . his first documentary, Street Fight, is a masterpiece of editing, and his new one-- If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front--is equally as compelling; it tells the tale of a group of eco-terrorists in Oregon that target the forestry industry with a campaign of arson, and how Daniel McGowan-- who was once a member of the group, but since moved on-- is haunted by his radical past . . . and Curry gets access to members of ELF, other radicals, forestry workers, informants, prosecutors, the sheriff, law enforcement agents, and McGowan and his family . . . so the film is full of ambiguity, contradictory logical positions, and documentary gold . . . and Curry, wisely, never shows his hand but instead lets the viewer decide what to make of the ethics of the case: ten old growth redwoods out of a possible ten (and could that be Bansky standing on the redwood stump in the picture?)
I Am A Hero (Sort Of)
My neighbor called me the other day because her baby daughter had an engorged deer tick stuck to her head, and she wanted my help in removing it . . . and so I briskly walked to her house, ready to offer my aid; after some sizing up of the tick we decided that she should hold Natalya's head still, and I should try to pluck the little black tick from amidst her wispy blonde locks with a pair of tweezers . . . but babies move their heads a lot, and they don't appreciate someone holding their head still, so the odds of tick removal did not look good, but I decided to take a shot at it anyway, and-- on my first attempt-- with a deft and skillful pinch, I snagged the tick and removed nary a hair from baby Natalya's head . . . and the fact that the "tick" actually turned out to be a tick-shaped piece of dried food should have no bearing on the assessment of my heroism.
Film Buff
My wife and I were walking up the stairs, to put the kids to bed, when we heard a civilized discussion emanating from the bathroom-- and this stopped us in our tracks because we've never heard our kids having a civilized discussion anywhere, let alone the bathroom (which is usually a place of mayhem, chaos, and poorly aimed urine); Alex asked Ian "which character in the movie he liked the best" and Ian said he liked the eleven year old with glasses and Alex informed him that he was "the main character" and then Alex said he liked "the old guy who kept giving the kids clues" and Ian politely asked Alex why he liked him . . . and Catherine and I exchanged a tacit glance, both of us impressed by our cultured and refined children . . . and then the two of them walked out of the bathroom and Ian was still wearing jeans and a t-shirt but Alex was butt-naked, and when we saw him, my wife and I laughed at the incongruity of the dialogue and the nudity and Alex also realized how funny the tableau looked and so he started running around-- bare-assed-- shrieking and yelling like a savage, and Ian (though still fully clothed) followed suit.
I Corrupt My Six Year Old Son
My son Ian wants in on the Taco Count-- and though I realize this is no way to encourage healthy eating habits, I can't proscribe him from the fun without being a total hypocrite-- and so I am keeping track of his taco consumption (which is impressive, he's now eating four tacos at a sitting-- two hard shell and two soft shell-- the same amount that my wife eats) but I am going to prorate his Count for both his weight (which is 1/4 of mine) and the time (three months instead of twelve) and so for each taco that he eats in the next three months, I will multiply it by four to compensate for his small size and then multiply again by four so that it is equivalent to a year of taco eating . . . so each taco he eats will count as sixteen 2011 Tacos . . . and he's already eaten eight tacos in October . . . so that's 128 pro-rated tacos for his annual count.
Retraction (Yogi Berra is NOT Dead)
Yesterday, in a cascade of self-referential meta-madness, I explained that it is very difficult to consciously create an adage in the style of Yogi Berra, and then I quoted a colleague who-- in a heated description-- inadvertently coined such a phrase (If you saw her, you'd know what she looks like!) but then--accidentally-- I penned my own Yogi Berraism, when I said that "Yogi Berra would be smiling in his grave" if he heard Katie's wonderful maxim . . . because not only is Yogi Berra is not dead (he's 86) but skulls are always smiling, so the metaphor doesn't really make sense . . . and I am hoping that this post doesn't kill Berra, because I've had a history of killing celebrities with my attention (the first song I ever sang in front of a class was "Delia's Gone" by Johnny Cash, and he died the next day-- which made my students extraordinarily happy-- and in college, I started reading Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene, and he was dead within hours, so I've definitely got some kind of voodoo magic . . . or a more logical explanation is that I am a prodigal consumer of arts and literature, and so over the course of my life it would be more odd if no one died that I was perusing at the the time).
Katie vs. Yogi
I have praised the laconic anti-wit of Yogi Berra, and I even tried to invent my own Yogi Berra-esque adage-- and I learned that it's not the kind of thing you can consciously create-- but once in a while someone says something so perfectly true and paradoxical, that you know Yogi is smiling in his grave . . . and so when my colleague Katie attempted to describe an extremely inappropriately dressed high school girl, she got so worked up about the sleaziness of the student's outfit that she passionately told us: "If you saw her, you'd know what she looks like!"
Patience and Saliva
I swam at lunch on Monday-- we had a workshop, so no students all day-- and on the way back to school I stopped to pick up lunch, and though I was pressed for time, I decided to forgo the robotic convenience of ordering a sandwich at WaWa, and instead I patronized a local place in Milltown; I had to wait in line, and it took a long time for them to complete my order, and I was ravenous because of my swim and the several hours we spent poring over the National Core Standards, so--naturally-- when I got in my car, I tore open my "Grand Canyon," a turkey sub loaded with roasted peppers and marinated mushrooms, and took a bite to appease my hunger, but then I made one of the most civilized and refined decisions in my young life . . . I decided not to shovel the sandwich into my mouth as I drove because I didn't want to get oil all over my shirt (there were some cute grade school teachers at the workshop) and because I wanted to sit in the sun and actually enjoy the final minutes of lunch . . . so difficult as it was, I re-wrapped the sandwich and started driving-- and, of course, I got behind an old lady and hit every light, and by the time I got to the school I was drooling like one of Pavlov's dogs-- but I was still extremely proud of myself; I felt mature; I was able to delay my gratification and enjoy my food . . . this is a big step for me and let me offer an example as to why: a number of years ago, after a long car ride to Nags Head, when Whitney and I stopped at Petrozza's Italian Provisions for a rare authentic Italian sub south of the Mason Dixon line-- which we planned to eat on his deck while looking at the Atlantic Ocean-- instead, in a wonderful instance of simultaneous unplanned gluttony-- we both finished our gigantic sandwiches before we even reached the car . . . and-- as Whitney recalls-- we had a pretty good parking spot.
Genre Definitions (Back By Popular Demand)
One of the exciting recurring features here at Sentence of Dave is called: "Dave Defines Science Fiction," and though I'd be hard-pressed to top my original definition, this new one adds a wrinkle . . . so without further fanfare, here it is: fantasy is how things never were, and science fiction is how things will never be (and this highly entertaining and much discussed topic is recurring because I'm reading a good science-fiction novel by Richard K. Morgan that corresponds to my original definition . . . though I could care less about the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, I love exploring the world he inhabits; the book is called Altered Carbon and the London Times blurb is accurate: "This seamless marriage of hardcore cyberpunk and hard-boiled detective tale is an astonishing first novel").
Do You Understand BitCoin?
I learned about BitCoin in a pathetically analogue way (a hard copy of the October New Yorker's "Money Issue") and though I'm not sure I completely understand the concept, I am still fascinated by the story and will attempt to give the short, short version here: in 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto created a sophisticated, cryptographically secure code that created a new currency called BitCoin, and these coins could be "mined" by entering a computer lottery that rewards speedy computing power-- and at the start it was relatively easy to "mine" Bit Coins because few people were attempting to crack the code, but now it requires an extraordinary amount of computing power to "mine" a BitCoin because so many computers are competing . . . and-- though they have no physical presence or financial backing-- BitCoins have an actual market value (a little over four dollars a coin) and they can be traded for real currency and products and kept safe in "wallets" and Nakamoto's code ensures that no digital BitCoin can be spent more than once (and all transactions are public, though the "wallets" can be owned by anonymous users) and Satoshi seems to be a cipher himself, no one has ever uncovered who he really is-- but his code has so far proved to be impenetrable . . . if it could be compromised then the coins would lose all value . . . and he could also be considered criminal, if the new currency competes with the American dollar, and then his action could be considered treasonous, and there is the question of who needs an anonymous digital untraceable type of cash . . . possibly people involved in sketchy activities, but don't go by this rambling summary, do your own research and get back to me on what you've learned on this most marvelous invention of the digital age (and I'm not sure the guy who wrote the New Yorker article actually understand what BitCoin "mining" is either-- according to Wikipedia, BitCoin mining actually helps to cryptographically ensure that no individual BitCoin gets double spent, so a "miner" uses processing power to attempt to create unique "blocks" which keep BitCoins safe from hackers and the miner is rewarded by the network with a set amount of BitCoins if your computer can create one of these cryptographic blocks).
A Harsh Dictum
When I mentioned that I might start wearing sleeveless t-shirts (because I'm always hot) my wife said that she would not be seen with me if I chose to wear such apparel in public-- unless I was playing basketball-- but I see plenty of people wearing sleeveless shirts who aren't actually playing hoops (though they might be on their way to play basketball . . . who can be sure?) and I don't see the problem . . . as long as you're not at a high end restaurant.
Please Tell Me Your Kids Do This
Saturday, we went for ice cream after Alex's soccer game, and while we were waiting for the lady to scoop the cones, Alex, who is seven years old, scraped a sprinkle off the counter-- out of a streak congealed ice cream that had been sitting in the unseasonably hot sun-- and nonchalantly popped said sprinkle into his mouth, as if he was sampling a bar snack . . . and I chastised him for his decision, but I am wondering if that's just typical behavior for a hungry second grade boy.
If You're Angry and You Know it Clap Your Hands
I've read a few books on the current economic crisis and watched the documentary Inside Job, and while these works explained the complexities of the collapse and certainly assigned some blame, none of them channeled the powerless frustration and anger that I have towards both our government and big business . . . but Matt Taibbi addresses this in his book Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America, which began as a Rolling Stone article; he points fingers, calls people "morons" and "assholes" and far worse, and refers to Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" . . . he skewers Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson and Lawrence Summers and Obama and Reagan and Clinton and both Bush presidents and everyone else involved in making decisions about our economy . . . and the result is frightening and comprehensive condemnation of our economic system, portraying it as an unregulated, backroom dealing casino that rewards the super-wealthy at the expense of the taxpayers, and, sadly, there seems to be no simple solution . . . there's nothing we can do, no party we can vote for, because the result will be the same . . . and while we debate red and blue state issues-- while half the nation rails about "overweening government power" and the other half protests against "corporate excess"-- the real problem is that our system is a combination of both these problems, and the media is never going to extensively cover complicated and boring issues like the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act and the loosening of the Commodity Exchange Act and the actual ramifications of ObamaCare, and so instead we debate about abortion and health-care and tax cuts-- we argue about if gas prices have increased because of demand from China or because we need to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge-- while the real business of America is done between the mega-banks and the government and the usual suspects, behind a green curtain that shields them from the democratic process that is more show than substance.
A Good Rule To Know
My son Alex told me that at school last week, he had to write a safety rule on a star shaped piece of paper, and that the teacher then put all the stars on the wall . . . he also said that most kids copied rules from the movie that inspired this lesson . . . Captain Buckle, a police officer, reminded the students to "always go places with a buddy" and "look both ways when you cross the street"-- but Alex was proud that he thought of an original rule-- a rule Captain Buckle did not mention . . . a rule his father taught him . . . and so his star on the wall reminds people of something very important: "no metal in the microwave."
A Joke That Doubles As An IQ Test
Here is something fun and annoying to do to your friends: explain that you are about to tell a joke, but that the joke also doubles as test of their intelligence-- this will make them anxious to get the joke, but chances are that they won't-- and then say, "A termite walks into a bar and asks, 'Where's the bartender?'"
Synco-what?
Though I pride myself on my large vocabulary, I've had my troubles recently . . . and now I'm faced with writing the most difficult sentence in my career, and it is about learning the clinical term for something that afflicts me, but I really do not want to write this sentence, for reasons I will soon explain-- and I suffer this solely for you, my diligent readers; last Wednesday in the English Office, my colleague Rachel said a string of words that sounded nothing like English: "He had a vasovagal response . . . it's a syncope," and so I asked her to explain and during her explanation, I started feeling lightheaded and my fingers started tingling and I got a strange sensation in my chest and I felt very nervous . . . almost as if I was going to pass out . . . and that's when I learned the truth: I often suffer from vasovagal responses, especially when people are talking about blood and fainting, which is a common trigger for the response . . . not that I mind actually seeing blood-- but I have trouble thinking about it (probably due to my gigantic imaginative brain) and so even as I write this sentence in the school library, I feel as though I might plant my face into the keyboard, but I soldier on anyway, dizzy but validated, because my response has a definition and and so I am not a freak.
Death Be Not Proud of A Turtle
The boys and I took a trip to Sandy Hook last Thursday, and despite the rain, poison ivy and mosquitoes, we had a good time, especially out on North Beach; Ian's highlight was the dead terrapin he found in a foamy and debris filled tide pool-- he poked it with a stick and when the head bobbed to the surface, we noticed that the eyes had been eaten out of the skull-- and this grisly image must have stuck with him because on the car ride home he said, "I'm proud that I found that turtle, but I'm not proud that it was dead and had no eyes."
One Thing At A Time
When trying to improve at a sport, it's best to focus on one skill at a time: in the heat of competition it's near impossible to remember anything, let alone two separate things . . . and so I gave my son Alex one thing to improve during his soccer game on Sunday, and I think the "one thing at a time method" worked, as he played well and assisted in his team's only goal . . . what skill did I ask him to work on? . . . just before he ran onto the field, I told him to try to avoid prolonged holding and "adjustment" of his genitals during the course of play-- as this not only made him lose focus on the ball, but was also inappropriate in mixed company-- and while he wasn't perfect in this endeavor, he was certainly more successful than in the previous game, and that's all you can ask of a seven year old boy.
Bite Me?
Last week during first period, one of my students announced that she had successfully passed her Road Test and was now the proud owner of a New Jersey Probationary Driver's License, and another girl turned to her and said, "Did you get somebody to bite it?" and I found this statement odd and said so, and she explained that it's good luck to get someone to bite your new driving license . . . but none of the other kids had heard of this tradition, nor had the students in the class next door . . . but I did find this reference to what must be a rather obscure practice, which may stem from biting a gold coin to tell if it's real (and the resultant Olympic tradition of biting your gold medal).
A Contradiction So Bottomless That Even Dave Cannot Resolve It
I love the television show Community and I love claymation . . . but I hate the claymation episode of Community.
Thanks Dan
Lately, I've been obsessed with the TV show Community . . . it's a sitcom satirizing traditional TV Tropes (and if you haven't been to the TV Tropes web-site, block out a few hours and check it out) and creator and writer Dan Harmon, in an interview in Wired magazine, explains his method of organizing beats, scenes, episodes, and entire seasons of the show; he calls his graphic organizer an "embryo" and he ensures that the elements are present at every step before he moves on . . . and so last week, while I was teaching narrative writing in my composition class, preparing kids to write their college essays, I told a number of stories (not that I don't tell stories the rest of the year) and I found that my stories subscribed to Harmon's organizer, as did the narrative models we used from the text (Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" and "Salvation" by Langston Hughes and "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris) and so here is Harmon's embryo, in case you want to try it out:
- 1. A character is in a zone of comfort
- 2. But they want something
- 3. They enter an unfamiliar situation
- 4. Adapt to it
- 5. Get what they wanted
- 6. Pay a heavy price for it
- 7. Then return to their familiar situation
- 8. Having changed
and while all stories don't conform to this pattern-- especially once you get modern and post-modern and characters never adapt (Kafka) or fail to get what they want (Hemingway) or do not pay a heavy price (Nicholson Baker) or remain static during the course of the story (Camus)-- I think that the most satisfying stories-- whether your talking Into The Wild or Moby Dick-- usually do follow this archetype.
Asymmetrical Asynchronous Control
My parents have a pinball machine in their basement, and my Dad was impressed that my son Ian could use the flippers independently-- apparently even some adults have trouble with this skill-- but Ian mastered this when he was three . . . and he seems to have some weird control over both sides of his body-- he kicks lefty and throws righty-- and he's always had the ability to raise one eyebrow, and in a far more natural manner than Mr. Spock.
Dave's Second Best Idea Ever!
Fans of this blog may recall Dave's Best Idea Ever, and might even be familiar with some of Dave's Bad Ideas, and so-- because Dave is a humble man who responds to the opinions of his readers-- I will let you decide which category this new idea of mine belongs, but-- not that I mean to sway you-- based on empirical evidence, I think it should be in the former . . . and I will warn you that this is a Soccer Idea, but I think that even non-soccer folks will appreciate its brilliance . . . The Problem is this: it is difficult to get very young soccer players to pass the ball to their teammates, or even to remember that their teammates actually exist, and so I wanted to create a drill that not only encouraged passing, but also had an element of immediacy to it, and not only that, I wanted the drill to reward passing instead of dribbling, which is difficult to do when the players are young and the skill levels are various, but I figured out the solution to this insoluble problem and I present it to you free-of-charge because I consider this blog to be my public service to the universe (because there's no way I'm ever going to serve hobos at a soup kitchen) and so here is the answer: zombies . . . little kids know how to act like zombies, and so I made one child be the "zombie" in the drill, and this "zombie" must hold a ball out in front of them (which is a bit mummy-like, but no one questioned it, and it slows them down) and then I instructed the zombie that all he or she desires is to zombie-walk at the ball and tag the person with the ball at their feet with their "zombie-ball" and so I put three kids in a box made with cones and told them that they have to keep the ball inside the box and away from the zombie-- but they can't get tagged by a zombie or kick the ball out of the box, or else they become the zombie-- and the zombie moves slow enough for just about any player to have enough time to look up and make a decent pass, but the zombie is fast enough (and usually making scary noises) and this encourages the player to get rid of the ball quickly and to pass it to a teammate . . . instead of just dribbling aimlessly . . . and the drill certainly makes them realize that there are other people on their team, and they understood quickly enough that the best way to defeat the zombie was to stay spread out and kick it far away when the zombie approached, and, for once, they were doing something that approximated actual soccer, passing a ball around from person to person-- and even though they were only avoiding a zombie, it still made them behave in a totally different way than they normally behave on the pitch-- and one group got good enough that I had to introduce a second zombie . . . and now I am dreaming of an entire side of zombies, forcing the children to spread out and knock the ball around like a miniature Manchester United . . . so all I can tell you is, give it a try and enjoy the results, and I am positive you will admit that this is in the running for Dave's Second Best Idea Ever.
A Sight Gag Just For You
You might recall that I permanently damaged my iPod while swimming with it in a waterproof case called an Otterbox-- but I was lucky enough to know a student with an ex-boyfriend who worked at an Apple Store, and, despite the water damage, he set me up with a new iPod, which I did not submerge underwater-- but I still used my old Otterbox to protect the new iPod from rain and sweat, until the Otterbox's head-phone jack broke . . . and now I need a new water-resistant case for my iPod, but until I get one I am using a Ziploc sandwich bag as an ersatz but physically humorous water-proof case, and now I am actually becoming resistant to buying a new case for my iPod because it's so much fun to tell people in the office that I just got a great new water-proof case for my iPod (and most people at least feign some interest because it's a technological subject . . . Katie actually asked if I got an Otterbox) and then once I've built up some interest and drama about my new-fangled waterproof case, I pull out my iPod, in the clear plastic sandwich bag, with the headphones snaking out of the corner, and the people laugh and laugh, and I think to myself: I could have been a great prop comic, just like Carrot Top.
The Rise And Fall of North Eastern Fall
Some folks love the smell of napalm in the morning, but not me-- I love the smell of decaying fungus in the morning . . . last Sunday morning to be specific, I was loving the reeky, sweet, pungent odors of an entire wheelbarrow full of weird toadstools, giant fan shaped fungi, and clusters of long stemmed mushrooms, all of which needed to be removed from my backyard, as they were quickly turning to a bug infested slime . . . and I know I shouldn't complain about things I can't control but this is the worst fall ever-- what happened to late September Sunday morning sitting on the porch in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, drinking coffee in the crisp autumn air, enjoying the rattle of dried leaves, without having to fend off giant jungle mosquitoes?
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