After finishing George Packer's extremely depressing book The Unwinding, I decided to read something lighter, and so I turned to a book a student recommended called The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers . . . and while I couldn't put the book down, as I wanted to find out if Special Agent Chip Bepler of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife could finally take down Mike Van Nostrand, the brash and blatant kingpin of American reptile smuggling, this book is definitely not light reading: Bryan Christy tells a tale of drugs, crime, corruption boa constrictors full of cocaine melting in a van, environmental devastation, obsessive herpetologists, crooked zookeepers, and a completely overwhelmed Miami division of Fish and Wildlife, with just three agents to cover South Florida, the Keys, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands . . . three agents to "investigate every illegal plant or animal that came through the port of Miami, by plane or by boat . . . three agents to police the waterways against manatee abusers . . . three agents to wade into the marshes before dawn to await duck poachers . . . three agents to watch over the Florida panther, three to stop Mexican restaurants from serving up sea turtle eggs, three to force beachside hotels to dim their lights so that the sea turtles that did hatch could follow the reflected light of the moon to the Atlantic Ocean instead of finding death in the artificial illumination of a well-lit parking lot" and not only that, the book ends with a funeral, but I won't spoil it since Sunswept Entertainment is making a movie based on the story (and it seems they've turned Chip Bepler into a woman).
Metaphors in a Meta-Metaphor
George Packer's book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America is a gripping and intimate account of what has happened financially and politically in America over the past forty years, told through the eyes of a diverse group of people -- ruined entrepreneurs and liberal activists, Newt Gingrich and Jay Z, Wall Street Occupiers and white trash, Washington insiders and visionary technophiles -- and while most of the book subscribes to the titular metaphor: unless you are one of the lucky ones, the ones that stand with the political and financial establishment, unless you are someone who goes with the political "flow" then you are fine, but the rest of America is unraveling; I warn you, the book is painful to read and it will cause you to feel ire and depression and indignation and outright anger . . . but there's nothing much you can do, you are either in or you are out, and if you are in, then there's no incentive to change things that are bringing you money and power, and if you are out, then you don't have any power to speak of, and you can't muster the energy and the force to fight the lobbies and the banks and Washington politics and Wall Street and globalization and corruption and corporate union-busting . . . but at least along the way, there are a few tangential metaphors that are more fun the the overarching general unwinding of our society; Dean Price, a tobacco farmer's son who is trying to create sustainable agriculture and biofuel in the South, imagines the American factory farm poultry, those chickens so pumped full of chemicals that they are too big to walk on their own "served up and eaten by customers who would grow obese and eventually be seen in Walmart riding electric carts, because they were too heavy to walk the aisles of a Supercenter, just like the hormone fed chickens" and Packer explains how they brought judges out of retirement to go about the work of "clearing Florida's of half a million foreclosure cases. as earlier generations had cleared the mangrove swamps that made way for Tampa, and, finally, Peter Thiel -- founder of PayPal and and really rich dude -- uses a metaphor to show the general decline in attitude towards technology: he says that in the 1970's, best of the year sci-fi anthologies were full of stories where "me and my friend the robot walked on the moon" while now the trend in sci-fi is dystopian and fragmented (and The Hunger Games is the perfect analogy for what has happened . . . young folks, who will do everything their parents did, will not have access to the same economy and nation that privileged previous generations, and so they will be fighting each other to the death for the scraps) and Thiel calls this a "tech-slowdown" and he points out that most technological advances that have occurred recently have been in the imaginary binary world of 1s and 0s inside computers, not in the physical world; to summarize, this is an amazing depressing mess of a book without solutions, as it should be, but there are occasional bright spots: the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the perseverance of Dean Price in the face of a politically close-minded and corrupt world.
We'll Never Get to the Bottom of This One
My eight year old son Ian, who we regard as slightly shifty, woke up the other morning with chocolate on his face . . . but he didn't have any chocolate for dessert the night before, and so the only explanation is that he has a hidden cache of chocolate in his room, and that he ate some of it after he went to bed -- but I searched his room thoroughly and couldn't find anything (though we have found secret troves of candy in his room before, and so I had probably cause to conduct this search) and Ian insists that he didn't have any secret chocolate before bed . . . though he did bring up the possibility that he may have ate some chocolate while sleep-walking, and while I don't believe this for one bit, Ian is a tough nut to crack, and I don't feel like breaking out the water-board, and so we're just going to chalk this one up to poor detective work on our part and concede that we will never know the truth.
Hypothetical Soundtrack
If you feel the need to listen to music that evokes a nonexistent 1970's police show in which the heroes adeptly navigate the mean streets of their decaying city, and often have to cross the thin blue line in order to administer justice in a chaotic and amoral world, and then face repercussions from an oppressive and byzantine bureaucracy, a politically minded and data driven chief, and an apathetic force, then listen to The Crusaders album Free As the Wind . . . it's absolutely fantastic: play it straight through, and I promise you'll have a car chase (and more!) in your brain.
To The Guy in the Lexus Driving in Front of Me with Ten Inches of Snow on His Roof and Back Windshield:
On Milk Related Things
Last Thursday in the English office, I rejected the tastiness of Chantal's kale and banana smoothie because the consistency was too milky, and this led to the inevitable discussion about milk related things, and the fact that I have never drank a glass of milk, not even a glass of chocolate milk, nor have I ever had a milkshake (Kevin thought this was absolutely impossible and wanted me to provide witnesses to verify this patently absurd statement) and when I claimed that I wouldn't even try Nitro Milk Stout beer because -- though I know it contains no milk-- it has the word "milk" in the title and thus makes me think of milky things, Kevin became determined to penetrate my defenses, and he succeeded . . . he thought of the one thing with "milk" in it that I do love: Neutral Milk Hotel.
Gummy For Men
I am embarrassed to admit that I love gummy candy . . . gummy bears, gummy worms, gummy coke bottles . . . you name it, but I rarely indulge in these festive, colorful treats because I feel absolutely absurd eating them; no adult man can maintain any sort of dignity while sucking on a gummy peach ring, and I think there are other men that feel the same way-- other closeted-gummy-men-- and so there must be a market for macho gummy treats: gummy chewing tobacco, gummy seeds, gummy pork rinds, etc.
This is as Close to Archimedes as I Am Going to Get
I am certainly not a physicist in any sense of the word -- my "eureka" moments are usually very abstract -- but last week, while I was coaching a youth basketball game, I figured out how something works in the physical world; my thought process began during a game when our team was slaughtering the opposition, we were really racking up the points, and what surprised me was how often the shots were falling into the basket -- we always seemed to be getting the roll -- but upon further observation, I found that this was often the case . . . little kids make a fair amount of the shots they put up, if they hit the rim . . . and this is my best explanation as to why this is so: when an adult shoots a basketball, the arc of the ball usually rises far above the height of the basket, and then the ball plummets down towards the rim-- it's like the ball is being dropped from five feet above the basket-- and so if it hits wrong, it's got quite a bit of momentum, so it's going to "brick" and bounce wildly from the hoop, but a little kid shot typically just clears the rim . . . the point where the ball is at an actual standstill -- the apex-- is just above the basket, and so it hits the rim with very little impetus and has a much better chance of remaining on the rim, and possibly rolling in.
Kids Aren't Half As Annoying When You Are Playing Ping-Pong With Them
Nothing makes me happier than the fact that my kids are now proficient at ping-pong . . . cracking a cold beer and knocking that ball back and forth is as mindless and stress-free as parenting gets.
If Everyone Else is Juicing, How Can I Compete?
I recently learned that a number of people in my English department are "juicing" and have been at it for quite a while . . . they are drinking daily concoctions of kale, carrots, bananas, berries, yogurt, spinach, lime, and other healthy foods . . . and no one informed me of this shocking development (in fact, I learned about it rather randomly when a perfectly sensible guy said he was thinking about purchasing a $400 dollar Vitamix blender, which astounded me, but I then learned that everyone in the room -- five people -- were all liquefying vegetables and drinking them) and so now I'm wondering if I have to start drinking my vegetables just to keep up with the other teachers, who are obviously going to reap incredible benefits from these glowing green smoothies: clear complexions, full heads of silky hair, super-cognitive speed, boundless energy, the disappearance of hang-overs, and other various superpowers . . . but I don't really want to start slurping kale and carrots for breakfast, so I'm going to hope that it's just a phase, and that everyone will go back to eating normal crap soon.
Roger, Do It For the Children! (Or Most of the Children, But Not the Children in Shakespeare Class)
It's time once again for my annual epistle to Roger Goodell, beseeching him to move the Super Bowl to Saturday, and this year the impact of Super Bowl Sunday is worse than normal . . . typically, I start teaching Hamlet the Monday following the Super Bowl, which is difficult enough, but this year, because we've already had three snow days and the semester is off kilter, the Monday following the Super Bowl is an exam day . . . and a few of my students are stressing out because they have to stay up and watch the Super Bowl and they also have to take two exams the next day (luckily, this won't effect my period two class, though they have their exam on Monday morning at 7:26, because it's my Shakespeare class and they have admitted that they DO NOT watch football . . . when I asked if anyone knew the details of Peyton Manning's cervical fusion surgery, they all looked at me blankly, and a very smart girl said to me, "this is SHAKESPEARE class -- we don't know things like that.")
Lack of Sentence and an Idea for a T-shirt Wrapped into One Half-Assed Fragment of Thought
Last week, I had a really great idea for a sentence while I was talking to Alec at the pub, but the next morning, I couldn't remember it (and while that is an atrocious sentence, as far as content, the theme itself would make a great t-shirt: Dave went to the pub and all I got was this lousy sentence).
Facebook Stock Plummets! Dave Buys New Snowboard!
You don't need to read Dave Eggers' overly long and polemical book The Circle to know that Facebook is a vast evil time-suck that trivializes your life, robs you of your privacy, and makes you very stupid (and -- full disclosure -- I just sold some Facebook stock short, so I'm hoping that the rest of humanity reaches this conclusion too, and rapidly . . . and if this Princeton study is any indication, then -- like an infectious disease -- the Facebook epidemic will soon wane, as folks become immune to its infectious qualities and I will make hundreds of dollars).
It's Good to be the Cook
The Danish film A Hijacking taught me three things: 1) if your ship is taken by Somali pirates, everyone on board -- including the pirates -- is held hostage by the ransom negotiations 2) if you're trapped on a boat, nobody in their right mind shoots the cook 3) Somalis and Danes drunkenly singing "Happy Birthday" in English is really creepy.
You Might Only Want to Read 1/2 of this Sentence
The folks at work claim that my braided belt is from the '90's, but that's not true -- my braided belt from the '90's disintegrated long ago, and this braided belt is relatively new and I bought it at Kohls . . . and I really tried to wear a more fashionable belt but the problem with non-braided belts is that there are a limited number of holes, and so if you gain or lose a few pounds, or eat a giant lunch, then there might not be an ideal belt setting for your particular girth at that moment, and I like to buy my pants a little big, and so I actually need a belt to cinch them at the waist, because I'm not buying the pants big for my gut-- which isn't all that big-- I'm buying the pants big for my butt, which is ample and round, and needs room to breathe.
Batting A Thousand (Sort of)
I saw three ex-students out-of-context in the span of three days and nailed all of their names:
1) saw a girl I had many, many years ago at a concert at The Saint in Asbury Park-- where her younger brother was playing drums in a band with one of my colleagues-- and though she is over thirty and has a kid and a house and a mortgage, she was far more surprised that I have kids and a house and a mortgage . . . "Mr. P. is all grown up!" was her reaction;
2) saw a dude I taught a few years ago stocking beer at the fancy beer store -- although I this one was a Texas-leaguer, as I only remembered his last name;
3) and, finally, an easy one . . . I saw a girl I taught last year lurking in the high school parking lot (there's nothing lamer than hanging around the high school once you've graduated, but -- to her credit -- I think she was waiting to give someone a ride).
1) saw a girl I had many, many years ago at a concert at The Saint in Asbury Park-- where her younger brother was playing drums in a band with one of my colleagues-- and though she is over thirty and has a kid and a house and a mortgage, she was far more surprised that I have kids and a house and a mortgage . . . "Mr. P. is all grown up!" was her reaction;
2) saw a dude I taught a few years ago stocking beer at the fancy beer store -- although I this one was a Texas-leaguer, as I only remembered his last name;
3) and, finally, an easy one . . . I saw a girl I taught last year lurking in the high school parking lot (there's nothing lamer than hanging around the high school once you've graduated, but -- to her credit -- I think she was waiting to give someone a ride).
Despite All the F*%king Grading, There Are Some Fun Things About Being a Teacher
One of the great things about being a teacher is that you get to teach people things, and so when I show Marshall Curry's fantastic documentary Street Fight to my students it is ostensibly to teach them about politics, but the actual reason I show the film is so that when Cory Booker's campaign manager compares Sharpe James to former D.C. mayor Marion Barry, I get to pause the film and explain to my students about Marion Barry: who he was, what he did, and how-- despite what he did-- he got elected again (and it's a great excuse to say "crack cocaine" in class, which is always a crowd pleaser among the high school seniors . . . and I must warn you, if you're one of those people who like to watch movies in silence, with no pauses or interruptions, then you should NOT take my class, because I consider showing a movie in class more of a performance art: you are seeing a movie with Dave, who might pause it at any time to comment, or might not even bother to pause it . . . it's the educational version of Mystery Science Theater 3000, without the robots).
A Loooooooong Week for Ian
By Wednesday afternoon of last week, this was the list of Ian's infractions at school, as reported by his very forgiving and patient teacher on his behavior sheet: putting his middle finger down (instead of up, he claims he was taunted into doing this, but he knows better), putting the cap to the glue stick up his butt and then giving it to someone, getting caught erasing the details about the middle-finger episode and the glue stick/butt incident and so not only did his behavior sheet include an addendum (written in pen) describing those two previous incidents, but it also explained that Ian claimed that he "accidentally" erased that part of the note -- though he admitted to me that he did this in order to get in less trouble, and -- finally-- he got into an argument with Lucy and called her a "buttface buffoon."
My Wife and I Agree on How Not To Lose Your Shit
When I go to the gym, I leave my wallet and cell-phone in the glove compartment of my car because I think that there is a greater chance of my gym locker being broken into rather than my run-of-the-mill gray Toyota min-van, and I asked my wife what she does, and she uses the same strategy . . . for the same exact reason (though she drives our run-of-the-mill Subaru) and since my wife and I rarely agree on questions of logic, I am guessing that we are doing the smart thing for this scenario.
Sports: The Reason Why I Don't Invent a Bunch of Cool Stuff for the Internet
While reading George Packer's fragmented and arresting book about the fragmentation of America (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America) I learned why I am not more like Peter Thiel -- who has a long list of entrepreneurial and technological achievements, among them co-founding PayPal-- because to get hired by Thiel you not only had to be "incredibly smart" but also "without distracting obligations like wives and children or time-wasting hobbies like sports and TV . . . one applicant was turned down because he admitted to enjoying shooting hoops."
If . . . Then . . . But
Wednesday morning . . . 5:45 AM . . . and it's so foggy that I can't see the end of the road-- if I wasn't with my trusty canine companion, it would have been very spooky and that's the great thing about having a dog, you always have someone to accompany you on a walk, no matter the situation -- but, of course I should point out, if it wasn't for my trusty canine companion, I wouldn't have been walking around in the fog at 5:45 AM, I would have been in bed, or indoors, and that's what's not so great about owning a dog.
Layers and Layers of Irony and Failure
Nothing makes me more unhappy that enforced pep (you may remember my difficulties when I was compelled to "Dress Like a Holiday") but rather than suffer the ire of certain female members of my department, I now begrudgingly go along with whatever spirit theme is chosen, and so on Wednesday, I wore the required uniform -- black shirt and pants, glasses, and a beret (I only wore the beret momentarily, for "check in," but that's still pretty spirited for me) -- and our department followed suit . . . we were supposed to be Beatnik poets, but I thought some people looked like French painters and others looked like college graduates . . . but we did well enough with our department unity to tie the business department, and since the math department came up with this contest idea, they administered the tie-breaker . . . a math test . . . mano a mano . . . by someone chosen from the department, and so --ironically -- my department chose me to take the test, because though I am the least spirited member of the department, I am pretty good at math (and even taught it, long long ago) and so this set-up the wonderful possibility that the person who really didn't want to "dress like a holiday" would end up being the department spirit hero . . . and so I e-mailed the math teacher administering the tie-breaker and we set up a time and she told me to bring a calculator . . . and that's when I realized that this might actually be a math test and not some math riddle or math trivia quiz or something fun and spirited . . . as we were dealing with the math department, not the English department, and this made me a bit anxious, and it turned out I was right: I had to take a ten question quiz with algebraic equations and number lines and solution sets . . . and this test, in mathematical terms, was 0% fun, but I still felt confident taking it (which means nothing . . . I always feel confident when I take math tests and I've gotten some really abysmal math grades in my life) and I remembered all my acronyms: SMATO (subtraction means adding the opposites) and Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally and FOIL (first outside middle last) and was proudly reciting them to the proctor of the test as I did the problems, and -- for a moment-- I thought I just might be the least spirited department hero ever . . . Cinderella story, underdog victory and all that, but my lack of spirit must have caused some kind of karmic justice; I got a 90% on the quiz-- pretty good, but not good enough, as the guy from the business department got a perfect score (and I really should have got them all right too, but I missed a pair of absolute value bars in the first question, I think I saw them as parentheses, and -- always my problem in math -- I didn't check over my work well enough) but I'm going to try to parlay this ostensible failure into a success . . . I am so distraught and humiliated at my crucial role in our defeat that I can't bear to take part in any other spirit days, or it will remind me of the trauma of this one (that's my story and I'm sticking to it . . . and if there is a moral to my woeful tale, it is this: if the math department says that they are giving you a math test, it's going to be a math test).
Persistence and Patience Pay Off (When You're Dealing with Poop)
A few months ago, I rode through some dog-poop and the poop got all wedged in my bike's knobby tires, and I didn't feel like scraping the poop off the tires with a stick, or spraying the poop off with the hose, so I decided to let the poop alone (winter was approaching) because it was cold, so I figured it wouldn't smell, and I knew once I rode my bike enough, the poop would take care of itself and fall off on its own . . . and now -- months later -- my tires are finally poop-free (aside from a few globs of poop on the edge of the front tire, but I'm sure that will work its way off soon enough).
Caloric Categorization
The only healthy snack that satisfies me is a quartered apple with globs of peanut butter on each slice-- but sometimes I pour chocolate chips onto the peanut butter, and then I'm not sure if it's still a healthy snack, or if it has crossed the line into the territory of a "dessert."
Two News Stories People Can Relate To . . .
I'm plugging away at After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead and though I've read more than a few books on this topic, I'm still learning a lot from Alan S. Blinder (did you know that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act probably didn't have much effect on crisis? fascinating, right?) and while understanding the never-ending saga of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown of 2008 is close to being a job, not all news stories are so dense and difficult; last week was especially good for engaging and easy news . . . first there was the "polar vortex," which everyone enjoyed talking about-- I enjoyed all the fun facts: parts o Minnesota are colder than Mars! New Jersey is colder than Antarctica! and Alaska!-- and the other great story (especially if you live in New Jersey) is Bridgegate, and while I don't think Chris Christie is stupid enough to be directly involved in this fiasco, I sure hope he is . . . and everyone I know is rooting for this outcome as well-- it just seems like the act that will define him-- and it's so much easier to understand traffic and revenge, as opposed to economic policy . . . and if you're one of the seven people in America who hasn't seen the John Stewart bit on the topic, check it out.
If I Could Leave You With One Profound Thought . . .
If you like "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" type stuff (men are waffles and women are spaghetti?) then you have to listen to the first act of This American Life Episode 14 (Accidental Documentaries) where you will hear a husband and a wife sending an audio "letter" to their son in medical school -- the tapes were made in 1967, but they were discovered long after the parents died and the son gave Ira Glass permission to use them on the air . . . but if you don't have time for the entire episode, then go twelve minutes in and there is a fantastic Carlin-esque baseball/football type point-to-point comparison of how men and women communicate . . . mom is discussing spirituality, her depression, and how much faith her husband has, and then there are quick cuts to the dad telling corny jokes and talking at length about some weird machine he is building in the basement for the family business . . . though these two are married, they aren't even living in the same universe and then twenty four minutes into it, dad leaves the son with one last "profound" thought, which is priceless (I played these bits for my high school classes and they loved them).
Dave Invents a Phrase: Parental Capital
Once upon a time, I learned not to take family viewing recommendations from people without kids, but I completely forgot this lesson a few weeks ago-- and when the twenty two year old student teacher suggested the animated comedy Bob's Burgers . . . she said the show is "cute and sweet" and not as crass as The Family Guy, and she's right, but it's still completely inappropriate for my kids -- there's lot of sexual innuendo (including geriatric sexual innuendo) and plenty of jokes about venereal disease, flatulence, cannibalism, dinner theater and other offensive topics . . . and, of course, it's their favorite show ever and because I set the precedent and let them watch it, I can't rescind this without losing major parental capital (and I'm glad, because Bob's Burgers is the first thing that they like to watch that I totally enjoy, Dr. Who is okay, but still a bit campy for me . . . and I'd also like to state that I think I am the first person to ever use the phrase "parental capital" as a parallel to "political capital" and I think the analogy is not only apt, but also super-awesome).
I Prefer to Watch
The difference between coaching soccer and coaching basketball is the difference between watching a squadron of fighter jets and piloting one of them.
Some Thoughts on Radishes, Red and Black
Apparently black radishes are not the same as red radishes . . . I thought I was getting away with something at the vegetable market the other day, when I bought black radishes instead of red radishes-- because I like red radishes and the black ones were a lot bigger, so I figured it would be more radish with less washing and peeling, but black radishes are more like a turnip-- kind of woody and starchy-- and you can't eat them in big chunks, the way I eat red radishes (people in my office think it is weird that I eat sliced radishes and Laughing Cow cheese, and when I explained to them that radishes are delicious, some of the teachers tried them, and one sarcastically remarked: "that's a flavor?")
If I Had A Million Dollars . . . I'd Probably Lose It in the Market
Though it's no literary masterpiece, I highly recommend What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars; Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan give a candid account of Paul's meteoric rise and fall in the futures industry, and along the way, you learn the difference between a gambler, a trader, a speculator, and an investor . . . and why speculators suddenly decide they are actually investors (just after the stocks they own take a nosedive) ; this is a book about human psychology and how it needs to be subverted in order to be successful in the market; the secret is to be like Ayn Rand -- when she was asked if gun control laws violated the Second Amendment, she said: "I don't know, I haven't thought about it" . . . but it's really hard to take that sort of objective and rational approach when you're dealing with your money.
If I Were Subjunctively Rich
People who are not rich usually have an "if I were rich" statement, and this statement is usually designed to show that if this person happened to become rich, they wouldn't be terribly ostentatious and vain and gauche with their new found wealth . . . for example: if I were rich, I would just want to throw big parties for all my friends . . . if I were rich, I wouldn't want a new house, but I would redo my kitchen . . . and so my version of this statement is: if I were rich, I would get a massage every other day (every day sounds too greedy, which is why I say every other day, so I don't sound so extravagant with my hypothetical money).
Ian Demands Content
My eight year old son Ian would like me to report to you that on New Year's Eve, while he was fast asleep on an air mattress several feet away from me, I heard him laughing uproariously in his sleep (and this was excellent to hear, far less creepy than hearing someone talk in their sleep, and far less dangerous than sleep-walking . . . read this fascinating book for more on this theme).
More Than Your Typical Serial Killer Mystery
The Cold Cold Ground, by Adrian Mckinty, is so much more than your typical police-procedural-hunt-down-the-serial-killer mystery; it is set in 1981, amidst "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, and Belfast is close to complete anarchy . . . Sean Duffy, a Catholic cop (or "peeler") works on an entirely Protestant force, and has to investigate a killer targeting homosexuals while navigating a byzantine world of IRA heavies, hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands, Protestant Militia groups, and angry unemployed locals . . . but the book still has a sense of humor (quite a bit more than this film) and some romance between the murders, riots, and explosions; a quick read that takes you back to a chaotic time with which Mckinty is extremely familiar: nine severed hands out of ten.
Too Close For Comfort
I stumbled on a website called Thoughts of Dave and this really worried me -- is he the original Dave? -- but luckily he's not the original Dave, I am the original Dave, as his first post was in December of 2007 (The Ultimate Martini Recipe) and Sentence of Dave started WAY before that . . . in November of 2007.
Dave Solves a Grammatical Mystery All By Himself
Ironically, though this blog is a grammatical nightmare, I solved a grammatical mystery without referring to the internet: I was reading Alan S. Blinder's book After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead and I noticed that in the phrase "an FDIC insured bank" there is the use of "an" before a consonant -- but a consonant in an abbreviation-- and I wondered why this was so, and then I remembered when Keanu Reeves says to Patrick Swayze "I am an F!B!I! agent" in Point Break and you also say "an X-ray" and "an NBA game" but you say "a WNBA" game and it is because when you say the name of certain consonant letters . . . and you only do this in abbreviations . . . then these consonant letters begin with a vowel sound (so for "F" you say "eff" and for "X" you say "ex" and for "N" you say "en") and so the article matches the sound of the letter, not the designation of the letter, and creates an interesting exception to the rule (or at least I find it interesting, but I'm sure most of you are asleep by now).
My Children Weren't the Only Animals in Florida
I would never visit the Naples Florida area again -- too much driving, too much development, too many strip malls, and too many cars -- but the paradoxical thing is that in between car rides (and boat rides) we saw an enormous amount of flora and fauna; we visited several parks (including Delnor-Wiggins State Park, Barefoot Beach, Keywaydin Island, Big Cypress National Preserve, and Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary) and here is an incomplete list of the stuff we saw: Cuban brown anoles, Cuban tree frogs, snowy egrets, ladyfish, lizard fish (apparently, you can put any word in front of "fish" and it is a legitimate fish) blue runner, mangrove snapper, spanish mackerel (we were catching these fish in a boat, and as we reeled them in the dolphins almost ate them, and -- according to my dad's friend-- the owner of the boat-- dolphins occasionally jump in the boat chasing a fish . . . and after we caught the fish, we fed them to the dolphins, which was very fun) a bunny, a bald eagle catching a fish, osprey, pelicans, cormorants, LOTS of big alligators, a baby alligator, a wood stork, a hawk, blue herons, green-backed herons, tri-colored herons, a yellow-crowned night heron, vultures, ibis, sandwich tern, kingfishers, woodpeckers, raccoon, big turtles, snook, alligator gar, a giant water spider, and a school of rays (which Alex and I saw while standing on a paddleboard, and from that vantage point you realize that there's all kinds of stuff swimming around you in the gulf, and that it's best not to think about it).
My Kids Are Those Kids?
So there you are, relaxing poolside, reading a book or closing your eyes for a quick nap . . . and you hear a family with a couple of kids arrive and they absolutely ruin the vibe: these kids are loud, and they fight, they splash with the intent of blinding each other, they bicker violently, scratch and dunk each other, attempt dangerous stunts, dive where they aren't supposed to dive, run where they aren't supposed to run, and whip a ball at each other instead of playing catch with it, and then they finally have to be reprimanded by their parents . . . and I am very sad to report that these kids are my kids, and wherever they go, they destroy whatever mood existed previously, and no matter what we do -- short of beating them senseless in public -- my wife and I can't get them to stop being like this; I think because they are so close in age, they live in their own little universe . . . they don't notice other people or their surroundings, and perhaps someday this will be a benefit -- they certainly aren't self-conscious -- but right now, they are the scourge to anyone lying in a lounge chair with a book.
One Fish Two Fish Blackfish Blue Fish
I highly recommend the documentary Blackfish, which focuses on the dangers of keeping killer whales in captivity (especially one particularly large and incorrigibly uncontrollable whale: Tilikum) and my wife and kids loved it too, but I should warn you to strap yourself in, as there are some graphic moments: you see some footage of the attacks (and seventy killer whale attacks have been documented, all of them occurring when the whales were in captivity), including the recent one where Dawn Brancheau is killed (but while director Gabriela Cowperwaithe allows you to witness more than Werner Herzog does in Grizzly Man, the footage is just to get an idea of what the whales are capable of, and stops short of being a gratuitous snuff film) and you will also see a killer whale penis-- my son Ian commented: "that wiener is bigger than me"-- and learn about the killer whale version of impotence (male dorsal fin collapse) and while my son Alex's review of the film was flawless: "epic but scary," my younger son said the movie was "awesome" but he only gave it "four and a half stars" because "it was missing something" and it turned out that what he thought was missing was "really good" footage of the attacks . . . but once my wife and I explained to him that these were real people that died, and that their friends and family might be watching the movie, then he understood why they didn't show the entirety of the violent scenes; this film is eye-opening and compelling, and it will certainly make you rethink your trip to SeaWorld (or the ersatz Canadian version, SeaLand).
Dave Resolves to Do Some Stuff
This year, I resolve to write shorter sentences . . . terse, grammatically correct sentences . . . sentences that are brief and full of pithy wit and wisdom, and I'd also like to lose a few pounds (actually, more than a few . . . I want to lose 13 pounds) and I would also like to finish my album and learn to play piano and I want to lose my temper less with my children (unless they really deserve it) and I'm also going to appreciate the holiday season more and not gripe so much about materialism and consumerism and the environmental disaster that is wrapping paper, and I'm not going to lie any more either.
Perhaps These are the Best Sentences of 2013!
Negligent and lazy readers, here is your chance to catch up on a year's worth of Sentences by Dave TM and while these "winners" were chosen rather arbitrarily, I think they will give you a good idea of my best work in 2013, which is no worse than my worst work in any other year . . . and so, without further fanfare, here are some of the sentences of the past year that might be better than some of the other sentences of the past year . . . depending, of course, on your personal taste and predilection for this sort of thing . . . as there is no way I could could actually predict what sentences you personally would prefer . . . so let's just say that these are my favorite sentences of 2013:
Best Absurd Question and Answer;
Best Real Question and Answers;
Best Political Commentary;
Grossest Medical Anecdote;
Kids Say the Darndest Things;
Kids Do the Darndest Things;
Best Sentence About Dressing Like A Holiday;
Most Awkward Moment of Dave;
Dave's Greatest Athletic (and Pathetic) Moment of the Year;
Cheesiest Poem of the Year;
Alex Succumbs to Peer Pressure;
Tacos, Racism, and the Circus;
Best Incident Involving Hot Peppers (To Witness, Not Experience);
Best Attempt at a Motif;
Dave's Dumbest Moment of 2013;
Dave's Greatest Moment of 2013;
A Real Moment That People Claimed Was Fictitious;
and finally,
Something Valuable for Children.
Best Absurd Question and Answer;
Best Real Question and Answers;
Best Political Commentary;
Grossest Medical Anecdote;
Kids Say the Darndest Things;
Kids Do the Darndest Things;
Best Sentence About Dressing Like A Holiday;
Most Awkward Moment of Dave;
Dave's Greatest Athletic (and Pathetic) Moment of the Year;
Cheesiest Poem of the Year;
Alex Succumbs to Peer Pressure;
Tacos, Racism, and the Circus;
Best Incident Involving Hot Peppers (To Witness, Not Experience);
Best Attempt at a Motif;
Dave's Dumbest Moment of 2013;
Dave's Greatest Moment of 2013;
A Real Moment That People Claimed Was Fictitious;
and finally,
Something Valuable for Children.
It Is On
My eight year old son Ian and I have a long term bet: he must beat me at ping-pong before he turns thirteen years of age, and the stakes are two pounds of high quality chocolate; the interesting thing is that if I wasn't so proud, I could easily win this bet by simply refusing to play him in ping-pong until he turns thirteen years of age, but of course, I won't do that, both because it would be "cheap" -- Ian's term for this strategy -- and also because I know that my future in athletics is limited, and that soon enough my kids will be able to outplay me at soccer, basketball, snowboarding, and tennis, but even as I age, I should be able to fend them off at games like darts, corn-hole and ping-pong (perhaps indefinitely . . . my goal is for my children never to beat me at these particular games . . . so that long after I am dead, they will have to say to their own children, "you know, I never once beat your grandfather at ___________" and if they lie about this and there is an afterlife, then I will certainly go poltergeist on their asses until they admit the truth, with no obfuscation, and perhaps -- if I am a very skillful poltergeist -- then I will even beat them at these games from the grave (that's actually a fantastic idea for a not-so-scary horror movie . . . a guy takes his family to an isolated Maine hotel for the off-season and goes crazy because he can't beat a trash-talking ghost at ping-pong).
Questions of Grammar
Yesterdays post revealed a thorny dilemma: when you are referring to a scene in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, then do you say the final scene of Of Mice and Men (e.g. the final passage of War and Peace) or do you simply say the final scene Of Mice and Men . . . since Steinbeck has given us a free "of," I chose to be elegant and use it and not put another "of" in front of the title Of . . . and now I've got the word "of" stuck in my head and it's weird, because it's pronounced "uv" and if you say it enough times, it starts to lose its meaning and just sound like some sort of primitive exclamation: uv uv uv . . . and there's nothing on the internet to settle this pedantic absurdity so I will promise to never mention it again (unless someone actually knows the answer).
Tragedy is Often Tragic (Can You Sing a C Sharp?)
I'll never understand why school so often privileges tragedies over comedies . . . kids read Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth rather than Twelfth Night . . . and though Cannery Row is Steinbeck's best novel, that's not the one that is taught . . . and there's nothing worse than a bunch of teary eyed ninth graders listening to the final passage Of Mice and Men, when George has to shoot Lenny, and then explaining to them that sometimes, if you're a really good friend, then you have to shoot your buddy in the head, so he doesn't have to spend the rest of his days in a primitive mental institution undergoing electro-shock therapy and torturous restraint . . . Twelfth Night and Cannery Row are both about parties, however, and I guess pedagogical folks don't consider that educational (unless the party happens in The Great Gatsby, and the result of the partying is the Death of the American Dream, which is suitably tragic and outweighs any possible joy and fun in the book . . . and then there's Lord of the Flies, another fun book full of vines and creepers and tragedy, but at least there's one joke: Jack says he should be the chief of the stranded boys because he is in the choir and "can sing C sharp").
I've Got my Eye on You
All you people who drive into the park (any park . . . I've seen you people in Donaldson Park, Johnson Park, Thompson Park, Roosevelt Park, and every other park that I have frequented on a regular basis) and sit in your car for a while and then drive out of the park . . . without ever leaving your car . . . I want you to know that I am watching you and you seem really sketchy and whatever you are up to, my dog and I are going to catch you at it and deal with you as we see fit.
Yet Again, Dave is Wrong
Why didn't anyone tell me you can't put non-stick pots and pans in the dishwasher?
You Can't Just Ask People Why They're White
I am a fan of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcasts, and in an episode about the Spanish-American War he calls Teddy Roosevelt "a heavily imperialistic, racist version of Peter Pan . . . always leading a troop of kids on an adventure" and that Roosevelt "would make Archie Bunker look like a liberal" BUT Carlin points out that you've got to "grade racism on a curve" because racism was such a pervasive part of society . . . and so I think people should go easy on Megyn Kelly -- while she does claim that a fictional character based upon a saint who was either Greek or Turkish was actually white -- she doesn't want to perpetuate any violence against ersatz non-white fictional versions of the icon, and while she is rather vehement about Jesus being white, when he most certainly swarthy and Middle-Eastern in complexion, and was probably even darker brown than Arabs are now (since there was no sunblock back then and he walked around outside a lot) but in the grand scheme of racism, desiring long dead religious figures and icons of greed and consumerism to look exactly as you look isn't such a big sin . . . so with the curve I'll give Megyn Kelly a C-, more for being stupid than actually being racist.
I Would Fail This Test
If you'd like to work in a South African gold mine, three miles beneath the earth -- then you'll have to contend with the free-fall terror of the "manwinder" -- a contraption which gets the miners down to where they need to be, and you'll have to deal with the creepiness of the "ghost miners," a "rabble of impoverished men" who penetrate the mines, abetted by criminal gangs, and then live in the mines and steal gold ore (they stay down for months at a time, until their skin turns gray -- and folks smuggle down wives, prostitutes, and food for them, in a lucrative black market) and you'll suffer the extraordinary heat and humidity, but before you get to experience all this, you must perform step exercises in a "test chamber" in order to see if your body can cool itself efficiently, and then and only then do you get a 14 day trial period in the mine . . . and my body can't regulate heat very well, so I don't think I'm going to change professions (I'm learning about this in Matthew Hart's new book Gold: The Race for the World's Most Seductive Metal).
Mystery Percentage Uncovered!
One of the great things about Mark Twain is that he achieved the job he desired as a youngster he watched the gargantuan riverboats steam past his home town of Hannibal, Missouri and as a young man he achieved his dream and become the pilot of one of those boats (the romance of it wore off fairly quickly, unfortunately) and so my class was discussing what percentage of people actually become what they wanted to be when they were young (a ballerina, a pilot, a basketball player, an astronaut, a princess, a teacher, a paleontologist -- that was mine, etcetera) but I couldn't find any information on the topic until this morning, and the students and I guess that the number would be low (2% to 10%) but while one article calls the results "depressing" and I'm not sure about the methods of the "Official LinkedIn Blog," I still find it fairly optimistic and reassuring that (according to this fairly small sample of a very homogenous cohort) one in three people achieve what they consider their "dream job" (and although I like teaching, there's no way I'm in that group . . . I wish I could set my own hours and work with my hands and excavate interesting sites . . . but I don't want to roam the desert -- too hot -- I think I'd like to be a plumber).
Seven Books for Reading (with Corresponding Pictures!)
If you like to read books, then head over to Gheorghe: The Blog to peruse my list of the seven best books of the year . . . and even if you don't like to read, you can still head on over because I've included pictures!
Sometimes It's Best to Do Nothing
I lost my little black iPod months ago, but I didn't panic . . . I didn't accuse the cleaning lady of stealing it or blame my children for losing it, nor did I run out and buy a new one or tear our house apart trying to find it . . . and (miracle of miracles!) my wife recently stumbled upon it, in the oddest place: sitting inside a high kitchen cabinet, perched on the edge of the shelf, amidst jars of salsa, Ramen noodle soup, peanut butter, chicken broth, mac & cheese, and crushed tomatoes . . . I must have needed one of these items and put the iPod down as I grabbed it . . . or maybe not . . . I'll never know exactly how it got there, but this is going to be my new method for finding things that aren't imperative to my life -- just wait until the problem solves itself.
Dieting With Rage and Apostrophe
I withstood the temptation free bagels in the main office, tantalizing heaps of cookies in the English office and a prominent display of Reese's Christmas Trees at Wawa using this simple method: every time I laid eyes on the food, I let loose with a stream of profane expletives . . . in my head, of course, and I directed my angry interior monologue at the stuff I didn't want to consume . . . and while I can't print what I said and retain the good taste of this blog (ha!) I can assure you that occasional cursing is good for your health and well-being (but if you use profanity all the f*cking time, then you become inured to the benefits, so try to watch your mouth unless you desperately need to relieve some stress).
Chestnuts Roasting on a Vaporized Cloud of Rocks and Asteroid
While decorating our tree, the boys and I unanimously decided to forego the Christmas carols and instead listen to this fantastically vivid Radiolab podcast called "Dinopocalypse", which turns the previous theory of extinction on its head . . . according to the scientists in this production, dinosaurs did not shiver and starve to death under a shroud of cataclysmic dust, instead something far more fiery and awful happened when a chunk of the Baptistina asteroid collided with the earth 65 million years ago (although NASA now believes that it wasn't Baptistina, but some other unknown asteroid, but . . . who cares, listen to the podcast because it's extraordinarily dramatic and apocalyptic).
Motivation and Consciousness (and Socks)
After I get out of the shower, on the weekend, I'll throw on some clothes -- but not socks -- and then I'll go downstairs to do whatever . . . but I know that invariably, I will want socks, but I neither put them on then, when it is convenient, nor do I carry a pair of socks downstairs with me, to put on when I will inevitably need them (and Saturday morning, when I realized this ineffective habit, I still did nothing to correct it).
Rashomon and Football
Collision Low Crossers offers an alternative to the typical sport's story; there are no underdogs or last second heroics in this 460 page book, instead there is a level of detail about the preparation, professionalism, camaraderie, complexity, turbulence, violence, itinerancy, and hopefulness of NFL football season that is "transformative . . . powerful and unexpected," not only for the players and coaches, but also for author, Nicholas Dawidoff, as the reporter practically lived with the Jets in 2011, so he could write something deeply reported . . . the book was transformative for me as well, and I will never view professional football in the same way again; Dawidoff explains it best in this passage: "Here they all stood together but existed in efficiently separated little worlds . . .There was a Rashomon quality to how differently everyone experienced much that went on in football . . . the daily interactions and even the games had alternative versions for the various players and various coaches."
Sometimes it's Best NOT to Watch Your Children
It's hard for me to watch my boys on the sled hill -- they make one horrible decision after another (they call it "extreme sledding" but it mainly involved a lot of jumping on each other, jumping in the way of sleds, going down backwards, building ramps, not paying attention to other people, walking right up the middle of the hill . . . oblivious to all the other kids sledding, lying in slushy puddles, fitting as many people on a tube as possible, wrestling and shoving snow in each other's faces, and riding down the icy part of the hill standing on their sleds, so that they face plant in horrible ways (Ian lost a tooth on Saturday and scraped his cheek and forehead raw on Sunday) and so I've found the best course of action is not to watch them.
Now That's Juxtaposition!
Nicholas Dawidoff's fantastic football book Collision Low Crossers has the words "recrudescent" and "slapdickmotherfuckers" on the same page!
Ice Is Slippery (Tonka Truck Reux)
I was walking the dog early last Wednesday morning-- all the snow had frozen solid and in many places the sidewalks were coated with a sheet of glistening ice-- so I should have been more aware of my footing, but I was thinking about remembering to send back a Netflix disc that we had left in the blur-ray player and so I didn't notice when I got to a spot where a steep driveway intersects the sidewalk, and I stepped onto a patch of ice, and because of the slope, my left foot shot straight into the air, and it seemed as if I was going to fall backwards and slam the back of my head on the curb, but I whirled my torso around as hard as I could, and tucked, and I managed to spin my body on its horizontal axis while I was in mid-air, so instead of landing on my back, I landed on my arms, which were braced for the fall, but my lower body hadn't fully gyrated in synchronicity with my upper body-- it was slightly behind -- and so I came down on my bad hip, the hip that I injured last spring in a similarly incredible athletic move that did not happen during an athletic event . . . another incident that no one saw, but had their been a witness, would have gone down in the annals of sporting history for time immemorial.
It's Hard to Spell "Kristyna"
Kristyna -- the aforementioned fund raising queen -- not only raises more money for the holiday toy and clothing drive than the rest of our department combined, but she also outdoes everyone in the way of Christmas spirit: she has four Christmas trees in her house, all decorated (the "beautiful" fake one, a live tree "that entered the mix this year" and two little ones . . . which are for her two little children . . . or more specifically, the little trees are for the ornaments her little children made, ornaments which she does not deem worthy enough to adorn the "beautiful" tree).
Deep Breaths . . . Deep Breaths . . . F*ck It, It's Swearing Time!
First, I admonish my child for spending an insanely long time in the shower, and then -- when he finally gets out of the shower -- I notice that his hair isn't wet and, despite efforts to the contrary, I lose my shit.
Can a Good Book Make Me a Jet Fan?
Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football, by Nicholas Dawidoff, is so well written and so full of vivid and insightful detail, that I don't even mind that it's about the Jets; the narrative runs from the extremely familiar -- Rex Ryan rents a giant house in the Outer Banks and he extends "an open invitation to the other Jets coaches and their families to come for a stay, play games like corn-hole toss and washers . . . all he asked was that each family choose one night to prepare dinner for everyone" to things you'd never know from watching football on Sunday: in the 2010 playoff game when the Jets beat the Patriots, it appeared that the Jets were porous against the run, but that was actually "intentional . . . allowing New England a reasonably effective series of runs that distracted the Patriots from what they did best: pass" and the multifarious mysteries of a sport where eleven players are doing eleven different things . . . the 2009 Jets gave up only eight passing touchdowns, but in 2010, when they had two great cornerbacks (Revis and Cromartie) they gave up three times as many . . . was it lack of pass rush? had paired-man coverage become too predictable? was Cromartie jealous of Revis? . . . answers are hard to come by, but the coaches put in 120 hour weeks trying to figure it out, and that's what this book is about -- what goes on during all those hours at the facility, in one sense, the book is barely about the players at all.
Eschatological Ruminations
We looked at several apocalypse tropes in my Creative Writing class last week -- an excerpt from Chuck Pahahniuk's Fight Club; the first pages of a fantastic book about the earth's orbit slowing (The Age of Miracles) and the David Bowie song "Five Years", which is a really long time to think about an impending apocalypse (what would you do? five minutes or five hours is easy, but five years?) and the morning after I did this lesson, I happened to listen to an episode of 99% Invisible called "Game Over" which got me all choked up -- and this was while I was walking the dog at 6:00 AM and shortly after my weeping in the dark, I ran into this big African American dude that I play basketball with (he's a garbageman and was reporting to the public works building, which is next to the dog park) and he'll always talk your ear off -- so I went from picking up dog poop to nearly bawling to removing my headphones and chatting in the dark about his back injury in the span of seven minutes, which is a lot of stimulus for me in the morning and my brain nearly suffered an apocalyptic apoplexy, but I recovered and then played the podcast for my students that day -- the show describes the end of a utopian digital world (The Sims Online) that had a cult following of very dedicated "players" that were really just hanging out and socializing, and there is a wonderful tape of the "DJ," a real human that spun music on a Sims radio station, in the final moments of the game, bidding his online buddies a tearful farewell as the Sim people freeze up, the houses and trees gradually blink out of existence, and finally, a server error message replaces the thriving little digital universe -- and this has made me have a rather selfish thought, that rather than die alone as most of us will, of a stroke or cancer or heart disease or falling down a well, instead I'd rather go out in a major cataclysm: an asteroid, a plague, man-eating ticks from space, whatever . . . because then at least everyone will be in it together (and I'd love to listen to the radio while it's all going down).
Percentage Breakdown of the First Season of 24
I know I'm a bit behind the times, but I finally finished the first season of the acclaimed TV series 24, and I've computed the exact percentages of all the major tropes and themes . . . here they are:
22% suspense;
14% drama;
16% suspenseful drama;
11% gratuitous Elisha Cuthbert footage;
0% jokes;
5% chasing;
17% hiding;
0% giggling;
10% amnesia . . . seriously, amnesia;
4% furrowing;
7% peeking;
0% Commedia dell'arte.
It's Hard to Spell "Asphyxiate"
I often have to remind myself that I have clever children -- they read lots of books and can do math -- but when we are in the car, and they can't answer simple "trivia" questions such as "Which month starts the New Year?" and "What day is Christmas?" it gets a bit frustrating . . . but they did know the answer to one question: "What did the Indians tell the Pilgrims to bury with their corn seed?" and the answer is dead fish, of course, and my kids said that they remembered this fact because I told them when we were burying their pet fish in the backyard, after the fish committed suicide by jumping out of the tank and asphyxiating (and I would like to point out that I spelled "asphyxiate" right on the first try, even though I felt like I was just typing a random jumble of consonants).
Christmas Shoes (and the Holidays) Cause Me to Behave Badly . . . But I Can't Remove These Things From Our Society
I'm not sure how I avoided it, but I never heard the song "Christmas Shoes" until last week -- the song was a topic of conversation in the English office, because apparently my friend Eric threatens to sing the song to his classes if they don't donate money for the toy and clothing drive . . . and this threat works -- and so some of the women in the office (including Krystina, the fundraising queen) made me listen to the song so that I would become more motivated to raise money for poor children (this was not logical in the least, and I'm pretty sure they knew how I was going to react, but I think they take perverse pleasure in yelling at me) as my students were chastising me for not "trying hard enough" or "offering enough incentives to donate" to which I replied: "If I have to promise to give you brownies so you'll donate some money for impoverished children, then you are all horrible people," and -- predictably -- the song made me angry and deranged, instead of jolly, though I must give the song credit, as it's an amazingly bad piece of art, the kind of thing you couldn't write as satire if you wanted to, and it has sent me full tilt into un-godly materialist consumer culture Xmas ranting season, though I really wanted to scale that whole side of my personality down and try to focus on the nearly non-existent "chillaxing" side of my personality, which perhaps with some nurturing can become more prevalent at this supposedly "wonderful time of the year..
Mind Your PQ
It's only fair that I make a full and candid declaration of my "media bias" to my readers, so they can have some perspective on my opinions -- and so I took an incredibly boring 40 question quiz created by "media bias expert" Dr. Tim Groseclose, who believes that mainstream media is slanted to the left and that this slant is having a major impact on the American mind (though I believe that the mainstream media, like any other corporation, is giving the people the stories they want -- and so therefore a reflection of the American mind . . . because if you want conservative news, you know where to get it) and my PQ Survey results (83.2) indicate that I'm fairly liberal -- somewhere between Joe Biden (80.5) and Hillary Clinton (87.6) -- but the quiz seems very one dimensional; if I were to guess, I think I would be a libertarian in respect to people's rights, somewhat conservative in market economics, radical in terms of environmentalism -- though hypocritical about it -- and socially liberal . . . but now I have no idea what I am (aside from an 83.2) but one thing the quiz does point out is how divided our government is . . . though the questions aren't terribly nuanced or exciting, the voting statistics are interesting in themselves (and I also took this quiz, and it labelled me a Working Class Warrior . . . which is absurd, since I'm an elitist pedantic bastard).
The Goldfinch
Nerding It Up (German Style)
My family has outstripped Monopoly . . . the house we rent in Vermont has the German board game Settlers of Catan, and while last spring when we didn't have the fortitude to figure out the rules (despite the fact that I had only heard rave reviews about the game) this time the boys and I were determined, and we attacked the game with blitzkrieg furor, and learned as we went, and we all decided that it may be the best game ever (and we even taught mom!) and Catan certainly rivals RISK (while being more cooperative, fun, strategic, random and tactical than the "game" of world domination) and now my kids want it for Christmas, and I want it too . . . but I am wondering if this will send them down a scary path of cardboard chits, lead figurines, multi-sided dice, and larping conventions.
Humblebraggadocio or Idiocy?
I spent two days in Vermont snowboarding without securing the back of my bindings -- and my excuse is that they are rather new, I bought them at the very end of last season and only used them once, and they are a different type of binding (they are Gnu "fast entry" bindings and have a lever you have to initiate on the back to lock them) and I forgot that part of the entry -- so I rode Stratton from top to bottom without being strapped in, and it didn't bother me all that much (aside from the bottom of my right foot hurting from a lot of pronating . . . but then I noticed the lever and remembered what I was supposed to do with it (although the top of one was snapped off, probably because it was hanging loose and got clipped) and so I will leave it to you to determine if you respect me for my exceptional balance or wish to denigrate me for my absolute lack of understanding of my own equipment (and my wife had to help me figure out the lace system in my boots, which I've had for two years, and could remove for the life of me, resulting in some rather loud and embarrassing profanity in a family friendly ski lodge).
Black is Beautiful?
Black Friday uses a positive connotation of the color black -- this is the day when retailers go from "being in the red" to turning a profit -- but Black Monday and Black Tuesday refer to infamous market crashes and use black to refer to the darkness accompanying the event . . . and then, of course, you can be back in black, the man in black, or none more black . . . it's a very versatile color, or lack thereof.
Rdio Knows Me Better Than My Friends (and Pandora)
How did I survive this many years without listening to Finnish surf rock band Laika and the Cosmonauts?
A Side Dish For Sirius
We braved the storm Wednesday afternoon and motored up Route 87 to our favorite spot in Vermont, and when I took the dog out Thursday morning for a Thanksgiving romp in the snow, he enjoyed a delectable vacation treat: he flushed a mole out of a snow-covered pile of hay, chased it down, and gobbled it up (despite my best efforts to get him to spit it out) and while I was a bit worried that it might make him sick, he suffered no ill effects from eating this shovel-footed rodent, which was certainly fresh, and now I know that we don't need a cat to keep our house free of mice.
Bring the Noise (Algorithm)
A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder explains that a little disorder is often more beneficial than organization -- and while we know this to be true in many systems, from evolution to business -- for many people, it's hard to accept this in day to day life . . . we think we need to be more organized, and rarely compute the cost/ benefit analysis of getting organized, and feel guilt over our messiness . . . but sometimes, when things get to clean, we need to manufacture messiness: once cell phone technology got sophisticated enough to filter out all background noise (something engineers loved, because it enabled less transmission of information, and therefore longer battery life and greater channel capacity) the phone companies ended up having to create a mathematical technique (e.g G.711.II) to add"comfort noise" and they had to do this for three reasons
1) when background noise is removed you can hear faint voice echoes, which is unnerving;
2) background noise indicates that the call is still happening, otherwise, whenever there is a pause in the conversation, it sounds as if the other person hung up;
3) at an unconscious level, we desire background noise and the absence of it is disorienting . . . "our brains rebel at the unnatural neatness."
1) when background noise is removed you can hear faint voice echoes, which is unnerving;
2) background noise indicates that the call is still happening, otherwise, whenever there is a pause in the conversation, it sounds as if the other person hung up;
3) at an unconscious level, we desire background noise and the absence of it is disorienting . . . "our brains rebel at the unnatural neatness."
Slow and Steady Loses the Race (When You're Competing Against a Kenyan)
An excellent Radiolab podcast called "Cut and Run" explains why a small area in Kenya produces so many incredible long distance runners (five American high school students have run sub-four minute miles . . . ever . . . while in one class in one school in Kenya, there were four kids who did it) and the program also explains why I get so fucking hot in the summer -- Kenyans generally possess a "nylotic" body type -- tall, slender, and with very long and tapered limbs -- and this body type sheds heat well and people who live in hot and dry climates have often evolved in this manner . . . and I am neither tall nor slender, and my limbs are stubby and thick (Popeye forearms and bulging calves) and while this is good for lifting things, it is NOT good for shedding heat . . . but that's not the only reason that the Kenyans from this region are great runners: for the final piece of the puzzle, you'll have to listen to the podcast, but I will tell you that involves circumcision and a pointed stick (and American runners aren't going to catch up to the Kenyans any time soon, judging by this statistic).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Giving Heuristics the Finger
I finished Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book Antifragile, and while I can't say it was fun and delightful, like a Malcolm Gladwell, I will say that it is a book you must read -- while Taleb is no great stylist, his thinking is logical, powerful, anti-establishment, anti-intellectual and apolitical -- which is refreshing; while this book frequents some of the same financial territory as The Black Swan, Taleb also ranges far, wide, and crazy with his thesis about systems that gain from volatility versus systems that are fragile, systems that fall apart in volatile times; I love what he has to say about books and technology . . . he explains that probabilistically, they age in an opposite fashion from humans: when you see an old human, you infer that he will probably live less time than a young human, but you should think in the reverse in regards to technology and books -- the longer the item has been around, the longer it probably will be around . . . we are stuck with cars and bicycles and cups and chairs for a long time, and the same with Shakespeare and Homer and Herodotus (Taleb tries only to read books that have been around for a long long time, and he claims only to drink things that have thousands of years of trials: coffee, tea, wine and water . . . he is a wacky guy) and what his philosophy ultimately comes down to is that you can only trust opinions from people with "skin in the game" and so he hates managers and governments and large institutions and pundits (especially Thomas Friedman, who he claims helped encourage the U.S. to invade Iraq, though he himself wouldn't be put in any danger if this happened) and pretty much anyone who doesn't have their own money on the line each and every day . . . he's brash, obnoxious, smart, frustrating, and also offers some diet and weight-lifting tips along with the finance and philosophy.
Two Blasphemous Statements in One Day
I'd choose to visit Philadelphia over New York City any day of the week (and weekends) and while there, I would rather eat a roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and long hots from DiNic's than a cheesesteak with onions from Jim's Steaks . . . so kill me.
An Endorsement of Bar Culture from Jimmy Stewart and a Giant Rabbit
My boss recommended this You Tube video by author John Green to inspire seniors struggling to write their college essays, and not only does it offer some great advice about how to view your life, but it also teaches you how long one million seconds are and reveals the significance of the classic Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey, which is about an affable tippler (Elwood P. Dowd) and his best buddy -- a six foot three inch invisible rabbit (which is the embodiment of a mischievous Celtic "pooka") -- and this film is one of the weirdest I have ever seen; it is oddly gripping, and my kids watched it in its entirety . . . if you like Jimmy Stewart and you're in the mood for something funny and whimsical that also makes you feel good about frequenting pubs and taverns, then this is the movie for you.
Surfing in the Jungle
So my students were working in groups -- connecting this podcast to this article with some help from Neil Postman -- and I was reading nature essays and just finished a vivid one about a trip to Tanzania and an encounter with a hungry lion, and so I yelled over the din to the girl who wrote the piece: "You went on safari! Wow!" and she looked up from the MacBook Air she was using (we have a cart of ten MacBook Airs for classroom use) and answered "No, I'm on Google Chrome" and I yelled, "No, I mean you went on a safari!" and she said, "No, I didn't go on Safari, I'm using Google Chrome" and I yelled, "NO! You really saw lions! You went on a safari!" and then we both simultaneously realized that we were treating the class to an impromptu farce.
Primitive Struggles of Digital Man
Last week, after a year of touting Spotify, I had a sudden resurgence of interest in Pandora -- soccer is over and I actually have some time in my house now, and so I want my computer to spit out jazz guitar and ambient music and trip-hop songs while I do non-soccer things like reading and cooking and helping the kids with their homework -- but then I started to do some research, and there are some other music streaming services that do things similar to Pandora: Grooveshark, iTunes Radio, Google Play and the one I am liking the most so far: Rdio . . . I can't find any definitive opinions on which is the best, and so I am experimenting with all of them, in the hope that I will find one I really like and then actually pay for it (to assuage some of my guilt for pirating so much music in the past) but the big picture behind all this difficult "research" is this: in 2013, you don't need to own music.
Zero Point Zero
When there are clouds in the sky, even if weather.com reports a zero point zero percent chance of rain, it's better to tell your wife that it might rain, because otherwise, if it does rain (which it did) you're going to get an angry phone-call . . . and the fact that the internet says it's not raining isn't going to make her feel better.
Conspicuous Conservation
Steve and Alison Sexton, two young economists (who happen to be twins) have discovered something they call "the Prius effect,": in places that are more "green," if people buy a hybrid car, they tend to buy a Prius -- instead of a Nissan or Honda -- because the Prius is the only hybrid that is immediately identifiable as a hybrid . . . and people in these especially "green" places do this for a good reason: showing your friends, neighbors, and colleagues that you are "green" is financially and socially beneficial . . . i.e. conspicuous conservation and so, in a sense, they are being less altruistic, because they might be buying the car simply to keep up with the Jones's (the Greens's?) and not to save the planet; this brings me to the real reason for this sentence: Saturday morning, I impulsively donated fifty dollars to the Unicef fund for victims of typhoon Haiyan and no one saw me do it (except my wife) and I'm not sure how to remedy this . . . I should have done it at work and "mistakenly" left the receipt page on the screen of the communal computer in the office, but now it's too late for that, so maybe I should I pretend to donate the money at school . . . but that's kind of cheesy, so maybe I'll just mention that I donated the money here on the blog (but, of course, there's no proof that I actually donated the money, aside from my word, which isn't worth very much).
Socrates Would Be a Blogger
Socrates was no fan of the written word; he did not like that writing is immutable, cannot defend itself, and does contain the give and take of a dialog . . . he compares the written word to a painting, distanced from reality, a reminiscence . . . but if he were around today, I think he would approve of a blog-- despite the ugliness of the name-- because of the "live" nature of digital writing -- nothing here in the blogosphere has the permanence of a book, and I can edit things when I want, revise history, remove stupidity, steal ideas and present them as my own, and even occasionally re-title some of my old posts (when I started this project, I titled each post with the date, which was pretty lame, even for me).
The Art of the False Concession
Sometimes I teach my students how to write, sometimes I teach them how to read, and sometimes I actually teach them something important: last week, I realized that my lesson had run too long the day before, and I was going to probably have to move the due date for an essay back a day . . . but I didn't start the lesson with this information, instead I kept the old due date on the board and waited -- because invariably, if you have an assignment due Friday, some brave kid will ask if the class can have until Monday to complete it -- and, as usual, a kid that I also coached in soccer took the bait and asked -- quite nicely -- if they could have the weekend to finish their writing piece, and I took a moment and thought deeply about his request (acting!) and then sighed and said, "Sure, why not" and then I told the class to thank the student for getting them some extra time on the essay and this kid was the hero . . . even though I planned to move the assignment back all along, but this way I was able to give them something against my will - it was their choice, not mine -- and so I told the next period what I had done, and how this was a very valuable skill called "the false concession" and I told them they should practice this on their friends -- instead of saying, "I'm full, does anyone want the rest of these french fries . . . otherwise, I'm going to throw them out" you should wait and when someone asks you for a french fry, you can say, "Sure, they're really good, but you can have the rest" and gift them to your friend, and when you're sitting around with people and you have to get up to go to the bathroom, you should ask the people if anyone wants a drink or needs anything, and then get up, so they think the reason you are getting up is for them, even though you were going to get up in the first place, and then after I revealed these mysteries, I told them to pass the word along to the student from the earlier period about what happened and one girl did this and the next day he was mildly annoyed with me, because he felt duped, but I explained that adults do this all the time and he should learn to do it too (and along with this rule, this may be the most significant thing I'll teach them all year).
Getting It Wrong
A logical guess as to who said "prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" is Yogi Berra . . . but it was actually Danish physicist Neils Bohr, and he certainly hit the nail on the head -- humanity is always getting it wrong, very wrong, when we speculate on how technology and culture will evolve . . . to hear more on this topic, listen to the Freakonomics podcast called Who Runs the Internet?; coincidentally, last week one of my students showed the class the picture above and talked about how he loved looking at old visions of the future -- and, as Clay Shirky pointed out during an interview in the podcast-- we had the imagination to conceive all kinds of wild scenarios: flying cars and floating cities . . . but in all of these visions, women were still wearing aprons and stuck in the kitchen . . . we could imagine a mailman wearing a jet-pack, but not a female lawyer in a pantsuit.
What Do You Call a Baby Doing a Baby Freeze? A Baby Baby Freeze?
My family was in Chelsea Market last Saturday and it was crowded; a young couple with a cute blonde toddler were walking directly in front of us, and as we passed through one of the ragged brick arches, the cute toddler threw herself to the ground and froze, and the couple stopped dead in their tracks and instead of doing what any self-respecting parents would do if their kid was blocking a major thoroughfare: grab your kid by the arm and drag her out of the way, instead of doing this, they began asking her a series of polite questions . . . such as: "Don't you want to get up and walk now?" and "Maybe you should stand up now?" and "Don't you want to come with mommy and daddy?" and so my wife and I almost stepped on her head, and all the people behind us had to similarly hurdle this obdurate baby doing a baby freeze in the middle of the market corridor, and I am wondering if this is a new parenting style, and if it is, then I don't like it (and sorry about the lack of funny image -- shockingly -- there are no pictures on the internet of a baby doing a baby freeze).
Tragically Close
I'm trying my best not to lose my temper with my children, my students and my soccer teams (and this is a tough task, because I'm simultaneously trying to drink less beer during the week) and for the majority of Tuesday, I was successful -- I had a smooth soccer practice with my U-9 team, despite the cold weather and the fact that my older son was in attendance -- but he didn't fight with his brother, and the team listened better than usual, and I was patient about explaining the drills and getting things organized (plus I had a lot of help from the other dads) and my kids were rewarded with hot cocoa once we got home, and then my older son showered and the younger one got into the shower, and I figured I was home free: I had navigated an entire day without raising my voice . . . but fifteen minutes later, when I went to check on Ian in the shower, he was just standing there, doing absolutely nothing -- his hair wasn't wet, there was still hot cocoa on his face, he was just letting the hot water run over him while he daydreamed, and while in retrospect, I can see the appeal of this, I couldn't deal with it at the time, and I may have done some yelling and banged a bathroom door and washed his hair rather briskly, so that some soap got into his eyes . . . and it irritates me that I was so close to making it through the day without losing my shit, but this one little incident, because it happened so late in the day, when my patience has worn itself thin, was my undoing . . . but I will take solace in what Hamlet says to his buddy Horatio, when he realizes that his fate is out of his control: "when our deep plots do pall . . . there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."
Maybe The Soviets Were on to Something (Sort of)
I went to dinner with several couples on Saturday night and I was bombarded with TV recommendations -- because we are living in the Platinum Age of Television -- and so apparently I need to watch Key and Peele and Vikings and Ray Donovan and Banshee and Spartacus and Downton Abbey and new episodes of Eastbound & Down and some other shows that I have forgotten (and this doesn't even include the shows that I'm trying to keep up with: Madmen and The Walking Dead and Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Homeland and Portlandia and American Horror Story and Justified and the first season of 24) and it's all too overwhelming for me, and so I think I'm going to have to take a sabbatical from television, but really what I think I want is a simpler time, when everybody watched the same thing; I recently listened to a 99% Invisible podcast called "Unsung Icons of Soviet Design" and while the Russians didn't have much choice -- everyone played the same arcade games, used the same cassette player, programmed the same awful personal computer and knew the same bedtime song . . . and they all knew this song because they all watched the same program every night at 8:00 PM, and saw the same puppets sing the same lullaby . . . and while I don't think it's necessary that we have a Soviet-style oppressive government that designs all culture and technology, it certainly was nice when you could rely on the fact that everyone you knew watched Seinfeld on Thursday night (and discussed it Friday at work).
I Learn Two Things in One Day!
I have been on a podcast binge, and if you listen to enough podcasts, it's hard not to learn something . . . and so while I was listening to an episode of 99% Invisible about augmented reality called "Reality (Only)" I noticed that Roman Mars was talking much faster than usual, in an almost robotic voice -- but this fit the theme of the show, which was about "reactive music": a unique soundtrack that comes from your headphones, an auditory overlay created by and from the sounds around you, mixed and mastered in your smartphone -- but then a young woman explained something about "reactive music," and her voice was too fast and so I took a look at my Ipod and apparently there is a "variable speed" function for people who don't have the patience to listen to a podcast at normal speed . . . and so I fixed this and Roman Mars returned to normal, his voice deep, calm, and collected and then I actually learned something from a podcast, not about the podcast playing device; and I am going to hyperbolically call this podcast my favorite of all time, it is an episode called "The Modern Moloch," which details how automobiles went from hated, lethal contraptions . . . technological demons to which we sacrificed our children (a political cartoon from the 1920's) to a piece of Americana that we always had a "love affair" with; the podcast explains how an auto lobbying group called "Motordom," realized that it was in the automobile industry's best interest for cars to be allowed unlimited access to the city, and so came up with some NRA style logic -- cars didn't kill people, reckless drivers killed people (this brings to mind Neil Postman's rule of thumb, that no piece of technology is neutral) and along with reckless drivers, you can also have reckless pedestrians . . . this was a paradigm shift, as before this the street was a place for kids to play, adults to socialize, work to be done, and carts to move at somewhere around 5 miles an hour . . . and then Motordom brilliantly co-opted a term for redneck -- a "jay" -- and came up with the novel idea of "jaywalking," which was more a term of ridicule than something legal -- and from this time forward, the streets belonged to the auto (the podcast also has excerpts from Dupont's program where they explain that Americans have a "love affair" with the automobile . . . and since it's "love," then we don't have to behave rationally) and while I try to drive as little as possible, because I hate cars, I know that I'm a hypocrite, because I still use my car to get to work, to go on vacation, and often to get around town, when I could walk, and I often wax eloquently about my Jeep Cherokee and fully understand how many of us fondly remember our first shitty car . . . but it still makes me happy to learn that we didn't always have a "love affair" with automobiles, the affair was shoved down our throat by industry and propaganda, and if we try hard enough, perhaps some day we can take back the streets for our children (I think this bucolic vision involves flying cars).
The Time Is Now (For Michael Jackson Covers and Ghetto Goals)
There comes a time in every man's life when he must take all the scrap lumber from under the deck and nail it together in the form of a primitive soccer goal (which might be referred to as a "ghetto goal") but despite the flimsiness, a man must be proud of his handiwork . . . until it disintegrates into a heap; there also comes a time in every man's life when he must cover a Michael Jackson song, and include literal interpretations of the lyrics (in monologue form) between the verses . . . and while I understand that both of these pieces of "art" might be shoddy work, there is no time like the present (lyrics and more over at Gheorghe: The Blog).
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