Road Trip Day 15: Recommendations

If you are going to visit Yellowstone National Park, I recommend:

1) staying at the cabin we rented in Paradise Valley, though it is thirty miles north of the park, because it's much quieter than the tourist traps around Yellowstone, the scenery is beautiful, the hiking is excellent, and the fishing is world class (I fished for twenty minutes yesterday morning and caught a bunch of whitefish and a good sized brown trout, and we saw the owner and his son pull in a huge rainbow and an even bigger brown trout in the evening);

2) hiking to Passage Falls -- my son Alex has definitely recovered from his virus and set wickedly fast pace-- Catherine, Ian and I could barely keep up with him;

3) eating at the Wild Flour Cafe & Bakery and Follow Yer Nose BBQ in Emigrant-- the tall girls working at the bakery make delicious pizzas, sandwiches, and treats and the pleasant dude from Alabama makes genuine southern bbq and sides at Follow Yer Nose;

4) Bozone Amber Ale and Red Lodge Bent Nail IPA.

Road Trip Day 14: We Drive Until We Arrive

A long day but a good one:

1) Alex recovered from his virus;

2) we visited some of the weird and smelly sites at Yellowstone-- fumaroles, geysers, paint pots, bubbling and boiling mud springs, mammoth inside-out limestone waterfalls, etc-- these places are a great reminder of how much thinner the earth's crust is here . . . the Yellowstone Supervolcano could blow at any time (I find it hard to believe that there are diehard creationists in this region of the country, when it's so apparent-- because of all the fossils and the geologic activity-- that the earth is an old and layered, evolutionary place);

3) after suffering many delays because of road construction, we finally made it to The Wild Rose--  it is located between Emigrant and Livingston, north of Yellowstone in the Gallatin National Forest . . . and my wife did a fantastic job with the rental: it is a brand new cabin on a big piece of land on the banks of the Yellowstone River-- which is full of trout-- and the cabin has it's own trout pond; the family that lives in the main house on the property is extremely hospitable, and set us up with fishing equipment and information; Ian and I both hooked into fish, but neither of us landed them . . . and then we got to eat our first home-cooked meal in a while, as Catherine drove up to Livingston and bought groceries-- including three kinds of sausage and local beer . . . my favorite part of Cat's trip to the local grocery store is when she calls me on the phone and gives me a synopsis of the beer selection, this time I chose Moose Drool Brown Ale and Bozone Amber;

4) my kids are obsessed with Professor Blastoff, a comedy podcast that got us through many of the long drives on the trip, and they are starting to recite the bits from the show when they are in the shower.

Road Trip Day 13: Flatulence in Paradise

We hit our first bump in the road trip yesterday: my son Alex came down with a head-ache, a stomach-ache, some body-aches and a fever . . . but Alta, Wyoming is an especially scenic place to convalesce (I can't stress this enough, The Grand Targhee Lodge is literally paradise in the summer: great hiking, cheap rates, laid back vibe, incredible weather, etc. etc. . . . but I'm sure this is true for just about any ski resort in the Rockies in the off-season, long ago, my wife and I had similar experiences at Breckenridge and Beaver Creek in Colorado); anyway, my wife was nice enough to drive Alex down to Driggs, Idaho so Alex could get some meds (it probably wasn't just kindness, my wife knows that I'm not assertive enough with doctors and she wanted to be certain that Alex got some meds); this bump in the road trip actually afforded us a break in the routine, which was kind of nice (despite Alex's pestilent flatulence, which had the remarkable ability to completely overpower the paradisiacally crisp and dry mountain air) because Ian and Catherine got to take the chairlift to the top of Fred's Mountain and take a hike with a naturalist (great photos on Captions of Cat) while Alex slept and I read about Yellowstone Park, and then Alex, Ian, and I watched the Argentina/Netherlands game while Cat took the lift up the mountain again and hiked the Bannock Trail, a long meandering trail down the spine of Fred's Mountain, which she called "the most beautiful hike of her life" and this convinced me that I should go up there and hike down as well -- and I had plenty of pent up energy from watching the game (which went to anxiety inducing PK's . . . go Argentina! . . . I chose them to win it all in our family soccer pool) but I decided that instead of taking the chairlift up, I would hike to the top of the mountain-- and this was partly because I had a lot of energy and partly because I was too cheap to buy a lift ticket and partly because I was too scared to use my wife's lift ticket even though my wife said there was no way the "granola guy" working the lift was going to deny me . . . but I was too tired to think on my feet if there was a confrontation-- even though my wife provided me an answer as to what to say if the granola guy with the scanner said anything-- plus, I wanted to conquer the mountain without the aid of a funicular, and so up I went, and within moments, I was lost, but a friendly employee using a backhoe to build a banked downhill mountain bike turn showed me the fastest way to the top, which was an insanely steep service road-- but despite the lack of oxygen, I made it up-- and at the top, which is nearly 10,000 feet, the air was fresh and clean, without a trace of my son's noxious viral gas, and you could see all the Tetons (from the backside! if you know what tetons means in French, then you'll find that especially dirty) and there were snow banks on the mountains and majestic pine trees and birds and butterflies and marmots and prairie dogs, and a 360 panorama of the Targhee National Forest in the valley below, but by the time I got back down to the bottom, every part of my body hurt, and I could barely walk up a flight of stairs . . . but Alex was feeling much better, and this wasn't the kid of hike you could take the kids on, way too long and dangerous, so perhaps his sickness was somethign of a blessing for both Cat and I, who have done a lot of family time in the last week and a half . . . and I'm sorry, but I don't have a resolution to this sentence . . . I don't know if Alex is completely over his illness, and I don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow and be completely incapacitated from hiking nearly seven miles at altitude in a little over two hours (that's right, I'm the master of the humblebrag) but like it or not, I will keep you posted.

Road Trip Day 12: We Drive Far Too Far

We took off from Hot Springs, South Dakota at 5 AM yesterday in order to cross Wyoming, swing around the Grand Tetons, cut through a sliver of Idaho, and then zip back into Wyoming on the far side of the Teton range . . . all this to reach our final destination-- The Grand Targhee Lodge-- before kickoff of the Brazil/Germany game . . . but it took us a little longer than expected and so we arrived thirty minutes into the first half, and thought the 5-0 score was a typographical error; the drive took a little over nine hours and now I understand the meaning of Camper Van Beethoven's lyric "no one ever conquered Wyoming from the left or from the right" . . . because we entered Wyoming on the right and finished on the left and we certainly didn't conquer the place, in fact, it nearly conquered us . . . it is such a vast sea of nothingness, of high plains and sharp buttes, exposed rock and sagebrush, pronghorn antelope and cattle, dark hills forever in the distance-- Wyoming is the tenth largest state and only has half a million people (and so-- besides Alaska-- it is the least densely populated state, averaging five people per square mile . . . for comparison, New Jersey is the most densely populated state, with 1189 people per square mile) and while most of the day was a blur of brown land and winding roads, there are a few moments that lodged themselves into my weary brain:

1) at 5:30 AM, Ian ate some of my kippered buffalo jerky-- and liked it-- and so Alex remarked that Ian and the ice cream tasting cowboy from Hot Springs should have switched foodstuff;

2) one of the things John Steinbeck observes about the United States in his book Travels with Charley is that the diction and content of road signs change from state to state; I saw this firsthand in Wyoming . . . there were actually two signs announcing one particular "Roadside Table" and we saw our first "80 mph" speed limit . . . of course, you need to be careful when you're driving that fast, as some areas are "Open Range/ Loose Stock" and others you should be "Bear Aware";

3) the town of Kinnear outdid (undid) Interior, with a population of 44 folks;

4) seeing the Tetons rise out of this vast sea of sagebrush is awesome . . . I think we debated for three hours if the white patches in the distance were snow (they were);

5) when you drink three beers at eight thousand feet, it feels like six (I already learned this with Whitney in Aspen, but I forgot).

Road Trip Day 10 into Day 11: We Learn Too Much

We were barraged with salvos of information from Sunday evening through Monday, probably too much to absorb, so don't quiz me on any of this-- and if you need any visuals, head to Captions of Cat:

1) on our way to dinner at the Firehouse Brewing Company in Rapid City-- highly recommended for both for the food and the beer-- we took an impromptu presidential quiz, as Rapid City has a presidential statue on every street corner; Ian would run ahead and stand on the plaque, blocking the name, and then we would guess which president the statue depicted . . . a number of them were easy: JFK, Taft . . . who was a fatty, John Adams (thanks Paul Giamatti!), Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush . . . and I nailed a number of more difficult ones: Herbert Hoover, Andrew Jackson, and Harry Truman . . . but some were impossible for us: Martin Van Buren,  Chester A. Arthur, and James K. Polk;

2) after a fantastic meal at the Firehouse, we walked through Main Street Square and stumbled upon a theater group setting up an outdoor production of Hamlet-- which was to begin at dusk-- and though we were full of food and beer and tired from a day of hiking, this piqued my curiosity-- were they going to do all four hours of the most famous Shakespearean tragedy on a tiny stage in a South Dakota park? or was this going to be a parody?-- so we stayed to see and it was fantastic: a boiled down, eighty minute version of the play, but all Shakespeare-- just the best bits-- and my kids loved it (I was also giving them a running commentary, using my brother Marc as King Claudius, which was probably very disturbing . . . you come home from school and I'm dead and Uncle Marc is in our house and he says I'm your new dad and then I show up as a ghost and tell you that Uncle Marc murdered me . . . so what would you do? . . . and my son Alex didn't bat an eye, he said "kill him" and then I remembered that The Lion King was a less disturbing parallel to the plot, and used that for reference) and my kids also loved watching the South Dakota delinquent teenagers hanging out in the parking deck just behind the stage, setting off car alarms and smoking cigarettes and acting cool (and Ian also loved sneaking behind the stage to see what character was going to enter next);

3) Monday morning we drove to Wind Cave National Park and I learned, for the seventeenth time, that I don't like cave tours and that if you've seen one cave, you've seen them all-- but my kids loved it and they want to do the four hour "Wild Cave" spelunking expedition once they are old enough (I also learned that some people are really really stupid . . . who brings an 18 month old screaming child on a cave tour? . . . though this wasn't as bad as when Cat and I went through Mammoth Caves in Kentucky and got stuck behind a family with horrible body odor);

 4) we learned that bison really do roam free on the plains of South Dakota;

5) we learned that Hot Springs is the most scenic town in the Black Hills-- all the buildings are made of light red sandstone and some are stately, a warm stream runs through the center of town-- fed by the springs-- and there is a even a waterfall . . . the place has none of the tourist vibe of the towns up near Mount Rushmore (it actually has a sense of decay, which is paradoxical, considering the solid nature of the buildings);

6) my children learned that Evans Plunge is their favorite place on earth-- it is billed as "the world's largest natural warm water indoor swimming pool" and it is quite huge, a giant gravel bottomed pool filled with 87 degree mineral water from the eponymous hot springs of the town . . . and it has some old school water slides-- extremely fast and scary-- and rope swings and rings, and an outdoor pool and water slide as well . . . worth visiting;

7) and though we had learned too much, we had to visit the Mammoth Site, as that's the reason we were in Hot Springs-- so we took another tour, and it was well worth it-- this site rivals Ashfall-- but this time the fossil trap was a slate-ringed waterhole . . . animals would come to snack on the plants that grew year round at the site (because of the hot springs) and then would slide down the slippery slate into the pool of water and drown or die of starvation; the site is sixty seven feet deep, a treasure trove of Pleistocene bones preserved in sandstone like fruit in jello-- mainly mammoths (there are several different species represented, including the gigantic Columbian mammoth, see the photo below) but they also found the remains of the giant short-faced bear, the biggest bear and possible one of the biggest mammalian terrestrial carnivores to ever live on our planet;

8) we learned about Crazy Horse on the way to Wind Cave National Park-- the twenty minute film at the monument nearly made me cry-- carving this mountain is like a great underdog sports movie . . . a far more moving place than Mount Rushmore (in fact, you could fit all four busts at Mount Rushmore in Crazy Horse's head);

9) I learned that nothing looks  sillier than a skinny dude in full cowboy attire-- black Stetson, black pinstriped button down long sleeve shirt, blue jeans, boots-- discerningly tasting an ice cream sample on one of those cute little spoons.

Road Trip Day Ten: We Visit Places With Excellent Names

Yesterday, we drove from Rapid City through Sturgis, and into Spearfish, and then descended into the Spearfish Canyon and hiked the 76 Trail and to Roughlock Falls, and then hooked around and had a burger at Lewie's in the town of Lead and then proceeded to Deadwood (the highlight of which was eating chocolate truffles at The Chubby Chipmunk, a dilapidated whitewashed concrete shack at the edge of town with a full parking lot and a tiny interior, where you can order from a vast array of expensive and very dense chocolate truffles -- they even have a truffle vending machine outside . . . it's $11.75 for four truffles and well worth it) and then we went back to Rapid City, which has a park full of concrete dinosaurs at the top of a mountain in the middle of town, and my kids said this place is more fun that Mount Rushmore because you can't climb on Mount Rushmore but you can climb on the concrete dinosaurs.

Road Trip Day Nine: We Drive (Not So Rapidly) to Rapid City

Yesterday morning, we bid farewell to Interior (population 67) and drove Route 44 to Rapid City (population 67,000) and-- after the prerequisite visit to Mount Rushmore-- we meandered through the Black Hills on the Needles Highway, which is an outrageously scenic and outrageously stomach-churning road-- lots of hairpin curves, tight switchbacks, and one-car-width-stone tunnels-- and just before we entered one of these skinny tunnels, we saw a mountain goat perched on a cliff, so now we know how to tell the difference between a big-horn sheep and a mountain goat (we saw big horn sheep in the Badlands) and it was very very hot again, which was fine, except that all the real men in the region wear cowboy hats, blue jeans and button down shirts with long sleeves-- long sleeves which they never roll up-- so I felt like a tool in my EMS light weight hiking shorts, black baseball hat and Adidas t-shirt; finally, for your amusement, I offer the names of two convenience/fuel establishments we have encountered multiple times in the West:


1) Kum & Go;

2) Loaf 'N Jug.

Road Trip Day Eight: The Badlands Start Treating Us Good

An epic day in the Badlands yesterday, but I will try to keep it terse:

1) I got up early to catch the sunrise over the Badlands, but so did the mosquitoes;

2) we tackled the Notch Trail at 7 AM, when it was cool and cloudy-- and after we ascended the rope and log ladder, edged our way along a cliff, and peered through the windy notch and into the White River Valley, we remarked at how much easier the hike was than the guidebook described it, and how lucky we were that it wasn't so hot . . . and then it started pouring rain, big drop rain-- the kind that hurts-- turning the ash and broken sandstone trail into a treacherous mudslick-- we tried to climb into a cave, but the climb turned out to be more dangerous than the actual trail, and then -- as fast as it came-- the downpour stopped and we made it down without injury (and later in the day we saw several ambulances at the head of this same trail and heard from a fireman at the rodeo that a guy fell from the rope ladder and broke his leg);

3) we found the best food in Interior (and maybe on the planet) at the Cedar Pass Lodge . . . and this could be hyperbole because we had been hiking all morning (and ate dinner at The Wagon Wheel the night before) but the Sunrise Fry Bread-- a piece of Indian fry bread covered with buffalo meat chili, refried beans, two fried eggs, and cheese-- is the best breakfast I have ever eaten in my entire life, and everyone else was very happy with their food as well;

4) we rode the Loop Road through the park, stopping several times to climb surrealistic rock formations-- the Badlands are a paradise for kids, a giant game of king of the hill, but not as fun for parents, who notice the cliffs and rockslides-- and we saw big horn sheep, prairie dogs, and bison;

5) Wall Drug was just as tacky as ever, and we learned that folks in South Dakota call seltzer "soda water" . . . we thought our waitress was mentally challenged and she thought the same of us, until we sorted the whole thing out;

6) my son Ian has been keeping a journal and when he read his description of the Ashfall Fossil Beds, I realized that he described what happened there better than me: "there was a giant volcano and it erupted and the lava didn't touch the animals but they suffocated from ash and the bad air from the volcanic eruption" and he also described the dynamic between my wife and me when we arrived at the Badlands Budget Host: "at the hotel there were fishing hooks in the bed and mommy got mad at dad because he chose this motel."

7) though it was ninety degrees, we went to the rodeo (and when I expressed my worry about the heat and the rodeo to the grizzled waitress at The Wagon Wheel, she agreed that it would be brutal but gave me some advice: "drink a lot of beer" but that didn't help-- and though we were very impressed with the bronco riding and the steer wrestling, we left after an hour and went back to The Badlands Budget Host to enjoy the above ground pool . . . even my wife took a swim).

Road Trip Day Seven: Go West, Young Man (and Keep Going and Going and Going)

Yesterday, we crossed the Missouri River and our trip into the West truly began:

1) Nebraska is a browner, drier, bigger version of Iowa-- bigger farms, bigger spaces, and smaller towns . . . and the gas stations serve "fried gizzards";

2) the Ashfall Fossil Beds is something to see before you die . . . beardogs, barrel bodied rhinos, three toes horses, giant turtles, a barrel bodied rhino embryo in utero, horned rodents, moon rats, saber-toothed deer, etc. etc. . . all frozen in place by the ash of a giant volcano that erupted 12 million years ago: this is the Pompeii of Mammalian Megafauna (I liked it so much there I did the unthinkable . . . I bought a t-shirt);

3) we then drove to Interior, South Dakota-- population 67-- which is literally inside the Badlands and we checked in to The Badlands Budget Host, which my wife described as "the scariest motel I've ever stayed in" and while I admit that it is a bit rustic (Ian found a fishing hook in one of the beds) but the views are spectacular and the A/C worked-- and thank God for it, as we went from a breezy cool day in Nebraska to a broiling lunar moonscape;

4) the Horseshoe Bar looked a bit seedy (everything looked a bit seedy in Interior, but that's because we got such great hotel deals with Hotwire.com in the Midwest-- every place we stayed had an indoor pool in a glassed in atrium overlooking a body of water-- and so the Budget Host's above ground pool didn't have a chance in hell to impress, though my kids didn't care) and so instead we ate an early dinner (screw you, Mountain Time) at the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill, which was located in "the business district" of Interior-- there was actually a sign-- and The Wagon Wheel was made of colorful corrugated metal; the interior of the place contained a grizzled biker, a grizzled bartender, a grizzled waitress/cook, and a bunch of video poker machines-- and surrounding one of the machines were several generations of a Native American family-- all female-- grandma transfixed by the screen, sipping her third Tecate, grandma's daughter playing on the adjacent machine, while her pre-teen daughter watched the youngest-- a cute little toddler in pink-- as she ate chicken fingers off a napkin on the floor of the bar . . . she was sitting on the floor of the bar, and her napkin was on the floor of the bar . . . the food was edible, but not much more, and that's perfectly fitting for a place called the Badlands.

Road Trip Day Six: Des Moines is the Capital of Iowa

Bill Bryson begins his book The Lost Continent with an opening worthy of Herman Melville: "I come from Des Moines . . . somebody has to" and then he pokes good-natured fun at the place, calling it "hypnotic" and boring and all the other things that people usually say about their hometown, but after driving for 13, 978 miles, visiting thirty eight of our fifty states, and cracking innumerable jokes along the way, Bryson finds new appreciation for Iowa's capital city; coincidentally The Lost Continent is the first book I finished on our road trip, and I finished it the day before we headed into Des Moines-- so I was looking forward to seeing the birth place of America's funniest expatriate travel writer, and the city did not disappoint, it is a charming place, amidst fertile, green, rolling hills (Iowa is NOT flat, though my father told my kids this repeatedly before we left) with a nice little zoo and a cool sculpture garden, beautiful botanical gardens and hip restaurants (we ate lunch at great little bar called El Bait Shop) and most importantly (after Chicago and New Brunswick) the driving is easy and the parking is plentiful . . . I really can't stress this enough, the city is on a grid and every road is three lanes wide (most of them one way) and wherever you want to go, there's a parking spot right in front of your destination-- there's even parking on the bridges!-- and there is no traffic to deter you from pulling in to your spot: a most excellent place, in some parallel life I'd like to settle there.

Road Trip Day Five: Megan Inadvertently Uses Zeugma

As we drove through the endless farmland between Chicago and Altoona, I worried that the USMNT would be blown out by Belgium and I also worried that we wouldn't be able to find a fun place to watch the blow-out-- but we were lucky enough on both counts; Jethro's BBQ was walking distance from our hotel, and-- after I explained just how far we had driven-- our extremely friendly waitress (Megan) not only recommended the beef brisket but also that I "get trashed" and I took her up on both accounts (she also drew us a lovely map to the local WalMart on a napkin) and though the USMNT lost the game, and though they could have gotten blown out-- they didn't-- and this was mainly because of NBTHS alumnus Tim Howard, who did my hometown proud, so no complaints about our first day in Iowa (aside from the surfeit of corn and the wind . . . but I think that comes with the territory).

Road Trip Day Four . . . I Begrudgingly Adjust to Central Time

Diligent readers are familiar with my rants about Daylight Savings Time, but this time I have nothing to complain about, as I've inflicted Central Time upon myself . . . so this sentence is going to be a little logy (can a sentence be logy? or just the author of it?) as I woke up at 4:30 AM Monday morning, and after reading some Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent) for inspiration, I did my favorite early morning thing to do at a hotel-- go to the  hotel fitness center and give whatever odd workout devices they have a perfunctory try and then swim some laps in an empty pool-- and though I got an early start, I still had a great time in Chicago; the Shedd Aquarium is awe-inspiring-- even better than the one in Camden-- and the Art Institute is equal to the Met (I saw more Magritte paintings in Chicago than I did in Belgium) and the sculptures and fountains and architecture and skyline in Millennium Park are as beautiful (or more so) than they are in Central Park and the "L" train system is equally as complicated, confusing and expensive as the subway in The Big Apple . . . the CTA employee saved us a few bucks on tickets by sending us around the block to Walgreens to purchase some kind of re-loadable card and then she had to use her personal card to scan the kids at a discount . . . absurdity . . . and the gist of it all is this: I don't know why this surprises me so much-- perhaps because we drove across a sea of farmland-- and I should have known better . . . but Chicago is a real city!

Road Trip Day Three . . . We Travel at the Air-Speed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow

Pittsburgh to Chicago is a long and boring haul through Ohio and Indiana, but luckily my son Alex lost his mind at the latter end of the ride, providing some much needed entertainment:

Alex: a coconut is almost a mammal!

Dad: what?

Alex: it has hair, and it gives milk . . . all it needs is to have live young;

Mom: what about a heart and a brain?

Alex: Ian doesn't have a brain, and he's a mammal!

but despite the long haul, the high temperatures, and my epic quest to find parking, we were able to rally and cover a lot of ground in the city-- for all the shortcomings of my children, I will give them this: as long as we keep feeding them, they can walk forever . . . even with the addition of "punishment push-ups," which they are consistently doing for various bad choices; anyway, here are a few highlights and lowlights of Day Three:

1) major surprise . . . when it's hot in Chicago, it's a beach town . . . at the shore of Lake Michigan, the skyscrapers abruptly end and the beaches begin . . . and another surprise . . . there were lots of attractive, scantily clad women roaming about (I had imagined the women of Chicago to be stout and solid . . . female versions of the guys in the SNL "dah Bears" skit) and there were loads of people sailing little boats and partying on yachts;

2) the view from the top of the John Hancock Observatory is astounding, but it must eventually get rather mundane, as the girl who ran the elevator made herself an excellent rubber band ball and was having a good time bouncing it;

3) the view from our hotel is awful, as all the rooms at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart are on the interior of the building, but this is karma-- as we were upgraded in Pittsburgh and got the best view in the city-- so things needed to even out (and you can see down into the hotel pool, which is mildly entertaining . . . and if you leave the room, you can look down into the lobby, which is very nice . . . the hotel is a donut within a donut, I think);

5) deep dish pizza at Gino's East is good but very filling (and also really expensive and takes quite a while to make) so though the kids loved it, I much prefer Pete and Elda's at the Jersey shore;

5) nutritionally, I had an especially ugly day: Jimmy Dean sausage and egg sandwich for breakfast, two McDonald cheeseburgers for brunch, a chili dog with onions at Portillo's for lunch, and deep dish pizza with sausage, peppers, and onions for dinner . . . but at least I avoided the deep-fried cheeseburger;

6) there was also some serious nutritional disappoint when we found out that Rick Bayless's two Mexican places that we were dying to visit are closed on both Sundays and Mondays . . . our only hope is a quick breakfast on Tuesday before we head to Iowa.

Road Trip Day Two . . . Can I Keep It Short and Sweet?

In order to keep my fans from migrating to my competitor's blog, I am going to summarize our second day in Pittsburgh in as few words as possible . . . I'm going to try my best to be terse and laconic:

1) we visited the Carnegie Science Center, which is quite a bit better than the Liberty Science Center (although I found being inside the submarine extremely claustrophobic);

2) while my wife and kids were watching a show in the Buhl Planetarium, I slipped off to the Jerome Bettis Grille in order to watch the noon Brazil/Chile World Cup game and found myself sitting alone, making strange noises at a giant TV, and drinking copious amounts of beer to mask my embarrassment, because every other person in the bar was in town for the 4 PM Pirates/Mets game, and they were doing their best to look at anything besides the soccer match-- though it was on the majority of the TV sets in the place-- so these people were watching baseball pre-game, or hockey reruns, or even looking at the autographs and memorabilia on the walls . . . they all seemed to be of the same mind, that if their glance happened upon soccer, they would turn communist or something worse . . . but my wife and kids joined me at half-time and an ethnic guy (Asian? Filipino? Colombian? all three?) from Long Island, who was also a soccer coach, stood next to us and we all yelled and rooted like crazy people, as the match was fantastic and went to penalty kicks, but even though they made a special announcement on the PA about the game and actually shut off the classic rock for a bit and played the volume, the baseball fans in the bar still refused to look at the game, they focused on their deep-fried cheeseburgers and got ready to enjoy an afternoon watching America's pastime, not some artistic sport that you play with your feet and head (and you heard me right, the Jerome Bettis Grille specialty is the deep-fried cheeseburger . . . I was tempted to order one until I actually saw the sort of person who eats one . . . 

3) we then hauled it up the hill into the Mexican War Streets -- the best name for a neighborhood ever-- and went on an epic quest in the epic Pittsburgh heat to find The Mattress Factory . . . a contemporary art museum with room sized installation pieces . . . and once again we were going against the grain, walking past a tide of Mets and Pirates fans, none of whom knew the way to this museum . . . but we finally found it and it was weird and eerie and dark and fun and mainly air-conditioned, much more exciting than an afternoon baseball game in 90 degree heat game could ever be;

4) and finally, my wife (and competitor) has banned me from using her pictures, so this is all I have to offer in the way of photography (and so much for keeping it short and sweet, but I'm better with words than with a camera . . . and that's not saying much).

An Original Photo by Dave

Road Trip Day One . . . We Become Honorary Pittsburghers

I'm going to stretch the boundaries of the sentence for these posts (mainly because I'm competing against another, ersatz blog being written by my wife -- Sentences of Cat -- and I want to be the definitive and comprehensive provider for information about this cross country trip) and so I'm going to use a chronological listing format to give you all the stuff you need to know:

1) we made it to Fallingwater without much conflict in the car, mainly because of two podcasts -- Song Exploder  . . . artists take apart songs track by track and explain how they put them together -- and Professor Blastoff . . . which is slightly inappropriate for the kids but hysterically funny;

2) Fallingwater makes miraculous use of steel-reinforced concrete, which I just learned all about in the highly entertaining book Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, and while I could appreciate the aesthetic charms of the place, mainly what kept running through my mind was: this would be an awesome place to have a party! but then I kept imagining drunk people leaning over the low balustrades and falling onto the wet slate below, and I questioned Frank Lloyd Wright's brilliance;

3) Hotwire upgraded us without telling us, and we found ourselves staying in the Pittsburgh Wyndham Grand, with a fantastic view from high above the confluence of the three rivers (the Ohio, the Allegheny, and the oft forgotten Monongohelalhgonelagonorrhea) and so after a surprisingly cheap meal at Pittsburgh's oldest restaurant -- the Original Oyster House-- we were able to watch the sun set into the confluence (and you're not going to get a word like "confluence" over at my competitor's blog;

4) the concierge at the Wyndham asked me where we were coming in from, and when I told him New Jersey, he said, "I've been to Elizabeth . . . they'll murder you twice there before you get out of the car," and I agreed that it was a tough town -- but not quite that bad (we travel there and play soccer, and while they play rather rough and tumble, no one ever gets knifed) and then he said, "I've also been to Camden" and I told him that's a rough town too, but "with a great aquarium" and I didn't bother to explain to him that not all of New Jersey is evocative of Mad Max and that I live in an innocuous Jersey town full of liberals, lesbians, Orthodox Jews, grad students, and a sprinkling of every ethnic group on the planet, and he assured me that Pittsburgh "is like Mr. Rogers" and it did seem to be full of nice old white men like the concierge, but we did meet one black guy, who owned the ice cream parlor we went to . . . the place is called DreamCream and each flavor in the shop represents a charity-- it could be an organization like the Red Cross, or an individual who needs an expensive medical test -- and by purchasing a particular flavor, you support that particular charity . . . so very Mr. Rogers;

5) and while I'm not above trashing my competitor's blog, I will steal one of her pictures.

Soccer Injury

During the USA/Portugal match, all the kids watching the game were sitting on the floor of my living room, and my son Ian didn't jump up quickly enough when the US scored their second goal, and so he got kneed in the side of the face . . . so amidst the jubilation he was curled in a ball, crying, and had to be extricated from the throng of cheering boys . . . and in my usual empathetic fashion I blamed the injury on his slow reaction time to the goal-- not the insane boys that injured him-- and advised him "when you watch soccer you've got to really pay attention because if a goal gets scored people go crazy."

Boats: Could They Cure PTSD?

In Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, Geoff Dyer summarizes writer Karl Marlantes theory: "in the Second World War people came home slowly, gradually, by boat, as part of a unit" but "in Vietnam, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, the swift return and dispersal of the group was accelerated and increased, something that may well have played a part in the drastic increase of PTSD" . . . and while this reverse acclimatization into the civilian life may be necessary to healthily adjust from wartime to peacetime, it's also possible that WWII guys were just tougher (this was the time of leather football helmets, a time when you could still die of septicemia from a rotten tooth). 

My Grill Communicates With Me In the Only Way It Knows How

I assumed that the very high temperatures on my Ducane grill thermometer were like the zone beyond the 85 mph mark on my mini-van's speedometer-- just for show-- but apparently, if you let enough fat and grease and meat shards pile up on the heat plates and the floor of the grill, and then throw a bunch of burgers on and close the lid, you can start a 700-degree fire inside your grill -- which charcoalizes burgers in mere minutes (and inspired me to finally clean the grill).

Itinerary

I am posting my cross country trip itinerary here so I don't get any statements like this after the trip . . . you should have told me you were going to Nebraska, my uncle owns a circus in Nebraska and you could have performed in it! or You were in Hot Springs, South Dakota last week . . . I was in Hot Springs, South Dakota last week . . . we could have met for margaritas at my favorite place . . . so here it is, and if you have any information about these places, I'd be happy to hear it: Pittsburgh to Chicago to Sioux City (near Adventureland) to Nebraska (Ashfall Fossil Beds) to the Badlands to the Black Hills (Rapid City and Hot Springs) to the Grand Tetons and finally to Yellowstone (we are staying north of the park in Emigrant, Montana).

Why Did All the Good Stuff Happen a Long Time Ago?

A lot of the supernatural -- werewolves and mermaids and vampires-- and the most fantastic religious miracles -- Jesus walking on water and Moses parting the Red Sea-- can probably be attributed to the fact that no one in ancient times had access to eyeglasses.

Parallel Preparation (Not Really)

If you're a diligent reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I haven't been reviewing many books lately, and that's because I have been reading travel guides and hiking guides and (my favorite) eating guides, in preparation for our cross-country trip, but one writer was able to pull me away from this preparatory research -- the humorous British curmudgeon Geoff Dyer; his new book is called Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush and it is a study in the act of perpetual preparation, because-- as the men on board repeatedly tell him-- the lessons they learn about how to effectively and safely run an aircraft carrier are "written in blood"-- the bad things that can happen on the ship and in the air above the ship are multifaceted and multifarious, and Dyer describes them all (though he doesn't witness anything horrific, but he hears about soldiers being sucked into jet engines and blown overboard and killed by catapulting cables and the variety of ways to crash land, etc. etc.) and the book is both absurdist in its detailed observation and inspirational in how these men lead their lives, and it's great preparation for our cross-country trip, because no matter how claustrophobic it gets in the mini-van and no matter how annoying the kids get, this is NOTHING compared to what men and women have to endure when they are contained for months on an aircraft carrier (which, to Dyer's chagrin, has neither a bar nor a ping-pong table).

Sometimes A Short Walk Can Be a Very Good Time

I warn my composition students not to take to much lined paper at the start of the exam, because the only fun thing that you can do during the course of the examination is walk to the front of the room to get more paper (of course, normal people can sit in one place for an hour and a half straight without taking a short walk, but I know that I need little breaks like that to look forward to).

Probably Better Off This Way

On Wednesday morning, I tried to telepathically call my dog to my bedside, but he didn't come; though this would have been a neat trick, it's probably better that he can't read my thoughts . . . I wouldn't want to burden anyone with my stream of crappiness, especially my most faithful canine companion.

I Welcome the NSA to Read This

I am reading Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State and while the revelations in the book are frightening and I certainly agree with Greenwald's point that "surveillance changes human behavior . . . people who know they are being watched are more confined, more cautious about what they say, less free" but I wonder if this is always an awful thing; there are people who feel they are always being surveilled by an omnipotent and omniscient being, and this doesn't bother them, in fact, it makes them strive harder to be moral and a good person in the eyes of their God (which can mean a lot of things, but that's a whole other can of worms) and I'm trying to convince my children that they are often being watched, even when they don't realize it (such as when they are eating in a restaurant, and my older son picks his nose and eats it) and even if our electronic correspondence is being surveilled by the U.S. government, this really hasn't changed things, as Greenwald still published his book-- sureveilled or not, he wasn't disappeared, like Dunbar in Catch-22, so I say to Uncle Sam, surveil away . . . read my third rate blog and my banal text messages . . . enjoy!

A Man Can Dream, Can't He?

I'd be fired for this, I suppose, but the other day, when I was showing my senior class the climax of The Matrix, there was a lock-drill . . . and so there was trouble inside the computer generated world designed to enslave humans (the matrix) because Neo was locked in battle with Agent Smith and there was trouble in "reality," because the robotic squid creatures were attacking Morpheus's hovercraft, and then the lock-down drill added another layer of trouble in our own reality outside of the movie and it made me think it would be really wonderful if I could stage some kind of attack of my classroom during this climactic moment, so there would be actual believable trouble on three levels of reality . . . the reality of the matrix, the reality of the world outside of the matrix but inside the film, and then the reality of the place where the film is being shown (some technical troubles with the projector might help the metaphor as well) but considering the climate in schools these days, I don't think it would be wise for me to stage an attack of my own classroom to accentuate a meta-philosophical point.

The Other Black Night

While my favorite Black Knight is the heavily armored dude in The Holy Grail who loses his arm and claims "it's just a flesh wound," I will concede a close second to The Black Knight pinball machine -- which introduced the two level playing field and also had feature called "Magna-save," which allowed you to press a button and operate an electromagnet to save your ball from draining-- when I played this thing back in 1980 it absolutely blew my mind (multi-balls on two levels! holy shit!) and so when the boys and I went to Asbury Park to visit the Silverball Pinball Museum last week, I was hoping they would have this machine . . . and they did, and it was a good lesson about the power of nostalgia over memory, because the game looks pretty lame and dated now (especially compared to the machines surrounding it) and so my advice is this: don't revisit anything from your youth, because experiencing it in the present might destroy happy memories from when you were ten (although I still had fun playing Centipede . . . whatever happened to the track ball?)

Dialing It In (For Good Reason)

This sentence is to celebrate the longest run of beautiful weather in the history of central New Jersey (and I apologize for a weak literary effort, but it's been too nice outside to sit at the computer and write . . . if I lived in Colorado this blog wouldn't exist).

A Student Teaches Me That LIfe Is a Different Kind of Highway

My students had to present philosophical metaphors last week and a very smart girl explained that her take on life is like driving -- she said that we are all rolling along the road, some one way and some in the opposite direction, and we all share the road but we don't know exactly where the other cars are going -- they may even be going to the same address as us, but for a very different reason, or just using the same road -- and we may wave or give them the finger, but we don't fully understand them and what's going on inside that vehicle . . . and that parallels her view of other people, we don't know their full intentions or thoughts but we can see similarities and/or major contrasts in how they are moving and acting and this gives us clues to how they think and feel; this philosophy boggled my mind because when I am driving, I don't think of the other cars as human entities, I think of them as obstacles and I'm often angry and wondering What the hell are these people doing out here on the road? Don't they have jobs? Are they just driving around aimlessly to irritate me? Why are they taking up space on this planet? Why are they driving 34 miles an hour in the passing lane? and if I get caught in a traffic jam, I don't console myself with the fact that I'm surrounded by other conscious people who have wants and needs, and a desire to get places, instead I feel claustrophobic and oppressed and insane and want all the cars around me to be vaporized by alien lasers form space . . . but from here on in, I'm going to try to change (a little) and (occasionally) attempt to empathize with both other cars and other people.

RISK Statistics Make Me Wonder

My son Ian begs us to play RISK, which is a major commitment, and then when we finally agree to play, he's usually miserable . . . on average, he cries 2.7 times a game, he outright cheats 6.5 times a game, and he fake quits 2.2 times per game; so my question is: why does he desire to "play" this game of domination, manipulation and betrayal . . . why does he desire this emotional turmoil?

This Hockey Puck Has Nothing To Do with the Rangers

A student of mine relayed an incident from her brother's dorm in college which I found radically inventive, but apparently, "to hockey puck" someone is a fairly mundane thing . . . so if you live in a dorm and you hate your RA, then you can urinate into some kind of cylinder -- such as the top of a peanut butter jar -- then freeze the urine, then pry the frozen urine from the lid, so that you have a "hockey puck" of frozen pee, and then you can slide this hockey puck of frozen pee under the door of the hated RA upon which you want to exact revenge (when he/she isn't in the room, of course) so that when they return to their room, they are greeted by a mysterious puddle of urine (in the story I heard, the RA was so befuddled by the urine puddles -- which were nowhere near the door, because it's easy to slide the "hockey puck"-- that he first changed the locks and then called animal control because he thought there was some creature living in his room that like to urinate on his floor when he was at class).

Sleep > Success

Yesterday a student played a video narrated by Eric Thomas, an ex-professional football player who is now a motivational speaker, and -- serendipitously-- the theme coincided with yesterday's sentence; in fact, it seemed as if Thomas was giving me a stern talking to about my need for sleep . . . he says you need to "want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe" and then (at 3:54 into the clip) he elaborates and says that most people "don't want success as much as you want to be cool . . . most of you don't want success as much as you want to sleep . . . some of you love sleep more than you love success," and I couldn't help agreeing with him . . . I would love to be more successful, but I'm not losing any sleep over it.

Sad But True (Awkward Dave Walks the Halls)

I'll never be a great man (for many reasons) but mainly because I need too much sleep (case in point: last week there was a half day for the students and so I had some free time to spend in my classroom, and a great man would have finished Amanda Gefter's Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, A Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing and the Beginning of Everything, a fascinating book about the most metaphysical questions in physics, but instead I fell asleep at work in a plastic chair, head leaning against the file cabinet, feet resting on a desk . . . a position so uncomfortable that when I awoke, twenty minutes later, both my legs were asleep, from my glutes to my toes, and I didn't realize the extent that they were asleep until I had walked twenty yards down the hall, to the water fountain -- I'm always thirsty after a nap-- and that's when the pins and needles struck, and so I had to stagger back down the hallway to my room (on surveillance camera) and almost made it without being seen, but just before I opened my door a teacher rounded the corner and gave me a funny look (well deserved, since I was careening from one side of the hall to the other) and so, as I collapsed through my classroom door, I yelled to her, "both my legs are asleep!" so she wouldn't think I was drunk (an actual possibility, since we were able to leave the school for lunch because it was a half day).

Educating the Youth With Facial Hair

We've been watching The Matrix in senior English class, and half-way through, I realized that if I shaved my facial hair into a goatee/mohawk then I'd look a bit like Cypher (at least in the facial hair department) and so I gave it my best shot (it's a bit crooked) and then on Monday I came into class with my new look, and I instructed my students to take out a sheet of paper for a quiz and then I said: "Question #1" and pointed to my face and asked them to"connect my face with what we've been doing in class," and about a third of the students answered correctly (and while it was well worth the laugh, the only problem is that I don't have a good exit strategy from this look, and so I've been wearing this ridiculous goatee/mohawk for a couple of days now . . . I even attended a wake with it . . . no one said anything).

When You Need Clean, But Not VERY Clean

Finger + hose = ghetto powerwasher.

Locks, Sad News, and Other Things

On my way to the gym, I was listening to a Radiolab episode called "Things," and I came to the conclusion that I was not much of a "things" person-- that I don't attach a lot of sentimentality or significance to objects . . . and then I went into the locker-room and saw a lock that looked like my lock, and I thought to myself: I'd better not lock my bag next to that lock, because I won't know which lock is which, so instead I'll lock up over here and then I noticed that my lock was missing -- it wasn't attached to the strap of my gym bag as it usually is, and after searching a bit, I went over to the lock that looked my lock and tried my combination and it worked -- but there was nothing in the locker, of course, and I pondered this for a moment or two and then I realized what had happened; the last time I was at the gym was Tuesday, and I overheard two guys talking about a guy I knew named Lee, a guy I had played pick-up basketball with for twenty years, and they mentioned his trademark army duffel bag and then they started talking in hushed tones but I thought I heard the word "drowned" and this really disturbed me-- but for some reason I didn't go up to the guys, maybe I was embarrassed because I was eavesdropping and instead I lifted for a few more minutes-- but I couldn't concentrate-- so I left, and I guess because my mind was on other things, I relocked my lock after I packed up my stuff and left it there . . . and then I headed home and started searching for Lee on the internet, but I realized that though I had known him for twenty years, I didn't know his last name . . . and I should point out that this guy was one of the nicest, most positive guys I've ever met, and a great basketball player, and the kind of guy you'd want on your team, because he'd pass you the ball, compliment you up and down, and then make four three pointers in a row so you'd get to play in the next game . . . and after a little searching , I found out what happened and it's tragic . . . Lee went missing on Wednesday and they found his body in Farrington Lake, the lake behind my parents' house-- the lake next to the court at Bicentennial Park, where I first started playing with this guy-- and while nothing is particularly clear about what happened, there was even mention of depression or possible mental troubles in the newspaper (which I really couldn't fathom, but you never know what's going on in somebody's head, no matter how they act in public) but I will say this: he was a great guy and he will be missed.

Dave Uses the Word Quadrennial in Proper Context!

If you're excited for the World Cup, or like the word quadrennially, or just want to hear some stuff my friend Terry told me, then head over to Gheorghe: The Blog for Dave's Definitive and Quadrennial World Cup Preview.

It's a Lot of Work Not Doing Work!

Tuesday evening, our neighbor knocked at the door and then asked Catherine if she could come over and turn on their stove, and this is because our neighbors are Orthodox Jews, and during the holiday (Shavuot) they couldn't use electrical appliances (thus the knocking at the door, ringing the doorbell is prohibited) or do any "work," such as turn on the stove (but once the stove is on, then they can use it to cook).

Life Changing Sentence You Might Want to Avoid

I assume you know about Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom's logically argued premise that we are probably living in a computer simulation (but if you don't know about this theory, then do NOT click on the links and FORGET YOU EVER READ THIS!)

Dart Board > Laundry Room = Duh

I recently put up a dart board in the basement, and while my stroke has improved because of this, I've often gone down to the basement in order to switch the laundry over, gotten waylaid by the dart board, ironed out a few kinks in the delivery, then headed upstairs, happy with my progress . . . my initial purpose to do some laundry totally forgotten, until I get upstairs, so I head down again, take a few more shots at the dartboard . . . rinse, lather, repeat.

Two Furry Thumbs Down

I can't remember who implored me to watch Ted, but if I do, I'm going to punch them in the nose.

Reverspectively Speaking

Not only was the Patrick Hughes show at the Flowers Gallery in Chelsea well worth the trip-- the art is trippy and three-dimensional, mesmerizing, and mind-blowing-- but the curator was also the nicest person we've ever encountered in a private gallery . . . she gave us a tour of all the paintings, pointed out cool stuff in many of them, showed us how some differed from others, and spoke at length about the artist (and she knew full well that we weren't buying anything, but maybe she thought our kids were cute or something; anyway, the show is up for a few more weeks, and I highly recommend getting over there and seeing it).

Reminder x 14!

Today my wife and I have been married for fourteen years, and this sentence is to celebrate this fantastic occasion (and also-- since I wrote it several days ago and "scheduled" it to appear-- to remind me to make my sentiments about this fantastic occasion known to my wife).

Who Knew?

Friday night, my ten year old son surprised and impressed the family with a passable British accent (apparently, he's been working on it for a while and he claims that it's hard to say American words-- such as "barbecue"-- properly . . . after he tried to say "barbecue", then his younger brother gave it a shot, and so I tried as well . . . and my accent was so heinous that it ended the episode).

Reminder

My family is driving cross country this summer and I've got to remember to play Bruce Springsteen's song "Badlands" when we enter the Badlands . . . I wonder what the odds are that I actually do this?

Not Sure If This Would Be Good or Bad . . .

I have two typically scatterbrained kids -- they forget clothing, water bottles, musical instruments, homework projects, and whatever task they have been asked to do-- but when they play Minecraft, they have laser-like focus, and so if menial work could be done through an interface like Minecraft-- with robots or drones or automation or something -- then little kids would line up to work these jobs, for free . . . I'm not sure what this would do to the economy, but if you could flip a burger on a computer screen, and then achieve some kind of digital reward for cooking it perfectly, and you could eventually level up, then that whole stigma would vanish (and teachers and parents would have to come up with some other cliche to inspire kids to go to college).

Losing Your Noodle

Aristotle, an all around smart guy, believed that the heart was the seat of our thoughts; now, of course, we know that our thoughts originate in our brain-- and if you need further proof, check out the story of Phineas Gage (or better yet, The Kids in the Hall "Academy Awards" skit) but this makes me wonder, if we did not have Aristotle or modern neuroscience to guide us, could we make a person believe that his thoughts originate in his foot, or elbow, or buttocks . . . and so I urge science people to get on this topic immediately (my guess is that it's perfectly possible, because it's not like you feel your thoughts in your brain, you just believe that your consciousness is swimming around in the general vicinity of your head).

It's Fun To Pass Judgement (from the Confines of a Motor Vehicle)

When you're cruising along without a care but the other side of the road has traffic piled up for miles, I know what you're thinking: I'm a good person and deserve my fate, while those sinners over there will have to repent by sitting in that jam.

Goblins, Corduroy, and Synth Pop

I wasn't much of a film buff in high school (my movie watching was limited to Monty Python flicks, Surf II, and anything that might contain a naked boob) and so I missed quite a few classic '80's films but I plugged a couple gaps this weekend: I watched both Labyrinth and The Sure Thing, and despite the obvious differences (puppets vs. no puppets) they contain some common ground: cheesy '80's music, young stars who eventually become fairly iconic (Jennifer Connelly and John Cusack), weird and harsh lighting, several endearing scenes amidst some predictable rubbish, and David Bowie's crotch (actually, only Labyrinth contains David Bowie's crotch, but The Sure Thing has the PG-13 rating . . . odd).

Robotrons, Methy Mikes, and Big Mitches

Colson Whitehead's new book The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death should be more fun than it is; Grantland paid the $10,000 stake for Whitehead-- a professional novelist and amateur poker player-- to take part in The World Series of Poker; Whitehead trains for the main event by playing in smaller tournaments in Atlantic City and he acquires a classy female novelist and professional poker coach who has actually played in the big event, and so the book has the potential to take on a Rocky tone, but playing poker at this level isn't much fun, nor is the training, and Colson Whitehead is not a fun guy, in fact, the funniest thing about the book may be the picture on the back cover, where he sports his poker uniform, a custom made "Republic of Anhedonia" track jacket . . . and while Whitehead is a bit of a grouch, the writing is hip, the allusions come fast and furious, and there's quite a bit of poker knowledge wedged in between his existential griping.

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger? We'll See . . .

I like to paddleboard on the Raritan River, mainly as a matter of convenience, as I live only a few hundred yards from a boat launch, and though I know the water isn't pristine, I prefer not to think about what's in the sauce, and instead I enjoy the views of the New Brunswick skyline, the Rutgers crew complex, and the rugged and forested cliffs directly across from the park (not to mention the large swath of open water as the river approaches the Donald and Morris Goodkind Bridges) but now that my children are also paddleboarding on the river . . . and falling into the river, as kids are wont to do, this report scares me a bit . . . apparently, the river is full of more than savage monsters, it also contains an unhealthy amount of mercury, benzene, arsenic, oil and gas drips, toxic fertilizer, and goose feces . . . a toxic brew, which-- best case scenario-- will turn my children into radioactive superheroes, or -- more likely -- it will do some weird and awful stuff to their innards, and because we don't have a control, a Family of Dave living next to a perfectly clean unpolluted river, we'll never know the exact effect recreating on the Raritan has on my kin.

Lesson Learned (I Instigate an Awkward Moment at the Pub)

If you are at your local pub, and an inebriated stranger approaches you and asks whether he should play Molly Hatchet or The Allman Brothers on the jukebox, the correct response is, "Whatever, man, they're both awesome!" but that's not what I said; instead I took a moment and sincerely thought about the question and told him, quite sincerely, that I couldn't recall any songs by Molly Hatchet so I wasn't qualified to decide, and this really astounded him-- that I wasn't familiar with Molly Hatchet-- so much so that he sang an a capella version of "Flirtin' With Disaster" to me and several of my friends, really belted it out, holding a fake microphone and everything, for an awkwardly long time, but I couldn't bring myself to walk away because he really wanted me to appreciate Molly Hatchet (but, of course, this had the opposite effect, as now any time I hear the name Molly Hatchet, I will associate the band with this horribly awkward moment).

Low Pressure Hello

Fellow New Jerseyans (New Jerseyites?) let us take a moment to give a warm welcome to an old friend we haven't seen (or felt) in a long while . . . he winters in the mangrove swamps of Mexico's Pacific coast with his cousin El Nino . . . but now he's back and making up for lost time . . . so welcome home Signor Unbearable Humidity . . . and you'll notice his good buddy Jock Itch sidling alongside him (and his arch-nemesis Tinactin in hot pursuit).

Silver Bullet For a Fourth Grader

Before

After

The bane of the elementary school boy is The School Project (and consequently, The School Project is also the bane of the elementary school boy's mom because she is the one that will provide succor when the elementary school boy announces-- at 9 PM-- that he forgot about his School Project; at this point, the elementary school boy's father, otherwise known as Dad, who has had a long afternoon coaching soccer, advises his son to hand in a piece of crap, take the bad grade like a man, then-- after dispensing this wisdom-- the elementary school dad goes to bed . . . but as evidenced by the "Before" and "After" pics that my wife e-mailed me the next day, this is NOT the proper course and when there is a project, you should take a careful look at "the scoring rubric" so you can advise your son or daughter on what to prioritize and how to make a plan of action and a rough-draft or sketch (or you take the easy way out and just do it for them-- but my wife is too principled for that).

Dirty White Boys

I've taught high school for nearly twenty years, and I'm still surprised by what will galvanize a class discussion; the other day in Creative Writing, an African American kid told a humorous story about how his grandmother-- who watched him every day after school-- insisted on bathing before returning him home to his parents, and I remarked that my own children bathe every other day, but only if we force them to, and this provoked a serious and spirited discussion about cleanliness, hygiene, and bathing frequency, and during the course of this discussion, two African American kids both admitted, sincerely and with true candor, that they had heard rumors from their parents and grandparents that "white people don't bathe every day," and when I confirmed this to be true, they thought it was hysterical and egregious -- and the Hispanic and South American kids in the class agreed, and told me about "inside clothes" and "outside clothes," and how you could never let "outside clothes" touch your bed, and this made me want to stir the pot some, so I told them that my kids often go to bed "with sticks and leaves in their hair," which may have been a slight exaggeration but the reaction it produced was worth the hyperbole (one girl actually turned to me and said, "Are you sure you're raising those kids right?").

Small Talk With Big Payoff

It's always a struggle for me to make small talk with the people at work that are not members of the English department, but Friday I had a great success: there is a janitor that passes by most days while I am on hall duty, and it was especially hot and humid that morning and so when I saw him, instead of offering my usual lame greeting (What's happening?) I stopped him and asked him, very kindly, if he could turn on the air-conditioning, because the weather was so hot and sticky . . . but, of course, as we both well knew, the high school doesn't have air-conditioning in the hallways and classrooms, and so he got a real kick out of that and pretended to "clap on" the A/C, a dated but perfect joke for the situation, and this made us both so happy that I am going to work hard to think of other one-liners to offer people around the building, so if anyone has a good idea, send it my way.

Seventeen Second Tour of Human Consciousness

Human cognition is still essentially a black box-- stimuli, filtered through our senses, enters our consciousness, this stuff is invisibly and unexplainably processed in our brain, and thoughts are produced . . . with varying degrees of success, recall, and logic . . . and we can rarely explain the causality of the stream: we can remember and explain some things at the drop of a hat, we have difficulty recalling other things, and sometimes we remember things too late (the French call this l'esprit d'escalier . . . the wit of the staircase) and this video clip of my son Alex captures all the mysteries and emotions of the mind in a mere seventeen seconds-- you'll probably have to watch it twice; I learned more from this clip than I did from all my college psychology courses (which isn't saying much) and it was pure luck that my kids stumbled upon it (they were rummaging through iPhoto, as they have reached the ripe old ages of eight and ten, and now look back upon their youth nostalgically).

And Now For Something Completely Different

Fans of Sentence of Dave know my son eight year old son Ian as a foul-mouthed candy-hoarder who once "betrayed the family" with a premeditated second floor flood, but apparently there's more going on in his head than profanity and malevolence . . . Tuesday morning, Ian was searching for something, and he looked distraught, so my wife asked him what he was looking for and offered to help him, but at first he wouldn't tell her what he was looking for and refused her aid, but my wife persisted and he finally said, "I can't find a letter . . . it's on a white piece of paper" and my wife remembered seeing this protruding from his desk drawer, and she had pushed it into the desk -- so she found it for him, and he seemed relieved . . . and rather secretive about it, so later that day, when Ian wasn't around, she went upstairs and looked at the letter and then showed it to me; it was a Mother's Day card to my mother-in-law-- who lived with us in an apartment in our basement for many years and looked after our kids until she passed away from cancer in the summer of 2012; Ian was very close with her and misses her very much, and this card expressed that sentiment in a rather unusual way . . . it was a Mother's Day card addressed to "Nanny" and thanked her for playing games with him and giving him treats but the writing was childish and sloppy and the paper was crumpled and at the bottom something was crossed out and the year "2009" was written in the lower right corner . . . and I looked carefully and was able to decipher the phrase that was crossed out and it said "4 years ago" and I realized what he had done -- he created an artifact; though he had written this note recently, he wanted it to be from when he was four years old and Nanny was still alive, and so he aged it and wrote with childish handwriting, and then he wrote the four years ago phrase and then realized that people didn't write that to date a letter, they put the actual year, so he crossed it out and wrote "2009" . . . and after we looked at the letter (and were appropriately choked up over it) we put it back in his desk and didn't say anything about it, but on Friday afternoon, he brought it downstairs and claimed he "found it" in the storage closet and that he must have written it when he was four, but when I reminded him that he couldn't write when he was four, he admitted that he had just written it and so when he is silent and contemplative, I will not assume that he is planning something malicious because I now have empirical evidence that belies this.

Empirical Evidence Trumps the Label

While walking the dog in the rain on Friday afternoon, I learned something valuable: my waterproof Columbia jacket is only a windbreaker.

If You Were to Actually Get Three Wishes, You Should Go Nuts With Them

My son Ian decided that if you make it to "your thirties," then you should be rewarded with three wishes, but when I asked him what he would wish for, hoping for some crazy-ass imaginative kid stuff . . . zombie armies, world domination, interplanetary battle ships, and such, but his wishes turned out to be fairly lame: first he said he would wish for a time machine, which had promise, but then he said he would use the time machine to "make a plane ride to Florida seem like three minutes" which resulted in me lecturing him in the style of Louie C.K. and then he wished that "he could visit all fifty states" with his family and his buddy Ben-- which was sweet, but entirely within the realm of possibility without squandering a magical wish-- and then he finished up with the completely mundane and cliche desire to "live a long and healthy life."

There's No Crying in Silicon Valley!

While we all know that "there's no crying in baseball," apparently the same isn't true about founding the most successful computer company in history, as Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography is chock full of incidents where the charismatic, sensitive, and quite possibly delusional Jobs breaks down in tears, often in front of co-workers, rivals, or friends (and usually when his "reality distortion field" ceases to operate).

iPod, I Name Thee Lazarus

One of the perks of writing a trivial blog filled with drivel is that I can fact-check extremely mundane details from my life; for example, I know for certain that I bought my iPod Nano in April of 2008 and I made a habit of swimming with this iPod in November of 2008 (which didn't last long, as my supposedly waterproof Otterbox case leaked, resulting in a waterlogged and broken iPod . . . but one of my well-connected students set me up with an "appointment" with her ex-boyfriend at the Apple Store and he gave me a new one, despite the fact that water damage is NOT covered by the limited warranty) and then I used the new iPod-- an exact clone of the old iPod-- without incident for many years, until I lost it for several months in the winter of 2013, and now I am realizing that this particular iPod (which I have conflated with the original water-damaged iPod in a philosophical leap reminiscent of the Ship of Theseus dilemma) is imbued with miraculous qualities, because my wife's iPod -- a newer, sleeker model-- doesn't hold a charge and gives her loads of problems, but this model (like my Jeep) is built to last, possibly to infinity and beyond; to make a long story short, Tuesday morning, when I got in my car to go to work, I saw my iPod lying prostrate in the road . . . it must have fallen out of my gym bag, and so it spent the night on the pavement, getting soaked by several rainstorms and quite possibly run over by cars, and so I assumed this was finally the end -- R.I.P iPod-- but when I pressed the "play" symbol, the screen popped right up, and so I put it in a bowl of dry rice and it is now in good working order-- and this tempts me to to try other more extreme experiments on the device: fire, acid, ice, my digestive system . . . but perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate, as I'm sure I will place it in peril some time soon, without forcing the issue.

A Belated Happy Mother's Day to Hannah Duston?

To determine if you are going to purchase a  Hannah Duston bobble-head doll (pictured above) and to decide whether Hannah Duston is the greatest mom in American history or a cold-blooded racist child killer, you are going to have to learn the story of Hannah Duston . . . and the best way to do this is to listen to the most recent episode of 99 Percent Invisible: Monumental Dilemma.