Sometimes Ignorance is Bliss

If you like your novels with extra torture, then read Don Winslow's fantastic, Ellroy-esque tale of Mexican drug cartels, DEA agents, and all the players in between them . . . The Power of the Dog will immerse you in a world you wish did not exist . . . and probably make you think legalizing drugs is a better option than what happened (or may have happened-- like James Ellroy, Winslow translates his hypotheses into prose with the verisimilitude of fact).

I've Still Got It . . .

Though it's been a three year hiatus, I've still got the remarkable ability to count to four at just the right moment in the bridge of "Born to Run" . . . I thought that era of my life was over, but after a candid discussion with LeCompt about addiction and recovery-- and I won't go into details to protect all parties involved-- Dom and Connell reminded him that I'm the guy who is especially adept at counting, and -- as usual-- after I performed my bit, I got several high fives from random folks at the bar, who were duly impressed by my special purpose.

Mix and Match Your Way to Fabulous Wealth and Riches

According to Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, you don't always need something big and new to spur technological growth; progress often occurs because of "recombinant innovation" . . . you take the resources you have and rearrange them; e.g. Facebook and Google cars and Waze . . . so if you want to innovate, just combine current technologies in ways people haven't: a Vitamix/ drone . . . a rectal thermometer/ whip antennae . . . an iPad/ TV tray . . . see, it's easy!

Art Doesn't Have To Make You Feel Stupid

Art doesn't have to be the way it's portrayed in the inconclusive and unsettling documentary My Kid Could Paint That . . . I just watched it again (this time with with my own kids) and the film can be pretty cynical about the values of the current art scene: there is the recurring theme that modern art may be a scam and a lie-- and then it ends ambiguously, and we still don't know the answer to the puzzle; if you don't want to tackle opaque issues like that, then just take your kids to Grounds for Sculpture, and enormous outdoor sculpture "museum" outside of Trenton, they have just installed a Seward Johnson retrospective on and around the grounds-- many of the pieces are of pop culture icons and famous paintings, and some of them are enormous . . . and while the kids had a blast exploring the park and discovering all the surprises, we had the most fun in one of the buildings, where they set up life-sized tableaus of several famous paintings, and put them on camera-- so that when you entered the tableau, you appeared inside the framed version on the wall (which was in another location in the building) and this concept took a little while to understand, but once we had it figured out, we had people stationed at paintings, others running and getting inside the tableaus, and lots of zany antics . . . if you can get there before they take this stuff down, do it.

What's In an Excellent Sounding Name?

I met a man named Bill Rainwater yesterday . . . I wish I had a cool surname like that.

This Sentence Could Be Better

This sentence would be much better if I came to the end of three trilogies-- which is entirely in the realm of possibility, because the boys and I just watched The Matrix and I've never seen The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, but I don't want to ruin the original movie and I've heard the sequels are nothing special, and so I may never complete that one; I did race to the end of two detective sagas, though, and both are well worth it: the final book in Adrian Mckinty's Troubles Trilogy (In the Morning I'll Be Gone) is the best one of the series -- IRA plots, a locked room murder, multiple intelligence agencies, and plenty of atmosphere . . . and the season three finale of the British TV series Sherlock (His Last Vow) is also worth the ride, enough twists and turns in the plot to make you queasy and -- like the Mckinty novel -- some wild violence, which seems even more so because of the intelligent build-up . . . summer is coming to a close so enjoy this stuff while you still can.

All This So Kids Can Chase a Ball?

Here is the necessary paperwork-- copied directly from the reminder e-mail-- so that my son and his friends can kick around a ball on a grassy field:
                                                           
1) Player and coach passes in one pile; passes must be on the official paper; the pictures must be in the upper left corner of the pass;

 2) 3 copies of the roster

 3) All the birth certificates in its own pile. in the same order as the roster;

 4) All the medical releases in its own pile. in the same order as the roster;

 5) All the signed SAGE forms in its own pile, in the same order as the roster;

 6) All the membership forms in the same order as the roster in its own pile;

 7) Coaches licenses, SAGE forms, and concussion forms in its own pile;

 8) All checks in an envelope in the same order as the roster - please include any partial payment or scholarship information.

The End of Days

Monday was a rude awakening for me . . . a horrible wriggling thought wormed its way into my brain: summer is going to end . . . this awful thought was caused by the start of high school soccer double sessions . . . the morning training run nearly killed me (I haven't been running all summer) and then I had to go to Costco with a substantial list and my legs were so sore that once I filled the cart, I had trouble pushing it . . . and so those of you who are jealous of teachers because we get so much time off, you should also realize that after so much time off, the looming threat of actually having to work again is quite stressful-- probably more stressful than work itself (one of my educator friends reminded me that we are in the "Sunday" of the summer, which dovetails nicely with my "Year as a Week" metaphor).

Everybody Loves Creedence and Tom Petty, Right?

Books have been written on the epic Beatles vs. Stones, debate but I'm pretty sure everybody loves Creedence and Tom Petty (and although Petty's new album is nothing spectacular, I'm glad he's finally hit number one on the charts . . . his albums were my go-to driving music on our cross-country trip, and I am forever indebted to him for that . . . and also for making that van scene in The Silence of the Lambs so memorable).

The Troubles Can Be Very Entertaining

Adrian Mckinty's second book in his "Troubles Trilogy" is as good as the first-- not only does the I Hear the Sirens in the Street have a cracking good mystery (headless torso, layers of espionage, John DeLorean, hauntingly beautiful widowed Irish farm lass, etc. etc.) but the setting-- the early '80's in Northern Ireland, amidst the worst of the terrorism, bombings, mob violence, and sectarian anger-- lends an extra air of tension and futility to the typical "damaged detective" story, and the writing is top notch-- a great beach book for the end of the summer . . . and also in the way of mysteries from across the pond, the Sherlock Holmes episode "The Sign of the Three," where Watson gets married and Sherlock Holmes delivers the most fantastically awkward, moving inspirational, deductive and dramatic best man's speech in matrimonial history is a must see, and it works as a set piece, so you don't need to watch the rest of the series to understand it.

Sometimes Dave Isn't Awkward

While the primary purpose of this blog is to dwell on my awkwardness and nerdiness, once in a great while a positive light shines on me, and I'm not even going to bother to humblebrag about these things-- they both happened at the end of the school year and they need to be recorded for posterity:

1) the seniors voted me "favorite teacher," which is an honor I had never achieved previously-- and it strikes me as rather odd that I won it this year, as I felt this was the grouchiest year of my life, but maybe my irate rants about too much coaching, too many students, and my two mischievous and often troublesome children won their hearts;

2) while my friend and fellow English teach Liz was signing a student yearbook, she noticed another entry . . . and this one was signed "Mrs. Pellicane," and it wasn't my wife who did the signing, so apparently some student-- who remains anonymous simply because she didn't sign her name-- not only has a crush on me, but has also moved right past the ugly and embarrassing "teen mistress" stage and just gone ahead and assumed the persona of my wife . . . weird but quite flattering (little does this girl know what it's actually like to be married to me, it's not all funny stories and book reviews . . . you also have to deal with the flatulence, the sloth, and my inability to follow simple instructions and find anything in the kitchen.

Best Job on the Planet

A lot has happened in the fifteen years since my wife and I visited the Galapagos Islands-- the last Pinta turtle, Lonesome George mated with another species of tortoise (but the eggs were not viable) and he died soon after, there has been political unrest-- fishermen, angry about a ban on catching sea cucumbers, protested against environmental regulations (tortoises were taken captive and some were killed, and the fishermen occupied the Charles Darwin Research Center) and-- on a positive note-- the vast majority of goats have been eradicated from Isabela and several other islands . . . the goats-- who came with the first sailors to visit the islands,  five hundred years ago, were slowly razing the forests and threatening much of the native wildlife, including the tortoises, and so they had to be killed; this story is detailed (among other recent developments in the Galapagos) in a fantastic Radiolab podcast . . . and so the question is, of course: how do you kill 150,000 goats? and the answer is awesome . . . you shoot them from a helicopter, and this has to be the greatest job on earth . . . you get to fly around in a helicopter over one of the most scenic places on earth, chasing goats over volcanic terrain, and shooting them video game style and leaving them to rot (so as not to rob the island of nutrients) and so though I can't shoot a rifle, and though I am prone to motion sickness (I can't even read in the car) I am preparing my resume for submission . . . watch the video and you'll want to sign up too.

Accepted Premise - Logic = Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell makes good use of his tried-and-true formula in his new book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants . . . he presents an idea, presents the assumptions and logic behind the idea-- the reasons why people believe it is true-- and then explains why the assumptions and logic are misguided; while you know what to expect, it still works-- in fact, it works better because there's a sense of anticipation of exactly when in the chapter the tide will turn and the initial, incontrovertible idea will disintegrate into a cloud of smoke; this book has a motley collection of underdogs -- characters, concepts, and collectives that are thought to be at a disadvantage, but it turns out that the very thing that is disadvantageous about each of them is actually the key to victory; Gladwell begins by debunking the Biblical story of David and Goliath, and then he connects a wide variety of topics to his theme: class size, insurrection, dyslexics, the Irish Troubles, civil rights activists, the Impressionists, youth basketball, innovative cancer treatments, crime, etcetera . . . the book is an inspirational and fun read, and you will certainly come away with a practical understanding how the "inverted U" applies to your life.

Words, words, words . . .

Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel's book Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture sounds like a weighty tome, but it's actually a skinny little book that explains how the authors developed and utilized a really excellent internet application . . . the Google Ngram Viewer, a tool which allows you to see the frequency of words and phrases as they occur over time in Google's massive library of digitized books; Uncharted explains some of the ways to use this data, which gives insight into things like the birth and death of words, the gradual waning of many irregular verbs, the effects of Nazi censorship of certain artists, how fame works, and the typical course of an invention-- but it's also quite fun to type in your own searches and see what happens . . . Godzilla vs. King Kong, martini vs. beer, rights vs. justice, funeral vs. wedding . . . and there's other powerful features as well, so if you've never tried it, click  on the link and give it a whirl.

It's Fun To Punt a Football in the Stratosphere

Chronicle is an updated (and much much better) version of the Scott Baio classic Zapped! . . . minus all the gratuitous nudity; the movie is about three teens that have a weird supernatural experience together, and though they are unlikely friends, they are bound together by their newfound telekinetic powers-- the heart of the film is the kids developing their powers and their friendship . . .  I really liked this movie, more than my wife, and while I admit that it's full of cliche movie tropes: a kid bullied at school, absent parents, entering a place that would only be entered in a movie, the death the characters you expect to die, etc . . . but the genius is in the details -- it's a short movie and it's worth watching to see the scenes where the kids develop and use their powers . . . what they do with them is perfect and awesome to watch . . . oddly, the best bits of the film are before things go horribly wrong, before all the conflict-- the conflict works and makes sense and the drama is real and explosive and exciting, but it also feels inevitable and typical, but -- especially if you're a dude-- you've got to see the middle of this movie, the portion where things are going well and three teenage boys are doing the exact telekinetic things that three teenage boys would do.

Revisiting Beuller

When I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off in 1986, I thought the movie was all about Ferris outwitting his blowhard principal, Ed Rooney-- after all, Ferris is adored by sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, and even dickheads . . . they all think he's a righteous dude, and so he was fighting oppressive authority for all of us teenagers-- but I just watched the movie again, with my kids-- who were rooting for Ferris, of course-- but now I realize that the movie is actually about Cameron and his anxieties about the future, a future Ferris will have no problem with-- Ferris can jump up on a float in a parade and start singing and dancing, he's going to have no problem navigating the world, and though we're glad he makes it home on time, we know that, like James Bond, he's going to be fine . . . but for Cameron and Sloane, the future is much more ambiguous, and the real climax of the movie is the scene you don't see, the scene where Cameron confronts his father and takes the heat for wrecking his dad's beloved Ferrari . . . the film is a comedy, so we assume that everything turns out okay, but we'll never know for sure, that portion is oddly unresolved.

Hint: Brown M&M's

If you listen to Freakonomics, then Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's new book Think Like a Freak a bit anti-climactic-- it's mainly a rehash of their radio show-- but there are some new anecdotes and it might be worth reading just so you know the answer to this question: what do King Solomon and David Lee Roth have in common?

A Sentence in Which An Old Guy Runs and Thinks Faster Than Me

I was at the pool the other day, waiting patiently for a lap lane to open up; someone finally got out and I made my way over so I could hop in and start swimming, but an old dude beat me too it-- he scampered over and jumped into the open lane at the other end of the pool-- the deep end-- which is fairly unorthodox, people usually get into the lap lanes on the shallow end, but I had to admire his brass and so I shrugged and went back to reading my book, waiting for someone else to get tired of swimming . . . and the interesting thing is, this guy is a ponderously slow swimmer-- painfully slow-- and my children thought this anecdote was very funny, that he's such a slow swimmer, but he moved so quickly in order to get into the lane . . . fast on land but slow in the water . . . and the next time this happens, I might exhibit some brass of my own, and just dive in and start swimming towards him, in a game of aquatic chicken.

A Sagacious Aphorism from Someone More Sagacious Than Me

Stephen Pinker, the great cognitive scientist, was asked by Stephen Colbert to describe how the brain works in five words or less and Pinker immediately produced this gem of an aphorism: "Brain cells fire in patterns."

It Takes a Bad Ass to Live in the Bad Land

Jonathan Raban's book Bad Land: An American Romance tells the story of the homesteaders that attempted -- with varying degrees of success-- to farm the dry and dusty plains of eastern Montana; this is a swath of bleak and exposed land, with miles of barbed wire fences -- as it takes a lot of prairie grass to support a herd of cattle-- and while it can occasionally turn green, it relies on infrequent rain, and is often brown and desolate . . . to drive across it is endless, as it bleeds into the Dakotas, and while Badlands National Park is a weird and exotic area to visit, with strange rock formations and fields of prairie broken apart by multi-colored sandstone, the rest of this land is not as scenic, and it took especially courageous, intrepid, and industrious folks to make it out there (most of them did not, they continued west, leaving their homes, land, and farm equipment in arrears) but the ones that did survive are uniquely American . . . which includes some resolute and admirable people, but this is also the area where Ted Kaczynski holed up to write his manifesto; I highly recommend the book for people who like this kind of thing, but reading it will probably make you feel rather soft and effete (unless you know how to rope, castrate, and brand a calf . . . even a high school girl can do this sort of thing out west).

Yeah? No? Maybe?

In the past few years, the phrase "yeah . . . no" has become a bulwark of conversation-- SlateRadio concludes that the phrase creates "conversational harmony," and to that I say "yeah . . . no" as I see it as more of an insulator, an opening parenthesis that keeps a statement from being too definitive (not that this is a bad thing, life is complicated and it's often hard to give a straightforward "yes" or "no") and I also think we're adept at ending statements with some insulation, a closing parenthesis . . . such as: but that's only my opinion or it's complicated or but hey, what the fuck do I know?

Sagacious Aphorism #6

When you carry too many things, chances are you will drop one . . . but you will avoid the dreaded "making of two trips."

OBFT XXI

A light year attendance-wise for the Outer Banks Fishing Trip XXI, but no other complaints . . . the water was clear, the beer was cold, the breeze was refreshing, and the food at Tortuga's was great (even the jerk chicken and the Bajan burger) plus our friend Craig-- who couldn't make it because his children had abducted him and taken him to Storyland -- did something unprecedented . . . he took an educated guess at our whereabouts and "called in" a round of drinks to the bar; other things that happened:

1) Whitney was on a boat;

2) we listened to Lonely Island and T-Pain sing "I'm on a Boat";

3) Ian bought a keg and then passed out within the half-hour;

4) Jerry used stacks of poker chips to "write down" the phone number for the pizza place;

5) everyone had a bed, but Johnny still slept in the hammock;

6) Ian lost his expensive sunglasses in the ocean and we searched for them . . . fruitlessly;

7) Bruce told another joke;

8) it took me nearly twelve hours to get home, and during this time, I learned that Rob and Jerry do NOT dig my favorite podcast, Professor Blastoff;

9) Johnny told me I have to watch Snowpiercer and the mini-series Lonesome Dove; 

10) we gambled on corn-hole;

11) Marls tried his best to make a major work/life decision but found the OBFT not the ideal venue for this sort of thinking;

12) there was much reminiscing about past OBFTs and the consensus is that they somewhat run together in our minds, and we need a spreadsheet to remember what happened and when;

13) Jerry was the first person to ever use a cane on an OBFT . . . anyway, thanks again Whit, you and the Martha Wood delivered another great time in a long string of them.

Sagacious Aphorism #5

Just because you can't see a rattlesnake, doesn't mean it isn't there (this goes for fish, spiders, and serial killers too).

Sagacious Aphorism #4

Bob Dylan doesn't make any sense.

Sagacious Aphorism #3

It's better to endure the pain than the alternative.

Sagacious Aphorism #2

When you pretend things are made of lead, many of your friends will desert you . . . but not your true friends (I dimly recall that my friend Whitney and I invented this game circa 1991, in Daytona, Florida, when we should have been attending wet t-shirt contests and dance parties, but instead were annoying our hotel-mates by pretending that various objects in the room were made of lead: beer bottles, food, books, and -- probably the most annoying, which made people start to desert us-- the blanket that I was pinned beneath, which I had to slowly "roll" off my body . . . it was interminable-- and illogical: how did I get under it in the first place? and while Whitney and I found this hysterical, the rest of our fraternity brothers thought there were better things to do on spring break rather than watch two poor mimes enact an endless skit without a punch line, and so they left us; the game rears its ugly and boring head every so often-- I was once pinned to the floor of The Weeping Radish Brewery by a condiment sized cup of lead horseradish, and even my children have played it on occasion).

Sagacious Aphorism #1

When you put yourself under great pressure and time constraint, it's harder than you think to write a sagacious aphorism.

It's Aphorism Week!

After completing an epic cross-country journey, I'm sure I have some sagacious wisdom to dispense, and so I'm declaring it "aphorism week" . . . get ready for some timeless adages (and this has nothing to do with the fact that I'm going to visit my buddies in North Carolina, and need to mail it in for a couple of days).

There's One Place Like Home (And It's Home)

After two mammoth driving days, we made it home . . . and the house was still standing . . . so a big thanks to all the folks who made this possible: house-sitters and dog-sitters, mail-getters and garden-watchers, my adventurous wife and kids, and-- most importantly-- the biggest thanks of all to our 2008 Toyota Sienna, for putting in over 6000 miles of fast, wild, and bumpy driving without a flat or a hiccup or a breakdown.

Road Trip Day 23: Time To Reflect (Because We Drove Twelve Hours)

Some places we visited on our trip that I'd like to live: Des Moines, Hot Springs, Minneapolis, Emigrant, Pittsburgh, Rapid City and Alta . . . but probably not Richfield, Ohio (despite the fact that the byzantine Days Inn has a strange, dungeonlike indoor fun area with a pool, mini-golf, cornhole, ball pit, arcade, hot tub, and playground in a dimly lit gigantic interior covered courtyard space . . . my kids loved it . . . until Alex got ejected for hitting a mini-golf ball so hard it ricocheted up to the second level and bounced off the window of a room overlooking the courtyard) and even though there were many places we stopped where I envisioned myself leading some alternate life, I'll be happy if we make it back to Highland Park in one piece.

Road Trip Day 22: Watery Thoughts

Minnesota is the "land of 10,000 lakes" and this means:

1) that you have to go ahead and name all ten thousand of these lakes . . . so you get the usual suspects-- Sand Lake, Bass Lake, Pike Lake, Birch Lake, Moose Lake and Big Lake-- and more interesting monikers, such as Lake Vermilion, Burntside Lake, Miners Lake, and Bad Axe Lake-- and then the unfortunate . . . Leech Lake (although Lake Vermilion could certainly have been called that, as a number of leeches feasted on the deliciously pure blood of my children)

2) there is plenty of stuff to catch in these lakes, including a non-native southern delicacy-- the crawdad-- and my kids caught enough of them that we were able to have a "boil" and eat them up (for pictures, head to Captions of Cat)

3) all the lakes overshadow the fact that the Mississippi River begins here, rather humbly as a trickle up north, but even in Minneapolis, the river isn't very impressive (we walked beside it at Boom Island Park, and it's about the size of the Raritan in New Brunswick) and I don't think my kids understood what the river becomes as you head south . . . that's another road trip (they did understand how good the Mexican food was at Maya though . . . there's an ethnic neighborhood on Central Avenue full of Mexican, Arabic, Thai, and Columbian restaurants, and the food we had was out of this world, a pleasant surprise on a trip where we mainly ate burgers and bbq).

Road Trip Day 21: Feeling Minnesota

We made our way from Bismarck to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, where we stayed with our friend Sabine in her cabin on Lake Vermilion; the cabin is an original Sears Roebuck kit that was dragged across the ice to Echo Point, a scenic peninsula that juts into the lake-- this makes for good fishing, and I caught several species of fish: perch, smallmouth bass, and a walleye . . . and my kids caught loads of crawfish . . . but the fish story of the visit was the one that nearly got my son Ian; this fish story is verified by testimony from my wife: while Ian was wading near the dock, waist deep in the water, a huge Northern pike approached him and didn't swim away until Ian swatted him with his net.

Road Trip Day 20: If You're Ever in Bismarck . . .

We stumbled upon two great things in Bismarck: 1) the Best Western Plus Ramkota hotel has a mini-waterpark, with one large and two small slides . . . this was a lot of fun until my kids got into a fight-- which included cursing and scratching-- over who was going to go up the stairs to the slide first, even though there wasn't anyone else in the pool area 2) Reza's Pitch, a soccer bar and burger joint, which wins the prize for best burger on our road trip . . . and they have a neat system for how you order, you fill out a little sheet of paper, checking off what sort of cheese, sauce, and toppings you'd like on your burger and then you hand that to the waitress (and they have a great local beer selection, to boot, and one of the waitresses was very informative about rodeo culture and bucking broncos and wild bulls).

Road Trip Day 19: We Visit Another Obscure State Capital

My family and I are morning people, and so driving west to Montana was a pleasure-- the sun at our back, gaining hours as we passed through time zones-- but yesterday morning we turned the van around, and started back home, and so I drove east, right into the sun, with nary a tree to block the rays, because Eastern Montana is a vast range of prairie, hills, and exposed sandstone-- an ocean of unpopulated land to rival Wyoming-- and there wasn't much of a difference in the terrain when we crossed into North Dakota, but we're hoping that things start to change tomorrow, when we head east from Bismarck into Minnesota (and if you need visuals, head over to Captions of Cat).

Road Trip Day 18: We Learn Nothing

Though I have already issued a warning about the size and scope of Yellowstone, we did not heed my own sage advice yesterday, and after cruising east into the Lamar Valley (otherwise known as America's Serengeti) and seeing herds of bison, a wolf (this was through someone's scope-- there are these lunatic folks who set up very expensive magnification devices on hills in the park, and then drink coffee and chat for hours, until they see something . . . and they are quite hospitable about letting regular people with $30 binoculars from Sports Authority use their equipment) bald eagles, coyote cubs, a buffalo carcass (some other lunatics watched this thing all night and got to see a grizzly pick at it) and possibly a badger (I didn't see this but my kids did, and they claimed it was a "wolverine" until we went to eat dinner at Rivers Edge Bar and Grill in Pray and they saw a badger pelt and claimed that was what they saw . . . anyway, after seeing all this stuff and doing a hike around Trout Lake, we then drove down to Old Faithful-- which none of us had ever seen-- and it took a long time to drive down there, and then when we got there, the parking lots were enormous and full, so we had to park far away-- and there were hordes of people waiting for the geyser to erupt . . . which it did . . . and it was impressive, and then it started to rain, which cleared everyone out-- so we got to walk the miles of boardwalk and see the other geysers without the nuisance of the hordes of people, and once we completed the loop through geyser country, we caught Old Faithful for a second time, which was fun, except we had to run to our car-- the way you run to your car when you are leaving a concert and want to beat the traffic-- in order to get out of the parking lot, which is an odd thing to do in the middle of a national park in Montana, but the best thing about staying north of Yellowstone in the Paradise Valley is that if you've had a ten hour day in the park, you can stop at Chico Hot Springs on the way home, and swim in the ninety five degree pool, while drinking beer, even though it's cold and rainy and giant storm clouds are swooping in from over top of Emigrant Mountain.

Road Trip Day 17: Riparian Reunion

We floated a beautiful stretch of the Yellowstone yesterday-- and though the trout weren't biting, the time passed quickly-- as our river guides were my old friend Darren and his wife Pam; I hadn't talked to them in fourteen years, so we had a lot of catching up to do (the last time I was out to visit them, I blew four rods in my friend John's Jeep Wagoneer and we ended up living on Pam and Darren's apartment floor until Pam got so annoyed with us that she left town . . . John had to sell his car in Billings) and because the river was so high and fast, our trip only took a few hours, so we spent the rest of the afternoon at Chico Hot Springs, an idyllic spot under the shadow of Emigrant Mountain . . . and Catherine and I had a great time chatting with Darren and Pam, but the real surprise of the afternoon was that Alex and Ian had a great time hanging out with Annabell and Larkin-- in other words, Alex and Ian had a great time hanging out with a couple of girls . . . Montana girls who raise their own sheep and sell their own eggs, but still, actual females, which is impressive for my boys (this might be explained by the fact that they were starved for socialization with kids their own age, after spending so much time with their parents, and so even girls would suffice-- but Ian did ask if we would ever see those kids again, so I think they actually liked them).

Road Trip Day 16: Dog Days and Dog Years . . .

My favorite moment in Homer's Odyssey is when Odysseus-- after twenty years of adventuring-- finally returns home and finds that his house is overrun with suitors, who are accosting his wife Penelope; Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar in order to infiltrate the scene, and the only one who recognizes him is his faithful dog Argos, who then "passes into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years" and while I certainly don't hope that my faithful canine companion Sirius dies of happiness when I return, I do hope he passes out for a few minutes to show his loyalty.

Road Trip Day 16: We Do Some Stuff In Yellowstone

We drove back into Yellowstone today, and:

1) we took a hike on the Howard Eaton trail into the Hoodoos-- and though the roads and main parking areas of the park were crowded, we didn't see a single person out on the trail . . . but we did see some moose scat and a number of fresh bear footprints, pointing the same direction as we were walking;

2) though we didn't turn a corner and run into a bear, we did see plenty of marmots and pikas;

3) we hiked into the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone via Uncle Tom's Trail -- a set of steep switchbacks and three hundred sheer metal stairs . . . and though there was some ominous rumbles and a few flashes of lightning, we didn't end up being a horror story on the Weather.com sidebar: "stupid family dies on vacation";

4) I thought I saw a bear, but it was a bison in a ditch and then we stopped the van because a number of other cars were stopped in front of us, and a guy pointed out a grizzly bear in the distance to Catherine, but it disappeared into some trees before I caught sight of it . . . however, I did get to see a red fox squat in front of our car and poop in the road;

5) a woman told us a herd of moose had come down from the woods into the Mammoth junction area, but she didn't know the difference between moose and elk;

6) we realized that if you want to do three things in Yellowstone, you'll probably only end up doing two of them . . . it's a huge place;

7) after the long drive back to Emigrant, I walked over to the river with my spinning rod, balanced on a slippery log, fought off mosquitoes, and lost several lures to submerged tree branches . . . but it was worth it, because I caught a nice looking rainbow trout.

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).