Barely a Script, But a Bear of a Movie

I am a lucky man-- when things get rough in my life, I can always count on my family . . . but sometimes I wonder if my family is an extension of my own consciousness and perspective on the world . . . sometimes I wonder if my family sees the world the same way I see it; I was looking for a movie to show to my Creative Writing classes, a film that told a story with very little dialogue and an abundance of imagery, and my colleagues and the internet led me down the usual paths -- Wall - E, 2001, Castaway, etc.-- but I wanted to show something that the kids had never seen before, and I stumbled upon a French film called The Bear . . . a movie about a young bear who has to survive in the wild after his mother has been killed by an avalanche . . . and while my wife and children loved this movie . . . despite the blood, the mating scene, and the psychedelia (the baby bear ingests hallucinogenic mushrooms and "trips" and-- besides this-- he also has a number of weird and expressionistic dreams) and despite the lack of dialogue (my son Alex aptly summed up the script: "it could fit on half a page of paper") we had a fantastic time watching this thing, we speculated on how they filmed it, we enjoyed the aesthetic beauty of the bears, and we were appropriately moved by the plot . . . and so I thought I knew what to expect when I showed it in class, but there was a much wider variety of reactions from my high school students than I anticipated: some loved it, some were disturbed by the drama and the realism, some couldn't understand the fact that it was a movie -- that the bears were acting and that no one was shot or hurt or nearly drowned . . . that every scene was set up and that the emotional impact of the bears' body language was an artistic conceit, probably created more in the mind of the audience than by the emotional state of the bears . . . and while I highly recommend this movie, both for adults and children, I must warn you that you will sound like a lunatic when you describe it, because you will delve into the details of how well these bears can act-- how they can feign an injury and pretend to catch a frog and show sadness and regret-- and so no one will listen to you, nor will they understand what an entertaining flick this is . . . but trust me and check it out (also, it's fun to say the title as if you were a Bill Swerski Superfan . . . What are you watching? Da Bear).

Infectious Irony

If I hear one more Ebola joke, I'm going to run a fever, start bleeding from my gums, and have impaired kidney and liver function.

Some Girls Give Me Diamonds, Some Girls Heart Attacks . . .

This school year, I endure many hardships:

1) I have to teach in three different rooms;

2) the periods when I am off from teaching in these three different rooms, the English office is full of women . . .

but I have learned a few things:

1) some women plan their trips to the gym around their hair-washing schedule;

2) I am a disorganized wreck and should not be teaching in three rooms.

Autumnal Ultimatum

Dear Fall,

unless you start producing some appropriately cold and crisp weather, I am going on a writing strike--

unseasonably (and sweatily) yours--

Dave.

Dave Almost Does Something New and Different (Warning: This Sentence is Anti-Climactic)

Saturday night, in order to make my life even more entertaining, I used this Random Word Generator to generate three words (pear, ransom and rudder) and then I told everyone at dinner that I was going to use the random words seamlessly and fluidly during the course of the evening (we were headed to a birthday party) but I didn't tell my friends what the random words were, and then at the end of the night, they would have to guess what the words were . . . but then the party was so much fun that I actually talked to a lot of different people and completely forgot the plan; I will have to try this activity again at a less dynamic event.

Turning It Around

I was having a rough Monday, but then after I finished my sandwich, I took the used aluminum foil and wrapped it around my plastic knife and fork and threw this package-- tomahawk style-- at the trash can, which was twenty feet away and obstructed by a table, and my shot hooked around the edge of the table and cleanly into the trash . . . and then I felt much better.

How Do You Treat a Sick Zombie? Very Carefully

I've become inured to the astounding amount of zombie-slaughtering gook and gore on The Walking Dead, but in season four there's also deadly flu-virus outbreak among the survivors, so on top of all the gross undead stuff, you also have to endure actual realistic sickness and quarantine . . . yuck!

Research

If someone in the car in front of you does something stupid, it's very important to speed up and get a look at the person who did the stupid thing; you need to know exactly what kind of person comes to a complete stop in a merge lane (a gray-haired butch looking lady wearing a denim shirt) or pulls out from a gas station onto Route 1 and crosses several lanes driving perpendicular to the lanes before turning into the flow of the traffic (short Indian man wearing a hat).

The Hallway Stutter Step is Never Pretty

Normally, I teach all my classes in the same classroom, but this year-- due to some scheduling conflicts-- I'm in three different spots . . . in between second and third period I actually have to hustle up a flight of stairs in order to make it to class on time-- and all this moving around is a challenge for me, because I'm not very organized, and so I've been doing quite a bit of stutter-stepping in the hallways: that weird and abrupt stop and turn around that always looks bizarre-- because I've just remembered that I've forgotten something and so I switch from walking full speed in one direction to walking full speed in the opposite direction, and this spin move is preceded by some nimble footwork, which might look athletic on the soccer field, but is just awkward and ugly in the workplace, so I apologize to everyone who has had to endure seeing me do it.

It's Gotta Be the Shoes, Right?

The power of brands is fascinating . . . if I say the words "Dolce Gabbana" to a high school class, it doesn't make much of an impression on most of the kids, but several students (usually female) will have an instant and visceral reaction-- it's like they just ate something amazingly satisfying and delicious-- and I find it odd that I don't know exactly why they have this reaction; I know that Dolce & Gabbana makes high end shoes, but I don't know what the brand means (the way I know what it means to own a Subaru) but apparently that doesn't matter, just uttering the syllables in a passionate voice can elicit sighs and moans from a select few-- which is a testament to the product, the advertising, or a combination of both.

One of the Many Things That Grosses Me Out

Every morning, I pour out the puddle of condensation that forms overnight inside the yogurt tub.

Dave is Almost Weird, Sad and Lonely

Last Thursday, I almost didn't go to the pub for the following reasons:

1) I was totally exhausted from school and soccer;

2) I've gotten obsessed with the step sequencer within my computerized digital recording software, which allows you to drag and drop patterns of notes into different synthesizers and drum machines-- armed with a minimal knowledge of music theory and a decent understanding of the program (Cakewalk X2), you can create some really wild sounding electronic music, and then layer in guitar and your own percussion from a drum pad . . . but I'm glad I ended up going out because Roman told a lot of filthy jokes and it would have been kind of sad to stay in and make music with a computer, instead of going out with my friends (and-- as a bonus-- one of the ladies at the bar reciprocated in the joke telling and performed an inspired and completely profane version of the "DEATH . . .  BY BOOFATA!" joke).

Dave Sets a Personal Soccer Event Record!

Last week, in one seven day period, I crammed in a dozen soccer events; and while I don't claim that this is any kind of world record, it's pretty impressive for an introvert like me; for posterity, here they are:

1) I coached a JV game on Monday;

2) coached JV practice Tuesday afternoon;

3) coached travel practice Tuesday night;

4) coached a JV game on Wednesday;

5) coached JV practice Thursday afternoon;

6) coached travel practice Thursday night . . . but I still made it to the pub;

7) coached JV practice Friday . . . I probably shouldn't have stayed for the last round Thursday night;

8) coached a travel game on Saturday . . . and our field was flooded so we had to move the goals and basically create a small field on a different field, so this soccer event turned out to more work than usual;

9) attended a Red Bulls game Saturday night with the wife and kids-- a great game, the Red Bulls won 1-0 and we ate at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Newark before the game, a good spot;

10) I played soccer with my pick-up crew Sunday morning;

11) coached my son Ian's travel game later on Sunday;

12) then watched my older son Alex's travel game, which started directly after Ian's game on Sunday;

and the result of all this soccer is that the game invaded my dreams and consciousness, I woke up thinking about it and went to sleep thinking about it . . . and like when you repeat a word over and over again until it sounds like gibberish, there were times when I found my life existential and absurd, but at the end of the week, on Sunday, when both my sons played travel games and they scored all the goals (Ian scored two in a 3-2 loss and Alex scored 1 in a 2-1 loss) which made everything meaningful again, which is ridiculous, but no matter how much I know you should stay detached from your children's athletic success, there's still nothing more exciting than when they score a goal-- especially for my son Alex, who rarely knocks one in . . . and there's more of the same in the coming weeks, so I'm going to have trouble coming up with non-soccer related material.

Fatalii Has the Word "Fatal" In It

My friend grew some Fatalii peppers in his garden, but he's not into hot peppers so he gave them to me-- and I tried a bit of one raw, but it made me cry and spit up phlegm, so I pickled them (which makes more sense, since they are listed as the seventh hottest pepper in the world, with heat ranging from 125,000 to 400,00 Scoville Units . . . and to put this in perspective, a jalapeño pepper averages approximately 5,000 Scoville Units) and I opened the jar last week and tried one, and I did this after breakfast-- at 6:45 AM, just before going to school-- and the pepper was very hot but also very delicious, with a sweet citrusy flavor in addition to the spiciness-- so I had my wife put some on my salad; forty five minutes later, I started sweating and had to race to the bathroom (luckily I wasn't teaching . . . I have hall duty first period) but despite these consequences, I courageously downed the rest of the peppers when I ate my salad at lunch, and I think I've built some resistance because I didn't suffer any adverse effects after lunch and now I'm eating a couple of them a day and I feel very strong and virile and manly, and I also feel like my colon is very clean from the massive doses of capsaicin I've been administering to it, so if anyone wants to try one, just swing by (but make sure you're near a bathroom forty-five minutes after you ingest it).

A Good Read (If You're Over Thirty)

If you grew up in the '80's, Ernest Cline's sci-fi novel Ready Player One is so entertaining and satisfying that it feels like a guilty pleasure . . . it's set in the nearish future and things are predictably bleak and apocalyptic, but the masses find sanctuary in a massively multiplayer online virtual reality simulation called OASIS, which was created by the '80's nerd culture fanatic James Halliday; when Halliday died, he left a posthumous easter egg quest in the game-- and the winner would take control of his company, the game, and the incredibly vast fortunes that he amassed over his life (Halliday is a Steve Jobs/ Bill Gates hybrid) and the story follows Wade, the narrator, as he navigates the quest (and the violent repercussions of his success in reality) but the fun of the book is in the references and allusions: Joust, Zork, Pac-Man, Tempest, TRS-80,War Games, Star Wars, Bladerunner, John Hughes, Dungeons and Dragons, vintage Japanese TV and film, etcetera, etcetera . . . Cline packs in the '80's references on every page, from the obvious to the obscure; I'm not sure if the novel would be entertaining to anyone who wasn't a nerd in the '80's, but if you did grow up then, and know what a dodecahedron is, then read it.

Dave is Almost a Good Person

While walking around the school, I noticed a soda cup (complete with plastic top and straw) stuck in a boxwood shrub next to the soccer field-- a lazy student must have used the bush as a trash receptacle-- and so I went over, removed the cup, and threw it in the trash can (which was less than twenty yards from the shrubbery) and while part of me felt very good about my altruistic behavior, there was another part of my brain, the quid pro quo part, that was thinking: Dave just earned the right to litter (one time only) in the near future.

You Shouldn't Grade Coincidences (Unless You're a Jerk)

In the middle of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which is a play that hinges on a wild sequence of coincidences, Fabian comments on the madness: "if this were played on a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" and I'm sure this same idea flashed across the collective consciousness of millions of baseball fans last Thursday night when Derek Jeter, during his final at bat in Yankee stadium, drove in the game winning run in the bottom of the ninth inning with a walk-off single . . . it seemed too perfect, an "improbable fiction," but-- as Shakespeare well knew-- coincidences happen all the time . . . they are a product of statistical likelihood-- but no one wants to hear about probability if the event in question happened to them personally . . . no one wants their coincidence "graded" because if the coincidence happened to you, then you believe it is special; for example, my wife saw a car the other day with four bumper stickers, each advertising a geographical location: Highland Park, Ireland, Ocean Grove, and Chatham, and she thought it was especially coincidental that she had been to all four of those places but I argued that people who had been to two of them had likely been to all four, and that an astronomical number of people saw the back of this car-- because we live in a densely populated state-- and that many of them had the same experience as her, thus diluting the uniqueness of her coincidence, but this didn't matter to my wife, who found the event special from her point of view . . . if you like this topic, then you'll love the Radiolab podcast A Very Lucky Wind, which explores coincidence in both a rational and emotional manner . . . and includes a metaphor which ruined my older son's appreciation of the magic of coincidences; a golfer drives a ball out onto the fairway and it lands on a particular blade of grass and this blade of grass cannot believe that he's been selected out of all the blades of grass in the world, that the ball landed on him, but from our point of view, this isn't special at all, because the ball had to land somewhere . . . so when one of the players on my son's soccer team expressed his amazement at the fact that the guy who moved in next door to him had the exact same name as him, my son Alex was not particularly moved by this event and later said to me, "it's like the golf ball and the blade of grass, people are moving all over the place and eventually someone is going to move next to another person with the same name."

I'd Do a Hunger Strike, But I'm Afraid I Would Get Too Hungry . . .

If it doesn't cool down soon, I'm going to hold my breath until fall starts.

It's Not Plagiarism If You Change a Word, Right?

My existence (in the fall, anyway) is but a brief crack full of soccer between two eternities of darkness (with thanks to Vladimir Nabokov). 

A Good Movie to Watch

The purpose of Wes Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel is to remind you how funny it is to watch people run around . . .  the situation doesn't matter, as long as the camera is far enough away and someone is running away from someone else on a colorful, lavish set (the secondary purpose of the film is simply to look at the sets . . . the colors and details are even better than an episode of Madmen).

Orphan IS the New Black, Dammit!

I'm not sure if this is a spoonerism or simply a transposition of words, but several times last week, I called Orphan Black-- the Canadian sci-fi show about clones-- Orphan is the New Black . . . and while this was certainly a mistake, it does make sense on a sub-conscious level, because I "broke up" with Orange is the New Black half-way through the second season . . . I loved the first season, which was fast-paced and dark and funny, but the second season the episodes were longer and much heavier (and even though I still love Orphan Black and plan on continuing our relationship, I am glad to be finished with season two . . . I need to watch something less "black" for a while).

Me? Allergies?

I don't consider myself susceptible to things other people fall prey to-- broken bones, arthritis, back pain, mortality, the constraints of the space/time continuum, etc. --but I've been waking up every morning at 4 AM and sneezing my brains out, and then repeatedly sneezing throughout the day, while suffering from red eyes and an itchy nose; despite these symptoms, I've put off buying any allergy medication because I can't accept the fact that I'm allergic to something-- pollen or dust or ragweed or whatever is out now . . . I keep waiting for the dry weather to break and figure my allergies will disappear once we get some rain, never to return, as there's some part of me that thinks if you just endure the allergy, your body will "get used to it" but I'm not sure if that's scientifically true or not, and I don't feel like checking.

There Are Two Types of Sockpuppetry?

Charles Seife may come off as a stick-in-the-mud, but his new book Virtual Unreality is chock full of examples of the "trickery, fakery, and cyber skullduggery" that exists on the internet; for instance, the art of sockpuppetry . . . type 1 sock puppets are created so that a person gets more attention or authority or notoriety for an opinion -- if you're an American student in Edinburgh and you want to blog about the Middle East, it's much better to do it as a "gay girl in Damascus" . . . and it's popular to create a type 1 sock puppet and then have this puppet come down with a fatal malady, so that you garner loads of attention and sympathy as you "die" on-line . . . type 2 sockpuppetry is even more sad and nefarious: you create on-line personas to agree with your real online presence . . . to bolster reviews and denigrate your competitors, to laud your writing and opinions, and to provide reinforcements for on-line feuds; it's always embarrassing when you get caught doing this, as Scott Adams found out several years ago (and because of the permanence and persistence of information on the net, real or false, though Adams made this error in 2011, it's easy enough to resuscitate the story years later . . . so be wary out there).

Double the Compliment = Half the Value

After I gave my spiel at Back to School Night-- and the way it works is that you run through your day's schedule, except that each "class" is seven minutes long-- and so after I talked to the parents of my third period class, a kind and lovely mom stayed after the bell and told me "I have two kids here in the high school and my daughter is a senior so I wasn't going to bother seeing any of her teachers, but she told me that I had to come see you, so you're the only one of her teachers that I visited" and I thought this was a very sweet compliment, but then when I went inside the English Office, Stacey repeated the identical story . . . a mom had two daughters, one a senior, one a junior, and she was visiting the younger daughter's teachers, but she was making one exception: Stacey's Philosophy class and so Stacey and I compared notes and it turned out that the mom who said this to Stacey was the same mom who said it to me . . . but it's still a nice sentiment, even if it's only half true (or could it be one third true? did she say the same thing to her daughter's math teacher?)

The Fever

For me, finishing Megan Abbott's novel The Fever was like surviving a nasty roller-coaster ride without puking-- I don't like roller-coaster rides-- and there's a part of me that doesn't like Megan Abbott novels, because they are so disturbing . . . and while I acknowledge that the writing is sharp and the plot moves and the characters creep off the page, the topics of this book are malevolent and particularly disturbing: hypochondria, seizures, algae in the drinking water, HPV vaccines, panic, social media rumor-mongering, peer pressure, and inscrutable teenage girls . . . despite this, I couldn't put it down, this is the kind of book that you read over coffee and breakfast before work at 6:15 in the morning, just to get through a few more pages: nine algal blooms out of ten.

Bag Therapy

I am a disorganized person, and I don't write lists or keep a calendar or use any other aid to remedy my scattered brain . . . or so I thought . . . but a particularly observant colleague of mine recognized that some people-- women especially-- use bags to order their lives, and that is certainly the way I do it; I have a bag for my school stuff, a bag for my laptop, a cooler for my lunch, another cooler for water bottles, a smallish bag for my high school soccer coaching, a large hockey bag for my youth soccer coaching, two bags of soccer balls, a portable AED in a bag, a gym bag, two PUG goal bags, and, finally, a small backpack and a large backpack for spontaneous excursions . . . and I can hide a mess in each of these bags, but it's a contained mess; I keep all my school stuff in packed folders-- again, each folder hides a mess-- and I'm trying to shift my lesson plans and writing to Evernote, which is an application which allows you to access digital "bags" from anywhere there is wifi . . . most of my bags live in my car, and this system works well for me, as I can store and remove them when necessary, and-- once a year-- I clean them out and find all sorts of interesting and surprising treasures.

Almost Vegan

A big thumbs up for the MorningStar Chipotle Black Bean Burgers . . . going vegetarian is less taxing on the environment, saves loads of fresh water, and is morally the right thing to do; not only that, vegetarian options are more delicious than ever (unfortunately, I've gotten into the habit of putting several pieces of cold-cut ham and/or several slices of bacon on top of my veggie burger, which makes it even more delicious but might not count as eating vegetarian).

Awkward Dave Pays For His Silence

Last year, when the Wawa checkout guy asked me how big my coffee thermos was, I said "20 ounces, I think" and since then I've always paid the twenty ounce price for my refill, but the other day-- when I forgot my plastic coffee thermos in my classroom-- I bought a sixteen ounce coffee in a disposable cup and when I returned to school I poured the sixteen ounces of coffee into my plastic mug, so that it would stay warm longer, and I found out-- to my chagrin-- that my plastic coffee cup only holds 16 ounces: the paper cup to plastic mug transfer filled my plastic mug to the brim (it's obviously larger because it's insulated, so I am an idiot) but I am too embarrassed to tell the folks at Wawa that my cup only holds sixteen ounces, and so they are still ringing me up for twenty ounces . . . but I did catch a break on Friday, because there was a new checkout girl, and when she asked me what size my mug was, I told her "sixteen ounces" and so I guess I'll just have to wait until the entire staff turns over before I consistently pay the proper price for my mug.

Breaking News!

One of the advantages of living in a small town is that people you know might see your kids doing something stupid and report it back to you so that you can address the matter . . . and so apparently my son Alex has been getting on his skateboard and letting our dog -- who is a very fast runner-- pull him down the giant hill into Donaldson Park  . . . and, of course, Alex does this stunt without a helmet because you only have to wear a helmet when you ride a bike (even though getting pulled by a dog that weighs the same amount as you down a poorly paved road into a three way intersection with frequent park traffic and no braking method whatsoever is far more dangerous than riding a bike) and while I admire his courage-- as I was scared to skateboard on a flat surface when I was a kid-- I've advised him to wear a helmet because (relatively recently) as a society we've decided that kids should protect their heads as best they can from concussions (though I sustained a number of them, and look at me . . . I'm fine!)

Four-bagger

To baseball fans, a "four-bagger" is a home run, but if you own a dog, it's a particularly full day of fecal clean-up; last Tuesday, I bagged one in the morning, two in the afternoon (old piles I found in the yard) and a final bagful during our evening constitutional.

Super-Reverse Psychology

While my son Alex is very good at entertaining himself, my other son -- Ian-- often has trouble in this department, and he's also stubborn and doesn't take suggestions very well, but I've figured a way out of the dilemma; when he's roaming the house, annoying people and breaking things, I need to give him a list of choices that does not include the thing I want him to do . . . because it's a power thing with him, he hates succumbing to anyone's will; the longer the list, the better chance that he'll do what I want . . . so if I he needs to practice the piano, I'll say to him: "Ian you could do art or unload the dishwasher or read a book or go outside and juggle the soccer ball or collect bugs or take out the garbage or clean your room and play with Legos" and he'll say back to me "Okay, I'm going to play the piano."

Consistency and Varmints

I hadn't talked to this particular neighbor since Hurricane Sandy, but I saw him the other night while I was walking the dog and there was a small metal cage-trap in his driveway and he says to me--like we hadn't skipped a beat-- "I just trapped a possum" and I say back to him, "Yeah, they're around" which is a fairly lame reply, but I deny that in the heat of the moment you could have done any better.

Who Knew There Was a Battery in My Grill?

For the past few months, my grill ignition lighter has been performing poorly, but last weekend -- serendipitously-- I ripped the cap off the ignition lighter button with the grill cover and was shocked to discover that there's a battery underneath the lighter button . . . and so I changed the battery, found the cap under the grill, screwed it back on, and now the ignition lighter works like a charm and my propane ignites instantaneously (and if you already knew there was a battery inside your grill ignition lighter, that you have to access by unscrewing the cap, because you read the grill manual cover-to-cover when you bought your grill, then I hope you contract a horrible skin rash).

Buttons vs. Touch Screen: A Logical Debate

My 5th Generation iPod Nano died the other day and I'm trying to make do with an iPod Touch-- which I know is an absurd statement, since an iPod touch is essentially a tiny computer and I should be counting my blessings that technology has advanced so far in such a short time (I've spent a great deal of my life using a Sony Walkman) but I can't stand the touch screen-- my fingers are too fat too accurately enter any information, and though my mother gave me a tiny turquoise jeweled stylus to aid me in poking at the screen, my wife made fun of me for it-- and so I'm solving my problem by going retro (slightly) and I am buying a 6th Generation iPod Nano, which still has the analog buttons and the wheel; in other words, if we're going to debate this topic, then I say: buttons! buttons and wheel all the way!

Case Closed

There's nothing like getting to the bottom of a mystery, especially when you break a man under interrogation and he gives himself up . . . Friday, I noticed that there was a black mark on my pull down projector screen, and this made me angry because I use this screen all the time-- I write things on the white board, and then I pull the screen down and project video or a quiz or an image, and the advantage of having the screen, is that I don't have to erase the stuff that's on the white board; it's very convenient . . . but now this big black mark was going to be omnipresent in everything I projected . . . totally annoying . . . and so when this new guy came into my room period nine (he teaches a class in my room while I have lunch) and pulled down the screen, I said to him "I don't know what happened, but there's a black mark on the projector screen" and he said "I'm sorry, that was my bad, all the other rooms have Smart Boards and I mistakenly thought I was writing on a Smart Board" which was, ironically, very dumb, because you write on Smart Boards with these fake computerized markers, but whatever, I was just glad I had solved the mystery, and once I broke him and got him to confess, I lightened up and said, "at least it wasn't malicious, I thought it might have been a student that did it" and then I painted over the black mark with White Out, pleased that I could put one into the "solved" file.

Fine With Me

I'll never understand why local cops in movies and on TV shows get so upset when "the Feds" take over their case . . . if some folks from a government agency ever swooped in and wanted to teach my classes or grade my papers, I'd be more than willing to let them.

Building a Castle One Grain at a Time

One of the great things about teaching is that if you find something that works, you get to use it over and over on each new batch of students . . . so when we start the narrative unit in Composition class, which is essential for skills to write a good college essay, I always tell them a bad story first, and ask them to tell me what's wrong with it; the example I use is a true story from when I was in high school, and I played golf-- I was having trouble hitting the ball out of the sand, so my father took me to practice over the weekend at the local course, and then in my match on the following Monday, I hit the ball in the sand trap on the first hole, and-- armed with a few hours of practice, I approached the ball confidently and-- miracle of all miracles-- I holed the shot for a birdie-- and this is a true story, but we quickly determine that while it's true, it's also awful, annoying, self-congratulatory, and boring-- no one wants to hear that "practice makes perfect" because we all know this, and no one wants to hear a story where success comes so easily; I use Dan Harmon's story template to illustrate this-- in a good story, the main character needs to pay a heavy price for his success, and this helped me figure out a better (if fictitious) revision to this story, which came to me in the middle of class last week and will now become a part of my curriculum for the foreseeable future: if I had gone with my father to practice sand shots and he lined me up and showed me the technique and then stepped back to assess my progress, and I skulled the shot and hit my father in the temple with the ball and killed him, and then dedicated my life to improving my golf skills to repent for my egregious error because my ineptitude resulted in patricide and then-- after I buried him, mourned and finally went back to the course and I miraculously holed my first shot from the sand, then we all agreed, and only then, would the story would be a good one, because I would have paid a heavy enough price for obtaining my skills with the niblick.

I'm Working Again (and it's more tiring than not working)

You know it's been a long day when you fall asleep during an episode of Orphan Black.

How Would You Like If I Came Into Your Office And Heckled You?

This time, Dave didn't make the situation awkward, someone else did, and I'll keep it vague to protect all parties involved, but I was coaching my junior varsity team to victory the other day (a big deal, since we didn't win a game last season) when the mother of a certain player decided she needed an extended and serious conference with me about her son during the game-- and while those of us who play sports respect the imaginary boundary around the coach and players, even when the game is taking place in a public area, this mom had no problem walking right through that invisible barrier . . . and because of this I thought the matter was pressing-- a heart condition or an allergy or a death in the family-- but she essentially wanted to tell me to tell her son to get his act together or he would no longer be  allowed to play on the team-- which I immediately understood, and told her I would communicate this to her son, but then she wouldn't give up on the story and when I suggested that we could talk after the game, she said that wasn't possible, because she had an exam to study for and then she kept right on talking, while I was trying to sub players in and out, check a kid for a concussion, and change tactics because of a gale force wind-- and though she wasn't exactly heckling me, I still felt like Seinfeld in the episode where Kramer's girlfriend heckles him at the comedy club, and so Jerry goes to her office and heckles her while she's trying to get some work done, but -- in a sense this was my fault, because I should have dealt with her quickly and abruptly, but I'm not very good in awkward situations of conflict, so I finally just turned my back on her and didn't look in her direction for several minutes, and when I finally looked back over, she was gone.

I Should Put This Book in the Freezer

Despite my tendencies towards vasovagal syncope, I am reading Megan Abbott's The Fever, which contains seizures, hysteria, and a mysterious contagion . . . all stuff that makes me dizzy; her last novel, Dare Me, is the scariest novel ever written about cheer-leading (and cheerleaders are pretty intimidating creatures, or at least they were when I was in ninth grade) and this one has the same tone: every sentence has an underlying menace to it.

R.I.P Black Ipod Nano

My little black Ipod Nano finally met its match (it suffered through a full wash and spin cycle in the pocket of my work pants) and-- and I'm sure a number of my fanatical readers will be broken up over his demise, as this durable, reliable and adventurous gadget has been a mainstay on SoD since 2008 . . . so I'll be having a burial in my backyard tonight at 6 PM, if anyone wants to attend (but please don't tell too many people about this, because I think burying electronics in the yard breaks several eCycling regulations and I don't want the EPA breathing down my neck, nor do I want this treasured device torn apart and repurposed by a bunch of Jawas).

Bunny/ Seizure Juxtaposition

At the end of my wife's first day of school, a woman had a seizure in the school parking lot, delaying all the buses, and then a bunch of baby bunnies-- abandoned by their mother, escaped their warren and ran amok in very same parking lot-- but a giant man-- the husband of a Hispanic woman with a kindergartener in the school-- rounded up the bunnies and put them in a box, while the Hispanic woman and her friend told my wife, "we will raise up the bunnies and then let them go by the creek."

Einstein and My Son Both Think Time is Relative

It's really hard to keep a straight face when your ten year old son says, earnestly: "Ian, Ben and I have decided to get the band back together."

Slanging It Around

Sometimes, people use slang but they only know the denotation of the word-- so that the phrase works logically and grammatically-- but when they are told the connotation or the root of the slang, they are shocked by what the phrase actually refers to (e.g. on the first day of school, one of the younger teachers was taking a picture of another teacher for the yearbook, and when she got the photo just right, she said, "that's the money shot!" and we told her that she absolutely could never yell that phrase again in school, and then we told her why; at first she didn't believe us, and said that must be something from "your generation" but once enough unsolicited people gave her the same definition, she realized that though the literal definition of "money shot" was a memorable or impressive picture or image, there was no way to divorce the literal meaning from the derivation of the word).

No Fun No Fun No Fun

I heard P.J. O'Rourke on NPR plugging his new book, which is about the "baby boom" generation, and he explained that his generation really did "use up" all the fun in the '70's -- sex before STDs, drugs before "just say no" and America before complete fragmentation . . . and it if you want a visual example of this, read Mimi Pond's fictionalized autobiographical graphic novel Over Easy . . . the narrator's adventures as a waitress at the hippest diner in Oakland is gender-bending, drug-fueled artsy hippie punk fun . . . and the art is easy on the eyes, and the book is a breeze to read-- it's not dense like reading Watchmen . . . but no disco, please.

There Is No Unanimity About Uniforms

The day of practice when uniforms are distributed is uniformly loved by players and uniformly hated by coaches.

We Are Bested by a Ninja Grandmom

The kids and I went on an ethnic eating adventure Wednesday to the new dumpling place on Route 27 (Shanghai Dumpling House) because it's been insanely crowded with Asian people since it recently opened-- and we probably chose a bad time for the adventure, as it was hot outside, and hot in the restaurant, and we were hot and sweaty-- the kids had soccer camp all morning and I was coaching in the scorching hot sun-- so it wasn't the kind of day where we wanted to wait on line for lunch, but everything looked good, and so, after a moment of discussion, we queued up and waited for some tables to open; meanwhile the little old busybody Asian lady behind us kept making forays around our flanks to assess the seating situation-- she had a party of four and we had a party of three-- and though she feigned pleasantries, and even went so far as to chat with my kids, I knew her ruse, but despite my knowledge of her intentions, she pulled it off anyway, jumping the line and scurrying to a table of six that was occupied by two other old Asians, who she made some small talk with as her party sat down with them-- the boys and I compared her to a Samurai or a Ninja, but then when we looked those up, we found that they are both indigenous to Japan, so she is neither, just a quick and crafty old Asian lady; the ethnic hazing didn't end there, the place was packed but there was only one waiter, and we had a hard time getting his attention, and then they were out of several things that we ordered and we weren't sure exactly what was going on and what kind of food we were going to get, but when we finally got our food, the kids said it was worth the wait: the pork buns were crispy and delicious, the soup dumplings were amazing, and I really liked the wontons in spicy sauce . . . and I'd like to give some props to my children, who certainly have their shortcomings, but they are always up for a cheap ethnic food adventure, and they really held their own on this one, which was epic and annoying (the next time we go, it will not be during the lunch rush).

Grim Semantics

I'm usually a day or two ahead on my sentences and they automatically post in the mornings, so if I continue this project for the rest of my life, when I die, perhaps I will still post a couple of posthumous "death sentences" . . . I'm sure this has happened already on the interweb, and I find it creepy and weird (but not as creepy and weird as what happens in Susan Palwick's sci-fi novel Shelter . . . a rich but very sick man who has been downloading his memories "translates" himself into a digital entity so that he can remain in contact with his family, though he is disembodied and physically dead; his daughter finds this creepy, weird, and annoying, as he is always showing up on whatever on various monitors and embodying cleaning robots and such, in order to "visit" her . . . it's a great book if you're looking for some near-future character-driven sci-fi to read).

Defying the Odds

There should be a name for the disease that I have-- a sickness which defies all statistical logic: whenever I try to switch on a light or a fan, or open a drawer in order to find something in the kitchen, I always choose the wrong option . . . you'd think I'd get it right once in a while, probability dictates that I would get it right once in a while, but I don't.

This Is the Deal

I will entertain some high school students for ten months, as long as my town's school system takes my own children off my hands and entertains them (and I use the words "educate" and "entertain" interchangeable, because in many senses, they are the same).

The Positive Manifold is Annoying

Scott Barry Kaufman, an accomplished cognitive scientist who began his academic career as a special ed student relegated to the resource room, explains in his book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, The Truth About Talent, Practice, Creativity, and the Many Paths to Greatness that smart people (typical smart people, not savants or people higher on the autism spectrum) tend to be smart in all subjects, and do well on an entire battery of cognitive tests-- there is a positive correlation between succeeding in French class and being able to do Calculus, between discerning musical pitch and mentally rotating objects . . . and this seems unfair, that the intellectually rich get richer, but what pioneering cognitive psychologist Charles Spearman called "the indifference of the indicator" has now become a psychological law . . . the positive manifold always correlates and though you'd expect "that the more time a student puts into one area of study, the more performance in another suffers" this isn't the case; students who do well in one particular subject tend to perform well in other subjects (and this does not preclude them from being athletic, as kinesthetic sense also positively correlates, so you might not be able to beat them up to punish them for their superior academic performance).

Don't Know Much About History

Greg Grandin's book Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism is giving me a headache-- the Drug War stuff I read revealed the tip of another iceberg, American intervention and meddling in Latin America, and I never learned any of this stuff history class but I feel like I should know the basics; Grandin does lay out some simple cause and effect at the start of the book: "it was in Central America where the Republican Party first combined the three elements that give today's imperialism its moral force: punitive idealism, free-market absolutism, and right-wing Christian mobilization" but then things get complicated, for example "it was Carter, not Reagan who began to increase the military budget at the expense of social services" and it was Jimmy Carter who created the Rapid Deployment Force, to be used "pre-emptively" in trouble spots around the world (he supported the mujahideen six months before the Russians invaded Afghanistan) and it was Carter who vowed to protect the Persian Gulf region "by any means necessary" and, believe it or not, it was Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney who blindsided Henry Kissinger and his Realpolitik, and the two of them pushed for a "morality plank" in American diplomacy and a world political view based on "a belief in the rights of man, the rule of law, and guidance by the hand of God" instead of secrecy, coercion, and undue concessions . . . which makes the whole Abu Ghraib thing quite ironic.

Let's Enter the Mind of My Child

So I'm at the Chinese restaurant with my dad and my brother and the waiter brings us little plates for our dumplings, and my little plate is a bit damp (and if I thought about this for a moment, I would surmise that it's damp from being washed, but I don't like to think about things until after I do them) and so I wipe the water droplets off the plate with my shirt, the dirty, sweat soaked shirt I've been wearing all morning at soccer camp so now the plate is dry but filth-encrusted, and I'm totally happy.

The (Slightly Insane) Case of the Missing Teeth

My nine year old son Ian had a rough time at the dentist on Monday; he had two teeth pulled-- or, as his pediatric dentist euphemistically put it, "wiggled out"--  and though he was brave during the procedure, by the time he got home he was crying from the pain, clutching the little orange container which held his two extracted teeth . . . but once he recovered, he realized that he was definitely going to receive some sympathy in the form of pecuniary renumeration . . . i.e. the tooth fairy, and he asked his brother for some advice on whether he should put one tooth under his pillow per night, or stick them both under at the same time, but Alex didn't know what to tell him, and so he asked me . . . though he knows full well that I know that he knows that mom is the tooth-fairy and that teeth aren't fungible currency, and so I told him he'd have to make that decision on his own, and he was laboring over it, because he has an acquisitive nature and couldn't help speculating on which strategy would net him the greater gain . . . but then when it finally came time for bed, it turned out that he misplaced his little orange container full of teeth-- the container he desperately needed in order to get in the money-- and so I helped him look for a few minutes because I wanted to get him to get to bed so that I could watch The Guild, but we couldn't find it, and so I told him not to worry about it and go to bed, that the tooth fairy would still come-- but now he was concerned that he needed to leave something else under his pillow (once he drew a tooth on a sheet of paper and exchanged that for cash, because he wanted to keep his tooth) and then my wife got involved in the search-- she started stomping around the house, angrily looking for Ian's teeth, complaining that he couldn't be trusted with anything of value-- and I was smart enough not to remind her that the teeth actually had no value on any modern commodity or currency market, because she was in some kind of mood and she was using the teeth as a metaphor for all the things that my kids lose on a daily basis (and I don't think that my wife reads this blog very often, so I'll be frank here . . . the whole incident seemed kind of insane to me, especially when she told me that it was "nice to be you, since you don't give a shit" which was totally true, I was fine with giving Ian some coin, even if he didn't have the teeth, as there was plenty of evidence that he lost them: there were two holes in his gums, I saw the teeth earlier in the day, and there were several credible witnesses to the dental procedure) and by the time Catherine finally gave up on the search for the teeth, she was so annoyed that she didn't even want to watch The Guild because she said she "wouldn't enjoy it" and so she just went to bed (and part of this had to do with me not cleaning up any of my mess from dinner, which I meant to do, but I got really engrossed in my book about U.S. interventions in Latin America, so I may have been part of the reason that my wife was annoyed about irresponsible men in our household) and then early the next morning, I found the orange container of teeth amidst some Lego vehicles on the counter in the basement, leading to a paradoxical ending to this mystery; Ian received cash money for the teeth, or for the idea of the teeth, without actually exchanging the teeth, but now the teeth are back in play-- though they have no value in our household-- so Ian's best bet to parlay this into an even greater financial windfall is to sell them to a friend on the black market.

We Can't Stop Watching the Guild

I'm not sure sure which is nerdier: actually playing a MMORPG or binge-watching a show about people who play a MMORPG.

The Guild

If you need to watch something weird and funny, and you want to consume an entire season in one sitting (and you don't require A-list actors and really good lighting) then check out Felicia Day's web-based show The Guild, which follows the rather pathetic lives of a group of massively multiplayer online role-playing gamers as they navigate both the virtual and actual world (and I might add that in the first two seasons, there is absolutely no LARPing . . . which may or may not entice you to watch, depending on just how annoying and absurd you think LARPing is).

Non-Fiction/Fiction/Non-fiction Drug War Sandwich

I was so enthralled by Don Winslow's brutal and intense semi-fictional account of America's war on drugs (Power of the Dog) that I decided to read some non-fiction on the subject; after a bit of research I decided to purchase the Kindle version of Ioan Grillo's El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency . . . and a few pages into it, one of the anecdotes sounded familiar, and so I checked this blog and it turns out I read Grillo's book exactly two years ago . . . but even though I felt like an idiot for purchasing a book that I once borrowed from the library, now the story makes a lot more sense -- I know which characters are real, which are fictional, and which are fictionalized versions of real people: I highly recommend both of these books, and there is one more book on this topic that I want to tackle-- because I've heard such great things about it-- a non-fiction account by Elaine Shannon called Desperados: Latin Druglords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win. 

Sun, Sand, Salt, and Seaweed

You know you're on vacation when-- after a brisk run on the beach and a refreshing swim in the ocean-- you take a warm relaxing shower in the outdoor stall and pull a ball of seaweed out of your crack.

The Bull Revisited (But Better)

Nine years ago in Sea Isle City, the Springfield Inn had an electric bull and for five dollars you could ride as much as you liked, so we rode the thing all night -- we rode it until the operator wanted to kill us (and tried his best) and we woke up the next morning with sore legs, calloused hands, and  chafed inner thighs . . . Wednesday night history repeated itself, except the bull was at La Costa, the operator was much more pleasant, and we only rode a few times each . . . and then we realized the real purpose of the contraption: one cute woman after another mounted the thing (some of them wearing short skirts) and the operator made sure that these ladies lasted a long time atop the bull, which the crowd enjoyed enormously.

My Skin Hurts (But in a Good Way)

The weather has been so clear, crisp and sunny in Sea Isle City the past week that I'm looking forward to some rain . . . do people who live in San Diego eventually get annoyed with all the brightness and low humidity?

What Else Is in There?

While we were walking along Corson Inlet to the Strathmere Bay, to do some creature collecting on the sandbars, we saw a guy throw a dragnet into the inlet and he pulled out two puffer fish and a seahorse.

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.