Reunited (or Anthropomorphizing a Coffee Mug)

Once again, I am at the heart of another miracle . . . several weeks ago I misplaced my favorite ceramic coffee mug (green, 20 ounces, embossed with coffee beans) and after angrily searching the school for it, I determined that it was either lost or stolen . . . but then, miracle of miracle, my friend and colleague Liz returned it to me Tuesday morning-- she showed me the mug and she asked "Is this yours? We all think it must be yours," and the reason she thought it was mine was because it had been sitting by the staff sign-in sheet for several weeks with a post-it on it that sad "Lost Cup, Please help me find my way back home" and not only that, but an e-mail was sent out with a picture of the cup, explaining that it was left in the Counseling Department, and the picture was printed and put on the announcement board in the main office-- so every day I was signing a sheet inches from my cup and staring at a photo of it . . . but because I don't really see things (or look very carefully at my e-mail) I never noticed my cup . . . and Liz and the other teachers decided that the only person in the school that would NOT notice their cup when it was on such prominent display was me, and so they brought the cup directly to me, correctly assuming it was mine (and while I was mildly disturbed by the inadequacy of my observational skills, there was a silver lining-- this was an excellent opportunity for me to allude to the classic Edgar Allan Poe story "The Purloined Letter" and thus, I am categorizing this happening as a genuinely wonderful and miraculous event, one step below Moses parting the Red Sea, but several steps above seeing an image of Jesus on a tortilla).

Dave Continues His Crime (Fiction) Spree!

Now I know the reason Michael Connelly sells so many books-- The Fifth Witness makes you feel like you're a lawyer in a big media murder case . . . and while the bulk of the book takes place in the courtroom, there's enough extra stuff to keep things moving: sub-plots and violence and romance-- and right after I finished that one, I started The Black Box, which begins with the 1992 L.A. Riots and takes a convoluted journey to the present, as Harry Bosch investigates the execution of a Danish reporter that was present for the chaos and died in it. . . I will definitely read more of his novels in the future (but not all of them, as he's written thirty-plus books . . . you hear that Harper Lee?)

Great Ideas in Western Civilization

Kitchens should have little trapdoors where you can sweep all the crumbs and junk, so you don't have to use one of those useless dustpan things.

Eleven Years Old and No Worries . . .

My son Alex just turned eleven, and I'm happy to report that the weight of his years is having no effect on his carefree demeanor . . . a friend of mine asked Alex if he was stressed at all about the upcoming PARCC test (because his son was a little worried) and Alex said, "Nope . . . not at all, it doesn't mean anything"-- in fact, Catherine and I are actively trying to stress our children out about school (to no avail) and for a more concrete example of the way they live their lives, I present exhibit A (the photo above) which is a snapshot of the crevice behind Alex's bed-- apparently once he's done eating grapes, potato chips, animal crackers or apples (all of which he is forbidden to eat in his room, for exactly this reason) then he tosses the detritus over his head and it falls behind him, into the crack between the wall and his bed, and then he goes on living his life, Alex-style (and if I were to hazard a guess, it will be many more birthdays before this changes).

Educating the Youth With Facial Hair Part II

It's very important to model what you are teaching-- if you are writing thesis statements, you should write one with the kids . . . if you are analyzing rhetoric, you should show them how it's done-- and if you're showing a clip Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, then you should trim your facial hair accordingly . . . it's just good pedagogical practice to do so (maybe next year I'll dye my hair blonde as well).

The Good Doctor and I Celebrate Another Birthday

My beard grows white, my skin grows loose,
the looming specter tightens his noose,
and if you deny him, he'll cook your goose . . .
let me remind you, it happened to Seuss.

Tales of Wawa

On my way to Wawa, I saw a teenage girl with long dark hair hanging over her face and she was high in the air, sitting cross-legged on the roof of a car, texting away in the cold . . . it was an odd tableau, especially on a deserted suburban street; the next day, when I bought a spicy turkey chipotle sandwich at Wawa, the guy making my sandwich told me I made a "good choice," which made me very happy (probably a little too happy-- what the hell does the sandwich maker at Wawa know about good food?) though I think he was breaking Wawa protocol-- because the reason you get a sandwich at Wawa is the fact that you can order on the little touchscreen and avoid all human interaction (and it turned out that the sandwich was not such a "good choice" . . . I normally bring lunch from home, and my stomach wasn't used to digesting an entire spicy turkey chipotle sub while teaching my 10/11 creative writing class . . . and rule #1 of teaching is that it's no fun to teach when your digestive system is going berserk).

New Music: Girl vs. Death Squad

After a few hiccups, I've got my home music studio up and running again (everything pretty much died in the span of a week-- my DAW software, my operating system, my digital audio converter, and my MIDI drum machine) and I'm trying to record ten solid songs and call it an album . . . I've got a cool name for the project-- Slouching Beast-- and "Girl vs. Death Squad" is the first track I finished, it's inspired by all the Mexican drug cartel stuff I read last summer; for lyrics and more, head over to Gheorghe: The Blog.

Puzzling

I've been consuming loads of crime stuff: The Fall, True Detective, The Skeleton Road, The Fifth Witness . . . so you'd think my investigative skills would be on fleek, but the following mysteries in my life still remain unsolved:

1) two weeks ago, the garbagemen took the recycling on Wednesday instead of Thursday;

2) both my jump shot and my hairline have diminished on the same timeline;

3) even though Rudy was totally cheesy, it still made me cry.

Can You Build a Teacher Bigger, Faster, Stronger?

Elizabeth Green's book Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) avoids most of the politics that Dana Goldstein covers in The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession and instead focuses on the quest to find out what good teaching is and what characteristics a good teacher possesses; along the way she dispels some myths-- one is that teachers are "natural born" . . . it would be convenient if this were so, because then it would be simply a matter of firing the worst ten percent of teachers (which is a LOT of people-- there are 3.7 million teachers in America . . . it is by far the largest number of white collar workers in any one profession, as a comparison, there are 180,000 architects and 1.3 million engineers) and replacing them with folks that are "born to teach" and then all our test scores would rise, but though there have been plenty of attempts, there are no particular characteristics or personality traits or intellectual capacities that make a good teacher-- as long as you are smart enough, it's something you learn . . . then there are the folks that just think if there were enough accountability and testing, we could figure out where the problems are-- but these sort of data collection set-ups don't actually help teachers improve and generally collpse under their own weight, and on the other side of the coin are the autonomy people, who believe that good teaching results from teachers being completely on their own, free of testing and data . . . but there's no indication that this is the case either; Green goes to Japan, a country that test far better than us in math, and she finds that they use a system very different than ours, where teachers have a lighter class load, but much more time to collaborate and observe colleagues, and then study and criticize their lessons in an intense fashion-- and, ironically, the Japanese learned this system from the United States-- we invented it, but we never implemented it (the book closely observes math teaching and an easy way to spot the difference is that American classes progress in an "I, We, You" fashion-- the teacher demonstrates, the kids work together, and then they try it alone, while Japan works in a "You, Y'all, We" manner, where the kids work on a single problem-- carefully crafted by a team of teachers-- and they work alone and struggle at first, then discuss possible methods with each other, and then have a teacher directed discussion on how they might go about solving the problem) and Green comes to the conclusion that though we've tried some noble experiments (the "zero tolerance" charter schools in impoverished areas and plenty of collaborative programs in certain schools) that we have no national infrastructure for this sort of thing, no shared curriculum and vocabulary in disciplines, and a general incoherence because of state, national, and district mandates (which may or may not conflict with each other) and that more observation (especially by people outside of one's discipline-- which is what is happening now in schools everywhere around the country) is not particularly helpful unless the teacher is a complete trainwreck-- and most teachers are not (in fact, teachers which are rated ineffective one year, have a very good chance of being rated effective the next, so there's a lot of subjectivity in these ratings) and so they need very specific feedback and lesson ideas for their subject area, not more administrative data, but-- as Michael Roth points out in this review of the book, American teachers clock far more hours in the classroom than teachers from other countries (especially successful countries) and so there is no time to collaborate or watch other teachers lessons or team plan, and -- because of the particular American obsession with business and productivity-- I can't imagine our course or student loads ever diminishing, so in a sense, we will remain islands unto ourselves (I am very lucky that a lot of collaboration goes on informally in my department, but it's pretty random and essentially determined by what English teachers you have lunch with . . . which is no way to improve national test scores in reading and math) but you never know, the book is worth reading just for the math ideas alone, which might help you to help your kid with his math homework.

Dave Learns How to Use a Scarf!

It took my me all winter to figure it out, but I finally mastered the scarf-- in order to wear one, I need to first put on a hooded sweatshirt, then I need to wrap the scarf around my bare (and rather thick) neck, and then, in order to secure the scarf in place, I need to pull the hood of the sweatshirt over the scarf-- so it's jammed in there; this method really keeps the scarf up over my chin and mouth and it stays that way-- I walked the dog for an hour down by the river and the wind didn't bother me at all . ..  so if next winter is a bad one, and I start posting scarf incompetence stuff again, someone please remind me about this epiphany.

I Don't Know What Women Want, But I Know What ISIS Wants

Though I still don't know what women really want, I do know what ISIS really wants . . . and you can too if you read Graeme Wood's really long and in-depth Atlantic article "What ISIS Really Wants" but if you don't feel like reading it (it's definitely a downer) then I'll sum it up in a nutshell: apocalypse, genocide, slavery, crucifixion, beheadings, territory, a caliphate, social welfare, free healthcare, Sharia law, and-- finally-- a showdown in Dabiq between the jihadists and "Rome," where the Islamic State will be victorious, and then they will go on to sack Istanbul and spread through the world, only to be beaten back by the anti-Messiah "Dajjal" . . . and the remaining five thousand members of ISIS will be cornered in Jerusalem, where--with the help of Jesus-- they will triumph and rule the earth . . . and this is all derived from a carefully considered, radically rigid reading of the Koran and the Hadith . . . so it's not so much to ask for, is it?

Cowardly Swedes in the Snow and the Jungle

It is both awful and compelling to witness a grown man's total humiliation-- I have only seen this once and it is indelibly engraved in my brain . . . my wife and I were hiking up a limestone karst in the Khao Sok region of Thailand, and our leader Nit-- a whiskey slugging ex-tiger hunter turned eco-guide-- was pointing out the jungle sights: boar, elephant, and tapir tracks; trees that had been ripped apart by Malayan sun bears; monitor lizards basking in the sun; hornbills flying overhead . . . it was loud, cicadas and gibbons shrieked and chattered; and we were making our way up a steep section, switchback after switchback-- Catherine and I were at the back of the line; Nit was in the lead, followed by Hans the big Swede, his tall and lovely wife Maude, and their teenage son . . . and one moment we were soaking in all the nature and the next moment was pandemonium . . . first we heard a loud predatory growl and then Hans turned and bolted, knocking his wife to the ground, and he sprinted by his son, his eyes round with fear . . . and finally, right in front of Catherine, he fell face first into the mud, tripped by a log . . . Nit was laughing hysterically, and Catherine and I, with our view from the back of the line, had seen the whole thing: Nit got ahead of the group and just before Hans rounded the turn, Nit did his best tiger imitation, a sharp guttural scream-- and granted, this was tiger territory-- and Hans bought it-- hook, line and sinker-- and took off like a bat out of hell, abandoning his wife and children in a moment of Costanzaesque panic . . . and so, a few minutes later, when we ended the hike on top of the karst, Hans was able to regain his breath, but not able to save face (which was bright red in embarrassment) and Nit couldn't have been happier that he had destroyed this man's reputation . . . this is a moment I can still see as vividly as the day it happened, it was both funny and horrible, but I never imagined what it did to Hans and Maude's marriage . . . until now-- an ex-student sent me an email recommending an international film called Force Majeure because she thought it was similar to this story (which I told in class) and though it takes place in the French Alps instead of the Thai jungle, the film is more than similar-- it is exactly like what happened in the jungle; a Swedish family is eating breakfast outside at a mountain-top ski resort and they see an avalanche headed towards the deck-- and while at first they think it is a "controlled" avalanche, as the wall of snow gets closer and closer, the restaurant patrons move from fascinated to afraid, and then the wall of snow hits-- and the Swedish mom grabs the two children to protect them and meanwhile the Swedish dad grabs his gloves and his phone and then (like brave Sir Robin) he runs away, abandoning his family to the snow . . . and though it turns out that the avalanche was indeed "controlled" and the frightening wall of snow which enveloped the deck was only avalanche "smoke," that doesn't change matters, and minutes later the dad slinks back into the scene and the rest of the movie (this is just the start) is about the consequences of his cowardice-- just like the event I saw, it's painful and terrible to watch (but also impossible to look away . . . check out the clip to get the idea).

How Much Light Do You Need in the Bathroom, Anyway?

Another sunrise, another sunset, another day the new bathroom light fixture stays safely nestled inside its box.

The Fall (Asleep)

The Fall might be a good show-- my wife certainly loves it-- but it's thin on humor and certainly takes things slowly (read as BORING) and this effectively and literally puts me to sleep every time I watch . . . but then my wife kindly summarizes the plot of the episode I missed and we move on . . . and now I've "finished" watching season two and I am very excited for season three, because the skin under my eyes is smooth and wrinkle free from all the shut-eye I've been getting.

Winter Gets Seriously Cold (and Seriously Silly)

It's gotten so cold here that I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to wear a scarf . . . how does one wear a scarf?

Ghost in the Machine/ Ghost in My Head

I'm teaching Hamlet now, so whenever I see that little "remember me" check-box that asks if you'd like a website to save your information, I hear it in the voice of Old Hamlet's Ghost . . . remember me.

Dave (Inadvertently) Appreciates Canada!

Back in 2012, I made a New Year's Resolution to appreciate Canada more, but apparently that's not the kind of thing you can force yourself to do . . . despite my abject failure at deliberately appreciating our neighbors to the north, I'm pleased to report that sometimes you can end up appreciating Canada by accident (which seems fitting for a country with a capital city that no one can identify) and I've been doing just that: two years ago I learned to play Gordon Lightfoot's ominous and excellent song "Sundown" on the guitar (and my friend Rob coincidentally learned it as well) and then a couple days ago I heard a snippet of a song on the radio and vaguely recognized it and wanted to learn it on the guitar and so I looked it up, and it turned out to be another Gordon Lightfoot song ("If You Could Read My Mind") and so I did some research and not only is Gordon Lightfoot Canadian, but he is one of the most appreciated Canadians; for example, but Robbie Robertson considers him a "national treasure" and Bob Dylan wishes his songs would all last forever . . . anyway, I like his lyrics more than I like his voice, but he's a hell of a lot better than Nickelback.

I've Seen the Future and It's Ridiculous

My children had their first Twinkie experience Friday night-- my wife's boss heard that they had never tried the quintessential processed treat and so she bought a box of them in order to corrupt their taste buds-- and my kids spent some time just soaking in the smell before they ate them, and while Alex held his Twinkie under his nose, he said to me: "this is the future, a Twinkie attached to a pair of glasses so it sits under your nose and you can smell it all day" and I almost pursued the discussion, but then I thought better of it and let him enjoy his greasy cream filled treat (when I was a kid, I preferred the Chocodile . . . which is a chocolate covered Twinkie and-- according to Wikipedia-- Hostess reissued them in 2014, but in a slightly smaller "fun-size," which seems like a weird appellation, because with something as delicious as a Chocodile, the bigger the better-- so a smaller version should be termed the "less fun" size).

Best Friends Forever (Aside From a 17 Year Hiatus After You Slept With My Wife)

So in the end, True Detectives is a Buddy Cop Show (Starsky and Hutch . . . Marty and Rust) and if you've got a buddy -- even if you're buddy is obtuse and philosophical and cold and obsessive and damaged . . . or drunk and licentious and hot-headed and undirected-- then you can head into the heart of darkness and maybe come out unscathed (or very scathed, but not so scathed that you can't do another season) and I'm wondering if the design of the mystery was so byzantine, like a Raymond Chandler novel, so that you could just sit back and enjoy the weird relationship between Marty and Rust, and forget about trying to figure out who was abducting and sacrificing children in the swamps of Louisiana (which isn't all that fun to think about anyway).

Snow Schtick

As a high school teacher, you occasionally educate your students, but in between the learning, you need a lot of schtick; Thursday during Creative Writing class, it started to snow and the kids reacted in the typical way: "Hooray, it's snowing! It's snowing!" and usually I allow them a minute or so of precipitation celebration before I make them start doing school stuff again, but not any longer--because I figured out how to nip the snow celebration in the bud; I said to them "an old lady just slipped on the ice and broke her hip, a car accident just happened on the Turnpike, and a stray dog just froze to death . . . and you're celebrating?" and a girl said "stop it!" to me and no one mentioned the snow again.

I Know Why the Enraged Bird Tweets

The New York Times article "How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life" investigates how public shaming in a digital forum can lead to very real consequences for the people targeted-- the article focuses on Justine Sacco's infamous tweet and there is no question that what she posted to her small group of followers was fairly dopey, tone-deaf, and possibly racist (Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!) and though Sacco claims she was satirizing the protective bubble that many white people inhabit, she came off as gleefully "flaunting" her privileged life; Sacco tweeted this before embarking on an eleven hour plane ride, and the by the time she touched down in South Africa, she had been lambasted all over the internet and as a result of the frenzy-- her tweet trended at number one-- she was fired from her job, she was told by authorities that no one could guarantee her safety, and employees at her hotel threatened to go on strike if she stayed there . . . and while I agree that people should be very careful what they post on the internet, as it is a permanent and public forum, I also see an irony in this system, where people are pushed to write controversial and edgy things in order to attract attention, and then the very people seeking these controversial and edgy things invoke unbridled indignance at the author, when they were trawling through Twitter to find exactly such things; this reminds me of Howard Stern's mantra: if you don't like what you're hearing, turn the dial . . . if you don't want to be offended, then get off the internet and read something that's been vetted by a professional editor-- satire is really hard to write (especially in 140 characters) and Justine Sacco failed at it, but the people who publicly humiliated her also failed to take the post in its proper context; the medium is the message here-- the tweet was in poor taste, but it was just a tweet, designed to live and die in a moment-- take flight or plummet into the binary abyss-- not haunt a woman for the rest of her days.

Defense Heuristically

I will guard you to the right until you prove that you can go left.

Icy Stairs vs. Hannibal Lecter

We just started watching another crime show about a serial killer (True Detectives) and this made me wonder how often serial killing actually occurs-- because if you watch Luther and The Fall and Dexter and Hannibal and The Following (I've only seen the first two on the list-- and that's enough serial killing for me) then you'd think that the world is absolutely overrun with psychopathic homicidal maniacs . . . but it turns out (according to Scientific American) that only one percent of the 15, 000 murders that occur in the U.S. each year are the work of serial killers, and the FBI estimates that there are 25-50 serial killers operating at any particular time . . . which is actually more than I thought, but you should still worry more about getting the ice off your porch steps then the chance that your neighbor has a bunch of frozen heads in the freezer.

Snow > Frozen Ice Terrain

A few weeks back I waxed poetically about how much I love to stomp across Donaldson Park in the snow, wearing my Sorel boots, my trusty canine companion bounding and rollicking by my side, tossing the fresh powder into the air with his snout-- but now that fresh snow has been rained upon, and sleeted upon, and it is frozen into a phantasmagoria of icy slicks, jagged chunks, and crusty shelves; my Sorel boots afford no traction on this stuff, and my back hurts from hiking across the uneven surfaces every morning and afternoon, and I'm not hoping for spring, because all that means is mud and rain, and I'm not sure if more snow will help matters, because the snow will be layered on ice, so the only thing I can wish for is that someone offers me a job in Colorado, where the beer flows like wine and the sun always shines and the snow is dry and powdery and you can just brush it off your windshield with a magazine.

Dave vs. the General Public

According to The Week magazine, there is a growing gap between what scientists believe and what the general U.S. public believes . . . for example: 86 percent of scientists think parents should be required to vaccinate their kids but only 68 percent of the general public believes this; also, 87 percent of scientists think climate change is caused by human activities, but only fifty percent of the general public believes this . . . and while I'm not a scientist, I am noticing that my beliefs don't often coincide with the general public either; for example:

1) it seems like everyone in the general public who has heard of Sleater-Kinney really likes their new album, but I find it kind of grating;

2) the general public is fond of skinny jeans, but I prefer them a bit baggier;

3) the general public seems to really enjoy seasonal decorations, and I think they're a hassle;

4) the general public likes cars with hubcaps, but I don't really care one way or the other (and I tend to lose them because I'm an awful parallel parker);

5) the general public couldn't give a shit how they use "lie" and "lay" but I like to use them properly;

6) and finally, the general public likes to dance at weddings, but I don't know what to do with my hands (or my feet).

Great Ideas in Pub History?

Alec and I are generally full of ideas on pub night, but sometimes these ideas don't sound as good the next morning:

1) last Thursday, I was a bit wound up from playing lead guitar in the Faculty Follies band, and this led to us deciding to form a band (with a rather crass name about a sexual practice that was popular in the '80's and in '80's movies, e.g. Vacation and The World According to Garp) and then make an album and post-date it from the '80's so that people would "remember" us even though we didn't exist-- Pete the bartender/owner shot this one down immediately;

2) moments later someone claimed that the people who are "unboxing" and testing toys and electronics and food and other stuff on YouTube are making "billions," and we wanted in on these untold riches, but realized that most items already have well-followed "unboxers" and so we would need a new niche if we wanted to make our "billions"-- and so we decided we could unbox and test toilet paper . . . I'll spare you the rest of that brainstorming session;

3) and then Friday night we revisited a recurring discussion about Alec's solution to the Washington Redskin nickname controversy-- Alec believes they should shorten their name to "The Skins" and each custom-made super-tight jersey should correspond to the player's skin tone (the numbers would look like they were "painted on" the jerseys in grease-paint) so it would appear that the opposing team would be the "shirt" team and the super-tough Skins would be going bare-chested-- and while I admire the aesthetics of the idea, I think the variety of skin tones on an NFL team  (and thus the inconsistency in jersey colors) would make it tough for the quarterback to pick out receivers (and we've never discussed whether the jerseys would have nipples and belly-buttons printed on them).

Really Explore the Space with the Brake Lights . . . More Brake Lights!

So we were driving home from SpiceZone (an Indian restaurant that is a zone of spiciness) and we got behind a Cadillac Escalade with the largest brake lights I have ever seen-- it was like the car was inside a pair of parentheses (the photo above doesn't do the effect justice, but I couldn't find anything better . . . and if I were a different kind of person I would have snapped a photo with my phone, but I'm not that person).

Faculty Follies

Once again, the Triennial (not triannual, thank God) Faculty Follies were a roaring success-- teachers, administrators, secretaries and hall-aides performed skits, dances, and other entertaining stuff to a packed house (plus there were videos, including an awesome parody of Serial that Stacey made . . . I was the prime suspect) and while I never physically got up on stage-- it's too weird up there-- I performed below the stage in the "house band" (we called ourselves the SATs . . . not nearly as good a name as The Hanging Chads) and it's too bad Weird Al cornered the market in stupid song parodies, because though we only rehearsed once, we rocked the house; here is our set list:

1) Instagram-- to The Beatles "Yesterday"--

2) It's Fun to Guess on the P.S.A.T. -- to "Y.M.C.A"--

3) Take Me to Lunch-- to Hozier's "Take Me to Church"--

4) You're Not the Only One-- to Sam Smith's "I'm Not the Only One."

This is My Future (and it's pathetic)

Last weekend was a harbinger of future parenting; my ten year old son was up later than me on two out of three nights: he went bowling with his friend on Friday and didn't get home until 10:30 -- long after I went to bed-- and he was the only one in the family awake to actually see the anti-climactic final play of the Super Bowl (he was angry that we left the Super Bowl party down the street at half-time, but I had a cold and felt like shit, and when we got home, I took Nyquil and still thought I could remain awake to see the rest of the game . . . but I forgot that no man is stronger than the soporific powers of Nyquil).

Harper Lee: The World's Laziest Writer?

Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is publishing a "new" novel on July 14th; Go Set a Watchman is chronologically the sequel to Mockingbird and details the relationship between an adult Scout Finch and her father Atticus long after the controversial trial of Tom Robinson, but Harper Lee actually wrote this story before To Kill a Mockingbird-- Go Set a Watchman contains flashbacks to Scout's childhood, and Lee's editor wisely advised her to write a novel focusing on those flashbacks, and the result is the story that became a staple on middle school curricula across the land . . . anyway, I find Harper Lee incredibly lazy, it's not like she's been polishing this "new" novel for the last sixty years-- she claims that she "lost" the manuscript and that a friend recently "discovered it" (I suppose it's possible that she misplaced the novel, since rumor has it that she's nearly blind, but the most probable scenario is that the royalties from Mockingbird have petered out and she needs some cash to maintain her genteel Southern lifestyle) and so I am warning people not to fall for this ruse engineered by a lazy old bat in a wheelchair (does she even need that wheelchair?) and join my total boycott of this book and the ensuing media events surrounding it; instead, if you're going to read a book by an old bat, then read Skeleton Road by Val McDermid; the book is a fantastic political mystery, and-- more significantly for this particular post-- if you like this book, then you can read one of her twenty-eight other novels . . . so Harper Lee, take that bitter pill and swallow with along with your daily dose of Metamucil-- maybe this prolific literary statistic will inspire you to dust off your Smith Corona, feed in a fresh ribbon, and get back to work.

Shiny Happy People Read Absurdist Fiction

The Happiest People in the World is a novel by Brock Clarke, and the opening took me by surprise-- I've been reading a lot of non-fiction and realistic fiction and realistic crime fiction lately, and I forgot how absurd a novel can be-- the beginning of the book is observed by a stuffed moose head in a local bar: it is a scene of great violence, and then things just keep getting weirder from there; there are CIA agents, a Danish political cartoonist on the lam posing as a guidance counselor, spies in disguise, terrorists, wannabe terrorists, rogue agents, small town lugnuts, disaffected veterans, and all sorts of other folks, interacting at a breakneck pace-- the plot shifts, the point of view shifts, the tone shifts, and-- despite the absurdity-- it's impossible to stop reading, which is a great reminder that if things are structured right, and the sentences are well-written, then a novel can take you on a far wilder ride than a movie . . . I read a lot of this stuff long ago: Thomas Pynchon and Tom Robbins and John Barth and Italo Calvino and Kurt Vonnegut . . . and then I got old and started reading books about economics and technology, so this was a nostalgic trip back to my old reading ways, when I really had no idea what was going on: both in my life and the books that I read.

Stella Gibson is a Better Swimmer Than Gillian Anderson

In the BBC series The Fall, Gillian Anderson plays Metropolitan Police Superintendent Stella Gibson, who is sent from London to Belfast to investigate a string of serial-killer type murders; she is a cold, weirdly sexual, detached character and when she's not frowning or sleeping in her clothes in the office, she likes to swim laps to blow off steam . . . but while Stella Gibson is the sort of person who does everything with crisp and lean efficiency, apparently Gillian Anderson doesn't know how to swim very well; this provides the only humor (at least I thought it was funny) in an otherwise dark and dour show: Anderson's swimming is hectic . . . she breathes frantically between every stroke, her stubby little arms pumping away, her body rigid, her head snapping violently, over and over in the same direction . . . and all this poor form must have contributed to her "frozen shoulder," which is why-- as she explains in this article-- she used a body double for the swimming scenes in season two (so Gillian, since I'm sure you're reading this, here are a few pointers: you want to take as few strokes as possible to cover the length of the pool, slipping your hands into the water they way you would slip them into a glove and turn your entire upper body to breathe-- you should try to point your belly-button at the sides of the pool with each stroke, and don't cross your arm over the center line, reach out and use your forearm as a paddle . . . and you can thank me in the comments).

A Movie Review in Honor of Groundhog Day

You may have heard the premise of Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood: he got the same actors together (Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Patricia Arquette) year after year for short shooting stints and then he stitched the scenes together to make a fantastic coming-of-age narrative with the greatest special effect of all-- the actual passage of time; the movie took twelve years to make, and follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from elementary school to his first day of college . . . and the effect is in no way gimmicky, though it's always exciting to see how everyone looks in transition, but the story carries itself . . . it is the opposite of the great Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day-- where time stands still for God-only-knows how long . . . in Boyhood time is an uncontrollable flash-flood that sweeps Mason's family across Texas . . . and I am always impressed by works of art like this, where the investment of massive amounts of time is crucial to the outcome: I couldn't make it through Finnegan's Wake but I love the idea that it took Joyce seventeen years to write the book and it should take you seventeen years to read it; I am also reminded of Columbine and Far From the Tree, both of which took a decade to write . . . and then, of course, there's Noah, who took a picture of himself every day for six years.

Dave Does the Opposite

In a shocking role reversal, I cooked dinner on Wednesday night while Catherine took the boys to the barber (and she bribed the boys into going for haircuts with a new toy-- a mini-basketball hoop with an electronic scoreboard) and when she got home, dinner was ready but she started assembling and playing around with the basketball hoop: hanging it on the closet door, testing out the scoreboard, unfolding the structure, etcetera and I had to be the nag and tell everyone that they could play with the new toy after dinner, but that I had been slaving over the food and it was getting cold and they were all being rather rude . . . and I'll tell you, it was no fun being the scold, so I'm going to try to go back to playing with the toys around dinner time because getting nagged is easier than doing the actual nagging.

Dave Almost Loses a Nipple

The night after I watched Michael Ginsberg of Madmen cut off his own nipple and present it to Peggy in a jewelry box, because the humming of the office's new IBM computer drove him insane, the very next morning, I was pushed to the brink of sanity by a chirping noise in our kitchen . . . but luckily my wife and I found the source before I had to slice off any body parts . . . the basement fire alarm needed new batteries.

Who's Writing This? Does It Matter?

A few days ago, my wife helped me install a little thesaurus app that works inside Google Chrome-- so that I can simply right-click on a word and it will give me several (various?) synonyms for any word that I type . . . and I am wondering if this makes my writing more Dave-like . . . because I won't settle for an ersatz (artificial?) word and instead I'll find the exact (precise?) word that my consciousness is searching (grasping?) for-- in other words, the thesaurus will be a cognitive tool that will allow me finer-grained, more nuanced access to my thoughts, treating my readers to the most Dave-like experience possible; on the other hand, there is the possibility that right-clicking on all these words is going to make my writing half-Dave/half-Cyborg . . . if the little app plants suggestions in my brain that wouldn't have come up otherwise, then you'll actually be reading a collaboration between Dave and a computer . . . either way, there's one thing that's certain: it's still going to be a bunch of tangential drivel.

Four Ways to Be a Better Student

"How to Fix a Broken High Schooler in Four Easy Steps" is the second part of the Freakonomics two-part podcast on American education and Philip Oreopoulos, who sets up programs to help high-risk students succeed, summarizes four major reasons why students fail:

1) students are too focused on the present-- which describes my own children perfectly, even though I always tell them "think about the future," this simple maxim doesn't sink in-- they live in the moment, without any worry of the consequences of their words and actions;

2) students tend to overly rely on routine, and just keep doing what they've been doing in the past-- and this one does NOT apply to my own children, as they can't establish a routine if their life depended on it (see number one);

3) students sometimes think too much about negative identities-- they focus on what they're not good at or hang around with the wrong crowd (I think my boys might BE the wrong crowd);

4) mistakes are made more often in stressful situations or situations where there's not enough information-- and this is a tough one because my natural inclination is to yell at my kids when they're doing something stupid because they lack information, but the yelling causes stress and they don't listen anyway, so we're caught in a vicious cycle of ignoring them and letting them fail on their own (which they do with flying colors) or telling them how to think and behave, which usually results in yelling and stress and more mistakes . . . so essentially there's no hope as a parent, you can never do the right thing and you just have to hope that by reading lots of comic books, your kids will pick up enough literacy to make it in the world.

Broadchurch Has Nothing to Do With Dr. Who

Broadchurch possesses all the classic mystery elements: a tragic crime, a troubled detective, and a "locked room" style plot-- except the locked room isn't a room, it's the quaint seaside town of Broadchurch . . . and the mystery is a little more mysterious than usual . . . and David Tennant is a little more troubled than the typical troubled detective (are there any well adjusted detectives out there?) and, most significantly, Broadchurch develops the scenes that most murder mysteries gloss over-- watch it and you'll see what I mean, and be prepared for some emotions amidst the deduction.

Snow > Mud

I know an old lady is going to break her hip and flights are going to be delayed and the roads are going to be a nightmare, but that still doesn't curb my enthusiasm for loads of snow-- it's so much better than walking the dog through mud and goose crap-- I take him down to the river and he gets to bound around, off leash (because there's no one else at the park) and I get to stomp after him in my Sorel snow boots, and the dim winter sunlight reflects off the snow and the water, which makes me very happy, and it all reminds me of the final scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . . . I'm Jim Carrey and my dog is KateWinslet.

Science Isn't Always Fun

The best thing about The Best Science and Nature Writing anthology is that the writers do all the work for you: if you want to learn about the wonders of gene expression, you don't have to pore over exciting medical journals such as Thorax . . . -- instead you can skip the primary-source research and just read David Dobbs' essay "The Social Lives of Genes," which details the incredible power your environment and social ties have over your genes (basically, if you're lonely, your immune system doesn't work very well) but I must warn you, the book is not all fun and games; Maryn McKenna's article "Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future" is downright scary-- infectious bacteria is becoming increasingly resistant to the antibiotics we have and we can't create new antibiotics fast enough to deal with this problem, so some time in the near future, we're going to loop back to the days when stepping on a rusty nail could kill you-- and that's a minor problem compared to what Roy Scranton describes in "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene": near the end of the essay he reminds us that "the human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end . . . likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly towards disaster, because humans are wired to think that tomorrow will be much like today-- it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things, is not stable and permanent; across the world today, our actions testify to the belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning he seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium."

Like a Sea Urchin in Your Urethra

In The Matrix, just before Morpheus sends Neo down the rabbit-hole, he commends him for his awareness: "you know something . . . what you know you can't explain, but you can feel it . . . you don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad" and his words are both ominous and elegant, a perfect set-up for the bombshell soon to come, but I recently learned from an anonymous source that the Wachowski Brothers ran through a number of alternatives before they arrived at the "splinter in your mind" simile . . . here they are:

1) like a cinderblock in your anus;

2) like a sea urchin in your urethra;

3) like a Khan worm in your ear;

4) like a polyp in TR's nostril;

5) like a hedgehog in your armpit;

6) like a caltrop between your butt cheeks;

7) like a booger in your mustache;

8) like the early-morning gound in your eye;

9) like a donkey in your bathtub;

10) like a splinter in your pinky-toe, right under the nail, and you can't get it out-- even with a pin that you sterilized with rubbing alcohol . . . it is this feeling that has brought you to me . . . do you know what I'm talking about?

Innovation: Dead in the Water or a Phoenix Rising?

So most of you are aware that I'm the greatest teacher ever (when I'm not feeling grouchy or tired from pub night or claustrophobic or hoarse from too much coaching or irked by teens and their cell-phones) and my great skill is that I consume a lot of media-- print, audio, and visual-- and just barely understand it, but my subconscious does a good job of making connections, which I only half-comprehend-- and because I have no problem not fully understanding things, I'm willing to present these loosely connected things to my classes, which are full of smart kids, and let them sort it out; I am trying to get them to understand how much style and rhetoric influence an argument (and I am all style and rhetoric, with very little content) and I recently stumbled upon two pieces on innovation that are almost humorous to consume one after another-- though their content is similar, they generate completely opposite tones; the first is a dire piece by Michael Hanlon in Aeon called "Why Has Human Progress Ground to a Halt" and it makes an excellent historical and global argument for why our best days of invention may be behind us (specifically: 1945-1971) and the second is an inspirational gem from Planet Money called "The Story of Ali Baba,"-- the piece offers two success stories of innovation, and in both, the innovators use the Chinese commerce marketplace Ali Baba to directly buy parts that individual inventors have never had access to before . . . ex-Wired editor Chris Anderson ends up opening a drone-building company and Shawn Hector and Steve Deutsch built an automated chicken coop . . . so you be the judge, humans are either treading water waiting for the flood, or living in the most convenient time to innovate in human history.

You Should Print This Out

Ferris Jabr's article "Why the Brains Prefers Paper" presents some interesting evidence as to why reading a book or magazine is better than reading on a screen; there are tactile reasons of course, and people comprehend texts better when they read them on paper (and remember more) and students suffer less eye-strain, stress, and fatigue when they take tests on paper-- as opposed to on a computer-- and they actually score better . . . so this is an interesting rebuttal to the new standardized tests students will be taking on computer this year-- in our school, kids are taking the PARCC test and they will be taking it completely on computer, but there is also a paper-and-pencil version of the test . . . so I wonder if the results between the two mediums will skew the data . . . I certainly hope so, as there's nothing I enjoy more than skewed data (except Campbell's Law . . . which often leads to skewed data).

Platinum Fatigue Part 2

I was making my way through the 2014 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing and I saw an essay entitled "TV as Birth Control" and figured it was on the same topic as yesterday's sentence-- people are so busy watching all these platinum quality TV shows that they don't have time for sex-- but that was not the thrust of the article: apparently, TV (especially soap operas) in developing countries gives women a different view of motherhood, fertility, and women's rights and generally causes a major drop in fertility rates (in the 1970's, the Mexican government used soap operas as propaganda to promote family planning and contraception . . . this is known as the "Sabido Method") and so despite the steamy and salacious associations, soap operas may save the human race from a Malthusian disaster.

Platinum Fatigue

Sometimes, I get so tired and I don't think I can keep it up-- the pace is too fast and I want to close my eyes and just sleep, like forever . . . but then I rise to the challenge and keep on swimming . . . but somewhere, buried deep in my subconsciousness, like a splinter in my mind, there's a niggling thought: I can't do it . . . it's impossible . . . there are too many . . . it's a fool's game . . . there's no way out . . . there are too many good shows!  . . . there's no way to keep up! but then I dispel the negativity and think to myself: I am doing it . . . I've watched The Wire and Madmen and The Sopranos and The Shield, Luther and Battlestar Galactica and Breaking Bad and Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Return and Top of the Lake and Portlandia and Deadwood and Orphan Black and The Walking Dead and Sherlock and Louie and Friday Night Lights and The Guild and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and I acknowledge that these are the best shows ever made and that we are living in the Platinum Age of Television, and that these shows are better than movies, better than books, better than music, almost better than fornication, and certainly better than any form of entertainment ever created in the entire history of humanity, and I bow down to the show-runners and the show-writers, I applaud everyone for the effort, and I express my admiration and appreciation (and I also wonder how this many different good shows can all make money) but I think I've finally hit the wall, I can't do it any longer-- I grew up on Night Court and Real People . . . I patiently waited all week for a new episode of Cheers-- so this is quality overload-- there's too many choices, something has to give; I've learned to quit fairly good shows (Orange is the New Black and American Horror Story) and while I'm trying to do Broadchurch and Fargo and Black Mirror, it's never enough--  people keep recommending new things: The Fall and The Affair and The Missing and The Return and True Detectives and The Americans and Happy Valley and a bunch more that I've forgotten . . . so I guess I've got to accept the fact that I can't watch them all, and be happy that I'll have something to do when I retire (which doesn't seem likely, considering what's a happening with my pension fund).

Football, Soccer, and the Cinema

Sunday's Seattle/Green Bay game was the first time all season that I watched an entire NFL game-- start to finish-- and while the finish turned out to be extremely exciting, I was mildly annoyed for the first three quarters: Seattle looked inept, and there were a lot of commercials for new movies (which wasn't annoying in itself, I can usually tune out movie trailers but my children and their friend had to do a full review of how "awesome" each movie looked . . . they-- like many folks much older-- are still deceived by the fast cuts and the good music into thinking that every movie will be a masterpiece, simply on the strength of its trailer) but luckily my friend Roman was demoing his new deep-fryer for us, so he kept us all amused through the slow sections of the game with delicious and crispy fried-treats . . . and then, of course, the last thirty minutes of the game were a lightning-paced rollercoaster of plot twists and spectacular plays (and discussions about the rules-- my kids are still at the age where the ins-and-outs of onside-kicks and two-point conversions are riveting . . . and I can get sucked into it as well: I still don't understand why Seattle didn't go for two when they were down 16-0 and they scored their first touchdown . . . but seeing how the game turned out, I guess that's why I'm not an NFL coach) and I will say that it was fun to watch football with a bunch of soccer players (my son mistakenly called the Superbowl "the World Cup" during the game, much to the amusement of his friend, who is a real football fan) and unlike a soccer match-- which would have been long over if it was 3-0 in the rain going into the last stretch of the game, an NFL football game always has the possibility of a cinematic ending . . . and no matter what, there will be "an ending"-- a specifically final chance, an official climax-- unlike the flow of a soccer match, where there is no exact moment you can call the last attempt at victory-- and so I guess we like out sports the same way we like our movie trailers: episodic, fast-paced, explosive, and awesome (and Seattle's fake kick to set-up their first touchdown was extra awesome for me, because it made me remember why I started rooting for the Seahawks in the first place-- I was watching a Giants game in 1979, pre-LT, so it was ponderous-- and at the half they showed Seattle running a fake-field goal play and then throwing the ball to their little Mexican kicked, Efren Herrerra, who scored a touchdown . . . and apparently they did this often, and so, on the merits of that awesome play, the Seahawks became my AFC team -- they were the opposite of the Giants: they had no running game to speak of, except when Jim Zorn scrambled; and Zorn mainly heaved lefty passes at his little wunderkind white-boy wide-receiver, Steve Largent, and-- until they got Kenny Easly in 1981-- their defense was porous . . . it's hard to identify the current NFC powerhouse Seahawks to that AFC expansion team, but it still reminds me that I had a super-excellent Seattle trash can in my room when I was a kid-- the Seahawk logo wrapped all the way around, and I was also the only kid in town sporting a Jim Zorn jersey).

46th Proverb of Dave

Corn muffins are simply an excuse to eat lots of butter.

The 846th Proverb of Dave

When you are old, you will accumulate too many extension cords.

The 77th Proverb of Dave

When you sweep the kitchen, save some dust for next time.

More Ice

Yesterday, my son Alex and his buddy Gary walked down near the river to play on the ice (not on the frozen river itself, which is forbidden for obvious reasons-- I'm not that negligent of a parent-- but there are large frozen puddles near the river that my kids love to play on) and when I went to check on them, the two of them were playing ice hockey-- literally-- they were using sticks they found to play hockey with a puck made from a large chunk of ice; I didn't bother to tell them how funny I found this, as I didn't want to interrupt their game (which they played for a really long time . . . I had to walk back there to remind Gary he had to get home, and I'm thinking this is one of those rare and priceless kid memories that I'm going to need to recall when future teenager Alex does something obscenely obnoxious).

Chem for Dogs

I'm not very strong in my comprehension of chemistry (in fact, I'm downright stupid when it comes to chemistry, as anyone who has taken a chem class with me can attest) and so I'm not going to try to explain why this happens (if you're curious, read this) but apparently, not only does salt melt ice, but it also lowers the temperature of the ice as it melts-- somehow the salt uses energy from the water to cause the melting, and when you take away energy, then things get colder . . . but the interesting part of this equation is that I learned this from my dog . . . the other day when it was very, very cold and I was walking him down at the park, he started bobbing up and down like he had Parkinson's, but then I noticed that he was walking on three legs-- he was holding one paw in the air, and I took a look at the paw and it wasn't injured so I just chalked it up to weirdness and in a moment he stopped, but when I brought this up at the dog park, everyone seemed to understand this principle about salt and ice and they all gladly told me about it (I talked to multiple people about this phenomenon, at different times, and everyone I talked to cited the fact that when you make ice cream, you use salt to lower the temperature of the cream . . . does everyone who owns a dog also make homemade ice cream?) and so my first solution to this problem was untenable: for a few days I carried my dog across the street to the park-- because all the salt collects on that patch of pavement-- but my dog is fairly heavy and I walk him a lot, so that got old quick . . . instead, I bought him some Musher's Secret paw wax and that did the trick . . . and now I can proudly say that my dog taught me more about chemistry than that old bat I had in high school.

When Someone Makes Soup, You Eat It

When your wife slaves all day over a batch of home-made chicken soup, then come dinner, you eat the soup (I made the mistake of making a few tacos with the leftover chicken, instead of partaking in the home-made soup, and she was really pissed at me).

This is My Best Effort

My son Alex passed his stomach virus to Ian and me, and while the really gross part is over, my body is so sore and worn-out that all I can do is sleep and pet the dog.

You Can Pick You Nose But You Can't Pick Your Kids

While my son Alex still habitually picks his nose and eats it-- which disgusts me to no end-- I am also proud to say that he can now execute another, more elegant pick-- the pick-and-roll, which he performed perfectly with his buddy Luke in a basketball scrimmage the other day . . . this was one of my proudest moments as a dad (it competes with watching him proficiently snowboard) because, let's face it, as your kids get older, you're not going to have much influence over their behavior, morals, and/or attitude-- you might get them to say "please" and "thank you" but the rest is a combination of genes and peer influence (read the groundbreaking book by Judith Harris on this topic: The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do) . . and so if all the kids are getting cell-phones implanted in their buttocks, then you're probably not going to convince your kid to do otherwise-- and if you join the party, then you'll just be a weird old wannabe hipster with a cell-phone implanted in your buttocks, so there's just no way to keep up with them . . . really the only way you can have some sort of permanent influence on your children is if you teach them a specific skill, especially if that skill will have a influence on their life in the future . . . I didn't learn to snowboard until I was twenty-two and I didn't learn the pick-and-roll until after that (I was developmentally challenged as a basketball player) and, despite learning them late, both these skills have had a great influence on my life: snowboarding became one of my favorite sports and encouraged me to travel to a lot of places I never would have gone, and I still play pick-up basketball to keep in shape, so seeing my son learn these things at age ten makes me very happy.

January > Teetotaling

I think all of us living in the Northern Hemisphere will agree that January is a terrible time for resolutions-- especially ones that involving eating and drinking less; it's cold and dark and one of the best ways to dispel the winter blues is with delicious food, delicious food preparation, social gatherings, and plenty of booze . . . and so I am proposing we switch New Year's Resolution Season to the first day of spring-- people tend to have plenty of resolve then and there's actually stuff to get done (spring cleaning, home improvement projects, gardening and landscaping, getting in shape for bikini season, etcetera) while in the winter, there's no need to lose weight-- you're wearing layers of clothing-- and there's a whole lot less that needs to be done . . . so let's save the dieting and teetotaling for some time in the future and face the facts: January and February are for eating and drinking until you have a smooth, soft layer of insulation covering your body that will protect you from the cold and the wind.

The Wild Fern: Seventeen Stars Out of Five

Fans of The Dave know that I tend to be fairly binary with my reviews-- things are either "the best in the world" or "the worst thing ever" and that may be because I don't have a very good memory; I tend to live inside each moment, like an incredibly focused Buddhist yogi, discarding the past and ignoring the future . . . but despite this ability/impairment, I'm asking you to take this review very very seriously: if you ever find yourself in Vermont, on Route 100, a bit north of Killington Mountain, then you need to visit The Wild Fern and you need to eat whatever the owner/cook/waitress/hostess Heather has prepared for the day-- if you catch breakfast, it might be the best bagel you've ever tasted (with local eggs and bacon) or a delicate and airy New Orleans style donut with Nutella-- and if you go for dinner, then you need to try everything: the burger (local beef, homemade English muffin, Vermont cheese) is juicy and delicious; the pizza is fantastic; and the roast pork and sauerkraut is one of the best things I've ever eaten (and I hate roast pork and sauerkraut!) but the food is only half the deal; there's usually live music (Heather's boyfriend is local musician Rick Redington and she plays the bass in his band-- Redington performed when we ate dinner there, he's an incredible guitarist/singer and seems like a very nice guy) and the place has some sort of local post-hippie vibe that's only possible in a rural place that's still spitting distance to civilization (The Wild Fern is in the middle of nowhere, but it's still only thirty minutes from the semi-bustle of Rutland) and while there's not much seating-- the place is a shack-- Heather will take your order, tell you her life story, lend you her vintage Guild guitar (if I could always play a guitar while I while I waited for my food, I'd never complain about slow service) and explain just how she makes her amazing food (and as an added perk, the "Luv Bus" is parked in the lot outside-- it's the touring bus for Rock Redington & The Luv and it's the perfect finishing touch of verisimilitude for the scene).

Meaner Girls

If you're a fan of Mean Girls (and if you're not a fan of Mean Girls, then you'd better become one) then you'll love Liane Moriarty's new novel Big Little Lies . . . it's the story of what happens when the mean girls grow up and become mean moms; the story is set in Australia and centers around a seemingly lovely beachside elementary school, and from the first pages you know that someone has died horribly (but you don't know who) and that you're going to keep turning pages until you find out: Moriarty is a sharp, precise, and incisive writer-- she moves adeptly from satire to serious to slapstick, from plot point to plot twist; the dialogue is by turns funny and dramatic, and even though this would probably be labelled chick-lit, the dark underbelly of the story kept me up late into the night: not only will you want to find out who died and how, but you'll want to keep reading just to enjoy her keen and clever voice: five trivia nights out of a possible five.

Those Clever Teenagers and Their Electronic Devices

Not sure if this goes into the category of "something I should have known . . . but didn't because I'm old and/or stupid" or if it's a genuinely new and hip life-hack . . . but I learned in class on Tuesday that kids get fairly creative when they want to amplify the sound from their cell phone: one student said she puts her phone in the sink when she showers so she can hear her music over the running water-- and, according to RadioShack, a sink is a legit amplifier-- and another girl explained to us that "you can put your phone in your mouth if you need more people to hear it" which I deemed absurd and unhygienic, but she replied "it's my phone"; I couldn't find anything on-line about the efficiency of the mouth/phone combo amp and I don't think I'm going to try it, so you'll have to do that experiment on your own; another girl said she put her phone inside a big (unlit) candle to get some amplification, and everyone in the class knew the trick of putting your phone in a cup to make the sound louder; coincidentally, the first time I ever saw/heard this "phone in the cup" trick was over winter break, when my friend Rob (who is in his forties) put his phone in an empty coffee mug so that I could hear a song he recorded better . . . and I'm wondering if he learned this move from a youngster or if he figured it out himself-- so I will have to do some further research and report back to you.

At Least I'm Being Reasonable

I wrote a fairly lame post the other day for Gheorghe:The Blog in which I listed and discussed some of the "logic" I use when instructing my children how to behave-- and since writing the post, I have meditated deeply on the issue (and plagiarized a few ideas from the comments) and now I've produced a more comprehensive list . . . if you've got any other good ones, leave them in the comments and I will do the honor of stealing them from you:

1) because I said so;

2) because kids are starving in Bangladesh/China/India/Cleveland;

3) because that's disgusting;

4) because if you don't get it done, mom will go nuts on you;

5) because that's incredibly stupid and if you're going to do that, you need to wear a helmet;

6) because we love you;

7) because you're spoiled and need to suffer;

8) because our family is a team and we need to cooperate;

9) because you never see your mother and me behave like that;

10) because you're damaging our family's reputation;

11) because you don't know good music;

12) because in the Old West, if you cheated at cards, they shot you;

13) because stress kills, and you're killing me;

14) because people who know how to do math actually get jobs and move out of the house;

15) because if you don't get enough sleep, you're atrocious;

16) because you don't belong indoors, so get the hell outside;

17) because that's what you need to do if you own a dog;

18) because screens have ambient light that keeps you awake when you need sleep;

19) because I need a nap;

20) because if you don't wash your hands, shower and eat your fish and vegetables then you'll get scurvy/goiter/Lyme's disease and/or Ebola and your gums will bleed and you'll grow a football sized lump on your neck and your blood will be full of parasites and your eyes will explode.

Candy For Men

Black licorice is slightly more badass than a bag full of Gummi bears.

Did Ajim Suck Out Michael Rockefeller's Brains?

This is the essential question at the heart of Carl Hoffman's book Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art . . . and unlike Serial, this journalistic journey down the rabbit-hole of time delivers a fairly definitive answer to the mystery of what happened to Michael Rockefeller in 1961-- although you're going to have to wait until the last page of the book to get it-- but along the way Hoffman raises plenty of other issues about colonialism and otherness, cultural relativism and morality, the motivations and rituals of subsistence cultures, revenge and balance, the value and acquisition of primitive art, and what connects and separates human culture (think headhunting, chairs and sewage) and while much of this might be anthropological abstraction or a maze of historical detail (I still can't figure out exactly what went down between the Asmat villages of Otsjanep and Omadesep) the narrative is held together by the lurking shadow in the New Guinea swamp, the ultimate taboo: cannibalism . . . and this pervades the story and the Asmat culture-- these are people without access to protein, warriors who believe in a spirit world as much as in the dense, green and watery reality of their actual home, and they are complex people, who have had to deal with an upheaval to their culture, in the form of mysterious white men-- who are generally all-powerful, possessing guns and flying vehicles, white men who made them feel guilt and regret for their sacred rituals-- and while they now profess that they are reformed of their headhunting habits, there are still those living in the villages, elders, who have tasted human flesh, and fifty years ago, when they had the chance to strike at a weak and vulnerable white-man-- not long after they suffered a massacre at the hands of a Dutch colonial-- then the case that Hoffman presents makes perfect sense.

There's Something Perfect About This (Unlike Driving a Motorcycle on the Turnpike)

There's something beautiful and appropriate about this progression: Highroads Harley Davidson in Highland Park closed down a few years ago, and now the building is a dealership for wheelchair vans.

Mnemosyne Demands a Sacrifice

My wife has to remember a wealth of information on a daily basis-- she has a lot of responsibility at her job and in our community, and she's also the reason our hectically scheduled household operates smoothly . . . and this doesn't end when we go on vacation: she's the primary packer and planner (I'm the chief researcher) so she's bound to forget a thing or two . . . but never has she forgotten three things on one trip, until now-- and I'm not relishing this in any way, shape or form, but I'd still like to record it, in a most unbiased and objective manner, for posterity-- not only that, this event does harken back to the humble beginnings of this blog; so . . . without any gloating . . . here's the list:

1) at the start of our trip, my wife forgot her prescription sunglasses, but we were only a few minutes down the road, so we turned back and got them;

2) while my wife was paying the check at the much recommended Wild Fern restaurant, she put down the iPad on the counter and left it there-- she didn't realize this until we were fifteen minutes away-- but we turned back and luckily it was still there (Heather, the owner/chef/waitress of The Wild Fern knew the house we were renting and said she was going to return it to us there if we didn't come back so we were safe either way);

3) when we were leaving the rented house in Stockbridge, my wife forgot her ceramic-travel coffee mug inside the house, but we had already locked up and left the key inside, so we had to chalk that one up to as a sacrifice to Mnemosyne.

You CAN Tune a Fish!

For those of you who need one more miracle to make it through the holiday season, this will do it for you: this event is described in The Acts of Peter, which is one of the apocryphal acts of the apostles of Jesus and it reminds me of the movie Chronicle, in which some teenage boys gain superpowers and do typical teenage stuff with their powers . . . so here Peter sees a smoked tuna hanging in a window and wants to show some people what the name of Jesus can do, so he resurrects the tuna and throws it into a (conveniently located) nearby fish pond and the tuna swims for hours on end, and people feed it bread and rejoice (this is in The Acts of Peter 5 . . . this book also features a talking dog).

Vacations With Kids Are Not Really Vacations

Another phenomenal Vermont vacation, full of snowboarding, skiing, great local food/beer, and plenty of anxiety (not only anxiety from supervising my children on the mountain, but also in our rented house-- a beautifully converted barn in Stockbridge which contains a couple of spiral stair-cases, which seem excellent in theory-- but spiral staircases with smooth and worn wooden risers are death-traps if you're wearing socks-- I slipped and fell hard-- and while my kids are getting better and better at navigating the mountain, they are also getting good enough to hurt themselves-- Alex whacked his head when he caught an edge snowboarding, but he was wearing a helmet so he only suffered a bump on his head and a bruise on his face, but no concussion, and Ian twisted his knee when a little kid cut in front of him) and after three days straight of riding-- longer days than usual because we met our friends on the mountain and peer pressure really motivates kids to keep on keeping on-- so after three long days, we finally took one off to relax, but we also promised my son Alex that we would play Settlers of Catan on this day off, and not just regular Settlers of Catan, but the new very-advanced "Cities and Knights" add-on that he got for Christmas, and it took four hours to finish the game (which I won!) but we took a break in the middle of the game for some sledding (Alex befriended some friendly Stockbridge locals) and then a trip to Rochester, Vermont to eat lunch at the Rochester Cafe and Country Store, which I highly recommend: the town is scenic, surrounded by mountain peaks, and the food and raspberry/peach pie at the cafe is super-delicious . . . and I hate pie; while I'm at it, I'll also recommend my favorite local beers from the trip: Rock Art American Red Ale and Alesmith IPA (and it's VERY important to have good beer on hand when you're playing a four hour board game with children).

Read My Lips: No New Resolutions

I'm going to be honest here: the only New Year's Resolution I ever followed through on was in 2011, when I resolved to eat more tacos (but I can't even be sure that I ate more tacos than usual, because in any given year, I eat a lot of tacos-- the experiment/resolution lacked a control year-- and, empirically speaking, the only thing I actually accomplished was to count the number of tacos I ate that year) and the rest of my resolutions have been ironic or farfetched, and so this year I resolve to do nothing other than do more of the same-- just a little bit better: I'm going to eat a little healthier, drink a little less in quantity-- but make up for it in quality, exercise a little more, lose my temper less, appreciate my wife more, coach a little more creatively, teach a little more effectively, record music more consistently, practice my guitar more diligently, tuck my elbow straighter when I shoot a basketball, take the dog on longer walks, find slightly better books to read, play a few more board games with my kids, cook dinner a few more times than I did last year, and-- finally-- and this is the biggest one on the list, and the wholesale change that I'm making in 2015 . . . read my lips for this one: no more pleated pants (for the most part, I have switched to flat-front pants, but I still had a few remnant pairs of pleated pants-- from the '90's?-- in my wardrobe and once in a while I would wear them, to the dismay of my wife and colleagues . . . but I donated them all last week, so I'm locked in to this particular resolution, which I'm sure is a good thing).

Dave Has a Miraculous Post-Christmas Vision!

When your mind strays outside the established box-walls, then you will certainly suffer disdain and criticism, even from those who profess to love you . . . but you must carry on, bravely,  faithfully, into the pale; so let it be know that upon the 26th day of the twelfth month of the Year, 2014, the day after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ (or maybe not, but that's a whole other historical conundrum) I was delivered a post-Christmas vision in the form of a mini-van packing strategy: instead of building upwards in the back section of the van, the way I would normally stacketh our belongings, leaving a small "cavern" for the dog-- instead of this precarious and vision-obstructive pile of luggage, I would buildeth horizontally and create a "floor" of luggage, coolers, equipment, instruments, and victuals and I would layeth the dog's bed and a blanket on this "floor" of stuff and then the dog would have much space in which  to cavort and frolic and the driver would also be able to see out the rear of the van . . . and when I announced this vision to my wife, she said unto me, "I don't want the dog lying on my bag!" and I pronounced to her that I would bury her bag deep in the "floor" of mine own construction, under a blanket so that our dog would not lieth on her bag (despite the fact that our dog is liething all over everything in our house) but then when she saw my handiwork, she pronounced it good and renounced her doubt in my vision (for this particular incident) and the family did rejoice (until we were fifteen minutes down the road and my wife announced she forgot her sunglasses, so we had to turn around and get them . . . which raises an interesting philosophical question: how far down the road do you have to go before you don't turn around and go back for sunglasses?)

A Book For People Who Thought "The Road" Was Too Depressing

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, adds nothing new to the apocalypse trope-- in fact, I think she keeps it simple on purpose: a killer virus wipes out the bulk of humanity-- but the book is deserving of all the accolades (National Book Award Finalist, Amazon Sci-fi Book of the Year) and then some . . . it's vivid and completely gripping from page one, it's beautifully written, and there are scenes of great violence and decay-- of course-- but unlike Cormac McCarthy's The Road, there are also moments of beauty and poetry and hope . . . it's The Walking Dead if the zombies were replaced by actors, musicians, and prophets; while it's not a super-idealistic noble-savage view of humanity, it's also not an illustration of Hobbes Leviathan . . . it's somewhere in between: more "literary" than hard sci-fi, but still a perfectly imagined world and I highly recommend it (especially, as an English teacher and a musician, because this book gives me hope that I might have some small but valuable role in a post-apocalyptic environment . . . "survival is insufficient").

Some of the Best Sentences Ever Written (By Me . . . This Year)

Once again, it's time for me to arbitrarily choose my favorite posts of the year; I hope you enjoy them and perhaps 2015 will provide more excellent material for me to condense (or refuse to condense) into sentence form . . . so without further fanfare, here are some of the best sentences ever written . . . by me . . . in 2014:

Greatest Holy Miracle (Involving Balls)

The Commenter of the Year's Favorite Sentence of the Year

The Sentences That Produced the Comment of the Year

Human Consciousness Explained and Illustrated

A Most Titillating Sentence About Racks and Knobs

The Best Advice for Ebay Sellers

An Ironically Woeful Sentence

An Unsolved Mystery

Best Before/After Incident

Least Awkward Moment of  Dave

Prank of the Year

Crackpot Theory of the Year

Most Educational Use of Facial Hair

An Actually Woeful Sentence

A Sentence That Contains Two of My Favorite Places in the Universe 

Most Surprising Cameo (and Comment) of the Year

A Mystery Solved

Angriest Sentence of the Year

Most Reflective Moment of Dave

French-kissing Your Sister (the Best Tie Ever)

Best Paean to Sarah Koenig and Serial

A Fashion Statement

and, finally . . .

A Fashion Dilemma.

Unwarranted Death Stare

So I'm walking down the hall, minding my own business, trying to get to my period 10/11 Creative Writing class on time and in front of me is a nice little girl that sits in the back right corner of the aforementioned class, and she's walking along with another nice little girl from the class, and Nice Girl #1  happens to turn around and she's sees me and makes eye contact and gives me the meanest glare imaginable-- a death stare-- and then she turns back around and walks into the class and I follow her and when I get into the room, I say to her "What was that for?" and she says, "I'm sorry, I predicted that you were absent because I didn't see you when I walked by class, so I told my friend you weren't here and then when I saw you in the hall I got really mad that my prediction was wrong."

If You Have a Cool Jazz Voice, Then You Don't Need Transitions

If you've got a cool jazz DJ voice, like Venus Flytrap or Gary Walker (from WBGO out of Newark) then you don't need to use transitions-- everything is smooth and cool, so last Wednesday, after Gary Walker finished playing Grover Washington Junior's groovy saxophone version of Stevie Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My Love," in one long flowing sentence, in his deep, gravelly signature voice, he explained that Grover Washington was a good friend of WBGO and that they love his music, and also, that fifteen years ago on "this very day" Grover was in Manhattan to do some recording for CBS and he "bent over to tie his shoes and he collapsed and died" and, then, all in the same breath, he informed folks that alternate side of the street parking would be in effect and to make sure to feed the meters.

A First World Conundrum

Does anyone else have trouble napping when the cleaning woman is doing her thing?

New Rack vs. New Knobs

My wife is wonderful and amazing just as she is, but that doesn't mean she can't occasionally improve things . . . so this year, for Christmas, she got a new rack (just for me!) and this is even better than her incredibly thoughtful gift back in 2011 (a set of new knobs) because she really didn't want (nor did she need) a new rack-- but she knew that I wanted her to accept the fact that we both might enjoy a new rack . . . because everyone loves a new rack . . . in the kitchen, of course, not the bedroom; in fact, we don't even have an old rack in the kitchen-- my wife likes to keep all the pots and pans in a set of deep drawers-- but I don't have the patience nor do I have the skill to successfully dig them out or stack them in . . . I like when everything is visible and easy to grab-- and this applies to both knobs and racks-- and so I always wanted a hanging rack for the pots and pans and she finally agreed to indulge me (and not only that, she bought it for me in secret and got our handyman to come over and install it . . . the best Christmas gift ever . . . even better than if she actually got a new rack . . . which is a recipe for back problems, if you ask me).

Seriously, Sirius?

So I'm walking my dog and it starts to rain and it's cold and damp and I'm hurrying home and he pulls me to a complete stop so he can urinate on a fire hydrant and I'm like really? that is so cliché and I tell him this, but it doesn't seem to make an impression-- so I guess it's actually a thing: dogs like to urinate on fire hydrants, even if it's raining (and my dog hates the rain and generally refuses to go out in it or stay out in it, so he must have desperately wanted to urinate on this fire hydrant).

Fell On Black Days

Sunday was the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and thus the shortest day and longest night of the year-- if you care to know how any of this astronomical crap works, here is a link-- but don't ask me about it, because I was too tired to comprehend any of the details of the article due to the fact that the lack of daylight sends me into a semi-dormant, totally idiotic state; on the bright side, the days will be getting longer now, but if you live in New Jersey don't get too excited-- because spring is rainy, cold and miserable (a fact I always forget) so not only is it going to be a long winter, but there won't be any decent weather until next fall.

The Significance of #47

Having this blog has made it easy to keep track of the important things in my life, such as the number of tacos I ate in 2011 (200!) and the number of books I read in 2013 (22) and I am very proud to say that this year I more than doubled last year's book count (mainly because I read a lot of quick reads: crime-fiction and travelogues and slick non-fiction) and I just finished my fifth Don Winslow novel of the year (The Gentlemen's Hour . . . plenty of surfing, corruption, torture, and murder . . . plus some big Serial type issues, such as how the prosecution and police often "massage" eyewitness reports and confessions in order to get what they need for a conviction-- whether it's the right guy or not) and that's book number 47; for the entire list and my seven favorites, head over to Gheorghe: The Blog.