When I was young, before I had exciting adult things to talk about (like home equity loan rates and the best shrubs to use as a privacy hedge) I liked to go to bars and play Movie Game #2 . . . otherwise known as The Obtuse Movie Summary Game; these days, it's tough to get adults to play, so I force the game on my high school seniors, and despite the lack of beer and chicken wings, we always have a great time . . . the idea is to summarize a movie (it's movies only in the original game, but in class we open it up to books and plays and TV shows and myths and fairy tales) in a vaguely clever way that keeps the audience in the dark for quite a while, and the protocol is to begin the obtuse summary with either "there's this dude" or "there's this chick" and in class, I set up the teams in pods and one team summarizes and the other teams race to my desk with slips of paper on which they have written their guesses . . . it's fast-paced, loud, and slightly dangerous, so teenagers love it . . . here are some of my own examples, I'll put the answers in the comment section and feel free to add your own, as I'll use them:
1) there's this dude and he dies and there's this chick and she dies and there's this dude and he dies and there's this chick and she dies and there's this dude and he dies and there's this little chick and she dies and there's this dude and this chick and they almost die, but instead they kiss and then they live;
2) there's this white dude and he's feeling bad but then he starts feeling good because he's created something that makes other people feel good, but then he starts feeling bad again, and-- inevitably-- the other people start feeling bad again too, and everything just continues in this cycle, with people around him feeling good and bad, and he's on the same cycle and it's breaking him;
3) there's this big fat white dude and he's totally being bullied by this really mean guy who just oppresses him and pokes at his blubber and chases him all over the place to poke at his blubber and bully him and call him fat, and finally the big white dude has just had it and goes ballistic on the bully and absolutely wreaks havoc;
4) there's this dude and he's the dude.
Sloth is Always the Solution
I learned this lesson weeks ago, but last Friday-- possibly due to lack of sleep or just general raccoon-mania, not only did I misplace my beloved green coffee mug, but I also rashly decided to retrace my steps and find it, instead of relying on my inherent laziness and letting the mug make its way back to me; I squandered my entire off-period searching the school: the bathrooms, the copy room, my three classrooms, my car, the office, the lost and found, etcetera . . . but no luck; and then, serendipitously, I ran into the nice lady from guidance (who started the campaign to reunite me with my mug the last time I left it there) and she said, "You left your cup again . . . I sent you an e-mail" and I realized that there was one place I went that I had forgotten-- I had gone to guidance for a moment to pick up a form, and even if someone pointed a gun at me, I wouldn't have remembered stopping there-- and so I went through all that effort, but was still doomed to fail, and I should have just done nothing and let the universe take its course.
Spring Has Sprung (a Deceptively Lovely Trap)
Everything is covered in a thin coating of dusty yellow pollen, my nose is running and my throat is sore, and the school is hot and stuffy . . . and when I got home from work yesterday and stripped off my shirt, I had to extricate a wriggling inchworm from my chest hair.
Let's Celebrate Dave's Indolence For Another Day
And after the Creation of Yesterday's Sentence and The Permanently Affixing of The Raccoon Proof Screen, Dave rested (although not all night, as at 3 AM, he did hear the mother raccoon on the roof attempting to get back in to the attic, but she was foiled by the screen).
Dave's Laziness Saves the Day!
If you haven't been following my life (which you should) then I'll give you the quick update, and I've got to warn you, there's been a lot of ins and outs, a lot of what-have-you's and a lot of strands . . . and if you have been following my life, then skim ahead to the new shit that has come to light:
1) the story so far: last week, a pregnant raccoon invaded our attic and had babies, and she did this the day before the insulation guys came to insulate the attic and so when they went up there to pump in the cellulose, they were chased away by an irate mother raccoon who was very concerned about protecting her kits-- kits which were mewling and sleeping directly over our heads in our bedroom; we called a raccoon guy and he came and threw some male scent up there-- which usually causes them to vacate-- and we saw how she got in: she tore off a screen I had stapled under a roof vent (to keep the squirrels out) and we learned that raccoons are much stronger and craftier than squirrels, and then we learned that this particular raccoon was much more stubborn than other raccoons-- the raccoon guy had to come back three times (unprecedented) and the raccoon was especially aggressive, so he had to hurl bamboo javelins of scent back to where the nest was (under the eaves) because the mother was confronting him at the access hole (and this section of the attic is really just a crawl space)
2) the new shit: after a final trip to our house Thursday afternoon, the raccoon guy declared the attic raccoon free, which was quite a relief, and he gave me some big washers and heavy duty screws and told me to use those to affix the screen, as they were raccoon-proof; at this point, I probably should have gotten up on the ladder and made the attic raccoon-proof, but it was almost time for soccer practice and I had just downloaded the Ultimate Guitar app on our Ipad and so instead of screwing in the screen, I played "Don't Go Back to Rockville" while my kids got their cleats and shin-guards on; at this point my wife came home and I told her the good news and she told me that she really thought I should screw in the screen, but I told her that the raccoons weren't coming back and I would do it tomorrow and she told me she wanted to "go on the record" as saying that it was really stupid to put this chore off, especially after all we had been through, but then we had to go to soccer, and when I got home from coaching, I grabbed a bite to eat and took a shower-- in the meantime my friend Connell showed up, as it was pub night; and my wife went "on the record" with Connell as to how I should affix the screen and made it clear to him that she would kill Dave if the raccoons came back due to Dave's indolence, and then I came down and pleaded my case-- I wanted to get a respiration mask at Home Depot and maybe some extra metal screen and mainly I didn't feel like going up there and doing the job and that I would definitely tackle the project tomorrow, and then I went upstairs to get a sweatshirt and I thought I might have heard something in the attic-- but maybe not, because I was starting to hear things all the time, due to a sleepless week of listening to raccoons every night; so then we went to the pub and it was a big night-- lots of people were out and there was much convivial dart-playing with the locals-- and it was getting late (12:30 AM) but we were shooting bulls in a game of cricket (which can take forever) when my phone rang and, of course, it was Catherine and she said "guess what? I heard something" and hung up, so I high-tailed it out of the pub (after taking two more turns at the bull) and when I got home she called me a "selfish lazy asshole" and I agreed with her and told her I was completely wrong and that I should have manned-up and gotten up there immediately and that I had no excuse except that "I didn't want to" and then we heard another sound later in the night and figured it was the mother leaving for the last time (perhaps she forgot her phone?) and we didn't hear the babies so we assumed that she carried them to a new spot (which is what the raccoon guy said would happen) and I got up early-- bleary eyed and slightly hungover-- and accepted my punishment: I set up the ladder and climbed into the dusty, nasty crawl space (without a dust mask) and stapled the screen into place and then I promised Catherine I would screw it in tight when I got home from school; despite the lack of sleep and the late-night scolding from my wife, it was still a fun day at work-- I got to recount the story and issue a dire warning to my students about the consequences of procrastination and I planned to get Catherine some flowers with a note attached that read "You Were Right!" to restore marital bliss, and just after I gave my last period of the day a much anticipated "raccoon update" my phone rang, and even though I was teaching, I answered it . . . it was my wife and she said, "the raccoons are still in there, call me as soon as you can" and then-- in a sequence of texts and phone calls-- I learned that when the insulation guy went up to finish blowing cellulose into the other side of the attic, the side you can stand in, he was attacked again and he literally had to jump through the attic access hole at the top of the stairs (a bigger hole than the one in our bedroom) and then the raccoon retreated to a deep recess in the attic where the old house met the new house, so Mark (the most heroic insulation guy in the universe) went back up there and covered that spot with a roll of fiberglass insulation and then Wayne -- the contractor, also a great guy and extremely good-natured about this insanity-- came over with a thermal sensor (which looks like a large stud-finder, but costs eight grand) and located the nest; the kits were behind Alex's closet; so he drilled a two inch hole, and when I arrived home from work, I was able to see the babies through this hole, you could poke them, and apparently the mom was somewhere in this recess as well, somewhat trapped by the insulation; Mark also reported there was some other carcass (with maggots on it) in the recess next to this one-- it was either a squirrel or a raccoon, he couldn't tell and he couldn't get it out until the mother raccoon was gone; the raccoon guy came back over and said he didn't realize that the mother could get to the other side of the attic and he recommended laying down more scent in the attic and in the nest hole, and promised she would soon vacate, but Wayne -- the contractor-- wanted to get the job done as soon as possible and was seriously thinking about cutting a hole in the closet wall and trying to capture the mother and get her out that way; there was an interesting, slightly confrontational showdown between the contractor and the raccoon guy, with each of them questioning the other's methods, but the raccoon guy finally convinced Wayne that a cornered raccoon is a vicious dangerous, disease-ridden beast, and Wayne decided he would just have to finish the job later; now all this was compelling drama, but this is what is truly important about the story;
3) part three . . . the moral: what's truly important here is that Dave is no longer in trouble and, in fact, his wife even said that Dave's laziness was "a blessing in disguise" because if Dave would have permanently affixed that screen-- as his wife suggested-- then the mother would have either been trapped in the attic and ripped her way out, or perhaps, she would have been "locked" out of the attic and done serious damage trying to get back in, or she would have abandoned her babies and they would have died in there, creating a horrible stench; so marital bliss was restored (without flowers) and I was a hero in the manner of Hamlet; at this point I decided to switch things up and actually do some stuff, so I reconnected with my eccentric animal trapping neighbor Leonard-- who I hadn't spoken with since this incident-- and though he had given up trapping animals and driving them far from the borough, he was extremely helpful and set me up with a nice metal trap and warned me six way to Sunday about how mean and nasty raccoons were and how they would "rip your arm off" and so I put the trap up in the attic just for extra insurance (baited with marshmallows and peanut butter) and broke the access panel while doing this, so I had to pull out some plywood and cut a new panel-- which was scary because it meant the attic was wide open and that crazy animal was definitely up there-- but I got that done and the panel back in place and then we went to dinner for my grandmothers 93rd birthday, dropped the kids at my parents' house because our house was a mess and full of dust and debris, and then Catherine and I returned home and quickly fell asleep . . . and in the middle of the night Catherine heard the mother carrying out all the babies and in the morning we checked the hole in the closet and the babies were gone . . . so I stapled the screen in place -- very lazily-- and if that loosely affixed screen stays put, then we know we are raccoon free and I can get up there and screw it in, and if not, I'll be writing another extremely long sentence; again, to reiterate, the point of this story is that Dave's Laziness looked like it might undo him, but instead his unmitigated sloth saved the day!
1) the story so far: last week, a pregnant raccoon invaded our attic and had babies, and she did this the day before the insulation guys came to insulate the attic and so when they went up there to pump in the cellulose, they were chased away by an irate mother raccoon who was very concerned about protecting her kits-- kits which were mewling and sleeping directly over our heads in our bedroom; we called a raccoon guy and he came and threw some male scent up there-- which usually causes them to vacate-- and we saw how she got in: she tore off a screen I had stapled under a roof vent (to keep the squirrels out) and we learned that raccoons are much stronger and craftier than squirrels, and then we learned that this particular raccoon was much more stubborn than other raccoons-- the raccoon guy had to come back three times (unprecedented) and the raccoon was especially aggressive, so he had to hurl bamboo javelins of scent back to where the nest was (under the eaves) because the mother was confronting him at the access hole (and this section of the attic is really just a crawl space)
2) the new shit: after a final trip to our house Thursday afternoon, the raccoon guy declared the attic raccoon free, which was quite a relief, and he gave me some big washers and heavy duty screws and told me to use those to affix the screen, as they were raccoon-proof; at this point, I probably should have gotten up on the ladder and made the attic raccoon-proof, but it was almost time for soccer practice and I had just downloaded the Ultimate Guitar app on our Ipad and so instead of screwing in the screen, I played "Don't Go Back to Rockville" while my kids got their cleats and shin-guards on; at this point my wife came home and I told her the good news and she told me that she really thought I should screw in the screen, but I told her that the raccoons weren't coming back and I would do it tomorrow and she told me she wanted to "go on the record" as saying that it was really stupid to put this chore off, especially after all we had been through, but then we had to go to soccer, and when I got home from coaching, I grabbed a bite to eat and took a shower-- in the meantime my friend Connell showed up, as it was pub night; and my wife went "on the record" with Connell as to how I should affix the screen and made it clear to him that she would kill Dave if the raccoons came back due to Dave's indolence, and then I came down and pleaded my case-- I wanted to get a respiration mask at Home Depot and maybe some extra metal screen and mainly I didn't feel like going up there and doing the job and that I would definitely tackle the project tomorrow, and then I went upstairs to get a sweatshirt and I thought I might have heard something in the attic-- but maybe not, because I was starting to hear things all the time, due to a sleepless week of listening to raccoons every night; so then we went to the pub and it was a big night-- lots of people were out and there was much convivial dart-playing with the locals-- and it was getting late (12:30 AM) but we were shooting bulls in a game of cricket (which can take forever) when my phone rang and, of course, it was Catherine and she said "guess what? I heard something" and hung up, so I high-tailed it out of the pub (after taking two more turns at the bull) and when I got home she called me a "selfish lazy asshole" and I agreed with her and told her I was completely wrong and that I should have manned-up and gotten up there immediately and that I had no excuse except that "I didn't want to" and then we heard another sound later in the night and figured it was the mother leaving for the last time (perhaps she forgot her phone?) and we didn't hear the babies so we assumed that she carried them to a new spot (which is what the raccoon guy said would happen) and I got up early-- bleary eyed and slightly hungover-- and accepted my punishment: I set up the ladder and climbed into the dusty, nasty crawl space (without a dust mask) and stapled the screen into place and then I promised Catherine I would screw it in tight when I got home from school; despite the lack of sleep and the late-night scolding from my wife, it was still a fun day at work-- I got to recount the story and issue a dire warning to my students about the consequences of procrastination and I planned to get Catherine some flowers with a note attached that read "You Were Right!" to restore marital bliss, and just after I gave my last period of the day a much anticipated "raccoon update" my phone rang, and even though I was teaching, I answered it . . . it was my wife and she said, "the raccoons are still in there, call me as soon as you can" and then-- in a sequence of texts and phone calls-- I learned that when the insulation guy went up to finish blowing cellulose into the other side of the attic, the side you can stand in, he was attacked again and he literally had to jump through the attic access hole at the top of the stairs (a bigger hole than the one in our bedroom) and then the raccoon retreated to a deep recess in the attic where the old house met the new house, so Mark (the most heroic insulation guy in the universe) went back up there and covered that spot with a roll of fiberglass insulation and then Wayne -- the contractor, also a great guy and extremely good-natured about this insanity-- came over with a thermal sensor (which looks like a large stud-finder, but costs eight grand) and located the nest; the kits were behind Alex's closet; so he drilled a two inch hole, and when I arrived home from work, I was able to see the babies through this hole, you could poke them, and apparently the mom was somewhere in this recess as well, somewhat trapped by the insulation; Mark also reported there was some other carcass (with maggots on it) in the recess next to this one-- it was either a squirrel or a raccoon, he couldn't tell and he couldn't get it out until the mother raccoon was gone; the raccoon guy came back over and said he didn't realize that the mother could get to the other side of the attic and he recommended laying down more scent in the attic and in the nest hole, and promised she would soon vacate, but Wayne -- the contractor-- wanted to get the job done as soon as possible and was seriously thinking about cutting a hole in the closet wall and trying to capture the mother and get her out that way; there was an interesting, slightly confrontational showdown between the contractor and the raccoon guy, with each of them questioning the other's methods, but the raccoon guy finally convinced Wayne that a cornered raccoon is a vicious dangerous, disease-ridden beast, and Wayne decided he would just have to finish the job later; now all this was compelling drama, but this is what is truly important about the story;
3) part three . . . the moral: what's truly important here is that Dave is no longer in trouble and, in fact, his wife even said that Dave's laziness was "a blessing in disguise" because if Dave would have permanently affixed that screen-- as his wife suggested-- then the mother would have either been trapped in the attic and ripped her way out, or perhaps, she would have been "locked" out of the attic and done serious damage trying to get back in, or she would have abandoned her babies and they would have died in there, creating a horrible stench; so marital bliss was restored (without flowers) and I was a hero in the manner of Hamlet; at this point I decided to switch things up and actually do some stuff, so I reconnected with my eccentric animal trapping neighbor Leonard-- who I hadn't spoken with since this incident-- and though he had given up trapping animals and driving them far from the borough, he was extremely helpful and set me up with a nice metal trap and warned me six way to Sunday about how mean and nasty raccoons were and how they would "rip your arm off" and so I put the trap up in the attic just for extra insurance (baited with marshmallows and peanut butter) and broke the access panel while doing this, so I had to pull out some plywood and cut a new panel-- which was scary because it meant the attic was wide open and that crazy animal was definitely up there-- but I got that done and the panel back in place and then we went to dinner for my grandmothers 93rd birthday, dropped the kids at my parents' house because our house was a mess and full of dust and debris, and then Catherine and I returned home and quickly fell asleep . . . and in the middle of the night Catherine heard the mother carrying out all the babies and in the morning we checked the hole in the closet and the babies were gone . . . so I stapled the screen in place -- very lazily-- and if that loosely affixed screen stays put, then we know we are raccoon free and I can get up there and screw it in, and if not, I'll be writing another extremely long sentence; again, to reiterate, the point of this story is that Dave's Laziness looked like it might undo him, but instead his unmitigated sloth saved the day!
A Reason to Procreate
As long as you bring your kids, you can go to the zoo and not look like a creep.
Blanking the Net
In the beginning, when I went on-line, I really felt like that guy in the Le Corbusier chair being blown away by a high fidelity Maxell cassette tape-- surfing was the perfect term for how I felt while navigating this weird and wild tsunami of information (the first word I ever typed into a search engine was "catapult" and I was astounded that there was stuff on the other end of the search) but things have changed; now that the digital world is fairly tame and civilized, "surfing" seems too athletic a metaphor; we don't careen and carve through a frothy chop of crashing dynamic digital liquid any longer, we "visit" sites that are curated to our tastes so that we feel perfectly at home . . . consequently, we need a new term for this experience: I humbly suggest "scootering around the web."
Speaking Proper English is Bad For Your Bank Account
During an episode of the TED Radio Hour called The Money Paradox, I learned about a weird study conducted by Keith Chen; in his own words, this is what he discovered:
I find that languages that oblige speakers to grammatically separate the future from the present lead them to invest less in the future . . . speakers of such languages save less, retire with less wealth, smoke more, practice more unsafe sex and are more obese; surprisingly, this effect persists even after controlling for a speaker’s education, income, family structure and religion . . .
and so if you live in Germany, Finland or China than you save a hell of a lot more money than if you live in America or England or India or Greece, and while I find this disturbing-- that the grammar of your language can have such a large effect on your behavior-- it also makes perfect sense; I love talking about "Future Dave"-- this abstract guy who might do any number of things in some vague time far from now, but Future Dave never appears in my world, so Present Dave never meets him . . . Present Dave refers to him, but always in a compartmentalized future tense, such as "I wonder how Future Dave will feel about having a tattoo of a lizard ripping out of his skin?" but if Present Dave were speaking Chinese, instead of English, then he would say "I wonder how Future Dave feels about drinking a sixth shot of tequila?" and this blurring makes the future and the present more connected . . . I know I should be saving more for retirement, but I care a lot more about Present Dave than I care about Future Dave, so it's hard to get really amped for that guy (and perhaps this is why it's hard to get extremely indignant about the possibility that the pension fund I've been paying into my entire career might go bankrupt by the time I retire . . . because that's not going to affect me, it's going to affect some old crotchety dude with my same name and address, but he's a separate entity).
I find that languages that oblige speakers to grammatically separate the future from the present lead them to invest less in the future . . . speakers of such languages save less, retire with less wealth, smoke more, practice more unsafe sex and are more obese; surprisingly, this effect persists even after controlling for a speaker’s education, income, family structure and religion . . .
and so if you live in Germany, Finland or China than you save a hell of a lot more money than if you live in America or England or India or Greece, and while I find this disturbing-- that the grammar of your language can have such a large effect on your behavior-- it also makes perfect sense; I love talking about "Future Dave"-- this abstract guy who might do any number of things in some vague time far from now, but Future Dave never appears in my world, so Present Dave never meets him . . . Present Dave refers to him, but always in a compartmentalized future tense, such as "I wonder how Future Dave will feel about having a tattoo of a lizard ripping out of his skin?" but if Present Dave were speaking Chinese, instead of English, then he would say "I wonder how Future Dave feels about drinking a sixth shot of tequila?" and this blurring makes the future and the present more connected . . . I know I should be saving more for retirement, but I care a lot more about Present Dave than I care about Future Dave, so it's hard to get really amped for that guy (and perhaps this is why it's hard to get extremely indignant about the possibility that the pension fund I've been paying into my entire career might go bankrupt by the time I retire . . . because that's not going to affect me, it's going to affect some old crotchety dude with my same name and address, but he's a separate entity).
Rick Perlstein is Not Ersatz
I'm trying to get fired up about Governor Christie breaking the law and not paying into my pension fund, but it's an abstract concept that won't affect me until far in the future so it's hard to get as indignant about it as I should (and I'm trying to be proactive and "tweet" my opinion to the proper politicians, but that's a fairly abstract way to protest as well) but meanwhile, I'm banging my way through Rick Perlstein's dense book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and learning just how galvanized America was politically in the early sixties; the theme of the book is that it was just as fun and exciting and rebellious to be a conservative as it was to be a liberal civil rights champion, or-- a few years later-- counter-culture hippie . . . everybody was getting radical and the middle of the road (Nelson Rockefeller) was boring (aside from his new woman) . . . Perlstein uses my favorite word (ersatz) to describe the rumored American model town the Soviets built so they could train Communist spies in "indigenous American arts" like sipping sodas at drugstore fountains . . . these were the sorts of things that the John Birch Society was worried about-- if you weren't into communal living, then you might be into building a bomb shelter in your yard-- and though a Communist defector killed Kennedy, he was killed in a city of vehement right-wing lunatics . . . soon after, George Wallace discovered that there were racists in every state, not just Alabama . . . and while Kubrick was satirizing the bomb, intelligent people were having serious discussions about how we might use it and what the death toll might be . . . and people came out in droves to protest, to sit-in, to firebomb, to riot, to root for radical candidates-- very different than the digital protests that happen today; these were wild times, and deserve deserve wild and whirling words, and Perlstein provides them (including, among others, the words "cloture" and "vitiated") and while his works aren't light reading by any stretch (and I recommend using Kindle so you can control the font) they are required reading if you want to understand the political zeitgeist of the sixties and early seventies.
Are Raccoon Good or Evil?
I'm having trouble focusing on anything besides the family of raccoon in our attic-- apparently-- according to our raccoon guy-- we have a very special raccoon mother up there: until our case, the raccoon guy never had to lay a third round of male scent, and he's also never had a raccoon confront him the way ours did . . . she came right up to the attic access hole and wouldn't let him enter, so he had to spread the scent (which smelled incredibly rank) on a piece of cloth wrapped around a bamboo javelin and chuck it back to where the nest is . . . anyway, the raccoon and the kits will eventually leave on their own, but the question is how much damage will they do in the meantime, and there's definitely no consensus on that-- if you visit this site , then you can live peacefully with your raccoon guests until they vacate, but if you go here, then raccoon are a menace that will cause thousands of dollars of damage and give you and your family roundworms (I think the second site might be pest control propaganda, but it's still scary stuff . . . so I attempted my own last-ditch tactics: I propped my guitar amp on a stack of pillows and hassocks so it was a foot from the ceiling and tried to blast them out with power chords and feedback and then I tossed some tennis balls soaked with bleach back toward the nest, but no luck with either ploy).
Is Anyone Else Pathetic Like This?
When I arrive home from school and there are men doing work in or around my house, I feel obligated to look busy-- despite the fact that I have put in a full day of work-- and so instead of doing the things I normally do when I get home, such as drinking coffee and strumming my guitar or having a snack while I write a sentence or reading a book, instead, I try to do something that looks like manual labor-- God knows why-- and so while the guys were pumping insulation into my walls and ripping out the old furnace and hot water heater, I took apart my Kindle so I could replace the battery (which is actually a fairly challenging task, there are eleven tiny screws around the screen and three tinier screws holding the battery in place) and only upon later reflection did I realize how ridiculously nerdy a task this was . . . if I really wanted to impress these guys, I should have tried to pull down the dangerous dangling limb in my yard.
My Oldest Son Defines Fun
In the Gospel according to Alex, fun is "when you do what you want, and it doesn't help you in life."
My Dog is in the Doghouse (and a Raccoon is in MY House)
We take good care of our dog, and he has an excellent life: plenty of walks, the occasional backwoods vacation, and lots of love . . . but apparently he doesn't appreciate this, because he has one responsibility-- protect the house!-- and in this regard, he has failed us . . . last week, the insulation guy was finishing up the job, running the cellulose hose into the attic, but he had to beat a hasty retreat from the attic when a mother raccoon, who was protecting a litter of raccoon kits, hissed at him-- kits which are feeding and shitting and urinating right above our bed; I am tempted to toss the dog through the attic access hole, but I know he'd get his ass kicked, so he's lying in a sunbeam now, letting any kind of vermin onto our property and into our attic, pretending not to understand all the grief I've been giving him (and, to add insult to injury, because of the dog's negligence we had to get a "raccoon guy" to spray some male scent up there to encourage the mom to relocate, and apparently-- as I haven't met him-- my wife thinks he's hot . . . so I'm sure she's going to be hearing raccoon all over the place so she can invite him back to "spray his scent" . . . and, honestly, if the scent gets rid of the raccoon, then I'll gladly let my wife flirt with him . . . or whatever it takes-- she did manage to get a "cash" discount from him and I'm inquiring as to how-- because the raccoon are still up there and neither my method-- blasting a radio at them-- nor my son Ian's method-- blasting his trombone at the ceiling-- have had any effect on them . . . the above photo was taken by the raccoon guy and this is the actual raccoon in our attic).
You Can Return Yogurt If It Looks Weird
I opened a large tub of Chobani Greek yogurt and it looked weird-- chunky and striated instead of smooth and glistening-- and though it was probably fine to consume, my wife told me I could "take it back," despite the fact that I didn't have a receipt; I went to the Stop & Shop Customer Service desk and the lady there took it back no questions asked, despite the fact that I was dressed like a slob (gray sweatpants and a gray hoodie) and she didn't even give me a chance to use the words "chunky and striated," which I memorized because I thought I would be interrogated a bit before she allowed me to get a new tub of yogurt . . . so the real question is this: if you're wearing a jacket and tie, can you return a brown avocado?
Do NOT Listen to This If You Are a Prisoner of the Illusion
If you bought your wife a diamond engagement ring, you're probably not going to want to listen to the new Freakonomics podcast "Diamonds Are a Marriage Counselor's Best Friend," which shatters the illusions that diamonds are rare (they're not . . . but the De Beers diamond syndicate tries to make it appear that way) and that diamonds are forever (they are a 20th century tradition, made popular by the advertising firm N.W. Ayer, who managed to convince the world that a diamond was a tangible representation of love and for a mere two months salary, you were getting a priceless, indestructible investment, but the truth is that diamonds don't hold their value-- the mark-up on them is tremendous and you can't resell them for even half of what you paid . . . in fact, because of "the overhang," all the diamonds already out there, they are quite common) and so my stubborn refusal to buy an engagement ring may have been the only good financial decision I've ever made, though it cost me a lot of pain and suffering (my mother finally saved the day and broke the impasse between Cat and I . . . we recycled a family heirloom).
This Book Is Nothing Like a Michael Connelly Novel
I am slowly making my way through Jim Holt's book Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story and while in a sense the subtitle is true, as Holt really is searching for clues to the answer to the biggest question of all-- why is there something, rather than nothing?-- but I have to tell you that this is nothing like proceeding through a Harry Bosch investigation; Holt interviews some strange characters (forcing me to learn some new words: Richard Swinburne, an Oxford philosopher who believes that the simplest hypothesis as to why there is something rather than nothing is that an omnipotent God created the universe, explains that he has a theodicy, which is a impossibly precise word that means he has a defense of why an omniscient, omnipotent and infinitely good being would allow evil in the universe . . . Holt calls his tone "almost homiletic," and I had to look up that word too-- it means speaking in the style of a homily . . . just before Holt interrogated Swinburne, he interviewed his "great cosmological adversary," a guy named Adolf Grumbaum who thought that the ultimate question was actually a pseudo-problem, and our problems with time and complexity and the Null hypothesis are all heuristic biases) and while Holt interrogates these folks to the best of his ability, I'm highly skeptical that he's going to wrap this thing up at the end of the book . . . I peeked at the name of the last chapter and it is called "Return to Nothingness" (I knew a teacher who always read the last few pages of a mystery novel first, so he could then go back and enjoy the story and not rush ahead simply to find out the solution to the plot).
Now That's Talent . . .
My wife is very good at many things: her job, cooking, looking good in sexy boots while shoveling snow, but her two most impressive abilities, while tangentially related, are slightly more obscure:
1) she is incredibly skilled at pouring large quantities of liquid without spilling; e.g. transferring a giant pot of homemade soup into a bunch of plastic containers . . . if I did that there would be a major broth lossage;
2) she can fill the dog bowl to the brim with water and carry it a long distance-- across the kitchen, around the breakfast bar, and past the big table-- without spilling a drop . . . every time she does this, I think she's going to spill it-- and say so-- but it never happens (and she makes fun of me when I barely fill the bowl halfway and-- despite my prudence-- still slosh water all over the floor . . . but I have an obscure ability, too . . . I can close the tops of our metal water bottles so tightly that no one else in the family can open them except me).
1) she is incredibly skilled at pouring large quantities of liquid without spilling; e.g. transferring a giant pot of homemade soup into a bunch of plastic containers . . . if I did that there would be a major broth lossage;
2) she can fill the dog bowl to the brim with water and carry it a long distance-- across the kitchen, around the breakfast bar, and past the big table-- without spilling a drop . . . every time she does this, I think she's going to spill it-- and say so-- but it never happens (and she makes fun of me when I barely fill the bowl halfway and-- despite my prudence-- still slosh water all over the floor . . . but I have an obscure ability, too . . . I can close the tops of our metal water bottles so tightly that no one else in the family can open them except me).
Holy Mother of Miracles!
Fanatics of Dave know that miracles abundantly manifest themselves when I am present, but this newest miracle is different, it is in fact more miraculous than all other previous miracles combined-- even more miraculous than the miracle of the balls; last Sunday (which many religions consider the holiest of days) I was driving a bunch of kids and parents to a travel soccer game (and I am certain that this blessed event was a reward for my good deed of carpooling) and when we got home, my friend's canvas chair got stuck in my minivan's back hatch, between the latch and the locking mechanism, and-- after much violent yanking and pulling-- the the chair finally came out, but the yanking and pulling must have broken something, as the locking mechanism now wouldn't catch, and so the hatch couldn't be closed; I drove home with the hatch open, and then tried the laying of screwdrivers and pliers to the crippled area, but to no avail, and while I was finally able to pry the little piece inside the mechanism into place so it would catch, but you still couldn't lock an dunlock the mechanism: if you opened the hatch, then you had to go through the whole process with the screwdriver again to get it to catch, which is no way to live your life, so I closed the latch and decided I would let it recuperate for a few days-- mainly because I didn't want to deal with it or bring it to one of those places where you pay some money and they fix your car, but after several days of dragging soccer equipment over the seats and out the sliding doors, I prayed to all of the higher powers in existence and then I lay my hand upon the handle and pushed the button, and-- miraculously!-- the hatch opened with ease and grace, and then I closed the hatch and it locked with ease and grace-- Jesus healed the cripples and the lepers-- but we all know that religious belief can kickstart your immune system-- but I healed an inanimate object, I healed a car!-- my latch was dead and entombed in darkness for three days, and then rose again, full of strength and latchiness, absolving me of having to pay a mechanic money to fix the problem . . . if this isn't a miracle, what is?
How Did Sheryl Crow Get Motivated to Write "Soak Up the Sun"?
The weather has been really pleasant around here for the last few days, and it's made my motivation to write sentences and record music and practice the guitar and even read a book severely wane; I just want to go outside and soak up the sun . . . and this makes me wonder how anyone who lives in a beautiful climate gets anything done, especially artists . . . I know Georgia O'Keefe found her inspiration in New Mexico, but she's probably the exception to the rule; this might explain why most of the movies coming out of Hollywood are crap, as the weather is so good out there that it must be very hard to focus on making a great work of art (and really, how can you connect and empathize with the common man when it's 72 degrees and sunny every day . . . I'm sure Hollywood movie production people start off with the best intentions, revising scripts and shooting scenes, but then it's just so damned nice out that they feel compelled to call it a day and go catamaraning . . . anyway, if the weather wasn't so nice here in Jersey, then I'd start a massive meta-study of great artists in the style of Franco Moretti . . . cross-indexing great works with the location in which they were created, and then see if my hypothesis holds water: that there is a negative correlation between good weather and great art (and if there's someone living in Greenland reading this, and you're stuck inside because it's hailing large chunks of ice, feel free to steal my idea and write the study).
Dearth of These in Central Jersey
Every time we visit Vermont, we envy all the delicious restaurants-- I don't understand why we don't have a hip Mexican inspired counter-service place like Mojo Cafe in our vicinity-- we have plenty of great authentic Mexican food (like the new place in Highland Park, El Sol, which I love)-- but Mojo Cafe is one of those places where someone with excellent handwriting writes the menu on a big chalkboard and they serve local produce and play cool music and have a million different bottles of hot sauce that you can sample, it's a hipster joint, certainly, but the food is really, really good . . . I also wish we had a organic deli like The Moon Dog Cafe . . . there's local produce for sale, amazing baked goods, and excellent and creative soups and sandwiches; I'm not sure why we don't have places like this in Middlesex County, as our population is much denser than Vermont, so someone check out the websites and open something similar . . . thanks in advance!
Famous Last Words (Dave Does Risk Assessment)
You're going to want to read the entirety of this rather long-winded sentence, if only because if I die, then you can say "I told you so"; this week in Composition class, we prioritized and classified our worries and anxieties, and then we took a look at the evidence and determined if there was any logic behind our assumptions; this is a good assignment for high school seniors, with graduation and the real world looming in the immediate future-- and how the students order the things they are concerned about makes for entertaining debates (such as the girl who was more worried about shark attacks than the possibility of never finding true love); to get this going, first I review some basic probability, and then we use specious sources from the internet to do back-of-the-envelope calculations, and, finally, we place our topics in one of three categories (Harmless, Don't Panic, and Red Alert); we learned that the chance of being killed by an meteorite is phenomenally low; same with bee stings and lightning; if you apply to more than five colleges, it's fairly certain that you will get into one; and if you're a guy, there's one thing to be concerned about: passing a kidney stone . . . the project also helped me out with one of my anxieties, a thick tree branch has partially cracked off a tree in my yard-- my neighbor had to point it out to me, as the dangling log is very high up (so I can't use my usual method to take it down: tossing a football with a rope duct-taped to it over the limb and then yanking . . . I did get to explain this feat in class and show my students this awesome picture) but after I did the math, I learned to stop worrying and love the log: there are 1440 minutes in a day, and the children and I probably spend three of them (if that) under the exact spot where the log would hit the ground-- my kids play at the park more than in the yard, and if I'm watering the plants in the yard, then I make a point not to stand under the "death spot," so the chance of one of us being hit by the log on any given day is miniscule . . . 2/10ths of a percent-- to put it in perspective, it's less dangerous than something else I worry about: me or one of the kids getting injured while we are skiing/snowboarding-- the chance of that happening is 6.97 injuries per 1000 visits, or 7/10ths of a percent every time you go to the mountain.
It's Happening Again
I am rapidly turning my newish (2008) Toyota Sienna minivan into my beloved and but heavily abused 1993 Jeep Cherokee . . . three years ago, when I bought the van, it was in perfect shape, but now it is missing a hubcap, there's a big scratch on the side from when I scraped my friend's car in the school lot, and the back latch is broken so you can't open the hatch, so I have to get all my soccer stuff out through the sliding doors . . . I'm worried that soon enough I'll be crawling in through the passenger side and using a boot as a cup-holder.
New Words and Old Rules
The oldest rule of discourse is this: never discuss religion or politics (this rule is slightly older than the second oldest rule of discourse: never speak when your mouth is full) but I'm going to make an exception today; the Lutheran Church near my school has this phrase on its placard: JESUS SWALLOWED UP DEATH FOREVER and while I readily admit that religion has never worked its magic on me . . . I'm not sure why this is the case, but jazz doesn't work on some people and ballet doesn't work on others and I don't want to get into why some rhetorical and aesthetic forms work on some people and others work on other people-- it's just the way of the world-- but I can't imagine how this aphorism would attract anyone to this particular church-- it's a weird and morbid and disturbing image-- and I did some research and placard is taken from a phrase in Isaiah 25:8, so it has its basis in the Bible (but so does the phrase "of these you may eat: locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper" . . . Leviticus 11:22 . . . but you don't see that on any church placards) so I understand where they're coming from, with Easter and the resurrection, but it still seems like a really odd thing to put on a sign; tangentially, on the political front, I learned a new word in Rick Perlstein's book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus . . . this is the first book in his trilogy of how modern conservatism was formed (I highly recommend the second book, Nixonland, and I'm loving this one as well . . . Perlstein writes dense, high energy prose from a tactical perspective on how conservatives got their hooks into America; his third book just came out and I plan on reading that one as well) and the word is normally a religious one: "chiliastic," which is a very specific adjective that describes "millenarianism," or the doctrine of Christ's expected return to earth to rule for one thousand years . . . but Perlstein uses the word in a hyperbolic and secular way (which is certainly his style) to describe how activists perceived the fight between the light and darkness of Communists and the anti-Communists-- anyway, I think "chiliastic" would be a great word to put on a church placard, as it would certainly make people curious about what was going on inside (especially since it contains the word "chili," which evokes heavenly deliciousness).
U-10 Soccer Players Say the Darndest Things (to their mothers)
Not only is my son Ian's travel team (which I coach) playing some wonderful soccer, but they've also got excellent diction and vocabulary; one player told his mom his favorite part of the Sunday's game was "the anticipation," which is a fairly abstract way to enjoy the sport (although he added that his second favorite part of the game was "getting the ball") and another player confided in his mom that he doesn't need words to get his friend to go where he wants him to go on the field, he uses "telepathy" to communicate with him.
Dave Attell, Artie Lange, and The Menzingers! New Brunswick Was Hopping . . .
Saturday night, on our way to see Dave Attell at The Stress Factory, we passed by The Court Tavern and there was a HUGE line to get in, which I've never seen (especially since bands don't go on until late) and I inquired as to just what was going on and some very happy hipsters said, in unison: "The Menzingers! They usually play much larger places, but once in a while they do a smaller venue!" and while none of us (Stacey, Kristen, Joe, Cat, Mooney, and me) had ever heard of The Menzingers, we were fascinated by the hype and swore we would go back and try to get in after the show; as we walked up to The Stress Factory, we saw a black Nissan Sentra (a rental?) stop in front, and a nerdy-looking guy wearing glasses got out of the car and removed the cone blocking the driveway, and then Dave Attell pulled in . . . we speculated that the guy riding with him was his opening act, and we were right -- his name was Louis Katz and he was by far the best opening act I've seen at The Stress Factory-- but still, you would think the opener would do the driving and the headliner would be in the back seat (of a much cooler car) snorting drugs and consorting with hookers, but I guess both guys live in New York, and Attell offered Katz a ride . . . anyway, Attell was great: smooth, relaxed, quick-witted, and interactive, an old master-- the only time the show ground to a halt was when Artie Lange showed up and did a few jokes and plugged his podcast-- Lange is looking sloppier than ever and his comedy is a bit plodding, especially in juxtaposition to Attell (plus there were some microphone problems) and the night ended with the typical discussion of why there aren't any young break-out female stand-up comics (who aren't lesbians) . . . or, as Stacey pointed out to Kristen, perhaps there are great female stand-ups and you just don't listen to them.
Better Get a Bucket
I thought I was at the end of my crime-fiction binge, but I was able to fit one more "wafer thin" novel into my gullet without exploding like Mr. Creosote-- I read the first Harry Bosch novel over break (The Black Echo) and it is definitely worth starting at the beginning; the plot is wild, convoluted and gripping, and you also find out about why Bosch has been demoted, why IAD is on his tail, and why his sense of humor isn't as keen as that of John Rebus . . . Bosch was a "tunnel rat" in Vietnam, and some of his fellow rats figure prominently in the novel's caper plot; now that I've read a few, I see the general formula of a Harry Bosch novel: there's an investigation that administrators do not want investigated; Bosch gets involved; no one else really wants to follow through the way Bosch does, so he ends up on his own; he is asked to stand down, but he becomes obsessed-- despite the fact that Internal Affairs is watching him for foul-play, breaches of protocol, and corruption-- and he eventually reaches the truth, which is not as neat and/or pretty as he would have liked, and he pays a heavy price for this knowledge . . . but he can handle it because his soul is nearly dead anyway; Connelly's brilliance is in the details-- in the description of the 1970 photo of the tunnel rats, each man's dog tags were taped together to prevent jangling when they went "out of the blue and into the black," and the novel is worth reading solely for the stuff that happens under the ground, in the L.A. sewer system and the spider holes in Vietnam (nearly as good as the Vienna tunnel stuff in The Third Man).
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Spring Break: Cold Weather and Discounts
Our Spring Break in Vermont had very little to do with spring; the house we rented near Weston was surrounded by deep snow (deep enough that walk around the yard, I had to wear snow shoes to avoid sinking in past my knees) and one night there was a snow storm and the next night there was an ice storm . . . the last day was wild, it warmed up and all the icicles were falling from the trees; and because of two excellent discounts, a good time was had by all . . .
Discount # 1) Okemo Mountain's Spring Skiesta Card . . . this is the best deal going, for $109 dollars you can ski every day from March 20th until the end of the season; the boys and I went to the mountain five days in a row, something I have never done before-- it was the perfect set-up for spring riding-- which is fun, but can be slushy and exhausting-- because if you get tired, you can just leave and come back the next day instead of trying to tough it out, which is never a good idea when there are high speeds, trees, and cliffs involved (our legs were jello by the fifth day, but we took the six person covered lift to the top anyway-- the ride was surreal: the mountain was enshrouded by a cloak of thick fog, the trees were covered in ice, and we were viewing it all through the curved orange plastic of the protective bubble, which was coated with a thin sheen of rime; the limited visibility made for a scary ride down, but we survived and unanimously decided against going for a sixth consecutive day);
2) my wife, inspired by this podcast, asked for a "good guy discount" at the Vermont Country Store in Weston and got ten dollars off a pair of Rieker Daisy clogs that she had her eye on (which were already on clearance . . . think of all the money she saved by spending all that money!)
Discount # 1) Okemo Mountain's Spring Skiesta Card . . . this is the best deal going, for $109 dollars you can ski every day from March 20th until the end of the season; the boys and I went to the mountain five days in a row, something I have never done before-- it was the perfect set-up for spring riding-- which is fun, but can be slushy and exhausting-- because if you get tired, you can just leave and come back the next day instead of trying to tough it out, which is never a good idea when there are high speeds, trees, and cliffs involved (our legs were jello by the fifth day, but we took the six person covered lift to the top anyway-- the ride was surreal: the mountain was enshrouded by a cloak of thick fog, the trees were covered in ice, and we were viewing it all through the curved orange plastic of the protective bubble, which was coated with a thin sheen of rime; the limited visibility made for a scary ride down, but we survived and unanimously decided against going for a sixth consecutive day);
2) my wife, inspired by this podcast, asked for a "good guy discount" at the Vermont Country Store in Weston and got ten dollars off a pair of Rieker Daisy clogs that she had her eye on (which were already on clearance . . . think of all the money she saved by spending all that money!)
The Truth About R2D2
According to my son Alex, the reason R2D2 makes all those beeping sounds is because he only speaks in profanity, and so he's beeping himself to insure that Star Wars is appropriate for kids (this does make sense . . . if I had to spend that much time with C3PO, I'd curse a lot too).
Music For Winter and Spring
Two new seasonal Slouching Beast songs:
1) "Long Winter" is a testament to just how long and brutal this winter was . . . I recorded it back in February and my voice sounds even raspier than usual . .. because it was so cold and dry for so long; check out the bass riff, I played it on my short scale Danelectro Longhorn, and the song was inspired by a Christina Gutierrez line from Serial;
2) "Shining Incident (Averted)" is my tribute to spring, or to making it through the winter without going Jack Torrance on your family . . . while it's not exactly Vivaldi, the vocals are a little more chipper and there's a full-fledged jazz interlude at the bridge . . . happy spring break!
What Doesn't Kill You, Might Make You Dumber, But You Also Get Some Good Stories
Much has been written about the inspirational power and profound consequences of having a good teacher-- but there's a dearth of information on the importance of having a few bad teachers along the way: truly mean people (like my fourth grade teacher) and incompetents and weirdos may not put us pedagogically ahead of Finland and Japan, but these folks do make our kids tougher, more jaded, and provide them with loads of entertaining stories that they can pass along to their own children (I lost twenty-five points once on a test because I didn't have the proper heading . . . and if you had a certain gym teacher in our high school, it was pretty much a forty-minute free-for-all melee with the floor hockey sticks, day in day out . . . and then there was the guy who made the high school kids race around on those little scooters . . . etcetera, etcetera).
There By The Grace of God, Goes My Snowboard
I'm glad I showed some compassion towards a mom and her son who were rudely blocking a main thoroughfare on the ski mountain-- my first impulse was to tell them they were sitting in a horrible location (and it was a horrible location, they were blocking a long flat narrow cruiser trail which you need to ride through with some speed in order to get up the incline to make it to the trailhead) but I saw that she was dealing with a meltdown: her son-- approximately six years old-- had taken off his snowboard and appeared to be done for the day, even though there was a LONG way to the base lodge, so his mom told him to walk down and stay to the side of the trail, and then she turned away so she could see her phone better, in order to call her husband, and in that moment her son dropped his snowboard and it went rocketing down the hill and he went running after it, screaming and wailing and crying, and the mom missed all of it, including the climax, when the board shot over the lip of the trail, catching some air before it plummeted over a cliff and into the woods . . . and I had to be the bearer of bad news-- "Miss! Miss!" I yelled, and then I told her what happened and by this time she was actually on the phone with her husband and she launched into an expletive laced description of what happened, and my kids, who got to watch the whole thing, and really enjoyed it, especially all the F-bombs, but on the way home, we stopped at the ski store and bought a pair of snowboard leashes (which I had gotten out of the habit of using) so that Alex and I would never have to endure that particular humiliation (and not only is it humiliating to have your snowboard race down the mountain without you, but it can also really hurt someone).
Bosch vs. Rebus
I think I've reached the end of my detective fiction binge-- in a New Yorker article, Joyce Carol Oates recommended Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin as masters of the genre, so I read a few Connelly books and an Ian Rankin (Standing in Another Man's Grave) and I liked both authors and will read more of them . . . here is my breakdown of Harry Bosch (Connelly) and John Rebus (Rankin) . . . they are both no longer married and each has a daughter, but Bosch's daughter is a chip off the old block (a chip off the old Bosch?) and wants to be a detective like her dad, while Rebus is almost estranged from his daughter; both detectives are old school and willing to bend some rules to get their man, but while neither are corrupt like Vic Mackey, Rebus seems more willing to associate with the underbelly of society to get what he needs; Bosch seems more obsessive and unrelenting (although Rebus can be a bit obsessive as well) while Rebus is more willing to down a few pints or some Highland Park scotch to unwind; both men like music, but Bosch loves jazz while Rebus likes classic rock (and is prone to making Led Zeppelin jokes) and though it's hard to tell, because I read random books in each series instead of starting at the beginning, both men seem to be surrounded by women that they have history with . . . anyway, thanks Joyce Carol Oates . . . if you have any other recommendations, just leave them in the comments.
Do You Drive Your Car, or Does It Drive You?
I drive my Toyota minivan like a 1993 Jeep Cherokee Sport (because that's what I drove for the twenty years before I got the van) but I saw a lady in the high school parking lot with a brand new sporty Jeep with a jacked up frame and removable doors, gingerly poking in and out of her parking spot to avoid rolling one of her giant tires over a low concrete lip (not even a curb).
Nemesis
My dog, who is normally friendly and good-natured, absolutely despises the black poodle that lives on our block . . . it's worse than Maggie and the baby with one eyebrow (and far more embarrassing, this neighbor must hate our dog and hate us as well, he must think we've trained him to be a wild and vicious killer).
Clash of the Titans: Sheryl Crow vs. Maroon 5
We had a heated musical debate in the English office Wednesday, and it wasn't typical (Beatles vs. Stones) or elitist (which Radiohead album is the best?) or hip (I'm too old to make an allusion here) and I'm happy to say I precipitated the discussion, first by bringing up a new singer I like (Courtney Barnett) and then comparing her to Sheryl Crow, and then revealing that while I was cooking the night before, I drank too much beer while listening to Sheryl Crow, because her music-- a guilty pleasure of mine-- always makes me feel a bit giddy . . . one of the younger teachers enjoyed the image of me bopping around the kitchen, slightly tipsy, singing "Soak Up the Sun" (although she wished I was drinking a Leinenkugel Summer Shandy instead of beer) and I was able to fully satisfy the role-reversal because I was also texting my wife and reminding her that dinner would be ready soon and she needed to get home . . . anyway this led to an odd debate where the older folks in the office were lauding the merits of Sheryl Crow, and Kristen the youngster was defending Maroon 5 . . . I'm not sure why she chose to pit Maroon 5 against Sheryl Crow, but it resulted in everyone pulling up songs on their phones and Chromebooks and playing them at once (especially "Move Like Jagger," which even Kristen detests) and while we couldn't convince her that Maroon 5 was awful (she kept defending these hypothetical and unnamed deep tracks . . . "the ones they never play on the radio") everyone else united in the defense of Sheryl Crow, and I think it comes down to this: neither one is Led Zeppelin, but Sheryl Crow has more good songs that Maroon 5, and less awful songs than Maroon 5, and it's way more fun to drink beer and cook while listening to The Very Best of Sheryl Crow (which doesn't even have Steve McQueen on it) but Kristen will never understand this because she associates Sheryl Crow with her mom and light FM, not Lilith Fair.
Let Them Eat Two Pieces of Cake
I'm hoping my wife skips this sentence, because I don't want her to revisit this event and the emotions surrounding it, but I'd like to make a full confession to my readers, for the sake of honest self-reflection; last Tuesday, after a very cold and windy soccer practice, I got home, ate some dinner, and then noticed that there was some leftover chocolate cake on the counter (my grandmother ate dinner with us the previous night and she baked a chocolate cake) and it was very cold and windy at soccer practice, so I had really worked up an appetite and I saw the cake -- two pieces of cake-- and without really thinking, I ate both of them . . . then I sat down to watch some TV with my wife, and when I got up to get a drink, she said "Can you get me a piece of cake?" and I turned and said, "Uh, there isn't any more cake . . . I ate the last piece" and she said, "There were two pieces! And I told you to save one for me!" and, though I didn't hear her say this, apparently she did indeed ask me to save her some cake (she roused Alex out of bed to confirm) and it didn't really matter if I heard her or not because -- as she pointed out-- there were TWO pieces of cake, one for each of us-- and she also didn't buy my story that the cake was dry and she wouldn't have liked it anyway and I did her a favor by getting rid of it, because she had eaten a piece the night before and knew the cake was delicious . . . and the event became a metaphor for my entire self-centered existence and I had to buy her some good chocolate from the expensive chocolate store to make up for my transgression, and then -- the icing on the cake-- the next day in Creative Writing class, purely by coincidence, we read the William Carlos Williams poem "This Is Just to Say" and I had a perfect anecdote for my class (but it wasn't worth the lambasting . . . next time, I'll leave a piece of cake . . . I swear).
Dave Wins the Powerball! And Quits Writing Sentences!
Actually, not quite . . . April Fools . . . neither you nor I are quite so lucky-- I will continue to write this drivel (and I hope you will continue to read it) because I did NOT win the Powerball (and it's not like I'm doing this for the money, anyway, so even if I did win the Powerball, I would continue writing this thing, because the Dalai Lama told me there will be no money, but on my deathbed, I will receive total consciousness . . . so I've got that going for me) but something very, very statistically unlikely happened and I had the perspicacity to notice and the mathematical acumen to figure out just how unlikely this event was . . . I teach Creative Writing, which is an elective that is open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors and I usually have an equal mix of the three grades in each class-- no particular grade is favored, but this year I have a thirty person class which contain zero juniors, and the chance of this happening is highly unlikely . . . there is a 66% chance for a class of one person to have zero juniors in it, and a 43% chance for a class of two to have no juniors in it (2/3 multiplied by 2/3) and a 29% chance that a class of three has no juniors in it, and if you continue in this fashion for a class of thirty, you have to calculate 2/3 to the 30th power, which comes out to 0.0000038576077564 (that's a 1 in 259,228 chance . . . which is pretty tiny, statistically speaking, but not quite as small as your chance of winning the Powerball lottery, which is 0.0000000057142857 or a 1 in 175,000,000 chance) and I'm wondering if there is some other explanation . . . perhaps junior schedules this year somehow prohibit them from taking electives period 7/8 . . . or maybe I should run out and buy a lottery ticket and strike while the iron is hot.
Curves and Blocks
We went to Philadelphia over the weekend and took in two excellent exhibits at The Franklin Institute; the first is called Body World: Animal Inside Out . . . it's an impressive collection of plasticized animals in various states of assembly: a giant squids split in half, cross-sections of a giraffe, a massive bull made entirely of musculature, the circulatory system of an ostrich, the innards of a dromedary (one hump) camel, etcetera . . . it's a wild and gross tour of an astounding variety of animal bodies; the second exhibit is called The Art of the Brick and it is lowbrow modern art at its finest . . . the exhibit features many, many pieces of Nathan Sawaya's Lego sculptures, and while the three minute film featuring Sawaya is pure cheese-- he was a corporate lawyer before he dedicated his life to Lego sculptures and he speaks in corny aphorisms, stuff like "my art is a reenactment of my personal feelings" and "everything is creativity"-- the exhibit itself was surprisingly excellent (and packed with people) and Sawaya's representations of past masterpieces (classic and modern) are suggestive and surreal, while his large sculptures are fascinating to look at because of his use of rectangular blocks to make rounded, complex figures (plus, it's fun to guess how many pieces he used for each sculpture, as there is a piece count for each . . . but I wonder if these counts are accurate . . . did he count every piece he used as he used it, or just approximate at the end?)
None Shall Pass
Last Tuesday, Alex and I went to soccer practice without Ian, because he pulled his quad; practice was a bit chaotic because everyone was sharing the turf-- Donaldson Park is a swamp-- and so once Alex and I arrived back home, at ten of eight, all I was hoping for was some warm food and and some quiet times, but this was not the case; we entered the house and Alex went into the kitchen, where my wife immediately called upon him to recite the months of the year . . . and he failed-- perhaps because he was tired and surprised by the question-- and then he was in deep trouble too, because a few minutes previous my wife had discovered a glaring hole in Ian's general knowledge-- he ddin't know the months of the year-- and so after Alex failed she yelled "he doesn't know them either! this is ridiculous . . . a fourth and fifth grader don't know the months of the year!" but it turned out Alex did know them, he just panicked in the heat of the moment . . . Ian, on the other hand, could not recite them, even with some time to think, and so there is a new house rule: before the boys get any screen time, they have to pass a "life quiz" on some basic knowledge . . . the months of the year, the location of Canada and Mexico in relation to the United States, the air-speed velocity of an unladen sparrow . . . something along those lines (and I lucked out, because my wife also demanded that they know each month's corresponding number and I'm a bit shaky on this, but my wife didn't quiz me, and so I got to watch Parks and Rec).
Fitbit Fit
The English Department has gotten a bit neurotic with their eating and exercise habits (this was mainly fueled by a school-wide "Biggest Loser" contest . . . the English teachers lost 113 collective pounds and swept the pot) and the obsessiveness culminated with a bought of Fitbit Mania; instead of working out, my friend and colleague Stacey spent forty-five minutes on the phone with Nike, trying to get them to retrieve some missing data from her Tuesday workout, because the Fitbit line graph was only showing "3000" and she definitely got "7000" . . . I'm not sure what the numbers mean, but I think even Ted Cruz can see the irony and humor in skipping a workout to retrieve digital information for exercise that you know you did, just to fill in a computer graph generated by an electronic wristband that can't be all that accurate in the first place (and I am holding out on getting one of these gadgets for this reason, and still using my low-tech analog method of measuring my work-outs . . . I call it the PantsFit and this is the way it works: I put my pants on, and if they fit, then I know I've been working out enough).
Funny How? Like a Clown? I Amuse You?
I have no problem with Constitutional textualist Ted Cruz enrolling in an Obamacare health plan-- though he staunchly disapproves of the Affordable Care Act and has argued that the plan should be repealed in its entirety-- because his wife is leaving her full time job at Goldman Sachs and and it's the financially practical thing to do: Cruz receives a subsidy for the health care . . . so it makes perfect sense . . . but I do have a problem with him seeing no humor or irony in his actions . . . it's got to strike him as just a little bit funny-- slightly amusing-- that he's willingly participating in the program that he's spoken so vehemently against (but maybe people who interpret the Constitution literally have trouble with tone, symbolism, and subtext . . . I hope he doesn't have to take the PARCC test).
Small Victories
Now that the snow and ice is gone, my dog Sirius and I are totally in the groove-- every morning, I walk him in a loop and he defecates right by the little park on Felton Avenue, which has a garbage can, so I can bag his feces and immediately toss them, thus avoiding the shame of carrying around a warm bag of dogshit.
Is This Blurry? We Might Be Able to Help . . .
My wife found three pairs of prescription glasses in my son's desk drawer-- he claims to have found them "in the middle of the road" and "on the path in the woods," which makes sense, since both of my children will pick up anything they find on the ground (last week, my son picked up someone's mouthpiece off the turf . . . yuck) and so if anyone on the South Side of Highland Park has lost a pair of glasses, we might have them (my wife was annoyed with the two of them and said they should have knocked on doors near where they found them in an attempt to return them, but I definitely couldn't see my kids ever doing something that compassionate and logical).
Fortnight of Health
On Monday, I started my fortnight of health: no weekday beer drinking, no junk food, and -- paradoxically-- no sports or heavy exercise . . . I'm trying to get in shape for Spring Break, as we are going to Vermont to do some snowboarding and skiing, and if I'm sporting a gut, then it's hard to bend over and latch in . . . and I'm also trying to stay uninjured between now and then, so no soccer or basketball . . . my Achilles tendon is sore from playing hoops, and my hip is sore from making a kick save (and a beauty) last week at indoor soccer; but, hopefully, in two short weeks, I'll be slimmer and my muscles will have regenerated, so that I can re-injure myself on the slopes and re-gain the weight I lost (in the form of delicious local Vermont beer).
Welcome to the Decline
For the doomsayers, events like 9/11, the latest financial collapse (and the solution to the latest financial collapse . . . three trillion dollars of quantitative easing) and the melting snows of Kilimanjaro indicate the imminent decline and fall, but I believe that God is in the details and for a simpler proof of the apocalypse, they need go no further than the coffee section at QuickChek, where the great minds of chemistry have spent their valuable time designing a drink with the flavor of "layers and layers of moist chocolate cake surrounded by a sweet marshmallow filling" . . . . the great and ominous signifier is "Whoopie Pie" coffee.
Spring Hates Soccer (and Softball and Lacrosse and Tennis and Fishing and Skateboarding)
At soccer practice last week, the wind was so strong that when we took the balls out of the bag, they all blew away and ended up across the track against the fence-- and then the portable goals blew away, and then cones blew over, and then the little discs blew away . . . and then, two days later-- on the first day of Spring, it snowed six inches and it didn't melt . . . so I am proposing that youth basketball season needs to be a month longer.
High Jingo
Harry Bosch investigates two cases at the same time in Michael Connelly's The Drop . . . a cold one involving a sexual predator and a serial killer and a hot one: the possible suicide of a powerful City Council Member's son . . . the hot case leads to political conspiracy and what Bosch calls "high jingo," which is his term for high-level political manipulation and gamesmanship-- something he and I both abhor-- which is why Bosch will remain a detective and I will remain a teacher . . . neither of us wants anything to do with the world of bureaucracy, administration and "high jingo," and while this means you can't have as broad an effect on the system, it also means that you don't have to compromise your values as often (but you can still use violence and intimidation once in a while to coerce a confession . . . that's just good fun).
If You're Not Careful, You Might Learn Something
Not only did I teach the kids a bunch of stuff at school this week, but I learned three things too:
1) one of my students has a sister with something called Hashimoto's disease . . . I had never heard of this but it has to do with your thyroid;
2) the same student (and a number of other students in this class) experience something called Raynaud's phenomenon . . . this is where your hands turn yellow or white because of an excessive reversal in blood flow due to cold or stress;
3) and then, finally, I learned one thing on the way to school while listening to Gary Walker on WBGO . . . he pointed out that only was Steve Turre a fantastic trombone player, but he was also a "master shellist" and I thought he said "master cellist" but he really did say "shellist," because Turre-- long time trombonist with the SNL band-- can play the shit out of a giant conch shell (check out the video).
Does the PARCC Make Students Puke?
While the PARCC test itself doesn't seem to be too grueling for students (although some kids have been "clicking through" and others have been "napping through" and I heard rumors that one kid wrote his essay in French and another wrote the lyrics to "Bohemian Rhapsody") the actual administering of the test has been a logistical nightmare for my high school-- you've got kids coming and going at all times of day, classes that start with eight kids and then kids return two at a time until you've got a room full of thirty, classes divided by the kids taking the PARCC, the kids opting out, and the kids who don't have to take it because it's not their day-- teachers aren't supposed to give quizzes or tests for the two weeks of testing and then try to "spiral back" over curriculum that test-taking kids missed -- and this could be anyone because there aren't enough computers to administer all the tests at once, so some kids take it in the AM and some kids take it in the PM, sophomores take it one day, and juniors another, and all the different math levels take different tests, many teachers (including myself) have to proctor at times when they normally grade or plan, and many teachers (including myself) have their classrooms changed for the duration of the test, so kids are wandering all over the school, trying to find their classes . . . the loss of instructional time is enormous, everyone-- teachers, students, and administrators-- has been completely disrupted by this thing, so unless the inherent value in taking the test and the data collected from the test (which is getting more and more skewed by the day, as smarter kids decide to opt out so they don't fall behind in their classes) so unless the experience of this test somehow proves more valuable than all the time and education lost, then I don't think it's going to last very long without some major changes (and-- perhaps because of all the anxiety and frustration produced by the major changes in schedule, there have been two hallway puking incidents during the test . . . yuck).
The Greatest Dramatic Blocking Idea in the History of the Theater
My English class was discussing the fourth scene of Act IV of Hamlet, when Hamlet talks to the army Captain and-- as he watches all these brave men in uniform march off to battle over a "little patch of ground"-- Hamlet laments that meanwhile, despite the "imminent death of twenty thousand men" and "examples gross as earth" spur him to revenge his father's murder, he has still done nothing about King Claudius . . . and I was explaining that Shakespeare really needed this army on stage (or at least the suggestion of an army) as a gigantic prop to make Hamlet feel guilt and shame and regret over his delay, and what a pain in the ass it must have been to stage this-- because Hamlet usually views the army from afar while delivering his "how all occasions do inform against me" soliloquy and one of my students asked me (sincerely) if "they used little people or toddlers as the army so that they would look like they were really far away from Hamlet" and while I've never heard of this being done (and there might be some problems with proportions-- especially if you've got an army of midgets crossing the stage) I told her that if I ever made my production of Hamlet (in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Siamese twins) that I was definitely going to do the scene her way, with a bunch of kids and little people in uniform, marching across the back of the stage through some manufactured fog while Hamlet beats himself up over his procrastination.
The Age of Drones
Drones have officially become "toasters"-- which, in economic terms, are technological items that are so cheap to produce that it's hard to make a profit on them -- and I know this because not only did my friend Alec purchase a drone, ostensibly to take pictures of difficult to reach places in theaters (he designs performance spaces) but mainly to be creepy and have fun, but my son also received one for his birthday (and I had to take a phone-call right after we assembled it and so he rushed into the backyard to try it out, unsupervised, and almost got it stuck in a tree but then I was able to convince him that a better place to fly it might be the basketball court at the park . . . and though it only cost sixty bucks, it works . . . in fact, it works so well that you can even fly it in the house).
New Genre of Comedy?
My son Ian was telling some "your llama" jokes Sunday night-- these are essentially "yo mama" jokes using the word "llama" instead of "mama" . . . and there's nothing more insulting than when someone talks trash about your llama.
Bones and More Bones
If you like hard-boiled mysteries and you like bones, than Michael Connelly's City of Bones is the book for you-- Harry Bosch gets to the bottom of the mystery surrounding a young boy's skeleton, which was found by a dog on a Hollywood hillside-- the boy died from a blow to the head and, according to his skeleton, he suffered severe abuse before he was murdered; the book has it all: detailed police procedural stuff, a tragic romance, action, violence, noir, and even a historic parallel . . . the La Brea woman, a 9000 year old fossilized human found in the La Brea tar pits: her cause of death is a blow to the head with a blunt object, and she's known as L.A.'s first homicide.
Nerds Do Sports
Radiolab's Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich usually nerd it up each week investigating something scientific, but they've recently done two fantastic episodes on sports; La Mancha Screwjob uses professional wrestling to discuss reality, illusion, and the fascinating meta-reality that lies somewhere between the two; American Football visits the brutal ghosts of football past and speculates on the future of the sport . . . including an interview with a football mom who is firmly on both sides of the concussion issue, and her talented and gigantic eight year old son who decided to eschew the game in favor of soccer and wishes he could do some "synchronized swimming" . . . his mom's reaction to this revelation is priceless . . . both episodes are awesome.
Can Someone Lend Me a Monkey?
All the great bands have a song with "monkey" in the title . . . Brass Monkey, Monkey Man, Monkey Gone to Heaven, Shock the Monkey . . . so Slouching Beast has followed suit (and I'd like to do a video for this song, so if anyone has a pet monkey I can borrow, please let me know).
Dave Almost Thinks of Something New and Creative
I was waiting in line at the Autozone to buy some stuff so I could do some work on my car (I needed to refill the washer fluid reservoir, which is right smack in the middle of my wheelhouse as far as car repairs go) and I came up with a brilliant sniglet for the trash you throw on the floor of your car . . . CARBAGE . . . but when I checked the internet, I learned that this term has already been coined . . . so the moral here is that the internet robbed me of my happiness because I had honestly never heard of the term before and thought of it on my own and believed it was equal to my other amazing sniglet: TUPPERAWARENESS . . . but now my self-esteem has been lowered a notch, whereas in a pre-internet world, I could have reveled in my glory, told my friends my new term, and maybe even suggested it to HBO and gotten Rich Hall to read it on Not Necessarily the News.
Students Ruin Everything
I always use my mouth to start peeling a clementine-- doesn't everyone?-- but a student saw me doing this and she advised me that "23 different people touch your produce before you buy it" and so I shouldn't be biting into anything I haven't washed, and while I dismissed her as crazy and explained that my immune system was stronger than anything that could live on the skin of an orange, apparently she's right.
Evil Circus!
Slouching Beast presents "Evil Circus," complete with its own live-action music video; I guarantee it's some of the most evil evil-circus music ever recorded . . . but I'm not quite as keen on the video, which might be more aptly named "How to Make a Three Minute Music Video with Thirty Seconds of Film" but despite the lack of material, I think I got the most out of my son Alex's creepy Halloween mask (and the clown's weapon is a rock-pick, in case you were wondering).
Majoring in Origami
It's unfortunate that it's not a viable career, because my boys are the Wright Brothers of paper airplane manufacture.
Together at Last: Daylight Saving Time and Skewed Data!
My zealous fans know that the only thing I love more than pontificating about skewed data is ranting about Daylight Saving Time and now-- finally!-- this Monday morning these two topics will collide in a perfect blend of peanut butter and chocolate when students across New Jersey take the PARCC test . . . some students started taking the test last week, but the snowstorm prevented them from finishing, so they will finish taking the test after "springing ahead," which is always devastating to high school students, who don't get enough sleep as it is . . . and some kids completed the test before "springing ahead" while other kids will take the entire test this week, as sleep deprived zombies . . . and while the time change won't affect elementary kids quite as much, it will affect their parents, who will be crabby and running late, and that will affect the kids . . . so Pearson either needs to find a way to correct the scores for this anomaly or --better yet-- with all the cash they rake in from their testing and data analysis, they should wage a campaign to eradicate Daylight Saving Time once and for all-- because Daylight Saving Time skews the results of the PARCC! do you hear that Pearson? your data is skewed! . . . this is not a threat, it's the truth-- so get rid of Daylight Saving Time for the sake of our children (and for the sake of testing our children, and for the sake of producing reams of unskewed data about our children so we can rank and place them appropriately).
Murder on a Sunday Morning
I highly recommend this documentary . . . almost as much as I highly recommend NOT being black in Gainesville, Florida when the police are out looking for a murder suspect (fans of the podcast Serial will love this . . . and Murder on a Sunday Morning has a unambiguous and satisfying ending, I promise).
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.
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.
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?
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