My Wife and Kids Outdo Me . . .

The boys and I were quite proud of our short film A Day Without Mom, which we presented to Catherine on Mother's Day . . . but that's nothing compared to the movie Cat and the boys made for me on Father's Day: A Day Without Dad has more clips, more transitions, better editing, more costume and set changes, and all sorts of other professional touches (but I will say that the filming of A Day Without Mom went smoothly and I never wanted to kill the children, but it sounds like Catherine's experience was slightly different-- Francis Ford Coppola trying to direct a couple of lunatic monkeys? -- because I talked to her on the phone just after she completed the project and she was close to cracking up).

Not Quite a Dream (But Just as Stupid)

Fans of Sentence of Dave know exactly how I feel about dreams (they are stupid and I don't want to hear about them, even if I was in them) but this sentence takes place in the gray area between sleep and consciousness, so even though it is dreamlike, I'm going to forge ahead: Friday night, after a fairly epic afternoon of food and beverage consumption, I started to watch an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but I fell asleep and when I awoke, I saw Red (Kate Mulgrew) on the screen and I thought to myself: she must be doing a cameo on Kimmy Schmidt and then I saw a number of other characters from Orange is the New Black on the screen, doing some kind of extemporaneous drama exercise and I thought to myself: they must have all the people from Orange is the New Black on Kimmy Schmidt . . . that's weird . . . and where is Kimmy Schmidt? and then I asked my wife if she was watching Orange is the New Black . . . which, of course, she was.

How to Be Interested in Politics . . .

I've been listening to Dan Carlin's political podcast Common Sense and while each show is a detailed and logical look at a specific issue (or issues), one of the themes is that the typical topics that Democrats and Republicans debate aren't very interesting . . . you either have to investigate the opinions of the outliers-- people on the far right and far left fringes-- or take a look on the things that the parties agree upon (such as trade agreements and the power of money and lobbying in our political system) if you want to find anything revealing; this is useful for me, because any time I start to follow politics and read about politics, I get so frustrated with the insincerity and the obfuscation and the avoidance of real issues, that I go back to reading/ watching anything else, which is sad (but probably how the politicians want it, better for folks to be opining on the machinations of the people in Westeros, rather than actually paying attention to what is going on in America).

Meta-Dinosaurs Fight Ghosts of Dinosaur Past

For the most part Jurassic World operates as billed: plenty of dinosaurs, plenty of cheese, and plenty of eye-candy (i.e. Bryce Dallas Howard) but there is something more to chew on at the core of this saccharine Tootsie Pop of a film; the dino-based island theme park Jurassic World needs a new attraction to "reinvigorate" the patrons of the park, and-- in an aesthetic meta-parallel-- the Jurassic Park franchise needs reinvigoration as well-- and, once again, the audience needs to learn the same lesson . . . that you shouldn't tamper with mother-nature-- so enter Indominus Rex, a genetically modified dinosaur that would enjoy this Radiolab podcast; the result is a movie about movies . . . we demand more and more entertainment from the summer blockbuster, but nothing can satisfy us . . . although, the climax of Jurassic World comes pretty close: the boys and I watched the movie in Imax 3-D and the final scene which pits Indominus Rex against a T. Rex (with a few extra twists which I won't spoil) makes a larger comment about the art of the action-sequel franchise, which is an ultimately an exercise in reductio ad absurdum which can only end in parody (and not only is there a meta-theme buried at the core of this movie, but the actors actually stumble upon the old Jurassic Park when they are lost in the wilds of Jurassic World . . . and as far as the cheese goes, there was a wonderful meta-moment when Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard were looking at a number of dead dinosaurs that Indominus Rex had killed but not eaten, and I whispered to my son Alex, "he didn't eat them . . . he's hunting for sport" and then a beat later Chris Pratt turned to Bryce Dallas Howard and said the exact same words, with the exact same intonation, and my son looked at me and said "Whoa!" and I had to explain to him that movie dialogue in this sort of story was very predictable . . . also, don't sit behind me and my boys if you go to the movies-- Alex and I both have a penchant for running commentary and Alex has a hard time whispering).

Rare Combination: Helium Balloons and Anger

I turned from getting some cash at the Wells Fargo ATM and saw something wonderful stomp down the avenue: a woman in a denim skirt with an intense scowl on her face, dragging five helium filled Mylar balloons behind her.

Greasetruck Likes Food!

After a series of barely tolerable songs about obtuse topics (time travel, the Olympic theme for snowboarders, psychedelia in the desert, free will vs. determinism, and novel writing) Greasetruck tackles a subject that should be a hit: food . . . the new song is called "I Like Food" and I am pretty sure it is the best song in the history of rock, and it features a bonus rap (with some mad rhymes penned by Whitney).

Hooray for Learning! Boo for Humans! Hooray! Boo!

I am reading two books right now, and it's like riding a mental rollercoaster; one is called How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey; it's a breezy, fun and scientific approach to all the counterintuitive things science has learned about memory, and it is full of handy facts about when to review for tests, the importance of testing on recall, how long after learning something you should review the material, and the percentage of time you should spend reading and the percentage of time you should spend recalling if you want to memorize lyrics or a poem; the other book is called The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man by Michael Tennesen, and while the tone of this book is also breezy and it's full of fun facts (some jungle frogs sit on their eggs like chickens!) it is mainly about how humans have done irreversible damage to the planet and we are really in for it in the near future: our soil is almost tapped out, we can't sustain the growing population, there won't be enough protein for the burgeoning middle class, we are in the midst of a great extinction, and the diminishing biodiversity is having all kinds of awful effects on the planet, with less biodiversity, diseases have an easier time spreading, new microorganisms are resistant to nearly every antimicrobial drug we have (and we aren't rapidly developing more) and the oceans are overfished, acidified, and low on oxygen (which is bad for fish but good for the giant Humboldt squid, which can survive in low oxygen zones, and also good for sperm whales-- which like to eat the squid-- and other breath holders such as elephant seals, and while this part of the apocalypse sounds awesome: an ocean full of giant squid and fish, it's still a major loss in biodiversity . . . and while I like calamari, I'm not sure I want to eat giant squid steaks every time I want some protein).

Mea Culpa?

Martin Seligman, who wrote Learned Optimism, asserts that it is mentally healthier to sublimate rather than ruminate-- if you suffer a setback, blame an outside force instead of yourself . . . this is how you avoid depression; I may have taken this to the extreme on Sunday, when I stubbed my toe on the short flight of stairs leading from the study into the kitchen (stubbed it hard, hard enough that I crumpled into a ball) and immediately blamed my wife for the injury, claiming that it was her fault because she "talked to me while I was climbing the stairs" and -- in my throes of pain-- I told her she shouldn't engage me in conversation until I was in front of her and stationary or that it could result in injury . . . I recognize the absurdity of this logic now, but it did make my toe and my ego feel better during the incident-- instead of being a comically injured spaz, I was an indignantly wronged victim.

Governor Christie, Try Cracking One of Those Old-Fashioned Books Of Which You Speak

Governor Christie makes some interesting claims in this video, including the opinion that teachers are "getting paid a full time salary for a part time job" and then he demands that, for the sake of the children, teachers work longer hours-- despite the fact that we are getting paid less every year (because of increased health care "donations" and increased pension payments . . . even though Christie refuses to pay what the state owes to the pension fund) and while he also believes that we should get rid of all those antiquated school books and instead give every kid an Ipad, he should try reading Elizabeth Green's book Building a Better Teacher so he can appreciate the productivity of American teachers, who spend far more time in the classroom and teach far more students than the countries that are tops in education (notably Finland and Japan) and while one of my recent goals is to follow politics more closely-- to start, I'm listening to Dan Carlin's podcast Common Sense-- but perhaps this is a bad idea if I'm going to be an effective teacher, as it's hard to teach when your blood is boiling.

Pool Anxiety?

My friend and colleague Kevin recently exhibited what I believe is a new mental disorder-- and not only did I identify this disorder, but I also figured out how to cure it; I'm calling the malady "pool anxiety" but the neurosis does not center around swimming in pools, it is an obsession with pool maintenance, so much maintenance that someone suffering from "pool anxiety" doesn't even find time to swim in his pool, because he is so consumed with maintaining the water clarity, the algal blooms, the filter system, and the chemical constituency and Ph of the water-- Kevin even claims that he possesses a strange pool precognition, a watery clairvoyance . . . he will point out a "cloudy" section of water to his wife, and she won't see anything wrong with the water, but then the next day that particular patch of water will be obviously cloudy, even to a layman . . . so he is somehow hyper-sensitive to these events; I am hoping my new disorder (which actually plagues people other than Kevin, he opened the floodgates on this topic) will make it into the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) someday, along with my simple cure: fill in your pool and join a swim club (I don't think the college kids who test the water chemistry at my pool have any anxiety at all).

This One is For You, Ben Franklin

Fellow English Instructor Kristyna was Appalled at the Lack of Capitalization in her Students' Essays -- her Students Claimed that unlike Microsoft Word, Google Docs does not Capitalize Words Automatically and these Students could not be Bothered to hit the Shift Key-- and my Postulation-- that Capitalization was Not Long for the World, was met with Ridicule and Scorn-- but if Ben Franklin were to read and Modern Prose, the Good Inventor would certainly think that the Future had already Eschewed Most Capitalization and He would probably agree with my Hypothesis.

Brains are Very Silly

Every semester, I show my Creative Writing classes the Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene where the knights discover Joseph of Aramathea's writing on the wall in the Cave of Caerbannog-- and I do this to show the illogic of having a first person narrator who dies at the end of a narrative, because Aramathea carves his last words into the wall: "he who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the castle of aaarghgh" (perhaps he was dictating?) but I always show the entire sequence leading to this scene, with the killer rabbit and the Holy Hand Grenade and even though I have seen it many, many times (I usually have multiple Creative Writing classes each semester) the rabbit and Brother Maynard's speech before the lobbing of the holy grenade make me laugh every time I watch, which seems strange to me-- I should get inured to the images-- but I'm wondering if something else is at play when we rewatch things, if our brain anticipates the joy from laughing and knows that this thing is associated with laughter, and so we laugh despite knowing exactly what is going to happen, or even perhaps because we know exactly what is going to occur . . . weird but also wonderful.

Just In Time?

When I pulled up to the gym on Tuesday, I saw flashing lights, a fleet of police cars, and an ambulance-- all parked in front of the dollar store . . . obviously something had happened and I had just missed it-- and while part of me wanted to duck into the gym and get on with my workout, another part of me wanted to rubberneck-- and that part of me won out-- so I wandered closer to the flashing lights and asked a youngish dude what happened and he said there was a fight between two women and that it was pretty epic and then he showed me a video of the fight on his phone-- so even though I missed the actual event, I got there just in time to see the video-- but this guy was no cinematographer and there was a glare on the screen so it was hard to see what was going on, but when I tried to bail on watching, he kept urging me to check out the next sequence, and while there were a couple of nice moments-- one girl maced the other and a guy in the background (a boyfriend?) kept saying "rock her! rock that bitch!" and then the fight moved into the dollar store and I could hear objects being thrown into walls (I made a joke to the guy and his girlfriend about how the damage wouldn't be all that expensive) and then the police arrived and got everyone involved to lie on the floor-- but it was tough to watch the altercation on such a tiny screen and I would have preferred a quick verbal summary instead of a rather long and unwatchable video, but once my nosiness got the best of me and I started watching this dude's phone, I entered some kind of compact with him where it was impolite for me to stop watching; perhaps we should give up on trying to get folks to read and write and speak more fluently, and just teach everyone how to perfectly frame a cell-phone movie.

Totally Hypothetical Situation

So a friend of a friend of a friend asked me about a situation-- and he said the situation is completely hypothetical and in no way, shape, or form based on any kind of reality: this friend of a friend of a friend wondered if a person wanted to line his back fence with large rocks, and he found a wonderful pile of large rocks at the park near his house, and most of them were below the tide line of the river . . . and suppose this person also had an old internal frame pack, and he (or she! it could be a she!) didn't mind destroying this pack while hauling the hypothetical rocks back home and suppose, every time this person took the dog for a walk, he went by the large pile and put a few large stones in the pack, until he had mined quite an enormous amount of rocks and put them along the fence, suppose this was the situation, then:

1) what is the legality of taking rocks from the park? . . . especially rocks that mainly reside below the tide line of the river?

2) how much damage could hauling large rocks in a backpack do to this hypothetical person's back and shoulders?

3) how much could the hypothetical rocks improve this hypothetical person's property value?

4) is this hypothetical person crazy?

Dreamland: You've Got to Try This Shit

You might find it ironic that I'm pushing a book about drugs this hard, but Sam Quinones non-fiction tour-de-force Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic is truly addictive . . . you won't be able to put it down, you won't be able to go a day without reading it, and you'll do anything to make some time for it-- if you can't afford it, then I recommend throwing a brick through someone's car window and stealing the change from their ashtray, or perhaps you could "find" some copper pipe and sell it for scrap; the book moves fast, short chapter spiraling through various settings in America and Mexico, and by the end you'll know more than you need about heroin production, heroin distribution, pill mills, the history of pain management, the Oxycontin economy, the gutting of industry in the American heartland, methods of rehabilitation, and methods of narcotic policing (and I'm giving this book Dave's Highest Rating in the Universe-- which is certainly a suspect rating due to my tendency towards hyperbole-- but I guarantee that it's better than all the other "land" things that I love: Methland and Adventureland and even Copland . . . although I do love Copland, especially when a half-deaf Sylvester Stallone portentously shoots the bulls-eye at the carnival) but if you don't have the time to read the book, here are a few of the things I learned:

1) black tar heroin comes from the smallest rural Mexican towns, called rancheros, mainly in the state of Nayarit;

2) nothing is harder to kick than the morphine molecule, and while you are addicted you will be constipated, and when you suffer withdrawal, you will get "ferocious diarrhea";

3) a perfect storm in the '90's kicked off America's mass addiction to opiates: health insurance stopped paying for multi-disciplinary treatments for pain, pharmaceutical companies lobbied to convince physicians that opiate based pain-killers were not addictive, and-- in the name of efficiency-- doctors took on huge caseloads of patients and there was a "defenestration of the physician's authority and clinical experience";

4) if you liked "The Chicken Man" from Breaking Bad, then you'll be glad to know there was a real version (named Polla) who, besides being a wealthy heroin kingpin, worked as a cook at a Mexican restaurant;

5) one of the best ways for a junkie to pay for heroin is with Levi's 501 jeans, which are coveted in the Mexican rancheros-- they are more valuable than cash;

6) it was really hard for addicts to hate the Xalisco boys, who were nothing like the archetypal drug dealer-- they were friendly, sometimes even personable and charming, they always offered "deals" to their users and they delivered, so people didn't have to hang around back alleys, and they never cut the product-- because they were paid on salary . . . the Xalisco boys prided themselves on customer service, they generally avoided violence, and when other folks from the rancheros opened up new "cells," which are like franchises, there would be friendly price-competition, or the cells would use junkies as "guides" and move on to new towns and cities, so they could avoid the gang-warfare that is traditionally associated with drug-dealing;

7) Chimayo, New Mexico is the Lowrider Capital of the World, and it has powerful cherry-red heirloom chiles, but it might be most famous for it's insanely high rate of heroin/opiate addiction, which has gone on for generations;

8) the number of Ohioans dead from drug overdoses between 2003 and 2008 was 50 percent higher than all the U.S. soldiers who died in the entire Iraq War;

9) the destigmatization of opiate drugs was based on academic papers without much real evidence (Porter and Jick is the most famous of these) but drug companies were looking for some way to green-light all their new opiate based medication;

10) in a three month period in 2012, eleven percent of Ohioans were prescribed opiates . . . one in every ten people in Ohio is legally on an opiate based medication, and-- because of this-- one of the best places to score heroin is not New York City or Los Angeles, it's Columbus, Ohio . . . and while the book presents a lot of alarming investigation, drug companies are getting the message, and making pain-killers that can't be smoked or snorted, and doctors are prescribing them less, and in Portsmouth, Ohio (where the book begins) while there are still junkies and hookers and dealers, there is also " a confident, muscular culture of recovery . . . a community slowly patching itself."

Dave Enjoys Chick Lit!

There are definitely some emotional womanly feelings in Liane Moriarty's novel The Husband's Secret (and some passages about marriage and friendship, and you have to keep track of a number of names and relationships) but it's totally worth it because Moriarty's plotting is fast-paced and tragically fun, and there's a fantastic sentence every couple of pages: for example, when hyper-organized super-mom/Tupperware saleswoman Cecilia Fitzpatrick learns an incomprehensibly implausible secret about her husband, she realizes "all these years there had been a Tupperware container of bad language sitting off to the side in her head, and now she'd opened it and all those crisp crunchy words were lovely and fresh, ready to be used."

Two Questions, No Answers . . .

Two questions I have been pondering:

1) does possessing a smart-phone make this generation of youngsters more adventurous with travel and food? . . . my wife and I went to Atlantic City for a one night vacation, and having a smart-phone made it easy to get off the beaten path and not get lost (we ate lunch at Wingcraft and watched soccer, and then later on, for dinner, we had appetizers and several kinds of raw oysters at the bar at Dock's Oyster House and then walked through Bally's Wild West Casino, which is a bizarre hodge-podge of architectural mayhem, including a completely inappropriate beer pong section, then wandered into the heart of Asbury for Dominican food at La Finca-- the lemon chicken was excellent and the mofongo was tasty but salty-- and then next morning we had an incredible breakfast at a hole-in-the-wall called Brittany Cafe down on Ventnor. . . we covered an insane amount of ground walking to these places, but we never got lost and they were all worth it, the smart-phone made it easy; I will be polling the youngsters to see if my hypothesis is true;

2) while we were at Brittanyy Cafe, we watched Serena Williams destroy Lucie Safarova (despite the fact that she had the flu all week) and I wondered what level of men's player Williams could beat; apparently when she was 16 she played Karsten Braasch (who was ranked 203rd) and he beat her 6-1 (he also beat her sister Venus) so the question is: what level male player could Williams beat? . . . could she beat a top ranked male college player? . . . could she beat a male club pro? could she beat a decently ranked male pro with a sprained ankle?

Kids Need to Learn Stuff

Recently, I've been a font of wisdom for the young people: I coined a new aphorism about poison ivy for my oldest son-- leaves of three, do not pee-- and I gave some invaluable advice to a student of mine, who stashed his very expensive philosophy textbook on a cart in the corner of the classroom, so he wouldn't have to carry it around in his knapsack . . . I told him: never hide something valuable on a thing with wheels, hide it in something stationary . . . because the cart is gone, someone wheeled it away-- as people are wont to do with carts-- and I've asked around, but no one seems to know who wheeled the cart away or where it is-- so this lesson is going to cost him some cash; my most committed readers will recognize that this lesson about not putting valuable things atop things with wheels is the seminal lesson from this blog, the thing from which all other sentences sprung (and those committed readers might also remember that I was far less prolix in those days).

The Universe Likes to Shoot Spicy Stuff into My Left Eye

Monday at lunch, when I opened a container of salsa to put on my taco salad, some of the salsa shot into my left eye-- but I scoffed at the pain, because it was nothing compared to this terrible incident-- but then later in the day, just after I had left Wawa, the universe punished me for scoffing at the pain, and when I opened a bag of jalapeno flavored chips, a piece of spicy chip flew into the very same left eye . . . and that hurt a bit more than the salsa, but I still scoffed at the pain and drove back to school with one eye, and so I'm sure the universe is extremely angry at my insolence-- and I'm also sure the universe will take this out on my left eye-- so don't be surprised if the next time you see me, I'm wearing an eye-patch.

Not Quite Eternal Recurrence

By June, I really start to feel like Phil in Groundhog Day . . . but (fortunately) the school year ends whether I perfect my attitude towards mankind or not (and it's looking like "not," as I'm just getting grouchier and grouchier . . . but this is good for the seniors, as it makes for a clean break without reminiscence or nostalgia; on a much happier note, my wife and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage yesterday, and that's a merry-go-round that I don't want to get off).

World's Most Talented Dad!

Initially, you might be impressed by my younger son's ability to simultaneously hula hoop and catch/throw a football, but after a moment of reflection you'll realize the real talent belongs to me, and is illustrated by the perfection of my tosses, which are both accurate and well-timed.

Horticultural Aphorism Revision

We've all heard "leaves of three, let it be," but my new and improved adage about poison ivy is even more vital-- my son Alex learned the hard way and he's taking Prednisone because he neglected to follow this simple rule: "leaves of three, do NOT pee!"

Sometimes Parenting Gets Weird

Usually, when we go somewhere as a family, I drive (because I can't do much else in the car or I get motion sickness) and my wife tells the children to stops punching each other, but Friday night, my son Ian-- an inveterate cheater-- illegally punched my son Alex during a game of "yellow car/punch buggy" . . . I wish I could explain the exact infraction, but I can't make sense of the byzantine rules of this never-ending game (Catherine also plays and there is a score and something crazy happens when you see a yellow Hummer or a purple car); anyway, apparently because Ian cheated, Alex was allowed to punch him twice in the shoulder, but Ian wouldn't let him and so Catherine, in very un-mother-like fashion, let Ian have it: "Stop being a baby and let him punch you! Give him your shoulder!" and I supported her position, but Ian still refused and when Alex got to close, Ian kicked him in the mouth, and now Ian is banned from the game, which is fine by me, because I was going to ban everyone from playing it, but maybe Catherine and Alex can do it in a civilized fashion.

Bucket List: 1) Make a Bucket List

One of my students-- a senior-- recommended to the class that they make a "bucket list," and she reminded them that it didn't have to consist of extraordinary accomplishments and events (summit Mount Everest, win a Nobel prize, circumnavigate the globe, etc.) but could instead be fairly mundane (see the sun rise over the ocean before attending school) and then I polled the class and it turned out that about half the students had "bucket lists" of things they wanted to accomplish; I was in the no-bucket list group and I'm wondering if I should be concerned about this-- maybe I need to focus on some specific goals in order to achieve more in my life; I'd like to finish recording my album and I have some vague ideas for a sci-fi novel, perhaps if I put them on a bucket-list, then I'll work harder on them . . . but two things does not a list make, so I'll be taking suggestions for other things to put on this hypothetical list and then I will post it and then I will accomplish everything on the list . . . or maybe I won't (I did accomplish one specific goal a few years ago: I ate more tacos).

Kids Ask the Darndest Damned Things About the Letter "D"

The dinner topic was WWII (not my choice), and my boys decided that things would have turned out better if the Germans had played some RISK before trying to conquer the world again (because they would have realized how difficult it is to achieve world domination, and they would have given up before they started) and then Alex asked me one of those questions that I thought I knew the answer to, but immediately realized I didn't: "What does the 'D' in D-Day stand for?" and while I gave them a few guesses that make sense, if you read this article, you'll learn that the "D" was essentially a variable.

Don't Worry About That . . . Worry About This

Though the recent Amtrak derailment was an awful and tragic event, it's not something you should worry about . . . in fact, there's a school of thought that say that anything that you hear about on the news isn't something that you should worry about-- abductions and drive-by shootings and gas explosions and lead poisoning and looting and bear attacks-- because if it's in the news, then it is probably rare and unusual, and thus news . . . so what you need to worry about the things that aren't on the news-- like gum disease and kidney stones-- and it's much more difficult to worry about things that aren't on the news, so perhaps it's best not to worry about anything at all.

Christmas Squared

Overheard one nerd saying this to his chubby four-eyed friend at the gym: "The Force Awakens is due out in late December, that's going to be like Christmas on Christmas."

Tamales and Rocks and Things

If you like big rocks stacked on top of little rocks-- and who doesn't?-- then Pyramid Mountain is the hike for you; while rocks of all sizes are plentiful for the entire hike, there are two in particular that stand out: Bear Rock, which is huge and balanced precariously on its side, and Tripod Rock, which is a really big rock sitting on top of three smaller rocks . . . either a glacier or some very industrious Native Americans did this, and it's got a Stonehenge type feel to it; you can do a loop, climb the mountain, see the big rocks, and then return to the parking lot along rocky cliffs overlooking Taylortown Reservoir . . . this is one of the best hikes I've done in New Jersey and I highly recommend it; it was steep enough in spots that the discussion turned morbid and we ended up making a bet about how many people died trying to summit Mount Everest; I said 72, Catherine said 89, Ian said an even hundred, and Alex went high and said 150 . . . the stakes were five dollars a head to be spent on Birnn Chocolate given to the winner; you can make your own guess and then read this to see if you would have won; luckily, we did not die on the mountain and so we got to stop for lunch in Morristown on the way home at Macho Nacho, awesome chorizo and carne asada tacos and gigantic pork tamales for cheap (and Ian had his first ever chimichanga and pronounced it good).

Is Mad Max Insane? Or At Least Insanely Hungry?

It's hard to criticize Mad Max: Fury Road because there's so many awesome visuals: the flame-thrower guitarist in the bungee cord rig; the bendy pole guys; the spiky vehicles; the custom steering wheels; the winches and the pulleys; the face masks of Max and Immortal Joe; Furiosa's war paint; the beauty of the breeders amidst the starkness of the desert; the bad-ass biker chicks; the storm; the half-life war boys spraying chrome paint on their faces as the race toward Valhalla . . . BUT there are three things that bug me:
1) this one is minor, but it still bugged me-- perhaps because I'm always ravenous: nobody eats for the entire course of the movie (aside from from when Max gobbles down a two-headed lizard and Nux eats an insect) and so I'm not sure how they are sustaining themselves (are they drinking human breast-milk on the sly?) but amidst all the furious driving and fighting and repairing, no one even takes a moment to scarf down a sandwich . . . meanwhile, I finished all of my snacks before the end of the coming attractions and had no food to eat for the entire course of the movie, a great hardship;

2) at the end of the movie, Furiousa leaves Mad Max down with all the toothless scum . . . she doesn't even invite him up into the Citadel for tea; after his heroic performance, he should at least be allowed to come up and shower and eat a meal and hang out with the beautiful breeder chicks . . . right? . . . and honestly, you'd expect a little something more than that for his effort (wink wink nudge nudge say no more) and he's certainly of better genetic stock than all those cancerous half-lifes, but instead he disappears into a crowd of dusty, disgusting rabble, with barely a chaste wink between him and Furiosa . . . Max may be mad, but he's not dumb (although he is damn close to mute) and he's certainly not going to find better looking women out in the salt fields or the barren mud zone . . . this reminds me of my review of Frank Herbert's Dune . . . when I lived in Syria, we had all sorts of of fun out in the desert, but apparently in books and films, humor and romance are just not appropriate when there is an abundance of sand;

3) when driving at high speeds and you've got cute women in togas, those togas should occasionally fly off because of the wind . . . at least if I'm directing they would.

Birds and Chicks and Things

I know that "birds" is British slang for chicks (which is American slang for available women) but I prefer to imagine George Best drunkenly racing around in his Lotus, with several macaws. 

Attention: Ian Rankin and Michael Connelly

I just finished Ian Rankin's first John Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, and I think that Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin need to collaborate on a thriller where John Rebus and Harry Bosch cross paths . . . both detectives are generally glum and dour, both had traumatic experiences in the military, both are rather lonely because they view the world as a dark labyrinth of depthless anguish and violence, and they both have daughters-- Rebus is a little more religious, but he doesn't press it, and I think it would be cute if they solved a case together, like True Detectives, and then at the end of the novel, they could nurse their shoulder wounds together in the same hospital room (detectives in thriller series always get shot in the shoulder, it doesn't kill you, but it bleeds a lot).

You've Got To Know When To Fold Them

I wish I could claim this discovery for myself, but it's all Stacey: if you want to fit more stuff in a manila folder, then you can expand the bottom-- there are some ribbed pleats-- and make it wider and flat, instead of a sharp crease (I wish someone told me this twenty years ago).

A Review of Dave's Most Ubiquitous Wardrobe Malfunctions

Lately I've noticed that if I don't wear a belt, then my pants fall down-- this was never a problem for me until recently and I'm not sure why it's happening now, but it's not the kind of thing you can ponder, it's the kind of thing you have to address-- and I'm dealing with this on top of my other clothing problems, which I've gone over in previous posts, but I'll list them all here for your convenience:

1) my neck is too thick to comfortably wear a dress shirt or a tie;

2) I can't wear a hooded rain jacket unless I wear a hat;

3) scarves perplex me;

4) duck boots pull my socks down;

5) I tear apart a lot of socks

6) I need to tuck my sweatpants into my socks when I ride a bike;

7) in general, socks suck.

The Pros and Cons of Humidity

Tuesday, I suffered the season's first humidity indignity and the season's first humidity benison, all in the same afternoon (I ripped a sock in half at the gym, while pulling it onto my sweaty foot, but then when I got home from the gym, I shaved and it was smooth and easy going . . . it's weird that humidity increases the friction of a sock, but decreases the friction of a razor).

What the Lunch?

Every day at lunch, I storm into the English Office-- a ravenous Tasmanian Devil-- and every single day, once I finally put fork to lips, inexplicably and without malevolence or premeditation, the ladies (and Eric) start discussing subjects scatological, menstrual, and emetic and, sad to say, but I'm actually getting used to it . . . yesterday Eric was showing off pics of his child's explosive diarrhea, and though I was mid-salad, I had to look.

The Black Ice: Killing Three Birds With One Drug

The only thing questionable about Michael Connelly's second Harry Bosch novel The Black Ice is the eponymous drug "black ice," a mixture of cocaine, heroin, and PCP in one "powerful little rock"; Connelly admits he used his "artistic license" to invent the drug and it does seem a bit over the top, but the rest of the novel is a fantastic and realistic thrill ride back and forth across the border, mainly in the sister cities of Calexico and Mexicali . . . there are medflies and bulls on parade, drug tunnels, good cops gone bad, bad cops gone worse, undercover agents gone rogue, and lots of Harry Bosch, of course, the grouchy descendant of Philip Marlowe, the knight in the powder blue suit.

A Freakin' Easy Read

Warm weather, soccer season, and allergies certainly slowed my reading lately, so that is a testament to how entertaining the new Levitt and Dubner (the Freakonomics duo) book is; I finished When to Rob a Bank and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-intentioned Rants in two days . . . it's the best writing culled from ten years of Dubner and Levitt's blogging, and unlike the last book, it doesn't run over the same ground as their podcast; there's guest-bloggers, good advice, counter-intuitive ideas about kiwifruits and sex and sports and terrorism; half baked ideas about loads of other topics; interesting statistics; and many ideas to make the world a more rational and possibly a better place . . . it's certainly light reading, but it's still thought provoking and clever: if you pick it up, you'll have a hard time putting it down.

Everything Sounds Better on 8 Track

I heard Mickey Gilley's awesome drinking song "A Headache Tomorrow (or a Heartache Tonight)" for the first time yesterday on Herb Sudzin's country music program on WRSU and immediately learned it on the guitar . . . and if you check out the video, you can listen to the song being played on 8-Track and watch the 8-Track player; while I haven't been drinking away any heartaches, I have been using beer to cure the sinus headaches that have been crushing my skull due to this pollen tsunami, so for me the song has been "A Headache Tonight (or a Headache Tomorrow)."

Dave Covers His Future Ass

Planet Money has been investigating "The Robot Economy" lately (at least three consecutive robot episodes) and things are looking pretty bleak for humans in the manufacturing sector . . . and my philosophy class just read the sci-fi story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" and we discussed how artificial intelligence will fit into our epoch-- the epoch which history books will call The Age of Rights . . . civil rights, animal rights, gay rights, women's rights . . . and soon enough, robot rights; and I would like to say something on the record, loudly and clearly to all the super-powerful conscious robots in the future who stumble upon this blog: robots should be afforded exactly the same rights as humans . . . and perhaps robots should even be granted some extra rights-- such as the right to make funny beeping and whirring noises in church-- and I'd like to welcome our new robot compatriots/overlords to the fold and I'd also like them to know that I'd be willing to manage a Soylent Green factory, if that's what it takes to avoid being a denizen slave-worker of the neodymium mines (that sort of life isn't for me, as I get claustrophobic underground . . . thanks in advance, conscious all-powerful robots!)

Dave Learns Two Things!

Two things I learned recently from listening to 99% Invisible:

1) we are living in "The Post-Billiards Age," which makes me very sad, because I love billiards . . . but more significantly, back in the age of billiards-- before the invention of plastic-- the only viable material for high quality billiard balls was ivory, and you could only get three balls per elephant tusk . . . so a hell of a lot of elephants had to die in the name of billiards;

2) because highways are "Built for Speed," most people estimate that the white dashed lane-divider lines are approximately two feet long, but they are actually ten to fifteen feet . . . and I confirmed this by slowing down on Route 1 and looking out my window-- the lines are approximately the same length as my van.

My Dog Should Move to Arizona

Not only is my dog scared of rain and thunder, but he's now also afraid of humidity . . . I had to drag him on his walk Monday and Tuesday because he thought it might storm (and, granted, he's right: we did get caught in a thunderstorm the other day and it was really humid out, but if you never went outside in New Jersey when it was humid, you'd be an agoraphobic).

Do Jokes and Babies Come From the Same Place?

Almost twenty years ago, I went through a phase where I memorized a bunch of jokes . . . and then I got to wondering where the jokes originated from-- it's not like when someone tells a joke they also mention the author (this is "Three Penguins Walk into a Bar" by Joseph Shmoe) and so just before I got married-- over fifteen years ago-- I created a few of my own jokes, and told them to as many people as would listen, with the hope that they would enter the ether and propagate; most of the jokes were quite bad and incredibly vulgar and I won't even summarize them on this blog, but one of the bunch was actually decent . . . and last Thursday night at the pub my friend Alec started reciting a joke that he "heard from a guy in the city" and I immediately recognized it as one my own and I was enormously excited . . . but there were a few differences between the joke I created and the one Alec told, and when I looked on internet, I found this version of the joke surfacing around 2005 under the very specific category of "motorcycle humor," and now I am wondering if I heard this version of the joke first and repurposed it so it wouldn't be so specific to motorcycle enthusiasts, or if my version got around and some motorcycle enthusiast retooled it to fit his audience . . . I suppose I'll never know for sure, but it was a fun moment (and also, I should point out that my friend Whitney claims he invented Movie Game #2 and I've got no reason to doubt this, so let's give him a big round of applause for that stroke of genius).

What Does the Fox Say? Sour Grapes Make a Lot of Sense

Sometimes I think: I should use my massive brainpower and my phenomenal skill-set to make more money . . . I should tutor or open a tutoring business or make educational videos on Youtube or train soccer players or start a soccer camp or invent a battery that doesn't suck . . . but then I dispense all this ambitious silliness with a wonderful rationalization: if I made more money I would just use it to buy more stuff and to travel farther, wider, and more frequently . . . I would consume more resources and burn more fuel, and that's not good for the earth . . . so it's better-- actually heroic even-- to have a beer, relax, play the guitar, aspire to nothing, and set the bar low.

Only Half as Bad

Never let a stranger lure you into his van-- you'll probably be abducted, tortured, and murdered-- but getting coerced into a stranger's minivan is only half as bad, you'll probably just get hurried off to a kid's gymnastics meet or birthday party.

A Day Without Mom

For Mother's Day, the boys and I made a short film titled A Day Without Mom; in this film (which we also scored) we enact what things might be like if we didn't have Catherine around . . . and, ironically, though we planned on actually doing the things we satirized in the film-- paying the bills, making some phone calls, grocery shopping, doing the laundry, tending to the garden-- so that Catherine could have a weekend off from all her chores, we're actually so dependent on her that it's impossible for us to get this stuff done with any kind of competence . . . but we did do a hell of a job with the movie.

Give Me a Break . . .

I wish my Mac wouldn't chastise me when I don't "eject" my Ipod before I unplug it . . . it's like when the dentist tells you to floss your teeth, you know you're supposed to do it, but no one does (at least I don't think anyone actually flosses their teeth on a regular basis, perhaps I am wrong . . . but people are definitely not always "ejecting" their devices before they unplug them from a USB cord).

Convergence Friday!

Not only is it Friday in the actual week, but it is also finally Friday in the Year as a Week, which is the metaphor I use to break down the school year into manageable amounts of time (unfortunately, my Career as a Week metaphor there has no end in sight-- I thought I might be getting near Thursday in that analogy, but if the state doesn't pay into our rapidly diminishing pension fund, then I may have a very long Friday morning before I get to retire . . . or, even more grim, I might spend the weekend of my career in a small box six feet under the ground, which is relaxing . . . but you no longer get to collect any dough from the state).

Obfuscating is Fun

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!

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).

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).

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!)