Dave's Take on East Coast Comicon

If you've never been to Comicon, I can save you the trouble: imagine the Route 1 Flea Market (the one in Kevin Smith's movie Mallrats) inside a warehouse--but remove the delicious barrel pickles and the arcade-- and now add a bunch of ersatz superheroes and a few stormtroopers; while I found this to be a bit over-stimulating, my children and their two friends loved it, and they all swear they are going to next year's event in costumes . . . and I guess if you're a kid, what's not to love: there's comic books, plastic junk, toys, weapons, posters, merch, and lots of adults dressed as Deadpool; for those of you hoping to make a pilgrimage, the Route 1 Flea Market is long gone, it was razed twenty years ago and replaced by a movie multiplex, and this multiplex often features movies about superheroes . . . but in the movies, the superheroes never seem to hang around en masse in flea markets.

The Test 45: Borderline Insanity

I don't say this often, but you must listen to this week's episode of The Test; in fact, I am giving it Dave's Coveted Platinum-Clad Guarantee of High Quality Fun and Educational Value . . . the premise is a simple one, and I won't give it away (since I introduce the concept with a musical riddle) and the ladies perform heroically, admirably, and humorously (but not knowledgeably) so give it a shot, and don't worry if you fail, because if you're listening to The Test, that means you are still alive and breathing, and that's a good thing.

Applying Things to Other Things

On Thursday in composition class, we listened to an excerpt of Freakonomics about skepticism and critical analysis (The Truth is Out There . . . Isn't It?) and in it-- 17 minutes in, if you want to listen-- a professional skeptic summarized the concept of a Type 1 Cognitive Error-- this is a false positive, and in an evolutionary sense, it's not a bad mistake to make . . . you're a hominid on the plains and you hear a rustle in the grass and even though it might be a squirrel or the wind, you err on the side of caution and head back to your cave-- because that rustle might be a saber-toothed tiger and even though it probably wasn't, by making this error, you survived to see another dawn . . . we humans are designed to make lots of these errors, because they aren't very costly (as opposed to a Type 2 Cognitive Error, where you think the reverse and decide that that rustle in the grass is probably nothing-- because it's usually nothing-- and then you get eaten . . . think about this in modern terms with an electrical socket: better to assume it's live, than actually stick a fork in it to check) and later in the day on Thursday, when I was at the high school turf for soccer practice, and I ran into a mom that I thought was someone I knew (but wasn't quite sure because she was out of context) and realized that I had possibly just sent this person an email about when I was going to pick up her son-- if it was the mom I knew-- and while I wasn't sure it was her, I instinctively knew that it was much less costly to make a Type 1 Error and say hello and tell her that I had sent her an email-- and if she turned out to be someone else, all I would suffer would be a moment of awkwardness-- but if I ignored her and she was the kid's mom, then I would come off as very rude and weird, so I addressed her and she was the person I thought she was and the interaction went as well as it could have (though I couldn't remember her name) and so I'd just like to thank the evolutionary processes that shaped my pattern seeking brain and its ability to suffer through so many Type 1 Cognitive Errors (and I'd like to apologize to all you people that I started waving at, but then-- mid-wave-- realized I didn't actually know you and so started weirdly scratching my head . . . because it's better to wave at a stranger then ignore one of your friends or acquaintances).

Caveat Chapin

The radio station should warn you before playing Harry Chapin's song "Cat's in the Cradle" -- there's are times when you don't need to be that unexpectedly reflective and maudlin (plus, I'm taking both my sons and a couple of their friends to Comicon tomorrow, so that should get me a lifetime pass from ever having to hear those lyrics again).

45.4% and 99%

If you're excited and astounded by the margin Stephen Curry broke his own three point record (402 three pointers this year, vs. 286 last year . . . so nearly a thirty percent increase . . . I think this may be one of those unbreakable records, like Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak) then you'll enjoy listening to "The Yin and Yang of Basketball," a 99% Invisible episode that describes the evolution of the game, from James Naismith's arbitrary decision to nail the peach baskets up at the ten foot mark to the attempts in the '70's to change the game, which had become ponderous and boring and mainly consisted of big men inching closer and closer to the basket to score; while many ideas were batted around to solve the problem: "no backboard, a convex backboard, a smaller basket, a bigger ball, a smaller ball, a no scoring zone around the basket, and even a height cap, which would work like a team salary cap but using a player's height instead of wages," it was the ABA's adoption of the three-pointer that changed the aesthetics of the game and made last night's impossibe and unsurpassable record possible.

A Review of Some Key Moments in the Film Better Off Dead

One of the joys of having children is forcing them to watch movies from your youth; Saturday night we ate tacos and the entire family enjoyed a screening of Better Off Dead, and while everyone remembers the deranged paperboy who wants his two dollars and the hamburger singing Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some," this movie has a lot more to it than those scenes and it is much weirder than I remembered . . . here are some moments you might have forgotten:

1. Ricky's mom drinks primer and blows up;

2. the Asian brothers with a PA system mounted in their car;

3. one of the Asian brothers is mute, the other speake like Howard Cosell;

4. Lane tries to commit suicide multiple times;

5. Lane's eight year old brother learns to pick up "trashy women" from a book;

6. Lane's eight year old brother builds a space shuttle from household parts, and it works;

7. Lane transforms from a klutz to a ski-pro in the span of a musical montage;

8. Lane's car transforms from a two hundred dollar heap of junk to a perfectly restored 1967 Camaro SS with a shiny paint job, also in the span of a musical montage;

9. Monique the French exchange student next door is both an an ace mechanic and a professional ski-instructor;

10. Ricky and Lane duel with ski-poles over Monique the French-exchange student;

11. Ricky's mom creates a living slime mold when she botches a recipe, she also cooks a stew that contains a very large living crustacean and has waving cephalopod tentacles;

12. though Monique can actually speak English-- a fact she has hidden from Ricky and his mom-- she substitutes "testicles" for the word "tentacles";

13. Charles de Mar (Curtis Armstrong) wears a top hat the entire movie and-- in an attempt to get high-- snorts both jello and snow;

14. at the end of the movie, Lane and Monique somehow drive the perfectly restored Camaro into Dodger stadium, park it on home plate, and make-out (the stadium is empty and Lane has his saxophone).

Plastic Fantastic Anaphora

I have a dream . . . I have a dream that one day in my kitchen cabinet there will only be one brand of plastic container . . . I have a dream that there will be only one brand of plastic container and whichever lid that I choose will fit any container that I choose-- of the proper shape-- I'm not an idiot . . . I have a dream that I will no longer waste my time searching for the correct brand of lid-- Tupperware, Rubbermaid, Ziploc, Sterilite, Gladware-- to fit the proper brand of container . . . I have a dream to streamline and expedite our plastic container cabinet. . . but when I told my family about this dream, my oldest son said, "Dad, that's the saddest dream I've ever heard."

Fight the Power

I urge you to listen to the 99 Percent Invisible episode "Flying Food"; it describes the relatively recent history of food advertising, and how innovators learned to make food look incredibly appealing-- to make food a delicious and dynamic subject that actually produces a visceral cravings in viewers-- but the important thing to remember, if you don't want to start salivating for burgers and fries every time you watch TV (because we eat WAY too much meat . . . for more on that topic, watch this TED talk by Times food writer Mark Bittman) then you need to remember that the actor who takes a bite out of the perfectly prepared burger and makes that orgasmically satisfied face, probably did that sixty-four times-- until he got the face just right-- and all the times previous, he spit the half chewed bite of burger and bun into a bucket-- the infamous spit bucket-- and if you can think of this image every time you see a delicious food image on TV, the image of the actor spitting a half-chewed bit of that burger or rib or donut into the spit bucket next to the set, a metal bucket slowing filling with half-digested chunks of meat and bread, covered in saliva-- then you are short-circuiting a habit routine . . . and to learn about this, read Charles Duhigg's book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business; you'll learn how to change the middle portion of the cue/routine/reward subroutines that are happening all the time in our lives; in this particular instance, you'll get the same cue-- a commercial with delicious looking food-- but you will go into a different routine, where you talk graphically about the spit bucket with whoever is in the room, and the reward will be that you don't salivate and desire the unhealthy food, but instead share a trade secret that might help others fight the power of this advertising as well (but you'll actually probably come off as a righteous pedant, which is what Dave is all about).

The Test 44: More Shows!

If there's one thing that Stacey and I have learned while making forty-plus episodes of The Test, it's that Cunningham loves shows and knows her shows . . . so give this one a shot, try to identify the TV Theme Songs, listen to Stacey sing, absorb Cunningham's wisdom on what to watch, and see how discerning your ears are . . . because while these shows are popular, their theme songs are tough to identify out-of-context.

An Open Letter to US Youth Soccer:

Dear US Youth Soccer,

While I recognize this as a "first world problem," your top-down bureaucratic decision to align US Youth soccer with the rest of the world, and switch from school year age ranges to calendar year age ranges is an arbitrary pain-in-my-ass (are you also going to dictate that we use the metric system?) and while this change could have been implemented with the youngest teams, and you could have "grandfathered" the older teams, instead you are tearing apart every team, everywhere; in larger towns, this isn't as much of a problem, as they have more participants and so it is easier to do a complete reset and conduct new try-outs, but this dictate truly punishes the small town coaches who have cobbled together competitive teams and now have to either play them "up" a year, which isn't good for anybody-- especially my team, which is generally undersized to begin with-- or send some kids packing (who probably won't have another place to go) and so while I recognize that you want to align yourself with international soccer as far as small sided training, which is beneficial to players, I don't understand why shifting age ranges is going to benefit any player in particular, and it is certainly going to hurt a number of teams, and give a number of volunteer travel coaches a huge headache . . . in fact, I'd far prefer adopting the metric system to dealing with the logistics of this; perhaps you will reconsider . . .

Irately,

Dave.

History Repeats Itself (to Dave's Chagrin)

I was walking the dog this morning in the predawn darkness--staring at the sidewalk, thinking my early morning thoughts about the day-- and then my arm was suddenly horizontal, my dog lunging violently at something . . . but I was able to hold the leash and keep him from chasing whatever it was he wanted to chase . . . it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the lack of light, and then I saw that we nearly walked into a deer-- it was a few feet away and staring at us, not moving at all-- so I pulled Sirius to the other side of the street and kept my eyes peeled for more deer; after a few minutes, I lapsed back into my own head, and that's when Sirius lunged and barked again-- scaring the crap out of me again -- and this time the deer was above my head, on the lawn of my friend's front yard, which is seven feet or so above the sidewalk; the moral to the story is this: at least it wasn't a skunk.

Learning Stuff the Old Fashioned Way

Each morning during the homeroom video announcements at my high school, there is an introductory snippet of a song-- and it's different every day and it's usually a rock song and it's usually from the '90's and I can usually identify it, but the musical fragment from Tuesday eluded me . . . the only lyrics I could make out were "naa naa na na na na naaa" and while I knew the song and knew it was an alternative rock song from my era, I couldn't identify the artist or the title, and-- despite enlisting the aid of the internet and my honors Philosophy class-- there was no figuring it out . . . I will warn you that it's an internet black hole if you Google songs with "na na na" in the lyrics, and so I had to give up and do it the old-fashioned way (remember the old-fashioned way? if you didn't know the name of the guy that had a cameo in the movie, then you had to wait until you ran into your friend who knew all about movies and ask him) and so when I saw the teacher that runs the produces the morning announcements in the hallway, I went up to him and asked him if he knew the song, and he did . . . so take your guess and then follow the link to find out if you're right.

Robots vs. Selfish Drunk People

I recently watched the movie Ex Machina, and I loved it-- especially the "villain," a super-intelligent, super-rich, super-selfish tech wizard who spends his time drunk and alone on his giant estate, building strong AI robots-- which look like beautiful women, of course; I also just finished Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder-- the novel doesn't really contain a villain, per se, unless it's nostalgia for the affected British upper class and all their traditions and foibles . . . but it does contain lots of drunken selfish people and serves as a reminder that there's nothing all that recent (the book was published in 1945) about misdirected intelligence, ethical egoism, louche sensibility, and a general malaise with existing society and morals-- a desire to throw away everything previous and move into a new era, even if it is a rank and gross one-- and the haunting grip that the previous has on the present; I recommend both the book and the movie, they are smart, fun, thought-provoking, and weird.

If You Can Measure It, Then You Will Care About It

I'm not sure where I first heard the sentiment "we can't measure what we care about, so we care about what we can measure" and when I Googled the quotation I found several places where it might have originated-- but it sounds like one of those things that is impossible to pinpoint; anyway, I think it applies to both education and sports, and I'm going to keep it in mind as a teacher and a coach, and I think you should keep it in mind as well (in fact, there will be a quiz on this quotation in seven years time).

The Test 43: Dave Speaks for the Trees

This week on The Test, I speak for the trees . . . because if I don't speak for the trees, who will?

How Do YOU Spell the "C" Word?

Thursday in the English Department, lines were drawn, alliances were formed, vitriol was spewed, judgments (judgements?) were made, umbrage was taken, and words were exchanged that may never be forgotten . . . the vociferous and combative debate centered around how to spell the "c" word, not the profane one, the one synonymous with lousy, and so your choices were:

A. crummy

B. crumby

and nearly the entire department agreed that the proper spelling is "crumby," but there were two dissenters-- Kevin and myself-- and I pointed out to the Crumby Camp that the dissenters happened to be the only two red-blooded American male coaches in department-- besides Terry, and no one asked his opinion on this-- and that the Crumby Crew were a bunch of effete, British literature loving Anglophiles (the type of people who like to go to the theatre and pronounce judgement on the colours of the costumes) and it turns out that Kevin and I were correct, of course-- crummy is the proper spelling, although "crumby" was fine in 19th century England . . . which only fortifies our position, since we reside in New Jersey and Bruce Springsteen would never say "I'm pulling out of this crumby town."

Three Thousand Words

I am usually articulate enough to portray The Life of Dave with words alone, but sometimes only photographs will do the trick:


1) one of the few surviving photos from our hike up Glen Onoko Falls;

2) the spot that I mistook for the men's locker room;

3) a photo of our very tired dog after our very long hike to the Hickory Run Boulder Field . . . normally he would never deign to such humiliation.

T Junctions

Charlie Jane Ander's novel genre-mash-up novel All the Birds in the Sky uses the love affair between a witch and a techno-geek as a metaphor to pit science against magic . . . and while the book has its moments, it's ponderous at times-- the writing is vivid, but I didn't particularly care for the characters; the book does portray earth at an interesting T Junction: the scientists are abandoning ship while the more mystical folks are trying to find a way to save what's left of everything on earth-- not just the humans-- and this portion of the metaphor rings very true, with the presidential election looming and two roads diverging in the yellow wood for our country and the world to travel . . . a slightly less vivid and rather technical (but sort of readable) economic explanation of this is presented by Mohamed A. El-Erian in his book The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse . . . he believes that central banks functioned as critical policy actors, and while they fell asleep at the wheel before 2008, they actually steered us away from total financial collapse . . . but they can't keep it up, and if we don't change political and institutional policies we could be headed down a path of "lost generations, worsening inequality, spreading poverty and political extremism" but if political and financial policy follows some simple guidelines, and there is stronger "multilateral policy coordination" then the "second road of the T junction" leads to much better economic and social outcomes . . . I'm not going to pretend I understood everything in the book, but I did like his ending analogy that incorporated the Ali/Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" fight and the two possible outcomes predicted by the Ali camp and subsequent training strategies . . . this I understood; rather than read the book, if I were you, I would listen to El-Erian discuss the premise on Slate Money . . . he gives a clear synopsis and you might get hooked on the show, which is generally a lot of fun.

Snakes on a Homonym (Parts 1 and 2)

My boys and their buddy Ben went to the salamander path on Tuesday, to turn over some rocks and find salamanders, but--to their surprise-- they found more reptiles than amphibians: six garter snakes to four red-backed salamanders; they brought the snakes back to the house, marched into the kitchen and -- to my wife's surprise-- tossed them on the counter (which is a geometric plane, of course . . . I know puns are gauche but I couldn't resist . . . and I like to imagine the scene like this: my wife yelling at the kids, Samuel Jackson style, while gesturing at the counter with one of those math-teacher rubber-tipped chalkboard pointers, "There are too many motherf*#$ing snakes on this motherf%$ing plane!") and then they removed the snakes from the kitchen, put them in a cooler, and wheeled them around town to show their friends (and released them in Ben's yard later that afternoon) but they neglected to inform my wife that though they had brought six snakes into the kitchen, they only managed to remove five of them, and so when we got back from soccer practice, there was a snake on the counter under a clear tupperware container-- when my wife started cooking it crept out from behind the spices to enjoy the heat of the burner and she trapped it . . . it was a cute little guy, just enough of a snake on that motherf*&^ing plane (and I was going to title this sentence Snakes on a Plane, but I mentioned this anecdote to an English teaching colleague and he said, "Ah . . . a homonym" and I realized that the only title more annoying than my initial idea is the current one).

Problem . . . Solution . . . Problem . . . Solution . . . Problem

I am sure you have had the problem of what to do with your keys when you drive somewhere to go for a run-- normally I take the car key off my giant keychain full of keys and then leave all those other keys in the glove compartment, and tie my car key to my waistband cinch string . . . I've even stuck the key in my sock (I'm afraid to put it in my pocket because it could fall out while I'm running) but I figured out a much more elegant solution-- I laced the my headphone cord through the key ring and put the key in my pocket, attached to my iPod-- so there was no way for the key to fall out of my pocket because it was attached to my iPod . . . but then when I got back to the car, though the key opened the door, it wouldn't turn in the ignition because the steering wheel was stuck at a weird angle and locked in place . . . and apparently the solution to this is to take both hands and turn the wheel in whatever direction feels springy, and then turn the key-- but I was able to get it to work by pushing up on the steering wheel with my knees while simultaneously turning the key . . . next time I will run in the park by my house and avoid all this crap . . . because I recognize the irony of driving somewhere to go for a run (instead of driving to the gym, I should put my van in neutral and push it up and down my street).

What Are the Odds?

On the way home from our trip to the Poconos, my wife asked me what the mileage was on the oil-change sticker and I said "97,629" and then I pressed the little dashboard peg so I could check the mileage on the odometer, and --miraculously-- it was exactly the same number: 97,629; this seemed impossibly fortuitous, and-- after some celebrating-- we decided we should play those numbers in the lottery . . . but on further reflection, this may be one of those things that seems extraordinary, but is actually fairly likely . . . because while we get the oil changed every four thousand miles or so, we don't think about changing the oil until a good three or four months after the last oil change-- which is approximately three or four thousand miles of driving, so if it was completely random, then it would be a one in four thousand chance, but it's not-- in fact-- it might be closer to a one in five hundred chance, if you think about the window of when the subject of an oil-change comes up versus where the odometer might be . . . so I think we'll skip playing the lottery and put the money towards the oil change.

We Really Did Hike Glen Onoko Falls

Although we had a lovely hike up the Glen Onoko Falls Trail in Lehigh Gorge State Park (next to Jim Thorpe, PA) there isn't much evidence-- my wife took a number of pictures of myself, the dog and the boys as we climbed the treacherously steep, rocky trail-- and there are numerous photo ops as there is literally another waterfall at every turn in the path, each more scintillating than the next . . . and we even had a nice lady take a family picture by the sign (which contains dire warnings about the trail: hike at your own risk, sections of the trail are steep and treacherous, hikers have been seriously injured and killed, wear proper hiking shoes, use extreme caution, etcetera) but then my wife trusted our oldest son to select the best photos from the many on the phone, as he insisted he had a shortcut method of pruning all the pictures . . . but he didn't know his ass from his elbow and instead of keeping the photos he wanted, he permanently deleted them . . . but I got my revenge on Sunday when we went to Hickory Run State Park to see the Boulder Field; my wife had never seen the field, a terminal moraine created by a glacier during the last ice age-- 18 acres of various sized boulders, a lake of boulders in the midst of a pine and hickory evergreen forest-- but the kids and I had been there years ago; my older son insisted that we drove there the last time we went-- but I couldn't find any driving directions, so instead we hiked three and a half miles over rocky terrain on the eponymously named Boulder Field Trail to get to the field, and when we (finally!) arrived, my son noticed a parking lot on the opposite side, and his loud complaints jogged my brain and I vaguely remembered driving down a gravel road to get to the site-- but I insisted it was far more fun to hike it (and the dog certainly thought so) but on the return to the car, by mile seven my left knee hurt and my feet were sore and everyone was very hungry . . . luckily, Woody's Country House was open, if you go there, get the chili.

The Test 42: Literary Stuff

This week on The Test, Stacey teaches Cunningham and me a few things about her literary heroes; if you listen to this episode, I promise you will learn some anecdotes you can brandish while you drink martinis at a posh cocktail party with your hyper-educated, effete, literary friends . . . along the way, I try to make some half-baked jokes, and Cunningham decides that in order to inspire her literary muse,  she may have to live inside a computer or journey to Mars . . . play along at home, have fun, and remember: in order to seem educated, you don't have to actually read the book, you just need to know some literary stuff.

 

Oops, I Did It Again?

I've got a plethora of excuses for my actions yesterday (though my wife is accepting none of them) but apparently I got naked in a public area again, though I didn't realize it; this time, at least I was out-of-state-- at the H2Oooohh! Waterpark in the Poconos-- and my first excuse is that I hate indoor water parks: I hate the noise and the echoes of the noise, I hate being damp, I hate how hot and crowded it is, and I hate the claustrophobia . . . so I was mentally bracing myself for a rough time, and I wasn't paying attention to details-- and so after we got our bracelets and proceeded through the glass doors, my wife handed me my bathing suit and spandex, and I went into "changing mode" and found a bench surrounded by lockers, and while I did find it weird that there was a big glass window, and that the people in line could see into the area, conveniently, there were no people near this section of the window, and there weren't any people around me-- so I whipped off my shorts and boxers and quickly put on my spandex and bathing suit . . . and while it should have seemed strange to me that I was in the same area as my wife, I didn't really count her as someone who shouldn't see me naked, and there were no other females around, and the floor was nice and dry and there was no one anywhere near this bench, and-- like I said-- there were lockers, so I went into "locker room mode," but apparently I was still in a very public and visible area (so much so that my wife couldn't stop laughing for the next twenty minutes and actually took a photo of the spot where I changed) and while I don't think anyone saw me, my wife insists that a couple of teenage boys witnessed the incident, and were like "WTF!" but this can neither be confirmed nor denied, and the worst part is that I've been to this waterpark several times before and know where the men's locker room is, but my brain somehow blanked this information out . . . I don't know why I went into auto-pilot like this, but perhaps I was excited because the floor was so nice and dry in this area, and inside the actual men's changing room the floor is wet and damp everywhere . . . anyway, my story is that I changed so quickly that no one saw anything out of the ordinary, but my wife isn't buying this one bit.

Quest for Pizza . . . Old Bridge Edition

My Quest for Pizza continues . . . my friend Stacey, who is an Old Bridge local, recommended General Saloon and the pizza is pretty good: thin crust, yummy bacon, but a little too much cheese . . . I think if we requested light on the cheese this pizza would have been excellent, and it was quite good despite the cheesiness . . . the place itself has a pleasant and comfortable pub-like vibe-- you can bring the kids for lunch and it looks like a fun place to see a band at night; after a hike with the dog at John A. Philips Preserve, I tried another highly recommended Old Bridge pizza spot: Krispy Pizza . . . and I love the name-- there's nothing more American than spelling shit wrong-- and the pizza is good as well, thin crust . . . my plain slice was a tad greasy, but still very tasty; the chicken on the buffalo chicken slice was awesome, crumbly and tender, and the sauce was fairly spicy . . . but Shanahan's Bakery is still my favorite place to grab a slice in the vicinity . . . who will oust them?

Incentives and The Prize

I'd like to know what economic lessons Tim Harford would find behind Mark Zuckerberg, Cory Booker, and Chris Christie's attempt to transform the Newark school system; Zuckerberg donated 100 million dollars, Cory Booker-- a passionate proponent of charter schools-- raised sums to match this money, and Chris Christie saw this as an opportunity to attack the unions; Dale Russakoff explains all this and more in her book The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools? and the morals of the story are complex, ugly, ambiguous, messy, and occasionally inspirational:

1) there is no magic bullet to fix education in an impoverished city;

2) top down directives, even if they use excellent jargon, don't change broken infrastructure;

3) you can't move kids around willy-nilly in a city like Newark to fill charter schools-- because the kids left behind have no where to learn, and the kids who get moved may have issues with with where they are moved-- gang turf, lack of busing, etcetera;

4) if you don't consult the community before implementing giant initiatives that involve their kids, they will feel angry and oppressed, especially if these directives are ordered by a white superintendent in a primarily black city;

5) you can be a rock-star or a mayor, but you can't be a rock-star mayor;

6) it's difficult to measure what parents and administrators find important in education, so the bureaucracy tends to find important what is easy to measure-- which is usually test scores-- and this can bite you in the ass;

7) consultants know how to bill hours and make a shitload of money from a situation like this (and it seems Zuckerberg has learned this lesson and is trying a different approach in the San Francisco bay area);

8) kids in a city like Newark need all kinds of additional support besides teaching, many of them have experienced horrible tragedy and violence, and they need counseling and psychological support as much as they need reading and math review;

9) Newark's billion dollar education budget is the "prize" sought after by politicians, unions, government and citizens . . . and there is going to be greed and corruption surrounding this much money;

10) there are superb teachers and students in the current system, and smart parents shepherd their kids through, but it's difficult to get rid of poor teachers because of union rules;

11) politicians and philanthropists will eventually lose interest and move on with their lives, but the parents and the kids and the community remains-- so change has to come from the bottom-up, and it needs to come from people that are going to stay in the community-- Booker went on to a senate position, Christie had to deal with Bridgegate and his presidential campaign, and Zuckerberg moved on to a new project-- meanwhile, the two hundred million dollar donation was a drop in the bucket, and got eaten up by consultants, contract negotiations with the union, and some charter schools-- but the main infrastructure in Newark is still ancient and crumbling, teachers still go to work in that environment, and students attempt to learn there . . . and the work needs to be done one student and one teacher and one classroom and one school building at a time, which is far more boring than radical, transformational top-down change;

12) if you want to understand some of the complexities of educational reform, read this book.

Life isn't Fair (but Sometimes It Is Logical)

Tim Harford's The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World is another gem, especially if you're a fan of Freakonomics style logic; he examines how incentives often do the reverse of what is intended-- the existence of nicotine patches encourage teens to smoke, too many women in big cities discourage marriage, mild preferences create neighborhoods that would suggest virulent racism, it's more beneficial to research the kind of coffee maker or car you're going to buy than the next presidential candidate, your boss is probably an overpaid dope who doesn't know how hard you work (and that makes perfect sense) and the best way to solve overpopulation might be to move to the city and have six kids . . . I don't have the time or energy to explain the logic behind all these conclusions, but the book is smart and worth a read, though I must warn you, it starts in a rather salaciously concupiscent manner (reminiscent of Superfreakonomics).

This Is Difficult to Articulate

I feel like on some level, in some space in my brain, I am very, very smart . . . but I just can't remember things, or think of examples when I need them, or put things into words very well . . . does everyone else feel like this too?

The Test 41: Zombies (and Zombeavers)

This week on The Test, Stacey collaborates with special guest Liz collaborates on a phenomenal and comprehensive zombie quiz-- Dave and Cunningham struggle (despite Cunningham's rather ambitious prediction that she will receive an A+) but learn that they know more about zombies than they thought; this is a great test for both newbs and aficionados, and, not only that, Stacey gets her comeuppance from the Voice of God (probably because of her frequent use of profanity) so give this one a shot and see how you fare.

I Can't Get the Slime into the Tube

I was very excited to use the bottle of Slime Tube Sealant that I purchased, as Slime Tube Sealant prevents and repairs flat tires, seals instantly and uses non-toxic fibro-seal technology, which is exactly what I needed to fix the slow leak in the back tire of my mountain bike, but, despite repeated efforts with various tools (including a pair of needle-nosed pliers and the top of the Slime Tube Sealant bottle, which claims to be a device for exactly this purpose) I couldn't get past instruction #2, even with help from a Youtube video-- and if you can't remove the valve core from the Schrader air valve, then you can't get the Slime Tube Sealant into the tire tube . . . so it's back to the bike shop for me-- I'm sure they've got a tool for this sort of thing, and I'm sure I'll feel like an idiot when I explain that I couldn't remove the Schrader valve core from my bike's back tire (even with the included tool) and that I couldn't motivate myself to remove the back tire of my bike and prize the tire off the rim and switch the tube myself, because I'm lazy and get no satisfaction from working with my hands because I'm an effete useless bastard who just wants to ride his bike but doesn't wanted to do any of the maintenance associated with riding said bike.

They Skipped This One in Driver's Ed

Obviously drunk-driving and texting-while-driving are bad news, but neither of these is as dangerous as driving with a large hairy black spider on your leg (and the worst thing about this incident is that in my attempt to kill this spider, I endangered my own life and the well-being of everyone in the vicinity of my car, but I didn't actually squash it-- I was travelling forty-five miles an hour--,and it scurried under the floor mat, whereabouts unknown, lurking, waiting for another chance to clamber up my leg and cause more mayhem on the highway).

Reverse Allusion

The weather has warmed up, and this has inspired me to continue my project of grabbing large rocks from the river during low tide, putting them in my backpack, and then carrying them up the hill to my backyard, where I use the stones for decorative mulch and ivy barriers . . . my friend Stacey calls this maneuver The Reverse Shawshank.

'tis the Season to Be Cranky

It is once again time for my semi-annual Daylight Saving Time Rant, but this year I'm happy to report that I've found one kindred soul who empathizes with my pain and suffering-- my friend Ann; her husband takes the same stance as my wife about Daylight Saving Time: it's only and hour, stop complaining . . . but Ann is of my mind, she feels the same anger at this pointless top-down bureaucratic time shift, and suffers the same anxiety and discomfort from the lost hour, which won't be found for six months-- and by then, I'll have adjusted, and it will screw me up all over again, and I don't know why we can't move the time 30 minutes ahead and leave it forever, or do a Daylight Saving Month and move the clocks two minutes a day, so no one is inconvenienced (we have computers) and while everyone agreed it would be bad news if Ann and I were married, as the dynamic combination of our indignance, suffering, criticizing, complaining, and general disgust would create a whirling black hole of negativity that would suck up everyone within twenty miles of the nexus, I think that it is good that we provide some yin in the yang of our respective marriages . . . nothing is more boring than two positive, practical, efficient, and focused yangs . . . so this Daylight Saving Time, let's celebrate the darkness, the yin, and those people who are willing to speak and complain and criticize and whine about this antiquated, absurd, and ultimately pointless practice.

Musical Theater as Punishment

My son Ian got in some serious trouble Friday night and his consequence for his various infractions is a two week grounding; for the first night of his punishment, I forced him to attend the school play: a musical version of Little Women . . .  I didn't really want to go (because I hate musical theater) but I had several students in the show and the added incentive that I could torture my son was enough motivation for me to spend my Saturday night with a bunch of teenagers and their parents in a high school auditorium-- and though we both didn't care much for the plot-- girl stuff-- Ian and I did both concede that the actors were really talented . . . and the next time Ian screws up I'm taking him to the opera.

The Test 40: More Theme Songs

This week on The Test, Cunningham administers another TV (and a movie!) Theme Song Quiz; Stacey and I do better than the first time around (but that's not saying much) and I am chastised by the Voice of God for making stuff up; as a bonus, in order to educate young Cunningham, Stacey sings the theme song from an ancient TV sitcom (and I join in).

 

Pleasant Rhyming Surprise

I was walking the dog Friday afternoon and a middle school girl nearly ran into me-- she was looking down intently at an object in her hands-- and I assumed she was staring at her cell-phone, and my brain started on its normal path-- cursing technology and its death grip on the youth-- but then I noticed she wasn't looking into a tiny screen, she was thoughtfully perusing a perfectly formed pine cone, and this made me very happy.

Something to Teach Your Kids: Money Talks and Bullshit Walks

While my parental proclamation declaring that my children may only watch approved and highly rated documentaries on school nights has predictably fallen by the wayside, I was able to resurrect a bastardized version of the decree on Wednesday night; instead of allowing my kids to continue their obsessive viewing of Family Guy on Netflix, I forced them to watch Spinal Tap . . . and while they didn't laugh as hard as I did, they admitted that they enjoyed the film, especially when Derek Smalls gets stuck inside the pod and when Nigel Tufnel reunites the band for a reunion tour in Japan . . . the next movie I'm forcing my kids to watch: The Breakfast Club.

Pizza Ambitions

The Freakonomics episode "The Cheeseburger Diet" has inspired me to eat pizza from a wider variety of establishments, and while I'm not as ambitious as Emily O'Mara, i.e. I haven't created a rubric to judge the pizza I eat, I do have a couple of recommendations: oddly, Shanahan's Bakery (in Milltown) makes fantastic pizza-- thin and delicious crust, sweet sauce, and just the right amount of cheese . . . and they also have lots of specialty slices; Brothers Pizza (in East Brunswick) was highly recommended by the locals, and I really liked their square cut "Grandma Style"-- which reminded me of Rhode Island pizza (no cheese) but I didn't really care for the mushroom slice-- canned mushrooms, doughy crust, and too much cheese . . . and while both of these places can certainly compete with my two mainstays, Mancini's-- which is in East Brunswick-- and Attilio's in Edison, I've yet to find pizza as good as the thin crust pie at Pete and Elda's in Neptune.

Expatriates

I remember when we first went to live and teach overseas, an older international teacher told me, "Don't expect anyone back at home to care or understand what it's like to leave the United States and live in a foreign place . . . when you go home for the summer, they're just going to tell you how many rolls of toilet paper they bought at Costco," and while I found this to be a bit of an exaggeration (while my family wasn't particularly curious about our life in Syria, my friends and colleagues were generally interested in my stories, anecdotes, and analysis . ..  or maybe they just pretended) and while I thought I had forgotten much of day-to-day life overseas was like, Janice Y. K. Lee's novel The Expatriates brought it all back for me; it's the story of three expatriate women in Hong Kong, and while it's definitely chick-lit and examines the inner lives of these women in detail-- and makes some statements about the inner lives of women in general-- it is also a story of the fishbowl world of the expatriate community and how that world operates . . . there is the sentiment while you are there, far from home, that the people you are with are (and will be) the most significant people in your life-- and Lee takes a sardonic look at that struggle to fit into this new community, how difficult that is for adults, but there is also the realization that "no one back home cares . . . there's an initial shallow interest in what life is like abroad, but most Americans aren't actually interested at all," and not only did the novel detail and articulate that theme, which is near and dear to me, but there's also Mercy Cho-- the Korean-American Columbia graduate who is so ironically American that she sees the "meta" in everything, despite the tragedy that surrounds her, she remains detached; you don't have to have been an expatriate to enjoy this rather intense (but also humorous) novel, but it certainly helps.

The Arbitrary Nature of Basketball Design

99% Invisible is a fairly nerdy podcast which focuses on design, but "The Yin and Yang of Basketball" is a refreshing change from the norm; it features a short history of basketball, and how James Naismith's arbitrary decision to place the basket ten feet off the ground privileged tall folks, which inevitably led the game down a ploddingly boring path, where big men banged around near the paint in order to get as close to the rim as possible, but as interest waned (in the 1970s) the ABA introduced the three-point shot, which spread the game out and led to the current state of affairs: Stephen Curry has broken his own three-point record with twenty-percent of the season left to play, if he continues on this pace he'll outstrip his old total by an incredible amount . . . most sporting records are never broken by more than ten percent (and usually much less) but this indicates a sea change in professional basketball-- for more on this, check out "Stephen Curry is the Revolution" at FiveThirtyEight.

Happy Birthday?

On the morning of my birthday, my mother texted me this:

Hi Dave, Happy 46th birthday . . . have a good day . . . I can't believe in four years, you will be 50, I will be 75, hopefully, and Alex will be driving on his permit . . .

and I feel like the tone of this text is a breach of birthday etiquette, as not only is there a reference to my mother's mortality-- and she's perfectly healthy-- but the text also thrusts me four years closer to my own hypothetical demise, for no apparent reason-- and four years is a long time: longer than my wife and I spent in Syria, the same amount of time it takes most people to get a degree, and so I wanted to text back (but didn't) a message in this vein: "That's true, and in fifty-four years, the bulk of the East Coast will be underwater and we'll both certainly be dead."

The Test 39: Chronological Fun for the Whole Family

Once upon a time, I had a great idea for a Trivial Pursuit style family board game-- you would receive three thematically connected things, and you would have to put them in chronological order (for example: The Great Wall of China, The Taj Mahal, The Mesa Verde Anasazi Cliff Dwellings) and while I gave up on this concept as fun for the whole family, it did make for a pretty good test . . . so check out this week's episode, see if you can compete with Stacey and our two special guests (MJ and Terry) and try not to get involved in our rift with Billy Joel.

More Undercover Economics

I highly recommend Tim Harford's book The Undercover Economist-- here are a few of the many many topics he covers:

1) why storebrand supermarket products are packaged with the "purpose of conveying awful quality" though they are often indistinguishable from actual braids . . . it wouldn't cost much to improve the logos of these products, but that would defeat the purpose, the packaging is designed to put off customers who might be willing to pay more . . . IBM did this with their LaserWriter E low end printer, which was the same machine as their high end LaserWriter, only with an additional chip to slow it down-- it was cheaper to manufacture it like this than make an actual slower printer for less-- and the same goes for "professional" and mass-market versions of software programs . . . the professional is built first and then the cheaper one is handicapped;

2) the externalities of traffic jams . . . the best solution might be a per trip tax, especially during rush hour in congested areas;

3) the economic reasons U.S. health care is "hugely expensive, very bureaucratic, and extremely patchy" and the ways we can combat this, using inside information, catastrophe insurance, and cooperation between the government and markets;

4) why poor countries are poor, and why tariffs and "bringing jobs" back isn't the answer-- this section gets quite technical, but mainly what I got out of it is that poor countries try to protect industries that can't compete in the global market instead of doing what they do best, and this often leads to subsidies and corruption which drain from the economy and only help special interest groups-- in other words, the best way to make really good cars in the US is a technology called "Japan," and we should grow a shitload of corn and export it so we can turn that foreign currency into great cars, instead of trying to make our own . . . this in controversial, of course, and people get laid off and fired and have to be retrained along the way . . . but that's what wealthier countries do, time after time (and I have read that no country has become poorer after opening its borders, though I have also read that you may need the government to help you establish the infrastructure to compete on an global level, and then you can kick out the ladder . . . economists never agree on anything).

Triple Threat

I may not be a great cook, and I'm certainly not a great singer, and (compared to my friends) I'm not the world's best beer drinker . . . but combine the three of them into one event and I think I'm right up there, one of the best there is at beer-drinking and singing while I'm cooking (especially if I'm listening to Sheryl Crowe).

You Be the Judge

So "face-swapping" apps are all the rage right now at our school, and the "face-swap" above is a combination of me and my colleague and podcasting partner Stacey; it's my face on her head, with her hair of course-- and the general consensus is that my face and Stacey's hair make for a spitting image of Brad Pitt . . . of course, there are a few doubters out there-- including my wife-- but I think those in doubt are just jealous and don't want to admit that if I had some luscious brown hair and a slightly longer face, I'd be a super-famous movie-star desired by most of the women on the planet . . . anyway, I'm growing my hair out, so in three or four years, we'll see just how accurate the face-swapping is.

Dave and Theodore Geisel Both Enjoy Another Birthday (to Varying Degrees)

The doctor and I
are both a year older,
but his celebration
is darker and colder.

An Open Letter to the Lady Who Yelled "FULL STOP!" at Me

Dear Old Lady with Two Little White Dogs Who Yelled "FULL STOP!!!" at me,

while I will readily admit that I did not come to a full stop at the STOP sign before I inched my car out at the intersection to make a left turn, I'd also like to point out that in the town of Highland Park, which has narrow streets and many cars parked on the sides of these streets, coming to a full stop at a STOP sign is useless, as you can't see anything until you inch your way forward and look beyond the parked cars on either side of the intersection-- and while I was inching out, at an approximate speed of ten miles per hour, I heard someone screaming . . . it was you, waving your arms, screaming "FULL STOP!" at me and I'd like to point out to you that this distracted me from my task of getting out into the intersection, because instead of looking for oncoming cars and pedestrians and bikers and skateboarders, instead of watching for these hazards, I was looking at you, a wildly gesticulating gray-haired lady with two white dogs, shrieking "FULL STOP!" at me and this nearly made me forget my mission, which is never hit a dog or a child with my vehicle, a mission I am proud to say that I am vigilantly pursuing each and every day of my life, despite your attempts to subvert my attention, and while I realize that you mean well, I hope this sentence finds its way to you and you recognize the irony and insanity of your actions.

Inflation Subverts Sticky Prices

The Planet Money podcast recommended everything written by Tim Harford, and I love Planet Money, so I went to the library and took out The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run-- or Ruin-- an Economy and the guys at Planet Money were right; this is a highly entertaining look at macroeconomics and some of the problems and solutions to keeping an economy chugging along . . . most of ideas are a bit counterintuitive . . . the best time to trim spending, pay off debt and deregulate is during a boom-- and while most countries do these things during a recession, the best thing to do during a recession is dust off huge government projects and allow the government to employ lots of people and create value and worth . . . but again, these are the things that usually happen during a booming economy; I also learned that inflation is the only way to defeat sticky prices and sticky wages-- it's really hard to cut people's pay and to mark down the value of goods and services once a  fair price is established, but if you have a bit of inflation every year, then you can still give people raises, they are just less than the rate of inflation, so-- in effect-- they are taking a pay cut, and this works the same way with devaluing a house or something that is difficult to part with for less money than you paid for it (even if it's truly worth less money-- countries with higher home ownership also have higher unemployment, because it's harder to move where the jobs are because housing markets are slow and sticky and efficient); Harford ends the book addressing inequality of income and what that really means around the world, within countries and between them, and he believes the course of action to understanding large-scale economics is that the models need to incorporate more on human behavior, because we don't behave like perfectly rational future prediction machines, we are at the whims of our "animal spirits" and when these exacerbate an economy on a large scale, it's extremely hard to predict what is going to happen.

The Test 38: One for the Sporting Fanatics

In honor of Stephen Curry's magical performance last night,  I humbly present the newest episode of The Test, which is dedicated to the wonderful pastime which is sports; while Stacey designed this quiz to torture Cunningham-- which it did-- the questions had the opposite effect on me, and made me wax profoundly on the value and significance of all things athletic . . . so give it a shot, see if you can beat me, see if anyone is funnier than Cunningham, and try not to get choked up when Stacey does her send-up up of The Locker Room Speech.

One for the Birders

After some internet research, I realized that I misspoke: the hawk that perched in the maple in our backyard yesterday was a red-shouldered hawk, not a red-tailed hawk . . . sometimes I'm such an idiot.

This Can't Be the Answer . . . Could It?

I'm going to give it a try-- and I've gotten endorsements from many knowledgeable people-- but I can't believe that the cure for my aching knee is a single velcro band (otherwise known as a Jumper's Knee Strap).

Dave Pitches a Great Idea for a TV Show

So here it is, my pitch for The Super Bachelor of Dave . . . instead of the typical fluff on the current show, the contestants will undergo a sequence of events detailed below-- so that the bachelor can estimate the genetic robustness of all the candidates and make an educated choice on who he wants to bear his young; each week the bachelor will give one or more of his 23 chromosomes to the ladies he wants to stay, and he'll give a prophylactic to those he wants a to go . . . indicating that he would not want to procreate with them (but does not dismiss them from a purely sexual tryst . . . no hard feelings) and I think this format could work for a bachelorette as well, and might even be more important . . . here are some possibilities for events:

1) a soccer match, of course-- there's no faster way to check out how athletic someone is than to watch them play soccer . . . teamwork, speed, spatial skills, and strategic inclinations are  all immediately apparent;

2) pick-up basketball . . . same as above;

3) tennis tournament . . . not as indicative as basketball and soccer, but I love those outfits;

4) a standardized test . . . SAT, ACT, whatever;

5) orienteering . . . it's nice to marry someone with a good sense of direction;

6) driving test . . . you don't want to be cringing when you're in the passenger seat;

7) flu exposure . . . this episode will be ugly, with lots of vomiting, fever, defecation and shivering, but you want a spouse with a hardy immune system and this is the only way to tell;

8) squats . . . curls are for the girls and bench isn't all that important, but it's good to know someone can put up some weight and has sturdy thighs and quads;

9) chili cook-off;

10) a financial assessment . . . you don't want to marry anyone carrying a huge credit card debt or with an outstanding lien on their property . . . and if they have money in the family, that's a big plus, even if they can't put up big numbers on the squat rack.

Now You Know

Apparently, not everyone on earth knows that the easiest way to remove a piece of eggshell that has fallen into your egg is to use the empty half of the cracked eggshell as a scooper-- the jagged edge pierces the egg membrane and the bit of shell is magically attracted to the large scooper-shell . . . I don't know who taught me this (probably the same person who taught me to detach my windshield wipers from my windshield and let them stick straight up the night before a snowstorm) but I've run into a surprising number of people who have never heard of this extremely effective technique . . . and this makes me wonder about all the amazing stuff that no one bothered to explain to me.

It Must Be February

My wife and kids are sick, and my knees are shot from playing basketball and indoor soccer.

Agent to the Stars

I needed a break from literature about the American Southwest (on deck . . . Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire) so I read John Scalzi's sci-fi novel Agent to the Stars; the plot sounds absurd-- aesthetically unappealing, smelly (but friendly) aliens travel across the universe to investigate and embrace the intelligent life on earth, but then drag their feet about first contact, because they've seen all of our movies and television and know how we generally treat gross alien creatures . . . so they seek representation and leave it to a Hollywood agent to figure out how to best introduce them to the planet-- but the novel is more serious than you might imagine from the synopsis . . . the characters are well drawn, the insight into the Hollywood agency is vivid and meticulous, the writing is sharp, and the plot really moves . . . the book is more than a satire of sci-fi and the film industry (although it is that as well) and dog-lovers, film-lovers and dog-film lovers will especially appreciate the story.

The Test 37: Black (and White) History

This week on The Test,  I administer a series of questions inspired by Black History Month and, I must admit that the ladies perform admirably-- in fact, they are deemed "not racist"-- but then, in order to be fair, I ask them a multi-part question about white people (that requires me to do several impersonations) and they do NOT perform admirably on this section . . . the questions might be more geared to folks of my generation . . . anyway, give this one a shot, and see if you are more racist, less racist, or exactly the same amount of racist as the gang.

If You Pee on a Tree in the Forest, and No One Sees You . . .

After some very poor scientific research in the English Office-- mainly based on anecdotal evidence, with occasional specious references to "studies" and "articles"-- we determined two things about asparagus consumption: 

1) when some people eat asparagus, their pee smells weird;

2) when other people eat asparagus, their pee does NOT smell weird;

and Stacey and I were proud of the "fact" that our pee did not smell weird after eating asparagus, but after a bit of reading I learned that our research and consequent hypotheses were patently stupid-- what did you expect from a bunch of English teachers?-- and the fact of the matter is that everyone's pee contains asparagusic acid after asparagus is eaten, but not everyone can smell the substance; some people have a specific smell-blindness (scientifically known as a specific anosmia) to the asparagus-pee-smell . . . which leads to a philosophical question: if asparagus pee falls into a toilet, and you can't smell it, does it smell like asparagus?

That Was Close

It's a good thing the sun came out yesterday, because one more day of cloudy weather and my bones would have turned to jelly (and my brain too, I was having trouble staying awake, I couldn't think straight, and all I wanted to do was eat chocolate and drink coffee . . . I don't know how people in the Pacific Northwest accomplish anything).

In Twenty Years, I'll Get to Say "I Told You So"

I tried to articulate my feelings on smartphones over on Gheorghe:The Blog, but the short and sweet versions is this:

1) I hate them;

2) I've completely banned them in my class and told my students I'm treating them like cigarettes, if I lay eyes on a smartphone, I'm confiscating it;

3) my school has embraced them, and now has a BYOD policy . . . Bring Your Own Device . . . which means students can use them in the hallways and at lunch, and can utilize them in class if the teacher allows it;

4) I think BYOD is lunacy, as do many other teachers, because it's hard enough to focus on chemistry without having a gaming system, social-networking conduit, camera, audio recorder, app center, and general panacea for all boredom in your immediate possession;

5) there's plenty of research citing the fact that test scores go up (6 percent on average and double that for lower achieving students) when smartphones are banned . . . and that writing notes down on paper is a powerful cognitive tool that aids in processing ideas and higher level thinking;

6) I believe people in the future will view our obsession with smartphones and their ubiquity with the same nostalgic horror that we view the "good old days" when people could smoke cigarettes on airplanes . . . and I believe that there are similarities between cigarettes and smartphones-- they are both portable addictive dopamine dispensers-- and folks in the future will laugh and laugh when they read descriptions of how we sent our youngsters to school and out driving (in human controlled cars!) with these incredibly distracting devices; they will view this period as a bout of temporary insanity, akin to when you could light up your cigarette or cigar any damn place you pleased.

Weird and Weirder

If you're not looking for a big commitment and you need something to stream on Netflix and you're in the mood for something kind of weird, then try Episode 7 of Black Mirror-- it's called "White Christmas" and it stars Jon Hamm; Black Mirror is a British update of The Twilight Zone . . . but the episodes center around the perils of technological innovation, and "White Christmas" is really fun and strange and features lots of surprises and a plot that circles right around to the beginning and makes perfect sense . . . if you're still in the mood for something short and self-contained and weird, watch Punch Drunk Love, it was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, stars Adam Sandler, and features a cameo by Philip Seymour Hoffman . . . I always had fond memories of this movie, but hadn't watched it since 2002, when it came out-- it holds up really well, and is even more bizarre than I remembered.

A Great Novel (with a not so great title)

The Milagro Beanfield War, by John Nichols, is quite a novel . . . it details a water-rights squabble in New Mexico, between the poor chicanos and the wealthy developers, and it is full of salt-of-the-earth characters, mock-epic hilarity, beautiful descriptions of the mountains and high desert plains, special agents, magical realism, guns, an incorrigible pig, local politics and astute social commentary . . . and it's got a page-turning plot to boot . . . the tone occasionally reminds me of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and while I admit Marquez came up with a much better title, you should really give The Milagro Beanfield War a try . . . I'm trying to read a shitload of books about the American Southwest in preparation for our family road trip this summer, and this one has given me an unusual and memorable perspective on northern New Mexico.

You Can't Undo a First Impression

When I receive a new class of students, I generally try to make a good first impression; I try to come across as fun and easygoing, but remind the students that my class will be challenging and I will reward diligence; unfortunately, this doesn't always happen . . . for a fantastically awkward pair of back-to-back examples of my worst start to a class ever, read this . . . and something similar happened two weeks ago; I had bronchitis and I missed two day of school . . . including the first day of my new Creative Writing class, so, as sub work, I gave them a fairly long New Yorker article about brainstorming to read: it's a fantastic article,  and while the first few paragraphs explain some of the history behind traditional brainstorming and how much everyone loves it, the thrust of the essay is that brainstorming doesn't work at all, and in fact, is worse than working alone; there's been a battery of psychological tests, and the research indicates that people produce the best ideas when there is healthy debate and criticism, and not a system that embraces blind acceptance of any idea at all . . . but I wasn't in school and so my students-- who had never met me and didn't know that if I give you something to read, you'd better read it-- perfunctorily read a few paragraphs of the article and then wrote a bunch of unfounded BS about how much everyone loves brainstorming, and so when I returned to school on Friday, still ailing and weak, but in school because it was a delayed opening because of snow and I didn't want to waste a sick day on a truncated schedule, and I read the pile of papers that got the thesis of the article completely wrong, I got very indignant, and-- because of the wackiness of the schedule-- I didn't have lunch at the proper time, so I brought a steaming bowl of soup to class, told the kids that they did a terrible job with the article and I was really angry because they made me read a pile of unfounded BS, gave them the article again, commanded them to reread it and do the assignment again and to type it up over the weekend and then explained to them that they had made a horrible first impression on me, and then, while they silently read the article, I slurped my soup and glowered at them . . . occasionally I stopped slurping my soup and enjoyed a phlegmy cough, and then I went back to slurping, while they read in silence . . . it was a really awkward first impression, and while we've reconciled since then (aside from the one girl who dropped the class . . . she probably thought she was dealing with a lunatic) I don't think they'll ever quite forget it or get over it.

Dave's Scarf-Technique Atrophies Due to Warm Winter

It's been a relatively mild winter, and so I haven't had much practice with my scarf-technique . . . I had it mastered last winter, but my skills have atrophied (and I forgot that I need to wear a hooded sweatshirt in order to make a scarf operate flawlessly) and it was very very cold and windy last night, but my parents took the kids overnight, so Catherine and I-- in honor of Valentine's Day-- decided to make a go of it and walk across the bridge into New Brunswick to eat at the delicious Ethiopian place (Desta) but my scarf was hanging low and my cheeks got so cold that I almost puked and I tried to convince her to turn back when we were halfway over the bridge, but she pressed on and I glumly followed . . .  we finally made it to the restaurant, warmed up, drank our ice cold beer from the cooler-- ice cold beer that felt warm to our frozen hands-- and had a delicious meal, and then I really piled my scarf high for the walk home, and while this protected my face, I learned another lesson: you can't wear glasses when you have a scarf piled high on your face or they steam up and freeze, so you can't see where you're going (which admittedly, is better than getting frostbite, but still not a pleasant way to walk around in the bitter cold).

The Test 36: TV Themes and Beatboxing

The gang reunites this week on The Test for Cunningham's perpetually astounding, perplexingly astounding TV Theme Song quiz (I've been channelling Walt "Clyde" Frazier lately) and-- warning-- Stacey and I have some serious cognitive difficulties with this one . . . Stacey gets philosophical about her malfunctioning brain and says something very poetic: "I can't even remember my memories," and I get frustrated and angry and claim I have Alzheimer's, and then I attribute my intellectual failures to the fact that it was Friday afternoon after a long week of teaching, which is ridiculous . . . anyway, we finish strong, with an amazing display of vocal prestidigitation; so take a shot, keep score, see how you do, and don't be stingy with the points . . . also, if you like it, give us a rating on iTunes and/or Stitcher . . . thanks!
 

You Can Clip Your Nails, and You Can Clip a Receiver, But Can You Clip a Receiver's Nails?

In the winter, when I clip my fingernails, even if I'm doing it over the sink or the toilet, the nail clippings fly all over the place and there's no finding/retrieving them . . . I think it's because my nails are less pliable in the winter (because of the cold weather) and while I still pretend I care about where the nail fragments are going-- and I still do the clipping over the toilet or the sink, I have to be candid and admit that literally zero percent of the nail clippings end up where I want them . . . so should I stop pretending and just clip my nails while I walk around the house, letting them fly willy-nilly where the dog might eat them, or should I keep up this faux-hygienic charade?

Perks of my Job

Teaching is fairly predictable: once you've taught a topic a few times, you know what questions the kids will ask and you know what issues will raise interesting discussions, but there are occasional super-excellent unpredictable moments along the way (such as this one) that are spontaneous and priceless, and something in that vein happened yesterday afternoon; I was giving the kids some background on Shakespeare, as we were about to begin Hamlet and I told them: "Chaucer was before Shakespeare, he wrote the Canterbury Tales in the late 1300's and he wrote them in Middle English-- which is really hard to read . . . but Shakespeare wrote in a more modern kind of English, which is much easier to read, it was named after the ruler of the time . . . anyone know what kind of English it was called, Shakespeare's English?" and a lovely girl-- an intelligent girl, I should add, so you don't get the wrong impression from this one particular response, a response given late in the day in the midst of a dark and snowy February afternoon, while I was lecturing about iambic pentameter and the Globe Theatre -- anyway, this wonderful girl sitting in the front left gamely took a shot at my question about the kind of English spoken during Shakespeare's time, a kind of English named after the ruler of the time; she said, "Metric English?" and her answer didn't really register in my brain, and I said, "No . . . Elizabethan English" and then there was a beat, and then the entire class realized why she said "Metric English" and we all laughed and laughed (even though the official adoption of meter sticks in the UK wasn't until far after Shakespeare's death).

Dreams Deferred, Destroyed, Depressed, Disintegrated, and Damaged

The boys and I just finished watching the epic documentary Hoop Dreams-- it streams on Netflix-- and if you haven't seen it, it's something you have to watch . . . but beware: the film keeps it very real, and the various dreams of the characters in the film are often deferred or shattered . . . and if you're a real glutton for punishment, check out where the main figures in the story are now . . . there are a few bright spots, but also plenty of tragedy; if you're still in the mood for even more depressingly frank anti-dream reality after watching Hoop Dreams, then go see The Big Short-- it has a documentary feel, and documentary-like moments, though it's not documentary, and Christian Bale and Steve Carell do a fantastic job playing real people (Michael Burry and Mark Bain) . . . but be prepared to confront the destruction of the American Dream (and you're also going to need to prepare a bit so you understand the vocabulary and the main concepts, you could either read a bunch of books and watch an actual documentary, or you could read my sentences about them . . . here are my suggestions: The Big Short, House of Cards, The Black Swan, After the Music Stops, Unintended Consequences, Griftopia and Inside Job).

Your Dog is Your Best Friend, But That Doesn't Make Him Smart

My dog thinks motorcycles are a species of wild animal that require barking and chasing (he also feels the same way about garbage trucks . . . it must be the low rumble of the engine . . . and I often wonder how he perceives these things; in his consciousness, the garbage truck must resemble a woolly mammoth and the motorcycle an elk or moose . . . and while this poses an imminent and obvious danger to him, it must be exciting to live in a world where those kinds of beasts still roam).

Philosophy and Dog Jokes

At this point in my life, I am resigned to the fact that I am a dilettante; I move from one thing to another, get very excited about it, make some progress, and then switch-- and while this methodology has it's obvious flaws, it's always exciting when the middle of the semester rolls around and I start teaching Philosophy Class again . . . I am seriously under-qualified to teach this course, and once it's over I generally forget that it's even on my schedule, but when it starts I'm always a ball of fire; this year, to prepare, I've been listening to a very informative (albeit nerdy) podcast called Philosophize This! and I'm reading a book called The Physicist & The Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time . . . and I'm going to be candid here, because Socrates taught us that the first step to wisdom is realizing that you are not very wise and that you know far less than you think: before I read this book, I had no idea who Henri Bergson was-- his story arc is similar to Humboldt's, in that he was extraordinarily famous in his time, and then fell out of favor-- and I had no idea that Bergson and Einstein had an "explosive debate" that "transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today," but now I'm starting to understand this, and I even read a Bergson excerpt from his essay "Laughter: An Essay on the meaning of Comic" . . . which got me thinking philosophically: do any animals ever laugh or make jokes or find things funny?

The Test 35: Stacey's Songs #4

This week on The Test, Stacey confounds special guest MJ and me with her fourth clever song quiz . . . but don't get scared off, we eventually figure out the answer; see if you can beat us to the punch: identify the artist and title of each clip, and then string the clues together to come up with the overarching theme . . . good luck!

Teach Your Children (Fairly) Well Part II

I am the parent and my children are the children, and if I want to make an arbitrary rule, such as: if you're going to watch TV on a school night, then it has to be a documentary, then they need to abide by the rule and embrace the rule and not give me a bunch of shit about the rule . . . which is why, last week, when we were two minutes into Hoop Dreams, my son Alex said he wanted to go upstairs and read instead of watching and I did something unprecedented in the history of parenting--

I forced my child to watch TV instead of allowing him to read a book

but I had good reason for this . . . Roger Ebert lists Hoop Dreams as the number one movie of the 1990's and my son was being totally close-minded because he was angry about my "documentaries on school nights" rule . . . a rule which my wife and children should realize is never going to last, and if they could simply humor me for a bit and allow me to reign like a lunatic dictator over my tiny realm . . . and Alex ended up liking the film-- you can't not like it, it's great (though not as fast paced and violent and entertaining as Arrow, a show to which my kids are addicted).

Teach Your Children (Fairly) Well

I think I'm as good as any parent about feigning excitement about a perfect score on a social studies quiz (nice job with the triangular trade route!) or a school project (nice diorama!) but now that my boys have seen some actual excitement over a school accomplishment, they may realize what's what; to explain, Ian's PE teacher (who I know from coaching soccer) texted me on Tuesday, in the middle of the day, to tell me that my son Ian (a fifth grader) had toppled the school record for the PACER (Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run) and that the record he beat had stood for four years, so he wanted to commend Ian on an impressive effort . . . and I was even more impressed than the PE teacher by his accomplishment because Ian had really exhausted himself the night before-- we had an away Rec basketball game in South River (away rec basketball games?) and a lot of kids on my team bailed (because it's rec basketball) so we only had five people (three of which I drove to the game) and the other team was full of sixth graders and our team is all fourth and fifth graders and most of the kids on the team can't handle the ball, so Ian had to play every minute at point guard, and though he's small, he had to go down to the low post because he's willing to foul kids . . . anyway, I was very proud of him and told him so, and now I'm going to have to step up my acting when he gets a good grade in math or draws something nice . . . why is it so much easier to get excited about athletic achievement?

Dave vs. The Fuzzy Green Ball

Everything seems epic when you're sick, and so yesterday, during my drive to the MedExpress while running a fever (turned out to be bronchitis)-- I fought an epic battle against a worn out tennis ball; the ball kept rolling under my feet while I was driving down Route 18, and I was worried that it would become lodged under the gas or brake pedal, and so I repeatedly bent down and grabbed the ball from under my feet-- temporarily obscuring my view of the road-- and then tossed the ball to the back of the van . . . and moments later it would come rolling back up again, like it had a mind of its own, and so-- finally-- and, as I said earlier, I was running a fever and my mind was cloudy, I thought to put it in one of the many cupholders my Toyota van possesses, and this was a perfect fit-- the ball will stay lodged in there until my kids decide to remove it, so they can play catch in the car (and it is possible that this fairly obvious idea didn't dawn on me for so long because my old car, a Jeep Cherokee, had no cupholders and so I had to use the sneaker which resided in the passenger seat . . . there were rarely passengers brave enough to ride in the "deathbox," and I'm too sick to do any research-- so I'll leave this work to Sentence of Dave fanatics-- but I wonder how many automobile accidents are caused by unrestricted rolling tennis balls . . . I'm guessing this is at least as dangerous as trying to clip your dog's nails as a stoplight.

Dave Expounds Upon The Bachelor

It astonishes me how popular The Bachelor is-- I can't imagine why modern educated women would want to watch a bunch of ditsy bimbos humiliate themselves in order to win the favor of a good-looking guy-- but my wife likes it and so do the women at work, and I've watched ten minutes of the current season, in two rather disappointing five minute sessions, and this copious "research" has led me to a couple of conclusions:

1) the format of the show is demeaning enough, but at least most of the women have respectable title descriptions . . . Jubilee is a "war veteran" and Leah is an "event planner" and there is a "chiropractic assistant" and a "bartender" and a "news anchor," and Rachel has the guts to call herself "unemployed" and Tiara has a sense of humor and claims to be a "chicken enthusiast" . . . or maybe she actually is a chicken enthusiast-- who knows?-- but when I watched a bit on Monday night, I noticed that Emily's footer read "twin," and that's not a career or a title or even much of a description  . . . it's just a genetic coincidence-- it would be like if someone's title was "Huntington's Disease Carrier" or "Sickle Cell Candidate"-- you can check out the list if you want to see for yourself;

2) the first time I got sucked in was earlier in the season, when the girls had to play a soccer game in order to get some face-time with Ben . . . this excited me, as the girls are cute and fit, and I was really interested in who was the best soccer player-- these are traits you'd want in a wife, someone sporty and athletic and competitive and coordinated .. . and I assumed many of the girls would be moderately athletic, but apparently they just starve themselves to keep their figures, because they were terrible soccer players and the game was just embarrassing (and ABC did an awful job filming the match, you couldn't see how any of the play developed) and if I had my druthers and were doing a program like this, it would be all athletic contests and fitness tests, interspersed with a few cognitive exams, so that I could choose a woman who would produce the smartest, most athletic offspring . . . coming next fall: The Bachelor (of Eugenics).

The Deepest of All Questions

I'm not going to do any research on this topic-- too disgusting-- and my experience with the subject is purely anecdotal, but I'm fairly certain that the phenomenon is real; some weeks, my toenails grow faster than normal (and require clipping) and some weeks they don't seem to grow at all . . . so why is toenail growth variable and what causes this?

You Should Read Death Comes to the Archbishop (before you read Moby Dick)

In preparation for our trip to the American Southwest this summer, I am reading some of the classic literature set in that region; I started by re-reading Death Comes to the Archbishop, a nearly plotless collection of vignettes by Willa Cather, based on the lives of two French Catholic religious men-- a bishop and a priest-- who leave civilized Europe in the mid-1800's and travel to the wilds of the New Mexico Territory-- newly acquired by the United States after the Mexican-American War-- in order to establish an organized diocese amidst the corruption of the Spanish, the poverty of the Mexicans, and the traditions and mysticism of the Native Americans; I admit that's a mouthful for a synopsis, and that hardly does justice to what happens in the book, but I regard this as one of the best American novels ever written-- while I love Moby Dick, Cather's masterpiece is probably a more worthwhile read and it certainly addresses much more modern issues-- race, class, religion, mysticism, greed, politics, assimilation, and borders . . . it is an absolute refutation Crevecoeur's outdated "melting pot" metaphor . . . the book was published in 1927 and it is utterly modern, like a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, it is a collection of climactic scenes and anecdotes (think There Will Be Blood or Magnolia) without much transition-- Elmore Leonard codified this into his mantra: "try to leave out all the parts people skip"; Cather's language is as rugged and sharply defined as the terrain she writes about . . . here are some of the passages I highlighted:

1) he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare;

2) he saw a flat white outline on the grey surface-- a white square made up of white squares . . . that his guide said, was the pueblo of Acoma;

3) one could not believe the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills . . . he had been riding among them since early morning, and the look of the country had no more changed than if he had stood still;

4) No priest can experience repentance and forgiveness of sin unless he himself falls into sin . . . otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic;

5) their Padre spoke like a horse for the last time: "Comete tu cola, comete tu cola!" (Eat your tail, Martinez, eat your tail!) Almost at once he died in convulsion;

6) in his experience, white people, when they addressed Indians, always put on a false face;

7) he had the pleasure of seeing the Navajo horsemen riding free over their great plains again . . . the two Frenchmen went as far as the Canyon de Chelly to behold the strange cliff ruins; once more crops were growing at the bottom of the world between the towering sandstone walls;

and while most of the prose is impeccably lucid, Cather was also not afraid to use specific words that will make you consult a dictionary (partibus, calabozo, codicil, pyx, hogan, coruscation, turbid, jalousies) but these only crop up occasionally, otherwise it is a smooth read; in the end, it is a tale of friendship between two religious men, Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant, in a harsh, complicated, inspirational, and fascinating environment; Cather's treatment of the Native Americans is empathetic and vivid (and must have influenced Aldous Huxley when he wrote Brave New World) and while she moves from mundane politics and vanity to the holiest of mysteries, the story never loses its historical grounding, it is set amongst realpeople-- Kit Carson especially-- and real events-- the Colorado Gold Rush near Pike's Peak and the building of Santa Fe's Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis Assisi, which Jean-Baptiste Lamy-- the man Bishop Latour was based upon-- oversaw and initiated . . . anyway, I've gone on far too long and I haven't even scratched the surface of what lies inside this book, but I guarantee it is an America that they don't teach you about in school, Jamestown and the Pilgrims and the Boston Tea Party and all that, and I'm sure when I'm visiting these spots this summer, Cather's words will ring in my ears . . . so if you feel like you want to read a classic piece of literature, and you don't want to slog through The Brothers Karamazov, I recommend this-- it's short, episodic, perfectly written, and full of valuable insight on the origins of our national character.