After some intense discussion in Philosophy class, we decided that it would probably be more utilitarian if dog owners decided at the outset-- and broadcast this to all involved-- that after ten years with their loyal companions, they would celebrate the pet/owner relationship by slaughtering and eating the animal, in order to avoid the melancholy doldrums of canine senescence and to bite into the exorbitant American consumption of factory farmed flesh . . . I can't imagine serving my own dog several years down the line at a morbid barbeque but I think if I understood this finality from the get go, then I could stomach it (obviously this is how things went not so long ago, when many of us lived on the farm: you hand fed your adorable piglet or lamb, knowing full well it was slated for the table and you digested the cognitive dissonance along with the seared flesh of your innocent dependent).
Note to Self: Buy Granola
Basmati rice in a brown zip-lock style bag has a similar heft as a bag of granola, and it also has a simlar feel and sound when it is poured-- which is why I poured a lot of uncooked Basmati rice into my bowl of Greek yogurt this morning before I noticed that it was rice pouring out of the bag and not granola (so much rice that I had to toss the whole mess into the trash . . . the rice grains were inextricable from the yogurt).
Spreading Some News About NYC
Yesterday, for my wife's birthday, we went on a West Village food tour that transmogrified into a West Village bar crawl; here is the itinerary, in case you want to replicate it without a guide (and without all the historical anecdotes about the neighborhood, which our tour guide provided; they were quite fascinating: astronomical real estate prices, gay pride landmarks, the site of Operation Midnight Climax, the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the Friends apartment, and lots of 18th and 19th century landmark building) so to begin, we took the 8:48 AM train with two other couples (Mel/Ed and Ann/Craig) and took the subway down to Christopher Street and met our tour guide (Ian) and then we ate rice balls and soppressata at Faicco's Italian Specialties (super delicious) wandered the neighborhood a bit and then had some sensational empanadas and plantain chips and a very expensive mojito at Havana Alma de Cuba, next was Hudson Bagel for an everything bagel with cream cheese, which seemed silly to us, but the other folks on the tour, who hailed from Mississippi, were very impressed and said they were much better than the bagels at Kroger; then we took a detour through Washington Square Park, listened to some outdoor piano, and saw the new Ai Weiwei sculpture under the arch; then falafel and lamb shawarma at the original Mamoun's Falafel-- a place we are familiar with because there is a franchise in New Brunswick -- and the main thing to remember about Mamoun's is do not eat the hot sauce, it's very very hot . . . of course, I always break this rule, in honor of manliness, and yesterday was no exception, and I will say that the falafel at the original location did taste a bit better than the stuff they offer in New Brunswick, at this stage Cat went rogue and ran next door and bought some Belgian pomme frites for the group to share, and this made everyone very happy (and quite full) but we had to stuff in a sliver of artichoke pizza from the eponymously named Artichoke Basille's Pizza (which we all agreed was tasty but very rich, a sliver was more than enough) and a cupcake from Molly's Cupcakes; we all agreed the food tour was a lot of fun, and we also agreed that it was really strange to see just how many food and walking tours were ambling through the Village (with aspiring actors as guides) and it made us realize that though the city is only a fourteen dollar train ride away and we totally take it for granted and mainly complain about the crowds and the prices, it's a place that people from all over the world come to visit; the strangest moment on the food tour was when the young woman from the Mississippi crew showed us a weird picture of what looked like an S&M dungeon and explained how it was her favorite bar in New Orleans because some horrific murders had taken place there in the 18th century; she went into great detail about this, and it would have been creepy, except that she described the place in a wonderfully serene Deep Southern drawl-- cognitive dissonance-- anyway, after that we went to a number of bars: Fat Cat, which was a weird and grungy underground space with live jazz, pool, shuffleboard, and ping-pong; then the Duplex, a flamboyant lounge with 80's music videos and excellent cocktails, then we ate more food (Tacombi . . . delicious fish and chorizo tacos) and finished the night at The Garret, a packed speakeasy style joint that you have to enter by walking through the Five Guys (turn left by the fryer) and by the time we left, fairly soused from all the Norse Whisperers and Full Brazilans, there was a long line to get in, which ran parallel to the line for burgers-- weird-- and on the way home we found out that Ann had gone to highschool with one of my fraternity brothers-- my little brother, in fact-- so that fact provided us with much amusement until we got back to New Brunswick and mustered strenght for the walk across the bridge and up the hill . . . I was a little groggy today and a lot poorer-- alcoholic beverages cost an arm and a leg in these areas-- but it was a great reminder of all the things packed into a small space in New York (next time we go to that area, we're going to drag the kids along and make them go to the Tenement Museum, so they can see a historically accurate sweatshop and get inspired to attend college).
That's a Nice Paper You've Got There . . .
This year at East Brunswick, I am teaching three sections of the notorious Rutgers Expos class to high school seniors; last summer, we met with one of the guys who runs the program and we designed the high school version of the course, and the deal is that if the students pass then they can get college credit for the class and thus not have to to take it at Rutgers (or they can transfer the credits to wherever they are going) and this has been a compelling intellectual experience for the three of us who created the curriculum and a wild ride for the students taking it: the kids read five long, dense non-fiction piece of writing and write a sequence of five 5 page synthesis essays using these texts in a very logical and academic manner-- it's more of a reading comprehension course than anything else-- and while we're giving them good high school grades for just doing everything correctly, passing their reading quizzes and writing the essays in the right format and creating outlines and taking notes-- they are also being given a Rutgers grade, on the Rutgers rubric . . . and the Rutgers rubric is tough-- the kids agree that a C on the Rutgers rubric is equivalent to a B+ essay in high school and at the bottom end, the Rutgers rubric has a built-in cliff, it falls from C to NP (Not Passing) without stopping along the way in the C- and D zone, which are two of my favorite grades for kids that sort of did the work but didn't really succeed-- I especially like the most sarcastic of all the grades, the D+ . . . there's a certain kind of majestic piece of crap that deserves it, but now those low-but-not-failing-gift grades are off the table and so the majority of students have gotten an NP on the first two essays; the grade is so prevalent that we've nicknamed it Nice Paper, because the essay is decent in appearance; it's typed and cited and five pages and it's got paragraphs and plenty of quotations, but for whatever reason-- poor reading comprehension, lack of independent thought, overuse of summary, incoherent logic, privileging the student opinion over the text, no attempt at synthesis-- it doesn't pass, and so grading them has been absolutely grueling: I've conferenced with every student about each essay-- 120 conferences, the bulk of them about NP essays-- and while I don't think it's quite as difficult as when a doctor has to deliver the bad news to someone who is terminally ill, it's certainly in the ballpark of George Clooney's job in Up in the Air, the film where he flies around the country and lays people off-- like Clooney, I'm trying to keep the conferences positive and candid, especially since the papers are not averaged together for the Rutgers grade, you only have to pass two of them to pass the course, but despite this, there have been plenty of emotional moments and some crying-- these are good students used to succeeding in their efforts, so this is a real wake-up call for them; I've found that it helps if I use my usual tactic and make the conferences more about me than them-- this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you!-- and so I put a chart on the board about how I feel grading each type of essay, so they could see the process through my eyes and empathize with me about how hard my job is and stop thinking about their own failing grade;
total trainwreck NP . . . fun and easy . . . because the errors are so significant and egregious that I can just chastise the student for their lousy effort and we can all move on with our lives;
NP bordering on a C . . . sad and painful . . . the student was so close and I was looking for a way to pass the essay but couldn't find it;
C . . . hopeful and irate . . . the essay has some promise but completely falls apart in spots;
C+ . . . reflective . . . I'm actually thinking about the argument and the logic;
B and B+ . . . suggestive . . . there have only been two B essays and I haven't read a B+ yet, but with the two B essays I just had a couple of ideas for how to improve the structure and logic and a couple of details they could have added . . . totally pleasant experience;
A . . . awesome experience . . . there's only been one A essay, and it was in my friend Kevin's class-- four teachers read it and all agreed that it was an A, it was sensational: total comprehension of the really difficult ideas in the text (emergent intelligence, self-organizing systems, evolutionary characteristics, and pattern amplification) and a brilliant application of these ideas to the other text we were working with . . . but I don't expect to see too many of these (and you'd think the other students would have been happy that someone wrote an A essay but they weren't . . . they were annoyed).
This One is No Fun
So I found out yesterday that an old student of mine (Emily Fredricks, graduated in 2011) was riding her bike to work in Philly and got hit and killed by a garbage truck; there have been protests, uproar, and extended media coverage about the accident, because she was in a Center City bike lane when she was struck . . . and right after I heard the news, I got in my car and turned on a new episode of Reply All, which presented another podcast (Heavyweight) and a transcendent story about a dude named Jesse who was riding his bike and got hit by a car and spent 17 days in a coma-- so a weird and disturbing coincidence that made me meditate on the costs of a society built around the automobile (and tomorrow is the 12 year mark of my brother's death by a car crash, and he's just one of many that I know that died in this manner . . . for a morbid but compelling take on the evolution of our automotive culture, listen to "The Modern Moloch").
The Best Gifts Don't Even Come in a Package
Tuition Wars
So here is my idea for a reality TV show . . . and I wish I had the gumption to actually do it: I tell my two children we are going to pay for one of them-- and only one of them-- to go to college, and thus pit the two of them against each other in a tactical battle to ascertain the scholarship: they could use any strategy they like to "win" the money . . . they could devote themselves to the family and do lots of chores and cooking and cleaning, or they could excel at school or in the arts or in sports or they could demonstrate extreme philanthropy or whatever . . . the main thing is that I would film every ugly minute of it and the show would make loads of cash and in the end, the big surprise would be that they both get to go to college, their education ironically financed by the very show that nearly destroyed them.
Compare/Contra$t
It's doubly annoying: not only do I have to take a day off of school so I can accompany my son Ian on his Initial Orthodontic Workup, but I then have to meet with the unfortunately named Dr. Overcash to discuss our plan of action; I already know braces are going to be expensive, but a name like Overcash is just rubbing it in-- not that I'm an anti-dentite-- he's a very nice guy and I trust and respect him, but it's certainly one of the worst dental names I've ever heard (unlike the aptly named pediatric doctor who cared for my son Alex when he got hit by a car last year . . . nothing assuages the anxiety of a trip to the emergency room more than a guy who introduces himself as Dr. Pepper).
Biathlon Lovers Beware
Our friends Rob and Tammy (who moved from central Jersey to Vermont many many years ago) stopped by on Saturday and they reminded us that back in the old days-- when we would trek up to their place for Thanksgiving-- the ski mountains were always already open and we'd get in a couple days of November riding over the long weekend . . . but these days, they said the mountains no longer open until December-- so some pretty specific climate change that's happened right in front of our eyes, in the last fifteen years . . . on the bright side, the boys and I have been out playing tennis every day since soccer season ended (and the same happened last year . . . I wonder if this generation of kids is going to be, on average, better at tennis and other warm weather sports and worse at snowboarding and skiing and snowshoeing and the biathlon).
That Prop is a Hero!
I learned a new term during the latest 99% Invisible: a "hero prop" is an item in a film that has a life of its own and serves more as a character than a component of the background story . . . my favorite "hero prop" is Marcellus Wallace's glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction (but I'm also a fan of the Leg Lamp in A Christmas Story).
I AM the Internet
Let's all take a moment and celebrate ten years of Sentence of Dave (ten years man! ten years! ten years . . . TEN . . . ten YEARS . . . ten years!) and in order to really understand what this means, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and apparently-- and this was as shocking to me as it will be to you-- I am responsible for 85% of the original content on the internet (my buddies over at Gheorghe: The Blog are responsible for most of the remainder, with a tiny sliver of a percentage ascribed to Twitter, Wikipedia, and eBaum's World) so while I contemplated quitting this project while I still have a few thoughts rattling around in my brain, I've decided to forge on towards dementia . . . because what would the internet do without me?
Smile . . . It's Thanksgiving (and, hopefully, you weren't molested by the head brother)
I felt slightly betrayed at the end of Roddy Doyle's new novel Smile . . . the narrator and the narration unravel into a metafictional mess . . . there are plenty of clues along the way that this is going to happen, but it was still rough reading; I wanted the narrator to get over his abuse at the hands of the Christian Brothers, I wanted his psyche to escape unscathed, I wanted Fitzpatrick to be a harmless barfly, but--alas-- it was not to be so . . . enough, I'm already spoiling things, but be forewarned . . . if you want something a little less heavy, Irish shenanigans and such, then read Doyle's The Barrytown Trilogy . . . The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van.
Dave Accessorizes!
It makes me extremely jealous that women have so many fabulous choices on how to accessorize their outfits-- scarves and brooches, feather boas and scrunchies, bangles and handbags-- so, to combat mundanity, I've added a couple of items to my fashion arsenal:
1) with my battery powered headlamp, not only am I a shining beacon of coolness in the 6 AM darkness, but I also don't trip on the uneven pavement near my house (the streetlight on our corner is out) and I'm able to let my dog pursue his interests (chasing deer in the park) without losing him . . . so shine on, you crazy fashionable Dave . . .
2) around the house, in the driveway, and even in the car on a quick errand, I am sporting a pair of OOFOS OOClogs to help my feet recover from plantar fasciitis . . . my wife is not smitten with these-- in fact, she called them "the world's ugliest pair of shoes," but I should point out that she has a long history of clog-hating (when she met my friend and rugby phenom Brian Hightower for the first time, she was not impressed, mainly because he was wearing a pair of hideous black clogs-- but also because he's short with a big head; Hightower let me try on the clogs and I really liked them, they were comfortable and easy to slip into; Catherine made some derogatory comments about the clogs and the type of men that wear them and then we went out and got drunk and I forgot all about the entire incident, but Whitney didn't, and a year later he gave me a pair of them for my birthday-- to Catherine's chagrin-- and I wore them until they fell apart . . . I'll never forget that gift, as it was both incredibly thoughtful and incredibly vengeful in equal measures).
1) with my battery powered headlamp, not only am I a shining beacon of coolness in the 6 AM darkness, but I also don't trip on the uneven pavement near my house (the streetlight on our corner is out) and I'm able to let my dog pursue his interests (chasing deer in the park) without losing him . . . so shine on, you crazy fashionable Dave . . .
Machine vs. Anti-Machine
Yikes . . . I wrote a lot of words about Highland Park soccer over on Gheorghe:TheBlog . . . my post is called Machine vs. Anti-Machine, and if you've several hours to kill, head over and read it.
It Might Be the Pants?
I got on the scale this morning and the number seemed a little heavy-- normally I step on just wearing underwear but this morning I also had on my pants, so I'm assuming this caused the discrepancy between what I think I should weigh and what I actually weigh: how much do pants weigh, sixteen pounds or so?
Cheers + The Replacements/2 = Professor Truck
I finished up a new song: "Lost Souls" . . . it's what you get if you add "Here Come a Regular" and the Cheers Theme Song together and divide by two . . . somewhere between the bibulous depressive alcoholism of The Replacements and the romanticized sit-com utopia of "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" . . . check it out, especially if your fond of sitting in a bar and drinking your troubles away.
Can You Hear Me Never?
So that's all she wrote . . . after twenty-five years of monogamous bliss with my lovely spouse, we're calling it quits . . . not with our entire marriage, just with the auditory phone communication portion of the relationship: every time we try to speak to each other on the phone, Catherine gets frustrated and ends up yelling at me because I don't finish my sentences (or my thoughts) and I also apparently don't talk at the right intervals-- I either pause too much or I ramble . . . and then-- because I'm being yelled at-- I get really anxious and offended, which exacerbates the problem . . . so we had a serious talk and decided the only way to solve the problem was to never talk to each other on the phone again; I brought up the "what about an emergency situation" exception but Catherine countered with the "an emergency is when you definitely need to speak quickly and coherently, so you're DEFINITELY not allowed to call me if it's an emergency" rebuttal so we've decided to leave it at no phone dialogue ever (and I'm not very consistent or proficient with my texting either . . . I think my preferred medium would have been the telegraph).
Is Holding Your Breath Exercise?
Enduring the stench in the men's locker room at the North Brunswick LA Fitness is a workout in itself.
Where to Go & What to Get
Here's a million dollar idea for all the ambitious web entrepreneurs out there: there should be some kind of bot (or industrious group of humans) that trawls restaurant reviews on sites like Yelp and Urbanspoon and then tells boils it all down and tells you exactly where you should go eat and exactly what you should order . . . and that's the name of the site: Where To Go & What To Get . . . my wife did a pretty good job of it Saturday night-- we were sampling beers at Cypress Brewery and she decided to find somewhere in that neck of the woods to eat and after reading a bunch of reviews on her phone, we ended up at Taiwan Tasty, a grubby little Chinese joint in an Asian strip mall where Old Post Road intersects with Route 1; there are a lot of red neon Chinese characters in the window and a sign in English that says "Chinese Food" and once you go there, you should definitely get two things:
1) the Minced Pork Black Bean with Leek, which has lots of leek greens, a few black beans, and delicious minced pork;
2) the beef scallion roll, which is not on the menu but is pictured on the wall . . . this is thin sliced lean beef rolled inside a delicious scallion pancake with a bit of plum sauce, my wife and I agreed that it's one of the best Asian dishes we've ever had . . .
so there it is in a nutshell, now you know where to go and what to get.
1) the Minced Pork Black Bean with Leek, which has lots of leek greens, a few black beans, and delicious minced pork;
2) the beef scallion roll, which is not on the menu but is pictured on the wall . . . this is thin sliced lean beef rolled inside a delicious scallion pancake with a bit of plum sauce, my wife and I agreed that it's one of the best Asian dishes we've ever had . . .
so there it is in a nutshell, now you know where to go and what to get.
My Son Ian Is Smart Like Kramer
Last night, I banged on the bathroom door and told my son Ian to brush his teeth and get out of the bathroom, because I wanted to shower-- it was 9:30 PM and I was still cold from practice-- and he said, "I'm brushing my teeth!" and I said, "Then why do I hear the shower still running!" and he said, "I'm brushing my teeth in the shower! It's smart! I'm multitasking!" and I had no stock parental reply to this silliness, as I was lost in thought, fondly reminiscing about Kramer's shower salad.
The Test 102: Superstitious Spray Butter Intervention
This week on our podcast The Test, things get real . . . grievances are aired, alliances are formed, and amidst the chaos, I manage to administer a quiz on superstitions and their origin stories; so tune in, take sides, keep score, and if you don't learn something, I give you permission to key Stacey's Jeep.
If It's Not Spanish, It's CRAP!
On my car ride to work this morning, in order to lexically prepare for our big family trip to Costa Rica, I listened to several episodes of Coffee Break Spanish, but I ended up learning all the wrong things; Kara and Mark, the hosts of the show, are Scottish and (of course) when they speak in English, they have distinct Scottish accents . . . and I'm not blaming them for where they were born, but I do find this is very distracting and so during the lessons, instead of practicing my Spanish pronunciation and vocabulary, I found myself trying to mimic their genuine Scottish accents-- I kept repeating words like "additionally" and "download" in the style of Kara and Mark, instead of focusing on rolling my r's; and while I certainly subscribe to the maxim "if it's not Scottish it's crap," I still think I'm going to have to find a different podcast to brush up on my Spanish (but I highly recommend this one, both for the lovely accents and the insanely upbeat music).
Carry the Little Cup Proudly
This one goes out to all the folks who aren't afraid to ask for a gratis tap water cup when they're eating fast casual . . . it's a little embarrassing but if you do it over the course of a lifetime, you save a lot of money, evade a shit-ton of empty calories, and avoid diabetes.
Poopy's Law (with Apologies to Adrian McKinty)
So here's the big follow-up to the first post ever commented on by an acclaimed author on Sentence of Dave . . . I've noticed that whenever I go into the yard with the good intention of cleaning up the dog poop, while I am searching for the dog poop so that I can bag it and dispose of it, I always end up stepping in dog poop . . . this happens 100% of the time-- including this afternoon-- and if it happens 100% of the time, then I believe this makes it a scientific law: Poopy's Law.
Adrian McKinty + Willie Nelson = Literature
Adrian McKinty has produced another solid mystery set amidst the Troubles in Northern Ireland-- Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly-- and this time Detective Sean Duffy is doggedly investigating a murder committed by crossbow, and along the way he has his requisite adventures of a Fenian in a strange land (the IRA and the RUC are more porous and intermingled than you might imagine) and the book is chock full of the usual McKinty-esque musical allusions (the title is a line from a Tom Waits song . . . who I coincidentally saw last night, playing a crippled Vietnam vet in The Fisher King) and the rest of the references run the gamut from The Butthole Surfers to Morrissey to Rachmaninoff (there's also a few literary allusions, including a nod to one of my favorite Orwell works: Homage to Catalonia) but the throwaway moment that elevates this book over the top, and makes it a work that should be passed down through the ages, a timeless piece that should represent our era, the Odyssey of our generation, is when Detective Duffy tries to break the ice and tells my favorite joke, the Willie Nelson joke . . . I just heard this joke for the first time a couple months ago and the earliest link to it on the internet is 2011 but I'm willing to excuse the anachronism (and the joke could easily be from the '80s . . . because Willie Nelson has been old since I was a kid, and-- remarkably-- he's still the same amount of old) and now, if you check the comments, Adrian McKinty himself provides the origin story of the joke, the first ever celebrity cameo on Sentence of Dave.
NYC: Yin, Yang, and a Lot of Grime
We went to the city today and it was a study in contrasts: after a brief brisk walk from our tree-lined, bosky town, we boarded a grimy Jersey transit train-- a classic slow-boat-to-China affair with the brown seats and the faux wood paneled decor-- then we walked through an incredibly loud construction zone and climbed up onto the High Line, which is absolute oasis from the pandemonium below-- and they can't build enough high end surreal apartments alongside it (we liked the Zaha Hadid, but you'll need to pony up 5 to 50 million per condo) and then we plunged into the frantic food frenzy at Chelsea Market and had tacos and crepes and there was the usual lack of seating but a few blocks later, we found plenty of seats and views and comfort at the Whitney, although the art ranged from beautiful to scary and everything in between, lots of abstract stuff and a floor devoted to Vietnam protest art and a special exhibit by Jimmy Durham which featured Native American themes amidst absurdist expressionism (and a particularly satisfying endless video installation featuring people bringing Jimmy mundane things-- food, toys, household items-- and Jimmy, who is wearing a three piece suit, then proceeds to smash the things with a big rock on his office desk and then stamp a receipt for the person who brought the object, and this goes on and on and on . . . we watched for twenty minutes and finally decided to leave, though we weren't bored, it was oddly compelling) and then we went to The Meatball Shop and the meatballs were very very good (rivaling my wife's beachhouse meatballs) and the homemade ice cream sandwiches were better, and then we took a grimy New York subway (it's a not a trip to the city if you don't ride the subway) to the 9/11 Memorial pools and the Oculus-- and the Memorial Pools are quite breathtaking, we had never seen them before and I got teary eyed reading all the names and thinking of my two fraternity brothers who perished in the attack and then we entered the cold sci-fi austerity of the Oculus, a spiked dinosaur of a building with an interior out of Bladerunner 2049 . . . so it was particularly anticlimactic when we boarded a disgusting, hot and crowded PATH train in the bowels of the beast, which dumped us out at Newark Penn, which was also crowded, and we made the usual mad dash to catch the Jersey Transit (another filthy classic train) but I did buy the tickets on an app and show the conductor my phone, so though the decor of train itself was 70's kitsch, the method of payment was kind of sleek . . . and once we finished this epic in contrast, there was only one movie to watch: The Fisher King, which juxtaposes the byzantine underworld of filth, mental illness and grotesque illusion with the stark angles of corporate Manhattan and resolves this contradiction the way only a Terry Gilliam film can.
There's Always a Tradeoff
Acupuncture alleviated my plantar fasciitis (but now my calf is really sore, which makes sense since my acupuncturist stuck a bunch of needles into it).
Good Walkers, Spoiled
There are few things I enjoy more than taking a brisk walk with my dog on a fall day; I usually listen to a podcast or some jazz (lately I've been into jazz organist Dr. Lonnie Smith, who should not be confused with jazz keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith or base-stealing left fielder Lonnie "Skates" Smith) but today's walk was short, slow, awkward, and quite lame . . . I've played pickup basketball three times in the last week and apparently that's enough times to make my plantar fasciitis flare up-- so my left heel feels like there's a spike lodged in it-- and my dog pulled a muscle in his rear leg and he can barely walk, so anyone who saw the two of us limping around the corner from my house must have thought we were not long for this earth, but now it's raining and we're resting and I have a good feeling about tomorrow (hopefully I won't wake up in the night again and nearly collapse while trying to walk to the bathroom, that tendon gets tight as a banjo drone string in the middle of the night).
More Proof That Dreams Are Meaningless
Just before I went to bed on Thursday, my son Alex showed me the piece of his saxophone which needed fixing, and then I had a very vivid dream that night in which I brought the saxophone to Sam Ash and the tech guy told me it would cost $64 dollars to fix the saxophone and then Friday morning, I actually brought the saxophone to Sam Ash, and the tech said the repair would cost anywhere from $30 to $50 because he had to solder something and then there was no mention of soldering in the dream, and then the tech talked me into getting a $70 tune-up for the instrument-- which I agreed upon because the intersection around Sam Ash is so congested that I didn't want to return to the shop for a long time . . . and this part of the transaction also did not occur in my dream, so my dream was not only mundane and lacking prophetic symbolism, but also economically inaccurate.
The Test 101: YouTube, Me Tube, We All Tube
This week on The Test, Cunningham takes us on an inspirationally aspirational (aspirational inspirational?) journey into the wild world of Youtube; be forewarned, she is a bit zealous towards the subject matter . . . Stacey and I not only drink her fanatical Kool-Aid, we fill an Olympic sized swimming pool with it and jump right in . . . so whether your skin is oily or dry, check this one out, and I promise you'll learn something (and maybe ever decide to switch careers).
The Good Life: Ages 16 to Adult
I played some pick-up basketball today at LA Fitness today and the age range in the first game had to be pushing the Guinness book for a competitive run-- there was a sixteen year old high school player cutting and slashing his way through the lane, the usual twenty-something regulars, a couple old folks (such as myself) and a sharp-shooting 73 year old . . . 73 years young and still picking and rolling, driving to his right, and putting up a crisp 18 footers with good spin-- that's a 57 year age gap (and I later saw this 73 year old phenom heading into the North Brunswick Smashburger while we were heading out . . . we both complained about our knees and lauded the smashing of the burger, and then I had a profound thought: if you can still run full court and scarf down a greasy burger when you're 73, then you've hit the longevity lottery, and it doesn't matter if you die when you're 74, as long as you go out shooting the ball and eating seasoned french fries . . . so while I'm certainly going to try to cook with higher heat this new year, I'm also going to try to keep playing sports that I'm getting worse and worse at-- soccer, tennis, and basketball-- just because the alternative-- not playing them at all-- is far worse).
Early Resolve
We should remember that the Gregorian calendar is a human construct and not get too hung up on it; in this spirit, I'm going to start my New Year's Resolution early this year: from this day forward, I promise to stop being such a coward and cook using higher heat.
13 - 0
The Athletic Director and I tried our best to find a team to beat my middle school soccer crew, but despite our best efforts they went undefeated-- today we beat our second Group IV team of the season (South Brunswick . . . they have 700 plus kids per class, Highland Park usually graduates around 100) and earlier in the season we beat New Brunswick, who never loses in Middle School . . . and to celebrate, I will not be having a beer, instead I am headed over to the turf to run 7:30 to 9 PM travel practice; my son Alex is not going because he got steamrollered by a giant kid in the game and hurt his knee, but his younger brother Ian said he is up for it-- soccer, soccer, soccer, for six hours straight-- and I guess all the practice is paying off.
Larry David = Monticello
Larry David is a national treasure and the highest authorities in the land should compel him to make "Curb Your Enthusiasm" until he dies . . . here is one of the lines from Season 9 that speaks to me in a profound way:
"yeah, the 'fuck it' philosophy-- it's a tough one-- I've tried it with orthotics . . . it didn't really work very well.”
"yeah, the 'fuck it' philosophy-- it's a tough one-- I've tried it with orthotics . . . it didn't really work very well.”
Deep Thoughts (About Getting Jacked)
When you go to the gym and lift weights, you use resistance training to stress out and damage your muscles and then, eventually, your body recognizes the inflammation and soreness and sends satellite cells to the damaged area and these special cells instruct the proteins to add myofibrils (muscle cells) to the affected area . . . and while you're stressing and straining your muscles to initiate this process, you're wandering around a dirty gym, touching equipment covered in other people's sweat, equipment that has thriving bacteria colonies on every surface, meanwhile people are coughing and panting and expectorating, and you're breathing it all in, particles of floating mucous and worse . . . so not only are your muscles getting a work-out while you are at the gym, but your immune system is doing reps as well: I'm not sure if this is a groundbreaking thought (and I'm not going to check) but perhaps people who go to the gym are not only physically stronger but they also might have tougher immune systems . . . some scientist should get on this and do a study.
Stuff You Probably Don't Need to Know
If you've never heard of Zardulu, Pizza Rat, Selfie Rat, and That Dragon, Cancer, then you're the same as me a week ago, and if you'd like to be enlightened, then listen to these two episodes of Reply All:
#50 The Cathedral
#56 Zardulu.
#50 The Cathedral
#56 Zardulu.
Metrics and Politics
I love the metric system and if that makes me a French socialist so be it . . . and if you find it fascinating that in America, the adoption of a logical, global measurement system is equivalent to treasonous thought, then you'll love the new 99% Invisible episode "Half Measures," which recounts the political machinations and manipulation that have surrounded this seemingly innocuous base 10 miracle . . . you'll hear of a poor science teacher who was demonized by a right wing radio host and her community because she wanted to "push her metric agenda" on children (she wanted the local airport to fix the Celsius display on their electronic display) and you'll finally feel vindicated when you learn that even though many Americans still cling to their antiquated units (because that's what makes America great) that anyone who actually has to measure anything fungible is using the metric system-- except for milk-- so even that gallon of gas you're burning in your SUV is actually measured in liters and then converted to gallons so you can feel patriotic; so here's some advice on how to start the metrication process: the next time you get on your digital scale, take a load off, ease up on the precision, and measure your weight in kilograms . . . you might reconsider that diet and decide to eat a croissant.
Rorschach is a Rorschach Test (or perhaps a Litmus Test)
Last year my son Ian was the star of Halloween, when he went viral as Eleven from Stranger Things, but this year props go to Alex, whose costume is literally a pop cultural Rorschach test . . . because he is dressed as Rorschach, the anti-hero from the greatest graphic novel ever written (Watchmen) and while his costume is a bit obscure, people who recognize him feel hip and in-the-know and have all kinds of good associations and perceptions, while those who don't will have their own unfounded and weird reactions to his inkblot mask . . . so maybe it's more of a litmus test for pop cultural literacy, not a Rorschach test . . . but my apologies for the imprecision, I'm writing this sentence quickly and under duress because it's Friday afternoon and my kids are going to a sleepover to binge on Stranger Things and my wife is encouraging me to mention the fact that Alex's mask changes shapes when he breathes and that she is responsible for not only this special mask but also the rest of the ensemble.
Bladerunner 2049
Last weekend felt shorter than normal because I spent the bulk of it watching Bladerunner 2049 (though my son Ian said he thought it went super fast, I actually fell asleep at one point while sitting up straight and watching intently-- my head snapped back and I nearly got whiplash-- despite this, I did really like the story, the Harrison Ford cameo, the ethical dilemmas, the sci-fi scenery and the fantastic waterlogged ending fight . . . but I'm warning you, this thing is long like Captain America:Civil War is long).
Listen to This (Both Parts)
I'd like to publicly thank my wife for a great podcast recommendation-- I listened to both The Skip Tracer Part I and The Skip Tracer Part II today, and I assure you that this is a story like no other: you'll meet the greatest bounty hunter in the universe (she's a very short Hispanic lady with a chihuahua) and accompany her on an serpentine adventure that will twist and turn through the political landscape so abruptly and adeptly you won't know where you stand at the end . . . all I know is that I would make a terrible bounty hunter.
Aiding and Abetting to Avoid Tooth Decay
I'd prefer if my kids spent this Halloween perpetrating some good old-fashioned mischief and vandalism, rather than begging for sugary sugary treats (or even binge-watching the new season of Stranger Things . . . Netflix doesn't give you diabetes).
The Test 100: The Exciting Super Test
To celebrate our 100th episode, Stacey administers a very exciting super test (on tests) and Cunningham and I learn a great deal-- although I do pull off an extremely lucky 3 out of 7 . . . I defy anyone to do better; so tune in, keep score, and if you don't learn something during this one, you can punch me in the shoulder (but not too hard).
A Good Deed Is a Good Deed, Case Closed
After a convivial dinner at Lola, a fun rock show at the Old Franklin Schoolhouse (The Roadside Graves, my favorite local band, finished the event) and a little too much imbibing of the spirits, my wife and I were walking back to Paul's car to catch a ride home and we came across a parked car with the hatchback open and my wife decided to do a good deed and close the hatch, but Paul and I thought she shouldn't touch someone else's car-- perhaps the owner had left the hatch open for a reason-- but Catherine was committed to doing a good deed so she closed it, and then, moments after she had shut the hatch, the owner of the car appeared-- thanked Cat for her concern-- and then opened the hatch so he could get the rest of the groceries.
The Main Thing About the Future is You're Not In It
If you're a fan of Shane Carruth's time-travel film Primer-- which Chuck Klosterman called the finest and most realistic time-travel movie ever made-- then you'll love reading How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu . . . it's a novel wrapped in a paradox of a conundrum, with charts and footnotes to aid and abet your confusion; at first, I pored over the diagrams and tried to understand the timeline, but soon enough I gave up (the same thing happened with Primer . . . I could look at this chart for the next twenty years, then time travel back to now and do it all over again, and I still wouldn't understand it) and I just forged ahead into the future of the story, turning pages whether I fully understood them or not, just as I'm doing with my life
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Diwali Miracle
My wife had off yesterday for Diwali-- her district has a high percentage of Indian students and "the festival of lights" is a very popular Hindu and Jain holiday-- and she originally planned to use her free time to take a trip to DSW and buy yet another pair of shoes, but then thought better of it (she has over a hundred pairs of shoes) and she did some fall cleaning instead, and while she was rummaging through a drawer full of art supplies in Ian's room, she found Ian's pet lizard-- alive and well!-- the lizard that has been missing since October 1st when Ian and Alex negligently left him on a toy truck in Alex's room and-- surprise?-- when they returned he was gone . . . so we assumed that he disappeared into the storage space between the walls or was eaten by the dog, but he somehow made it across the hall back to Ian's room and slipped into a dresser drawer-- Umberto Eco calls these moments in movies and books when you have to fill in the time between scenes or chapters "transitional walks" . . . no one knows exactly what happened to Hamlet on that pirate ship, you just have to imagine it, and we'll never now what Bossk did for those 19 days out in "the wild" of our house, but I like to imagine that he had many nocturnal adventures, journeying to the sink to lick water droplets from the cool porcelain, evading the dog (who sleeps in Ian's room and loves to eat small critters) and hunting bugs under Ian's bed . . . anyway, if Catherine didn't have off for Diwali, the lizard would have never been found, so I'm thinking of converting to Hinduism . . . and making Ian do so as well-- he was really sad about the purported death of his lizard, I caught him crying in the shower a week after Bossk had gone missing, and so yesterday Catherine took him out of school an hour early so he could see the miracle of the lizard before going to the middle school soccer game (and so she could bask in her heroic mother-of-the year Diwali light) and also, I should point out that we've got a new mystery to solve, a mouse was eating food on the shelves in the study so Catherine put a glue trap out last night on the table and now the glue trap is gone, which means a mouse is dragging it around somewhere (or the dog ate it) and so while we've got the lizard back in his tank, there's another creature loose in our house, having wacky adventures-- I'll keep you posted.
Westeros Needs Trump, America Doesn't
My wife and I are making our way through Season 7 of Game of Thrones, and it's obvious Westeros needs Donald Trump far more than the United States does (is there any way to digitally deport him?) because Westeros does need a wall to protect it from an onslaught of illegal white walker immigrants, and the force manning the wall does need bolstering to combat this onslaught . . . Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly need some of Trump's rhetorical expertise in order to convince the people, the rulers, and the intelligentsia of Westeros that there is a real threat headed their way (and wildling Craster really was an incestuous rapist, so Trump would have a ball teeing off on him) but here in America, illegal immigration is a non-issue that Trump brought to the forefront at the expense of problems that actually need to be addressed-- healthcare and wage disparity, the demise of unionization, failing infrastructure and global warming-- and while this was a brilliant rhetorical move, it's been quite awful for our nation-- a classic "wag the dog" so that the citizens focus on a perceived outside threat when the really trouble lies within the walls . . . this is especially problematic in our polarized political climate, as you have to take the opposite side in order to prove your party bona fides, so instead of moderation-- no work permits,no general amnesty and no easy citizenship for illegals . . . but also no threats to deport them all and build a wall to keep them out, as they are a valuable part of our economy-- this sort of sophistication is a tough position to profess in our political climate, and when pressed, most rational people will say that we shouldn't open are borders to anyone and everyone-- that's reasonable-- but there's also no major problem with illegal immigrants in America-- Trump fabricated that issue, unlike the white walkers, which are very real and bring nothing to the table: no work ethic, no delicious cuisine, and no skill at soccer . . . so Trump can head to Westeros and get to work on financing his big beautiful wall, but-- if you ask me-- America needs better tamales and an infusion of soccer expertise.
Joyce Carol Oates Has Got the (Good Book) Look
A few days ago I coined the term "man-ecdote" . . . it's a short tale told by a guy, from a masculine perspective, and if a lady is present, she might chastise him for expressing his outdated chauvinistic views in a post-gender/post-feminist world; here is a real example, recounted by yours truly-- a man-- in the office yesterday . . . at some point when I'm reading a hardcover book written by a woman, I turn to the inside of the dust jacket and appraise the photo of the author, and if she's bookish and frumpy then I'm pleased (as I was with Nancy Isenberg, the writer of White Trash: the 400 Year Untold History of Class in America, who looked exactly as I imagined a chick who would write a dense, polemical history tome would look) but if she's inappropriately good looking for the subject matter (God knows why, but I allow mystery and chick-lit authors a higher attractiveness to credibility ratio) then I'm slightly annoyed and wonder if what I'm reading is worthy of my time, and I think this stems from two (possibly intertwined) reasons:
1) I don't think it's fair that someone who is fit and sexy and put-together has also managed to write a quality piece of literature and/or non-fiction . . . that's monopolizing all the good stuff;
2) I think homely women with weird hair and glasses (e.g. Joyce Carol Oates) are smarter and more pensive than super-hot bombshells and thus they are more likely to have deep and profound thoughts, and so I trust their intellectual discourse more;
while Susan Sontag has alerted me to all the paradoxes and contradictions and stupidity of this kind of thinking, it's still hard to avoid doing it, because I'm a stupid man, full of stupid "man-ecdotes," and-- as a tangential bonus-- I'd also like to point out that if you tell a little story about some caramel glazed egg custard in a flaky and delicious pastry shell, then you've just recounted a "flan-ecdote."
1) I don't think it's fair that someone who is fit and sexy and put-together has also managed to write a quality piece of literature and/or non-fiction . . . that's monopolizing all the good stuff;
2) I think homely women with weird hair and glasses (e.g. Joyce Carol Oates) are smarter and more pensive than super-hot bombshells and thus they are more likely to have deep and profound thoughts, and so I trust their intellectual discourse more;
while Susan Sontag has alerted me to all the paradoxes and contradictions and stupidity of this kind of thinking, it's still hard to avoid doing it, because I'm a stupid man, full of stupid "man-ecdotes," and-- as a tangential bonus-- I'd also like to point out that if you tell a little story about some caramel glazed egg custard in a flaky and delicious pastry shell, then you've just recounted a "flan-ecdote."
Mortgage Interest and Appreciation
I like when the weather gets cold and rainy because then I feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of my house.
You Got Some Bubba Bona Fides?
Nancy Isenberg's treatise White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America is a detailed slog through the swampy history of class in America-- in many ways this tale parallels the story of race in our country, with plenty of cultural division, desired separation, but also the paradox of romanticized identification and appropriation-- she starts with the british colonizers dumping the "waste people" in America, and makes her way to Jimmy Carter running a redneck campaign to defeat George Wallace, Burt Reynolds defeating the hillbillies in Deliverance-- the city boys contending with feral rednecks and learning to be "real men" in this country crucible, but then in his next film (Smokey and the Bandit) Reynolds becomes the rednecks he was fighting, and leaves the shackles of society with runaway bride Sally Field . . . scalawags and squatters, indentured servants and trailer trash, they've been with us since the formation of this great nation, and while they were often derided, romanticized, alienated, and disenfranchised, you can't ignore them . . . Honest Abe Lincoln was called a "mudsill" and "Kentucky trash" and Andrew Jackson a "rude ill-tempered cracker," and Bill Clinton confused things the most-- he was deemed "our first black president" by many notables, but also had the reputation as Slick Willie, a fast talking Southern snake oil salesman . . . from Dolly Parton to Daisy Duke to Tammy Faye Baker to Sarah Palin, there's been no easy way to draw the line between white trash tramp and American treasure . . . we all know the tropes, from The Andy Griffith Show and The Beverly Hillbillies, on up to Swamp People and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo-- and Isenberg ends with the typical lessons that we all know-- we referring to the educated middle class . . . if you help the poor, there will be a political backlash, and the poor will often vote against their best interests because the people trying to help are portrayed at Northeastern liberal elite bureaucratic monsters, who want to take money from the hard-working salt-of-the-earth and give it to the undeserving, and that real men and women don't need socialist government hand-outs and the men to be admired are those who did it themselves, outside the system, without the sympathy of the city folks . . . and Donald Trump figured out a way--despite his lack of Bubba bona fides-- to appeal to this crowd; it's a load of bulshit, of course, as it's very hard in America to make it out of the trailer or the swamp-- though we espouse the American Dream, we talk the talk but we don't walk the walk (we hand our money down through bloodlines much more than European countries, and we have low rates of social mobility) and there is an element of Social Darwinism and eugenic breeding to American class lines that runs deeper than it should, considering our ultimate aim as a nation-- Isenberg explores this topic in the middle of the book, and she ends by discussing the plight of Billy Redden, the iconic banjo-playing inbred from Deliverance . . . he was chosen because of his odd look, did not play the banjo in the film, and wasn't paid very much . . . in 2012 he was interviewed and talked about his job working at Wal-Mart and how he was struggling to make ends meet, a mythic figure turned mundane . . . this is a comprehensive history, a book that is fascinating and boring by turns, full of detail, but it comes to an end a little before you think, because there are 120 pages of endnotes-- whew-- and while it was a fascinating journey, I'm glad to be out of that world . . . if you want something shorter, try Hillbilly Elegy.
The Test 99: Super Numbers (and Their Origin Stories)
This week on The Test, I give the ladies a numbers quiz with minimal math (although things still get fairly ugly, numerically speaking) and there's plenty of bonus material: I give some parenting advice, Stacey confesses to another crime, and Cunningham says some words that may or may not pertain to the answer . . . so tune in, keep score, and if you don't learn something, I'll give you a full refund.
I Look Generic (and So Does My Car)
I was stopped at a light on Woodbridge Avenue today, and I heard a short "BEEP" but I didn't think it was intended for me; at the next light, I heard the same short, lighthearted "BEEP" and I turned my head and the beep was coming from a postal truck-- the driver, an African American dude that I did not recognize, smiled, flashed me the peace sign, and then drove off . . . I think he thought I was someone else, which is understandable, as I'm pretty generic looking and I drive a gray Toyota Sienna minivan.
Intelligent Life, on Earth and in the Universe
My son Alex has been on my case to read Invincible, a comic series co-written by Robert Kirkman (the writer of The Walking Dead comics) and now that I've finished the first volume, I can see why-- it's excellent: smart, funny, and surprising-- but it's difficult playing the role of the student-- usually I'm telling my children to read this or watch that, and then checking to see if they got it, but now that dynamic is reversed . . . when I asked Alex about a plot-point I didn't understand, I had to suffer his disdain and disappointment over my sloppy reading: he grabbed the book and turned to the page I missed-- a single wordless panel that explained everything I didn't understand, and I immediately knew what it was like to be a student in my Shakespeare class . . . I know where all the key quotations are in the sea of Elizabethan English, and I'm always pointing them out to lost students; anyway, I can see how Alex relates to the story-- it starts as a typical father/son adventure in the framework of a superhero milieu, and it seems the father has an archetypal escaped-from-an-alien-planet-Superman backstory but then you find out that the comic is playing with that trope, and the father is something of a lunatic, from a lunatic alien civilization, and he has a bizarre and abstract master-plan for Earth, his son, his alien people and culture, and everything else in the universe . . . and the son has to grapple with the fact that his dad is a callous overblown maniac in the guise of a father . . . perhaps I'll learn some valuable lessons from reading it.
There is Intelligent Life on Earth
Though Sam Harris often comes off as a pretentious douche (and his podcast has absurdly bombastic theme music) but despite this shortcoming of charm, I really like him and appreciate what he's doing for intellectual discourse; his 100th episode (he makes the Spock-like claim that the number has no special inherent meaning to him, of course) is fantastic-- Harris doesn't speak much, instead he lets Nicholas Christakis do the talking-- Christakis directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale, and he attained some viral video prominence because he was at the center of the Yale Halloween videos with the shrieking African-American girl who had some serious misunderstandings about free speech in America . . . Christakis discusses the current attacks on the first amendment that are happening on college campuses, mob mentality, and some of the clever AI research they are doing at his lab and he comes off as rational, extremely intelligent, empathetic, and compelling . . . so much so that Sam Harris makes an orgy joke!
Of Soccer and Bugs
Sunday we played in Philipsburg and it was ungodly humid and we were assaulted by gnats, and then at practice yesterday I got all bitten up by mosquitoes, and today, despite the fact that we were on a turf field, I got eaten alive by blackflies . . . where is fall?
Dave Unboxes Something!
The Rutgers Expository Writing class stresses the importance of "unpacking" the prompt-- the students need to really mull over the question being asked and carefully analyze all the implications of the language of the assignment-- and so in honor of the first "unpacking of a prompt," I have made an "unboxing video"-- if you're not aware, these videos are extraordinarily popular (and super-weird) . . . I watched a few to get the tone down . . . I also think this is a good time to celebrate the life and exploits of Henry "Box" Brown, a slave who mailed himself from Virginia to freedom in a small wooden crate-- he endured 27 hours of wagon, steamboat, and train transport before arriving in Pennsylvania, to be "unboxed" by the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee.
A Sentence in Which No One Gets Whacked
One night this summer, my kids and I began The Godfather-- a movie we greatly anticipated watching together, because we all enjoyed Goodfellas so much-- but then I left for a few minutes to pick up some pizza and when I returned they had turned off The Godfather; I entered heroically with the take-out, and they were sitting there giggling over an episode of How I Met Your Mother and so I asked just what the hell was going on, they said, "It got a little slow and mom said we could turn it off" and I took great umbrage at this, very great umbrage, I ranted and raved a bit about taste, aesthetics, the nature of art, the problems with the American youth, the short attention span of the cell-phone generation, the demise of the great film, and the fact that some things in life are difficult and require perseverance; my wife concluded that I was completely insane, but I shut off How I met Your Mother, sat my kids down with their pizza, and forced them to finish watching The Godfather and even though Ian said he enjoyed it thoroughly, everyone was pissed off at me and thought I was a lunatic . . . of course, the reason I wanted my kids to watch The Godfather was so that they could watch The Godfather II, which is a far better movie (the middle movie in a trilogy is usually the best because the characters are established, but you don't need to wrap everything up in a contrived bow . . . Rocky II and The Empire Strikes Back and The Two Towers are all good examples of this phenomenon) but I knew I couldn't reenact the whole Godfather enforced viewing fiasco, or I would end up divorced or worse, so instead I negotiated with my children . . . I told them if they watched Godfather II with me, then they could finally watch Deadpool, a movie which I had forbidden them to watch because my students described it as crass, gratuitous and disgusting, but I figured watching a cinematic masterpiece would balance out watching some perverse trash and I'm proud to say that everything worked out for the best: they loved and appreciated Godfather II-- or at least they pretended to do so-- and then they had a friend over and watched Deadpool on Friday night, and I stayed out of the TV room and never saw a second of it, which suits me just fine, and we solved our differences diplomatically, without having anyone whacked.
The Test 98: Brother Can You Spare a Bazillion
Cunningham leads our triumphant return with this extraordinary effort on the federal budget . . . her command of all things fiduciary will leave you breathless, and there's an extra-special heartfelt audio moment when I learn from Stacey that Tom Petty has passed into the great wide open; check it out, keep score, and enjoy our latest episode: The Test 98: Brother Can You Spare a Bazillion?
Make America Tough Again
The recent spate of awfulness-- the mass shooting in Vegas, floods and hurricanes, infrastructure and budgetary problems dealing with floods and hurricanes, the healthcare dilemma, the Equifax hack, the death of Tom Petty, etcetera, etcetera-- all this awfulness centers around a discussion that we seem to be afraid to have in America . . . we're fine talking about how we want to live, and many of us are living quite well . . . but we need to discuss how we are going to die; Republicans need to explicitly confess that they do not think healthcare is a right and that they are willing to let many people suffer and die so other people can have tax cuts . . . Democrats need to stop with all this Bernie Sanders bullshit and explain that if the government completely subsidizes healthcare, the poor aren't going to get great insurance-- they aren't going to have access to all the expensive procedures and drugs that "Cadillac" employer-provided insurance gives you, and so people are going to die-- there are only so many resources and every person can't consume an infinite amount-- it doesn't add up-- so we're going to have to put a price on life- and we're going to have to put a price on information as well . . . all of our information is out there, and if Republicans need to point out that if we privatize health care, you will be burdened by the lack of privacy of your information . . . we also need to discuss the price of having a Second Amendment and how important that is to Americans-- I think it's very important to a certain segment of the country and they have to realize the burden of violence and suicide that accompanies this desire . . . it's not a whole lot different than the fact that cigarettes and alcohol are legal and we tolerate an enormous death toll so we can enjoy those vices, but the discussion needs to be had-- everyone knows the cost of smoking and the dangers of drinking and driving-- but I don't think these other issues are being taught in school, perhaps because they are of a political bent and generally, school curriculums steer clear of politics, but it's time to address them, along with other political hot-button issues such as global warming and our budget for infrastructure projects: are we going to keep paying for houses to be rebuilt in flood zones or are we going to let these areas return to being wetlands? should we make people actually pay for privatized flood insurance? should we keep burning fossil fuels at this rate? should we incentivize solar? are we going to tolerate the massive death toll from having a transportation system based on big human-driven cars or is there an infrastructure alternative? . . . all these issues are existential and we're not tough enough to talk about them-- the Trump administration has actually forbidden the EPA to discuss "climate change"-- the Harry Potter series became insanely popular because it addressed death in a real and realistic way and kids appreciated that, and now the adults and the children in our country need to toughen up as well and have these discussions before it is too late . . . we all want a tax cut, but we've got to realize what that entails: people will die on bad roads, people will die in floods, people will die because they have no health coverage, people will die because of pollutants and carcinogens, people will die at the hands of terrorists and lunatics bearing arms . . . and this all may be worth the price of a tax cut (I really want a new computer!) but we should at least have a frank policy discussion about it before we decide on this course of action and this frank discussion should start sooner rather than later, when people are younger, rather than when they are narrow-minded and entrenched.
Dave Balances the Scales of Justice!
It's rare that a perfectly just punishment is meted out for a crime-- a reprisal not overly rash and vengeful but also not anemically sympathetic-- but I am proud to say I was able to dish out just such a comeuppance to a student this week . . . last week this particular student took an extra sheet of giant sized easel paper for his group and when he realized that his group already had enough giant sized easel paper and they didn't need this piece of giant sized easel paper, he crumpled it up and threw it into the trash, but I saw him do this and made him uncrumple the piece of paper and reattach it to the pad (this easel paper has a sticky upper edge, like a gigantic post-it note, so this was easy enough) and this week, when this student and his partner had to choose a quotation from "The Apology" by Socrates and then put it on a giant sheet of easel paper and hang it on the wall, I gleefully handed him the sheet that he had crumpled the week before, made him admit that this was the perfect punishment for his crime, and thoroughly enjoyed watching him smooth out the wrinkles so he could legibly write the quotation.
R.I.P. Tom Petty and Our Pet Lizard?
This has been a tough week in our house-- not only did rock legend Tom Petty's soul pass into the great wide open, but it also looks like its curtains for our pet lizard, a crested gecko named Bossk . . . he's been missing since Sunday and at this point, he's probably either died from lack of food, water, heat and humidity or he's been eaten by the dog; my stupid children are one hundred percent responsible for the probable death of Bossk-- which I've pointed this out to them-- because they took the lizard out of the tank (which is fine, he's quite tame) and put him on a toy truck in Alex's room (right by the crawl space door) and then left Alex's room for a moment to get something-- they both left the lizard unattended-- and when they returned (moments later they insist) the lizard was gone . . . and this led to a mad search on Sunday morning, Alex was late for his soccer game and the upstairs looked like Hurricane Maria had passed through . . . but no lizard, so then we set up heating stations and food and water stations in both rooms, but there's been no sign of him (and the dog kept eating the lizard food, a yucky reconstituted vegetable paste) and while I'm sad about Bossk's probable demise, I'm also sort of glad my kids learned this lesson-- because this is at least the third time they've lost the lizard in this manner . . . I found it once clinging to the wall behind a bookcase; so hopefully they've learned that you can't leave a loose lizard unattended (and it's hard for me to actually be angry about this, because my track record with lizards is absolutely awful-- my room mate Rob and I had one in college, which we tried to keep in a wooden bird cage because we liked the aesthetic, but it promptly escaped-- three weeks later it crawled out from wherever it was hiding and died on the rug . . . then, after college, when I was living in a shitty house on Route 18 with eight other people, I had a monitor lizard and when I was away on vacation, someone kicked the heat rock plug out and it froze to death . . . because we were living in a house with no insulation, not an ideal habitat for a tropical creature . . . so anyway, we'll probably replace Bossk with a similar critter and hopefully my kids will keep a better eye on his successor, but-- judging by their ability to learn from their mistakes, I'm not particularly optimistic).
Tom Petty = America
Some people prefer The Beatles, others go for The Rolling Stones (I'm a Stones guy) but everybody, every red-blooded American, loves Tom Petty (and Creedence, of course) and he'll be sorely missed-- not missed in an abstract way, the way people lamented losing the great "talent" of Prince and Bowie-- but missed as a songwriter and as a significant contributor to our shared sonic landscape . . . Tom Petty is the tolerable Bob Dylan, the guy whose songs you listen to if you need to remove a bad song from your head . . . he's the guy I'm most comfortable with on the guitar, and I'm sure that's true for many back porch strummers . . . I once claimed in some hyperbolic G:TB post that "Don't Come Around Here No More" is the greatest song/video combination in the history of music, and I'm sticking to that . . . I learned of his death from Stacey, while we were recording The Test and I was very sad, but then I learned that he wasn't dead yet and I hoped he would recover and make a great late life album, like Johnny Cash and Gregg Allman and Willie Nelson have done, but I guess that's not to be . . . anyway, I'm glad his last album, Hypnotic Eye, topped the charts and I hope another songwriter as talented as Petty comes around sooner rather than later.
Drinking and (Not) Driving
Once autonomous self-driving cars become ubiquitous, it might be time for the United States (and the 12 other countries with a drinking age of 21) to think about lowering that number to resolve the you-can-serve-in-the-military-but-you-can't-order-a-beer paradox.
If You Hate Trump, You Should Read Larry Summers' Blog
If you'd like some anti-Trump fodder with more policy analysis and less ad hominem rhetoric, listen to the new episode of Freakonomics:"Why Larry Summers is the Economist Everyone Hates to Love" . . . Summers is the abrasive genius who has acted as US Treasury Secretary, chief economist for the Obama administration and the world bank, and president of Harvard-- until some remarks he made were deemed sexist and he resigned . . . anyway, Summers explains why many of Trump's economic policies are misguided, why his credibility (or lack thereof) is important to economic issues, and why we can't streamline the government to the extent that conservatives would like; here are a couple of things that I liked:
1) Summers thinks Trump is right in principle about corporate tax reform, though the administration hasn't implemented any policy on this (and Summers has no confidence that they have the know-how to do so) and he uses this wonderful library analogy to explain what we've been doing for the past seven years with corporate taxes:
3) I also like this piece about how "America needs its unions more than ever" about how the balance in power has shifted dramatically from the employee to the employer, and that's not changing any time soon (case in point, my groceries were delivered at 4:45 AM this morning, it was pitch black and the dog started barking when a guy in an Amazon Fresh truck pulled up, got out with a flashlight, and exchanged the containers on our porch . . . all hail Amazon . . . but I hope that guy was getting some overtime pay).
1) Summers thinks Trump is right in principle about corporate tax reform, though the administration hasn't implemented any policy on this (and Summers has no confidence that they have the know-how to do so) and he uses this wonderful library analogy to explain what we've been doing for the past seven years with corporate taxes:
Permit me an analogy here. Imagine that you are running a library and that there is a substantial volume of overdue books. You might offer amnesty to get people to return the books. You might announce you will never offer amnesty, so people will take fines seriously and return the books. Only an idiot would put a sign on the door saying, “No amnesty now, but we’re thinking hard about amnesty for next month.
You laugh, but American corporations have $2 trillion-plus overseas. If they bring that cash back right now, they pay 35 percent. If you’ve picked up any newspaper in the last seven years, you’ll know that Congress has been actively debating changes to that policy—for seven years. Just like the sign on the door of the library saying they’re thinking about amnesty for next month. It would be hard to conceive a policy better designed to keep that cash outside the US and not invested in the US than the policy we have pursued. That’s why I stress business tax reform as important for economic growth.
2) Summers explains why the government can't be downsized . . . he has several reasons, all of which he explains on his blog-- the piece is short and worth reading-- but the most telling statistic is that the relative price of a TV and a day in the hospital has changed by a factor of 100 since the 1980's;3) I also like this piece about how "America needs its unions more than ever" about how the balance in power has shifted dramatically from the employee to the employer, and that's not changing any time soon (case in point, my groceries were delivered at 4:45 AM this morning, it was pitch black and the dog started barking when a guy in an Amazon Fresh truck pulled up, got out with a flashlight, and exchanged the containers on our porch . . . all hail Amazon . . . but I hope that guy was getting some overtime pay).
Puns: Enjoy Them While You Can
Once the oceans and the robots rise up and destroy us, after the nukes and the supervolcanoes have exploded, and the straggling remainder are finished off by antibiotic-resistant pandemics . . . once the human race is wiped off the face of this planet, we will not be remembered for our intelligence or our foresight, but hopefully some future civilization will appreciate the thing at which we were the best . . . our sense of humor-- and it is for this alien culture that I write this sentence: yesterday in Creative Writing class I had my students play Scattergories as a brainstorming activity and then told them to apply the methodology to their own imagery piece-- go deep into your brain for details, avoid the obvious, and the sift through what you have and choose the best-- but one girl got obsessed with the game itself and kept searching for categories on her computer:
Student: Dairy products . . . that's a good category . . .
Teacher: That is a good category . . . but you can't just list dairy products for your piece, what kind of tone would that be?
Student: (without missing a beat) A little bit cheesy . . .
and we all rejoiced and then the kids taught me this joke:
why did the mushroom go to the party?
because he's a fun guy!
Student: Dairy products . . . that's a good category . . .
Teacher: That is a good category . . . but you can't just list dairy products for your piece, what kind of tone would that be?
Student: (without missing a beat) A little bit cheesy . . .
and we all rejoiced and then the kids taught me this joke:
why did the mushroom go to the party?
because he's a fun guy!
Stacey Again?
It's rare that an outsider makes my blog twice in one week-- I have so many fascinating thoughts and opinions that it's hard for interlopers to dent my consciousness-- but my friend and colleague Stacey so perfectly described our hot, humid cesspool of a high school that I've got to put it in print . . . she said being in our school is like being at a crowded public indoor pool, perpetually, except of course there's no water to jump into . . . it reminds me of when my kids were little and they took swim lessons over at Rutgers in the wintertime, and I'd have to wait around for them, sweating and overdressed, everything moist and slick with condensation . . . I'd try to read but it was just too gross to concentrate-- luckily, the weather has broken and fall is here, but I'll happily (and indignantly) use the same analogy at the end of the school year.
The Best Fun Fact Ever
The Guinness Book of World Records was the brainchild of Sir Hugh Beaver, the managing director of Guinness Brewery . . . in 1951, he got into a Monty Python-esque argument while hunting (about the airborne speed of two birds: the red grouse and the golden plover) and realized that bars would benefit greatly from a book to settle absurd arguments, so he tasked the McWhirter brothers with the project, with the promise that he'd stamp the Guinness name on the product, and in 1955, a perennial bestseller was born (a bestseller which is undergoing a transformation . . . listen to this episode of Planet Money for that story).
If It Wasn't For You Meddling Post-Traumatic Young Adults . . .
Edgar Cantero's meta-novel Meddling Kids is an interesting fictional experiment: a Scooby-Doo-like gang of kid detectives are reunited as adults to try to solve the one special case that traumatized them all, a case so nefarious that it sent them hurtling towards suicide, mental illness, alcoholism, and nihilistic depression . . . and while this conceit works for a while, it eventually it becomes a slog: too many hijinks and amphibian creatures; too much sorcery; too much plot and not enough jokes . . . but I still give it a B+ for the effort and hope Cantero's next effort is just as weird.
You Got a Choice, Dishwasher
My friend, colleague, and podcasting partner Stacey was taking a run at Capik Nature Preserve in Sayreville last weekend, and she spotted a group of boy scouts setting up camp near the trail; the scoutmaster and some other adults were supervising, and when she got close to them, the scoutmaster-- a middle-aged man-- looked at Stacey, an attractive six foot tall woman in athletic gear, and said, "Hey guys . . . here's our dishwasher!" and then he turned and addressed the young scouts, in case they hadn't heard his chauvinistic witticism, and repeated it to them, "Hey boys . . . look, our dishwasher is here!" and it took Stacey a moment to process the remark-- she mumbled something to the scoutmaster about them probably making a big mess, but then, as she ran on and replayed the scene-- the fact that the scoutmaster remarked on the beautiful weather to the guy that was ahead of her on the trail walking his dog, and waited for her to appear to make his "dishwasher" joke-- and she grew more and more incensed, and like Ransom Stoddard, she realized she had a choice: she could turn around and give the scoutmaster a piece of her mind . . . ask him if he had earned his badge in misogyny or if he still lived in his mother's basement, or she could take the high road and put the stupid remark (literally) behind her . . . but she did neither, instead she ran for an extra forty minutes, planning exactly what to say to this sexist scoutmaster who was supposed to be a role model for young men, but when she looped around again, the scouts were gone-- she had missed her opportunity-- the French call this l'esprit de l'escalier-- the wit of the staircase-- but a staircase is shorter than a running trail, so I'm sure some fantastic things ran through Stacey's mind as she ran-- it's too bad we don't have a transcript.
The Butterfly Effect Is Silly
James Gleick's new book Time Travel: A History is strange and uncategorizable: it begins as a history of the idea of time travel-- H.G. Wells was the first to marry those words together-- and then the chapters twist and turn through philosophy, physics, literature, memory psychology, technology and the meaning of the digital world . . . the book invites you to think about time as much as it details all the thoughts that have come before, I found myself deciding that the "butterfly effect" is rather silly-- ecosystems are more robust than that and one butterfly isn't going to throw all that much off . . . and our minds are probably similar, one change here or there in the fabric of our timelines wouldn't do all that much to our personality and fate (if it were a butterfly sized change) but we'll never know of course, because the most important thing about time to conscious individuals is that we live through it, our perceptions prisoners to the moments, and no matter what the physicists tell us about the reversibility of cause and effect, time is a one-way street for our bodies and a layered labyrinth for our brains . . . anyway, the book is full of quotable quotes, long summaries of time travel books and movies, philosophical implications of scientific breakthroughs, and plenty of food for thought . . . it makes me want to go back and reread some of Gleick's other great books, Chaos and Faster and The Information, and rereading is a method of time travel as well, one espoused by Nabokov, you return to a text knowing the framework and then start to observe it as a whole, outside of the timescape of flipping pages and forward progress, and know it differently . . . and if you like thinking about such things, then you'll love Time Travel: A History.
Humans: Impressively Stupid
Considering how important our keys are, it's impressive how reliant most of us are on very crappy keychains (mine are held together with a cheap faux mini-carabiner with no locking mechanism).
Vermont + Chick Peas = Delightful Geographical Culinary Anomaly
It's no surprise that Vermont has great local cheese and beer and wine and apples, but the victual you really want to procure is Yalla brand hummus and Yalla brand pita . . . this stuff rivals what we ate in Syria (minus the civil war and the intestinal parasites).
Ouch
While Cat and I were hiking this morning, a wasp stung me on the calf-- and after a reasonable amount of swatting and yelping, I think I handled the pain fairly stoically.
Taking a Break From the Seltzer
My wife and I are in Brattleboro for the long weekend-- sans children-- and we just did an impromptu micro-brew pub crawl . . . here are my notes:
1) Hermit Thrush is all about the sour (and the guy behind the bar will tell you how they achieve the sour, and it's more complicated than you might imagine)
2) Whetstone Station is all about the view;
3) McNeill's Brewery has fantastic home-brew style beer, games galore, a sincere and sweet waif of a bartender-- she brought us pads and pens so we could play Boggle and she asked what kind of music we'd like to hear and then put it on (I suggested Greg Allman's final album, Southern Blood) and there's also plenty of the dank, and the stickiest tables this side of the Mississippi.
1) Hermit Thrush is all about the sour (and the guy behind the bar will tell you how they achieve the sour, and it's more complicated than you might imagine)
2) Whetstone Station is all about the view;
3) McNeill's Brewery has fantastic home-brew style beer, games galore, a sincere and sweet waif of a bartender-- she brought us pads and pens so we could play Boggle and she asked what kind of music we'd like to hear and then put it on (I suggested Greg Allman's final album, Southern Blood) and there's also plenty of the dank, and the stickiest tables this side of the Mississippi.
This Sentence is Not About Salsa
I can't pinpoint exactly when this happened, it just crept up on us-- but I think my family is indicative of a larger American trend in that we drink a shitload of seltzer.
A Matter About A Mattress (Dave Turns the Corner)
My neighbors have five kids so they're are always cleaning out their house and their garage, getting rid of clutter, and tossing items their kids have aged out of, and all the cleaning and organizing and property maintenance seems to be done by the lady-of-the-house-- she certainly doesn't get much help from her husband and kids-- so while I feel bad that she has so many responsibilities, I also like to complain to my wife about whatever junk is cluttering up the sidewalk, as it's unsightly, it blocks my way to the park, and it detracts from my wife's beautifully maintained front garden; I used to be a live-and-let-live kind of guy, the kind of guy who didn't care if people neglected to bring in their garbage cans promptly from the curb after garbage collection (I once got into a passionate debate with my friends Dan and Dom on this issue-- they were homeowners at the time and disdainfully-- and accurately-- called me a "renter") but I think I turned some kind of crazy corner this morning-- the neighbors threw a twin mattress on the sidewalk in front of their driveway on Sunday (right where I start my morning walk with the dog) and bulk trash day isn't until September 27, so after gamely walking over the mattress several times yesterday, I decided that instead of complaining for a week and a half and driving my wife bananas, I would take matters into my own hands, and so before I went to work this morning (I wanted to get it done before the storm soaked the mattress) I threw the mattress on the roof of my van, drove down to the park, and tossed it in the dumpster . . . and while it's sad to wave good-bye to good-natured, easy-going Dave, I'm going to try to embrace New Crotchety Dave, the Dave who has Initiative and Interest in Property Values, the Dave who has realized sometimes it's easier to just do it yourself, instead of complaining about it, because I think this is the Dave of the future, the Dave that will eventually succumb to that wacky lunatic, Senile Crank Dave.
This is Why I Rarely Run Errands
Saturday morning, I got up and went out into the world, alone, to do some things: I drove out to Pennington to buy a craigslist bike for my son Ian; took a detour to visit the Stony Brook Millstone Watershed Preserve-- a beautiful reserve with a large environmental center and plenty of hiking trails through meadows, forests, and floodplains-- promptly got lost in the woods, ended up at a farmer's market on a road I did not recognize-- where I got conflicting directions on how to get back to the Watershed parking lot, and then used Google Maps on my phone to figure out the best way to go-- it's incredibly accurate, if I took ten steps or so in the wrong direction, I could tell-- then I stopped at Joe Canal's in Lawrenceville, but my little keychain bottle didn't work-- each store is independently owned and so I needed to sign up for another little red keychain bottle so I could get the discount, and then when I stopped at 7-11 on Route 1 for a snack, the friendly young dude behind the counter offered me a plastic bag for my potato chips and cheese-stick, and I refused-- I always try to refuse plastic bags, because they are an environmental scourge and most of the time you can just carry your shit or put it in your pockets, but the dude behind the counter was doing the hard sell-- he held up the bag and said, "It's free!" and if he wasn't such a friendly, good-natured young dude, I would have given him a lecture on the environmental cost of handing out non-recyclable plastic bags with every minor purchase, but that would have been obnoxious, so I just said, "Save it for the next guy" and he said, "Okay . . . then do you want a Squishy? It smells like food when you squeeze it" and he pointed to a display of little nerf food items in plastic, which were listed at $2.99 each and I wasn't sure if he was up-selling me one of these, or offering to give me one or what, so I just said, "No thanks but that's really funny" and I'm not sure what I was referencing: the fact that Squishy food items that smell actually exist and are sold in stores: or that he thought because I refused a plastic bag, I might want one of these; or that whenever I run errands, people say weird stuff to me (the last time I was at Kohls, the little old Asian cashier ordered me go back into the store to get more underwear to take advantage of a sale, complained about the high taxes, and said too many Indian people were moving into town).
Dave is on a Collision Course . . . with Himself
There's nothing better than the Tina Fey flick Mean Girls . . . I reference it at least once a day-- I especially like to say "You can't just ask someone why they're white"-- and there's nothing worse than musical theater, I disparage the genre no less than thrice month, and these two passionately polar opinions have got me in a real bind, because a musical version of Mean Girls is opening on Broadway and I'm not sure if I want to see it or not . . . it's a Hegelian conundrum: I'm afraid if I don't see it, I'll regret it for the rest of my life, but I'm afraid if I do shell out the cash and willingly take my wife to see some musical theater, I'll spontaneously combust.
The End of the Road
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