Breaking (Peanut Butter) News!

After my friend and podcasting partner Stacey read my candid peanut butter based confession, she went and checked her cupboard and she found five open containers of peanut butter-- check out the photo-- and although only one jar was completely empty (in comparison to the three jars I had emptied) she attributes that to the fact that she does the grocery shopping and when she thinks some of the jars are getting low, then she simply buys a fresh one . . . she cites the same reason as me for this irresponsible and wasteful behavior: she doesn't like to scrape out the jar because you inevitably get peanut butter on your hands . . . it's so much more fun to take a scoop from the smooth buttery surface of a freshly opened jar; after some discussion, we decided we're not horrible people (though our respective spouses might think otherwise) and there either needs to be a tool that can efficiently scrape a peanut-butter jar or-- and this would be even better-- peanut butter should be sold in squat truncated-cone shaped containers, which would be much easier to scrape with standard cutlery (perhaps this is a big peanut butter conspiracy, and the containers are shaped this way so people buy far more jars than they need . . . because so much peanut butter is in an "overhang" state in nearly empty jars, cached in cupboards across the nation).

One Is Obnoxious But Three Makes It Funny

My wife called me into the kitchen and presented me with exhibits A, B, and C . . .

three jars of peanut butter, in a line, on the counter;

she said, "I wanted to have an apple with peanut butter and this is what I found"

I replied "Hmm" because I wasn't sure what was going on and I didn't want to commit to a position;

she said, "open them"

and so I opened the first one--

it was empty;

I opened the second jar,

and it was empty as well;

so was the third . . .

I had put three empty jars of peanut butter back in the cabinet:

I don't like scraping peanut butter out of the jar-- you always end up getting peanut butter on your hands-- and so I'll often open a new jar . . . it's fun and easy to take those first scoops;

obviously, I did this a few times . . .

but I was saved by the fact that three empty jars goes so far beyond the pale of bad etiquette that it's hysterically funny (or at least I thought so).

Which Child is Smarter?

My entrepreneurial (and acquisitive) twelve year old son Ian and his buddy Ben went out after the storm last week to earn some cash shoveling snow, but my thirteen year old son Alex stayed home; when I asked him why he didn't go with Ian and Ben, he said, "I don't need any money, you guys pay for everything . . . I'm going upstairs to read a comic book."

The Reason People Are Always Finding Things For Me

I'm good looking, not good at looking.

The 200 Million Dollar Name?

Glenn Straub claims he sold his hip ultra-modern Atlantic City casino "Revel" to Bruce Deifik because of excessive regulatory requirements and New Jersey's anti-business climate . . . and Deifik was obviously so exhausted by these rules and regulations that he had nothing left in the tank when it came time to rename the joint, so he went with the most exceedingly literal, excruciatingly generic, and extremely mundane moniker you could imagine: Ocean Resort Casino.

Dave Does NOT Bring the Hammer Down

This year, I'm teaching my students very differently than I have in years previous and this is mainly because our college writing class is now based on the notorious Rutgers Expos model; students read five long, dense and difficult non-fiction texts and write synthesis essays connecting these texts; the goal for the student is independent logical thought supported by textual evidence and the goal for the teacher is to provide activities and a framework for the students to investigate the texts; write, think, and peer-edit; and collaboratively comprehend a set of difficult ideas . . . and most importantly, the goal for the teacher is not to perform the traditional, top-down, goal oriented, template-style teaching that makes for good clean lessons, neat closure, and competent performance on tests and papers . . . instead, I've learned to pull back and let kids make a mess of things, as they actually learn to think on their own, without my meddling guidance, my schema activation, and a "big reveal" at the end of class . . . I just finished a book which exemplifies this educational spirit, and it's an easy read that might affect you profoundly; it's called The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik, and, as you might guess, the gardening and carpentry metaphor applies to different methods of teaching; the carpentry model is where you build the kid to an exacting specification-- and there is a great deal of pressure to parent in this manner in the United States . . . to make sure your kid "turns out right," but Gopnik deconstructs the actual task "to parent" and provides plenty of psychological support to her thesis: kids learn better when they are given freedom to flourish in an environment where they can explore, grow, and play . . . and while the results may be more the way a garden grows, slow, messy, and unpredictable . . . which is exactly the way human children grow up-- while we've all heard why babies are born so helpless (it's hard to get such a big head through such a small opening, so infants have mushy skulls) we also have an extended period of middle childhood and adolescence . . . time to explore and grow (unless you're under duress from standardized tests . . . one of the scariest tidbits in the book is the natural experiment with high stakes testing and ADHD . . . districts that put high stakes testing in effect earlier had more ADHD diagnoses and more students on attention-deficit disorder drugs than districts that did not put the policies into place) and teachers and parents are responsible for creating garden-like environments where kids can think on their own; there's an especially powerful experiment with a toy (described here and in this podcast) that drives the point home; the end of the book is solution-based, Gopnik first points out that we're doing all of our children a grave injustice: the children of the middle-class are over-organized, over-trained, over-tested, and feel the pull of top-down dictates . . . so their learning is often carpentry-style and static, and the poor-- because of lack of money, infrastructure, and public space-- deal more with chaos and a lack of a good place to flourish . . . and she points out that we're never going back to the anomaly of the classic 50's "nuclear family" where the father worked and the mother minded the kids; this "traditional" model of the family was actually a rare consequence of the beginning of industrialization; through most of history, both men and women worked, whether on farms or in workshops or hunting and gathering or in careers, as we do now and because you now have to make the choice of keeping a parent at home and taking major pay-cut or having both parents work and then paying people to take care of yoru kids, child-care is a very low-paid profession-- though it requires incredible skill, love, and decision-making . . . carpentry-style "preschool" and rigorous top-down training seems more productive and outcome based, but it's actually an awful way to take care of kids, and to teach kids; so I'm trying my best with my own kids and with my students to let them explore, play, and often fail . . . and I'm trying to set-up rewarding activities and experiences where they have the locus of control and I'm not suggesting how to solve the problem . . . because we're not going to be around forever and if I've learned one thing in my life it's this: when I was a kid, if an adult told me to do something, then I was going to do the opposite (or worse).

O Brave New World That Has Such (Savage) People In It

While I may have recently learned how to mop, that doesn't bely the fact that I have come a long way in terms of savagery, hygiene and cleanliness; four incidents come to mind, all from when I was twenty-one and living in the Outer Banks, in a shack across the street from the beach with a bunch of dudes . . .

1) my friend Rob put down a half-eaten roast beef sandwich on our filthy, garbage-strewn living room table and got up to go do something and I took a look at the sandwich and thought: This is going to be trouble down the line . . . but I didn't actually do anything about the sandwich, which was soon obscured by a section of the newspaper and two weeks later, when someone picked up that section of the newspaper, looking for the crossword, we saw the remains of the sandwich-- it was now a moldy bun and the roast beef was gone, replaced by a mass of writhing white maggots;

2) the bathroom floor was so filthy that we decided it was a lost cause, but instead of even attempting to clean it, we threw down a pair of wooden pallets so that we didn't have to walk on the filth;

3) Hightower suggested that after you use a dish, you should then wash it, but my friend John made a rebuttal, which became house policy: if you're so high class that you need cutlery and flatware, fish it out of the sink and clean it . . . once we dirtied all the dishes, we never washed them and made do with our hands;

4) a friend stayed for a few days with his mangy cat and a week later, while I was waiting tables, I noticed that my scalp was really itchy . . . it turned out that I had fleas (there's a shampoo that gets rid of them).

My Wife Insists That The Thing I Just Said Must Be My Sentence Today

I don't know how to mop.

Today's Sentence Is Cancelled Due to Inclement Weather . . . or is it?

An ideal snow day for a misanthropic grouch like me: the conditions on the sled hill next to our house are perfect, my kids and their friends are there, and the weather and roads are bad enough that all those yahoos from Edison can't drive over here, crowd up the slope, park all over the neighborhood, and ignore the stop signs.

Forces (and Dog Vomit) Conspire Against Me

In philosophy class, we're discussing free will and determinism . . . I like to do this unit right after the New Year so we can discuss the futility of making a New Year's Resolution in a deterministic universe (I recently saw a meme that said "My New Year's Resolution last year was to lose ten pounds . . . only fifteen to go!") but while many profound thinkers believe we are not in control of our fate, they also believe that it's mentally healthy to believe we are in control of our fate, and so-- as usual-- I resolved to start the year eating healthy, drinking less, and-- most importantly-- avoiding sugar and sweets . . . which had been difficult because my son Alex won a five pound bag of Haribo gummy bears in a steal-a-gift and Haribo brand gummy products are hard to ignore but I was giving it the college try, walking past that brightly colored bag on the counter and not reaching in and grabbing any gummy bears, until last night, when the universe conspired against me, abrogating any free will that I might have thought I possessed; it went down like this: first, I let the dog out into the yard and then I busied myself doing the dishes and forgot that I had let him out (he usually goes out for a minute or two, especially when it's cold and then quickly shows up at the glass sliding door and barks until we let him in) and fifteen minutes later I realized that I had never let him back in the house, but just as I realized this he appeared at the sliding door and barked, so I let him in and thought nothing of it, then I went upstairs to put away some laundry and I heard my son Alex downstairs expressing extreme disgust and my wife was in the shower, so I ran down the stairs to see what Alex was yelling about and there was a large pile of chunky dog vomit on the throw carpet and the floor and half on the floor, the contents of the chunky pile were undigested and probably fecal in origin (although there may have been some rotting squirrel carcass in there as well) and I nearly puked while I was sopping it up with a multitude of paper towels . . . I took Sirius outside with the first batch of befouled paper towels, in case he had to vomit again, and I noticed that the back gate was open-- Sirius is a good dog and he never runs away, but he will go on an adventure if the back gate is open and we're quite close to the park and so I figured that's where he went and that's why he was gone for so long, and he obviously found some disgusting pile of feces and animal flesh and chowed it down and then came home and upchucked it all over the carpet . . . once I was done cleaning up I took him for a short walk but I couldn't get the awful smell out of my nose from the chunky undigested vomit, and the only recourse-- despite my best intentions . . . and I'm sure you'll agree that there was no amount of free will that could have circumvented these circumstances-- the sole solution was to feast on the only thing in the house that would definitely remove the stench from my throat and nose: a big colorful chewy handful of Haribo gummy bears.

2018: Year of YOG

My resolution for 2018 is to consistently involve myself in things that begin with the phoneme "yog" . . . I need to incorporate more yoga into my workouts because I'm not very flexible, I need to continue eating Greek yogurt in the morning because it has lots of protein and it's good for my microbiome, and I need to refer to my idol as often as I can, the king of the nonsensical sentence: Yogi Berra.

The Best Sentence of 2017 (That Was Never Written)

Here is my favorite moment of 2017 that I should have written a sentence about: we were doing some peer-editing in my college writing class and a sweet and lovely female student asked me my position on placing a comma after the penultimate item in a list-- she wanted to know if I was for placing this comma or against placing this comma, which is commonly known as the "serial comma" or the "Oxford comma," because it was traditionally used by editors and printers at Oxford University Press (but it was usually omitted by most newspapers, to save space and ink) and this lovely student asked me about this comma with all sincerity, as I am her teacher (and her writing teacher at that) but the projector was on and I couldn't ignore the perfect comedic set-up she had given me, so I told her I would play a short eductional video to explain what I thought on the matter (I love the "educational video" set up) and I cued up Vampire Weekend's song on this subject and let it play for 27 seconds and then we all laughed, as the matter was firmly resolved.

2017 Book List

I just finished my 46th book of 2017 this afternoon and it's a fitting one for the end of the year; Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millenials by Malcolm Harris is an intelligent, analytical and provocative book written by a millennial about the millennial generation that might just change your mind about millennials in general . . . from my perspective, this book is about the end of my era, Generation X, and any slackerly influence it might have had upon the world: kids these days are more prone to anxiety, work harder, do less drugs (drug overdoses seem to be following the Baby Boomer cohort), have less sex, do more homework, get surveilled more-- for a scary take on this, watch Episode 2 of season 4 of Black Mirror-- take out giant student loans which fund ever expanding building projects on college campuses, intern more, get paid less, compete more in an organized fashion, train for this organized competition in areas that are supposed to be fun and healthy-- sports, music, the science fair, dance; are trained by their cell phones to be more available and productive than any work force in history, and don't have much of a shot at the wealth in our nation, which has increasingly been hoarded by the old and the 1% . . . Harris backs this up with plenty of data-- beware: there are charts in this book-- but it is slender and if you have kids or teach or coach or work with kids in any capacity, then you should read this book; the conclusion is not very hopeful . . . I worry about my own children and this book is making me take a step back in my expectations for them and for myself as a parent; the book is also making me enjoy my stable and noncompetitive union job, as the millennial generation will experience job precarity as a matter of course; anyway, this ties in nicely with my New Year's Resolution, which is to try to live more in the slow, meditative, and profound world of great books, and avoid the twitchiness of the internet as much as possible . . . I did a pretty good job of it in 2017, especially because we cut the cable and I stopped watching football (and playing fantasy football, which is another one of those productivity training devices that "prepares" people for 24/7 availability and efficiency) and while I didn't quite reach my goal of a book a week, I was close . . . anyway, here is the list--  I discussed my seven favorites on Gheorghe: The Blog-- and wrote reviews of all of them here on Sentence of Dave . . . my favorite book of the year is The Power by Naomi Alderman: if you're going to read one book in 2018, that should be the one . . . and you should try to read at least one book a year, just to avoid being part of the American 26% that reads zero books each year; these are just the books I finished, I started plenty of others and bailed, so anything on this list is pretty good:

1) Selection Day by Aravind Adiga

2) Bill Bryson: One Summer: America, 1927

3) Mark Schatzker's The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

4) Whiplash: How to Survive Our Fast Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe

5) The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly

6) The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

7) Steven Johnson: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

8) Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty

9) Normal by Warren Ellis

10) Jonah Berger: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior

11) Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman

12) The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack

13) Tyler Cowen: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

14) Ill Will by Dan Chaon

15) Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell

16) Love Me Do! The Beatles Progress by Michael Braun

17) The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley

18) Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

19) Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty

20) Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific by Robert Kaplan

21) Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

22) Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

23) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

24) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

25) Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World by Jeff Madrick

26) Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

27) 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden Hue

28) Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

29) Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

30) The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

31) A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane

32) Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman

33) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

34) David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

35) Michael Connelly: Nine Dragons

36) Gar Anthony Haywood's Cemetery Road

37) Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

38) Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

39) Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

40) How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

41) Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty

42) Roddy Doyle's Smile

43) The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

44) Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

45) The Power by Naomi Alderman

46) Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of the Millenials by Malcolm Harris.

The Looming Time

The end of winter break is rearing its ugly head; to prepare, I woke up early this morning, did some school work, went to the gym, recorded some music, shoveled snow, took the dog for a hike in the park, watched Trading Places with the wife and kids, and then-- I am sad to report-- I was so amped up from all my productivity that I couldn't manage to take a nap (unlike my son Ian, who is still crashed out) and if you're looking for something weird and melancholy to listen to, during this looming time, I recommend The OOZ by King Krule.

What I Learned Over Winter Break

When my schedule is unobstructed by work, sports, and chores-- no matter how late I've slept or how many hours of sleep I had the night previous-- I will take a two-hour nap.

Dave's Head: Too Big for our Government

Apparently, my head is too big for me to the leave the country . . . or that's what the lady at the passport office told me: according to the maximum-head-size-ring on her plastic transparency, my Costco passport photo did not pass muster: the circumference of my head exceeded the allowable . . . the woman who took the discount passport photo at Costco should have taken a step or two (or three or seven) back in order to shrink my head the government-prescribed size-- the rest of my family appear to have normal sized heads, as they all fit within the ring (although she was a bit leery of Alex's photo because his hair was covering one eyebrow) but because of my big head, I had to pay for a new photo, at double the price of Costco, which the woman in the passport office snapped herself (and the ring on the passport lady's transparency reminded me of the ring that the clam warden uses to determine if clams are of a legal size to keep and eat-- but in the reverse, of course, if a clam can't fit through the ring, you can eat it but if your head can't fit through the ring then you can't go to Costa Rica).

The Power is a Shocker

I've frequently opined upon science-fiction up in this house, and my usual point is this: to qualify as real science-fiction, the setting/world of the story needs to be the main character-- this doesn't occlude fine characterization, but that can't be the main thrust of the plot . . . so Bladerunner 2049 qualifies but The Last Jedi does NOT . . . the two best recent examples of the genre are The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker and The Power by Naomi Alderman; I just finished The Power and despite the fact that it has Team Woman absolutely ravaging my team, The Team of Men, it's still one of my favorite books of the year . . . the premise is simple: teenage girls acquire the powers of an electric eel (much magnified) because of a chemically induced genetic mutation-- the gradual acquisition and development of this power by all women inverts the power structure of gender-- women become strong and warlike and men become weak and sexualized . . . the fun of the book-- despite the atrocities done to men-- is just how far Alderman takes the premise . . . while the characters are well-drawn and geographically various, the real star of the book is the timeline; she shows you everything that might happen if this conceit were true (and the book will resonate with you once you've finished . . . I annoyed my wife in the car this afternoon and I for a moment I thought that she might shock my testicles to put me in line, but then I remembered that Donald Trump is our President and I have nothing to worry about).

Irony vs. Coincidence: The Definitive (and Miraculous) Explanation

On Christmas Eve, my wife was preparing some spicy nuts for the big party when the doorbell rang; it was our neighbor Ira with a present for the kids and a treat for us-- some sweet and spicy walnuts!-- and my wife claimed this was "ironic," the fact that Ira brought over some spiced nuts while she was in the midst of prepping her own spiced nuts, but, after some discussion, we concluded that this was actually a coincidence-- an interesting juxtaposition of similar events-- and that irony requires a surprising reversal of expectations . . . and while sorting out irony and coincidence has always been a bit tricky, I was blessed today with a miracle beyond miracles-- in a very short span of time, the universe provided me with perfect examples of BOTH irony and coincidence . . . and I am assuming the universe did this so that I could share these examples with you:

1) I will begin with the coincidence . . . the kids slept at my parents' place last night and I went to pick them up this morning-- my parents now live in an over-55 community in Monroe, and so before we left, we took a swim in the indoor pool, which was wonderful: the pool was warm and the glass-encased atrium that houses the pool was warmer . . . then we got into the van to drive back to Highland Park and I started playing Big Fish Theory and we were talking hip-hop and I realized that they had never heard the greatest hip-hop album of all time: Paul's Boutique . . . so I pulled over and put it on and drove for a bit, enjoying the Dust Brothers magical samples and the Beastie Boys clever rhymes-- I hadn't listened to the album in years and it sounded better than ever-- and when I asked Alex how he liked it, I received no answer, so I turned to look at him and he was sleeping-- and then I looked over to the passenger seat and Ian was passed out as well, they must have been tired out from all the Christmas fun, the pool, and the pull-ups (Catherine got us a pull-up bar for Christmas-- the gift that keeps giving . . . you hernias) and then a bit later in the day, I got a call from my podiatrist-- my orthotic inserts were ready-- but I had to come to the office and see Doctor Kates briefly, to make sure they fit, so I got in the van-- my sneakers untied because I knew I would have to remove them soon-- and headed to Milltown and I was in a rush so I didn't bother to hook my phone up, instead I did something I rarely do-- I listened to the radio-- and the story on NPR was crap so I turned to the Princeton station, 103.3, and -- miracle beyond miracles-- I heard:

Now here we go dropping science, dropping it all over
Like bumping around the town like when you're driving a Range Rover

which are the opening lyrics to "Sounds of Science," one of the best tracks on Paul's Boutique . . . and this is not something that you don't hear on the radio very often (in fact, I've never heard this track on the radio) and so I celebrated this wonderful coincidence-- an odd juxtaposition of similar events-- with much glee and gaiety . . . I hadn't heard "Sounds of Science" in years and then I heard it twice in one day;

2) and now for the irony . . . the podiatrist's office is a sharp turn off Main Street in Milltown and the claustrophobic little parking lot was full, so I had to jam the minivan along the fence; I got out of the car, sneakers untied because I knew I would have to remove them immediately to try out the orthotics, opened the door to enter the waiting room, and walked into an old man; I couldn't get in, not only was there was an old guy blocking the door, there was also an older guy with a walker in the tiny vestibule, making his way out, so I waited patiently out in the cold until this crew egressed and then made my way in . . . and the waiting room was just packed, full of old people (and one attractive blonde woman) and I had to stand next to the counter, with my back to the office door-- the door they open to call people in to see the doctor-- and every time they opened the door it hit me in the back-- and I would trip on my untied laces (but it was too tight for me to bend over and tie them) and the main irony here is that it was standing room only in the podiatrist's office . . . my foot hurt and I was coming to get my new inserts and but I didn't wear my old inserts because I was going to get new inserts and I never imagined I'd be standing for a long period of time in the podiatrist's office . . . and even when a seat opened up, I couldn't take it-- despite the pain in my left heel-- because the average age in the waiting room was 70+ and they just kept coming in-- at one point there were four more people than there were chairs-- and these old people were complaining constantly and loudly, they were complaining about the long wait and they were complaining about the small parking lot and they were especially angry about lack of spaces in the parking lot and the gray minivan parked along the fence-- my gray minivan-- that was making it just impossible to pull out . . . but I kept my mouth shut because it was possible to get out, it was just a little tight, and there were actually faint lines painted on the blacktop, the barest suggestion of a parking spot, but enough that I knew this was a legitimate place to park (and what choice did I have?) and there was no way I was going to admit that it was my van because this was a tough crowd (and many of the geezers were sporting weapons, canes and such) but while I stood there in the waiting room-- for thirty-five minutes, balancing on my good foot-- I realized why fate had presented me with a miraculous Paul's Boutique coincidence and this bitter and painful podiatry irony: so that I could offer the definitive explanation of these two terms . . . a Boxing Day miracle!

Enjoy the Gifts, Prodigal Sons

Merry Christmas, to all those participating in the materialist-consumptionist complex.

Abracadabra . . . Dave Will Vanish at the End of this Sentence

No time to write-- we're having forty people over tonight and I have a chore list to accomplish . . . I wouldn't be so pressed for time if I didn't watch The Prestige with the boys, another great movie that is streaming on Netflix . . . this is definitely a good one to rewatch, my boys had fun speculating about all the twists and turns, and I could only vaguely remember them from my first viewing . . . enough of this, I have to cut up ten pounds of sausage.

Comparison is the Thief of Joy?

My kids and I watched the new Star Wars movie Thursday afternoon, and it's tolerable-- the fight scenes are decent, there's a fun chase on a filthy-rich-casino-planet-full-of-arms-dealers where the good guys escape by riding giant horse-dog-cat-lions to freedom . . . and then they free the giant horse-dog-cat-lions, and the brain-bond between Kylo Ren and Rey is a dark version of the brain-bond between E.T. and Elliott . . . that would make a great YouTube mash-up-- but there are also plenty of plot-holes and logical problems (Poe's outright mutiny barely gets him a slap on the wrist; if the kamikaze hyperjump inside another ship was always possible, then that should happen all the time, the force is becoming more Harry Potter magic than sci-fi, and the fact that this culture has invented spaceships that can traverse the galaxy and intelligent robots but they haven't figured out the technology for autopilot (or the possibility of using a droid as a pilot) is utterly ridiculous . . . so the moment when Laura Dern has to stay behind and sacrifice herself to "drive" the ship is just silly) but we erased the bad cinematic damage tonight; the boys and I watched City of God, which is streaming on Netflix, and though I hadn't seen it in fifteen years, I didn't forget a scene: it's the perfect blend of Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas, Brazilian-style . . . if you missed it, check it out before it disappears off Netflix . . . my kids complained for one second when I told them they would have to read subtitles, but thirty seconds into the first scene, the chicken-chase, they both pronounced it "a good movie."

Get Your Head in the Bardo

You've probably heard that acclaimed short-story writer George Saunders won the Man Booker prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and you might have even looked up the definition of "bardo" and learned that it's a Tibetan Buddhist term referring to a purgatorial state between life and death; the amount of time you'll spend there reflects how you lived and how you died-- and I'll warn you now: if you tackle this book, you will enter the bardo . . . a meditative state between history and story, fact and fiction, tragedy and comedy, grandeur and disgust . . . and while I struggled at first, because the book is a fragmented post-modern montage of cited recollections, some apparently fictitious, some obviously historical, and many existing in an ambiguous in-between state, but the fact that three of my colleagues successfully passed through the bardo inspired me (thanks, Stacey, Kevin, and Cunningham!) and I kept at it, pondering and plugging along, quotation after quotation, until I reached some sort of enlightenment: there is no reason that death will be any less absurd than life . . . and though Abe Lincoln was mired in the worst kind of war (and he may have been more calculating than most of us learned in school) he was also a loving father and suffered deeply when his son Willie died, but after spending a period of time in awkward and inconsolable mourning, he returned to the land of the living to preside over the country . . . Saunders captures this brief moment and makes something new of it, part poem, part macabre ghost tale, part existentialist tome on the silly and transitory nature of our lives, and part untold history . . . so many people never got a chance to tell their story and become a part of history, and now Willie Lincoln and the rest of the cast have their due.

What is the Opposite of a Diamond in the Rough?

We got into a discussion the other day somewhere in the comments on Gheorghe:TheBlog about the worst songs on the best albums, and this topic moved me so much that I decided to take action: on my Google Play Music account, I gave a thumbs up to every song on Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti except for one . . . "Kashmir" received a big thumbs down . . . and then I went through the Dire Straits album Making Movies and gave all the tracks a thumbs up except for "Les Boys," which I gave a decisive thumbs down; I'm not sure how this will affect my suggestions algorithm, but it made me very happy to express my opinion in this manner (although if you play the album, the song with the thumbs down is still played-- to construct the album without the "thumbs down" song, I guess I'd have to make a playlist . . . and I might start doing this-- removing a song or two from albums that I think are otherwise perfect and keeping the "Dave" version in my playlists, we've got all this wonderful digital technology, I might as well use it).

I've Got Other Plans . . . Personal Plans

I wish I could be as tight-lipped about my business as Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . . . but part of the fun of taking a personal day-- my first of the year, by the way-- is gloating about the great things you did while everyone else was at work; anyway, the boys played hooky from school, I bought some cheap lift tickets on Liftopia for Jack Frost (when the lift tickets are cheap, the lousy conditions aren't as annoying) and we headed to the Poconos for some early-season skiing and boarding; the conditions were typical-- fast, chunky, and a little dangerous-- but the sun came out in the afternoon and things softened up a bit, and there were only two mishaps:

1) when we packed our equipment last night, I couldn't find Ian's ski boots anywhere . . . and then we surmised that Pelican had never given us his boots, so we had to rush down Route 18 during rush hour to the ski shop and get his boots;

2) today was "college day" at Jack Frost and while the mountain was damn near empty, most of the people who were there were college students and a particularly inexperienced college student, hurtling down the mountain in "pizza pie position" on his rental skis, ran into my son Alex and banged him up  bit . . . but not so much that he couldn't do a few more runs, he was bruised but not broken . . .

and then when we got home, we noticed that the temperature was fifteen degrees warmer than on the mountain, and so Ian and I went out and played some tennis (at our park, you press a button and the lights come on) which makes this some kind of banner day, because I don't think we've ever gone skiing and played tennis (outdoors) in the same day . . . and the next time I take a personal day, I'm going to try to be a better, person, take after John Wayne, and keep it to myself.

You Need Both

When you pick up the skis, make sure you also pick up the boots.

The Whirligig of Time Brings in His Revenges

This Monday morning-- the darkest of all Monday mornings, the Monday morning closest to the winter solstice, the Monday morning when your alarm yanks you from the deep warm womb of sleep, despite the fact that the stars and moon are still lambently effulgent . . . not that I'm making excuses, but I would just like to point out, for the record, that I was certainly groggy-- anyway, this morning I made my usual left turn from Cranbury Road into my school but the traffic was backed up and the officer manning the light shortchanged me on my left arrow time and so I became that person . . . that person that is stuck in the intersection blocking traffic, that idiot, that grid-locker: cars were weaving around me, drivers were giving me hateful stares, there was some beeping and, once I realized I was NOT going to execute the left turn, I had to do some tentative backing up, a lame attempt to get out of the way; once I finally made the turn, I convinced myself that I was not to blame, I rationalized that it was all the traffic officer's fault-- he was asleep at the wheel, not me (and all my sympathies were with him, as it was the darkest Monday of the year) but unfortunately my friend Kevin was behind me at the light and he snapped a picture of my vehicular gaffe and sent it to me, with the terse but accurate caption "Moron" underneath . . . and then he added a deserved addendum: "That's the guy who gives his wife a hard time about filling up the gas tank."

Gas Tank = Toilet Paper Roll

So apparently there are two types of people:

1) people who fill their gas tank as soon as it gets a bit low;

2) people who drive around on fumes as a matter of course;

and I am one of those people who fills their tank as soon as it gets low-- it's bad for the car to drive with very little gas in the tank: you could burn out the fuel pump and you could kick up sediment (and, of course, you could actually run out of gas and have to freeze your ass off walking to the nearest station) but my wife is one of those people who is always driving around on empty (or even below empty) and while that's normally her business (sort of, because her car is the second most expensive item we own, after our house) sometimes it impinges on my life; Friday, we planned on swapping cars so that she could drop the van at the shop, which is right by her school, so they could put on the snow tires-- and my wife would get a ride to school (the shop is less than a mile from her school) and I would drive her car to my place of work; we made this plan last week, and so on Wednesday, I prepared the van for the swap-- I took out all the soccer equipment and stowed it in the shed-- and then I took the snow tires out from the crawl space (always a difficulty for me because you have to crouch down-- I often hit my head-- but I must point out that I did this chore without my wife's assistance) and I rolled the tires from the backyard to the driveway and put them in the back of the van so we were all prepared for the car swap and Friday morning I got up early, got ready for school, spent some time with my wife in the kitchen discussing the consequences of the FCC's rash and partisan decision on the future of net neutrality, and then hopped in the car-- the correct car, my wife's car-- to execute the final portion of the car swap, the actual swapping, but as I was driving out of town, I noticed that the gas meter was below empty . . . and I was running a little late because of our discussion about net neutrality so I didn't have time to stop for gas-- so I got pretty irate, mainly because my wife has a short commute, so she must have been running low on gas all week, but didn't prepare as considerately for the car swap as I had done and also because it's bad for the engine to run on empty, which I know she does-- she's an incorrigble low gas driver-- and also because I almost got stuck in a massive traffic jam, there was a helicopter hovering over Route 1 and the entire road was shut down and some of the overflow traffic was spilling on to Route 18 (and if I had taken Ryders Lane, I certainly would have run out of gas) and so I called home-- this is the danger of cell-phones, everything happens in real time before you have a chance to cool off, and got Ian to put Catherine on the phone and then I expressed my views on leaving someone a car with no gas in it for a car swap and then when I got to school, I did some research and sent a text describing just what could happen to the engine when you drive on empty and then I conducted an impromptu seven hour poll: I asked all my classes and every teacher I encountered if they ever drove on empty, and I'm happy to say that the results were slightly different than I thought: I began with a rather sexist hypothesis that this was a woman thing, and that women didn't understand the mechanics of an engine, but found that the split was fairly even-- wive's complained about their husbands, women admitted that they were risk-takers, men confided that they were on empty right this very moment, a woman whose father was a mechanic brought up the possibility of burning out the fuel pump, some people said they just hate getting gas and want to do it as little as possible, some people wanted to see just how much it cost to fill the entire tank . . . people were vehemently one side or the other-- people who didn't drive on empty thought that it was insane to do so-- that's my camp and my metaphor is toilet paper, there's very few things in life that you can directly gauge-- your gas tank is one of them and the amount of toilet paper left on the roll is another . . . when the roll gets low, you get more rolls of toilet paper and put them in the bathroom, you don't wait until there's one square left-- that's a disaster waiting to happen and it's a situation that's easy enough to assess and remedy . . .anyway, I don't think there's any way to change people on this issue and I'm not going to try (but I will check my wife's car the night before we do a car swap and if it's on empty, I will just go and get gas, and try not to lecture her about fuel pumps and sediment and frost bite).

Farewell, Interlocking Plastic Bricks

Today marked the end of an era, as we packed all the Legos in the basement into two giant green plastic containers and put them in the crawl space under the house-- they provided my kids many good times, were the subject of some absolutely awful home-made stop-motion movies, and nothing could compare to the peace and quiet they provided when the kids got busy with a new set, following those precise pictorial instructions . . . hopefully they will get pulled from beneath the house someday (one of the perks of Legos is they never decay) for a young cousin or grandkid or neighbor . . . or perhaps even a school project-- but until then, farewell interlocking plastic bricks, you provided our house with many productive and creative hours . . . we'd all be general contractors if everything were as easy to assemble as a set of Legos.

7 Books For Reading

I did my work over at Gheorghe: the Blog today: my seven favorite books I read this year.

Smelling Some Smells

Yesterday, in a free moment before my second period class entered the room, I did some stretching (you should properly loosen up your muscles before you teach Philosophy class) and I smelled perfume-- I was standing near the computer and the windows weren't open, so this puzzled me, until I realized I was actually smelling my own smells . . . earlier that morning, while I was rushing around in the bathroom, I used my wife's deodorant instead of my own . . . and apparently her stuff is strong enough to make my underarms smell like roses.

Nice Work Wilkie!

I just finished The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and though it was published in 1868 and the story is told by an extensive epistolary spiral of narrators, the prose is surprisingly straightforward and compelling and plot is surprising and byzantine-- this work is considered the archetypal English detective story and for good reason it's got all the classic tropes: the superb but oddly touched detective (Sergeant Cuff) and the ominous historical overtones (the British colonization of India) and a butler (spoiler: he didn't do it) and a spooky setting (moors and tidal quicksand) . . . but it's also got themes and elements that would fit right into a modern thriller: opioid addiction, Orientalism, secularism (for Gabriel Betteredge, Robinson Crusoe operates as both the I Ching and the Bible) and-- most significantly-- what might be the first instance of a state dependent and context dependent memory encoding and retrieval experiment in literature . . . I won't spoil the how and why of this, but read the novel-- it's excellent and it's free on the Kindle.

Hologram Elvis: Champion of the Impoverished Masses

The perfunctory nature of this blog limits me from doing any real research or deep thinking about the random crap I post, so while I'm just "putting this out there," I think a mind more insightful and better trained in economics could find an interesting causation between the rise of concert ticket prices (and the lucrative world of second market ticket brokers) and America's growing income inequality . . . you can't blame the scalpers for the price increase, second-market ticket brokers are not causing the fact that people will pay insane amounts to see "Hamilton,  they are reacting to an inefficiency in the market: thus, there must be greater demand than supply and the fact of the matter is that there are more people out there with disposable willing to (repeatedly) pay far more for a ticket to a premium event than most people in the bottom sector of the income hierarchy can financially tolerate . . . this may be a grim indicator of something more ominous, the rich depleting other resources to the point where they are unaffordable for the majority of the people, or there may be a technological fix on the horizon (such as the hologram Elvis in Blade Runner 2049).

A Game of Political Chicken

The new episode of This American Life, "Our Town," takes an in depth look at a classic political conundrum:

which came first . . . the low wages at the poultry processing factory or the undocumented workers that the poultry processing plants happily employed?

and the answer is more complicated than anyone-- including Jeff Sessions-- cares to contemplate: a causality that would break Jimmy Hoffa's heart.

Voodoo Lady, Doing That Stuff That You Do . . . Knocking Me Out With Your Voodoo

Today's session at the acupuncturist really concentrated the "puncture" portion of the treatment; I became a pincushion, a human voodoo doll-- representing myself in living effigy-- the needles revealing some unconscious hidden curse that was coursing through my veins . . . until Dana explained that it was just lactic acid.

Anti-natalist Chickens

During the latest episode of Waking Up With Sam Harris, David Benatar discusses his philosophical stance "anti-natalism," and how he believes it is sinful to bring new lives into a world dominated by suffering . . . in essence, he believes that it is better to not be born at all rather than to exist, and that once we exist, we attach a sentimental bias to our existence (unless it is so painful and awful that suicide is the only recourse) and so we go on existing even though not existing would have been better in the first place-- he likens this to attending a movie which is pretty awful, but not so awful that you would walk out, but certainly awful enough that you would have not gone to see it if you knew how bad it was (in my mind this movie is The Accountant, which "stars" Ben Affleck as an autistic action hero number cruncher . . . so dumb, but just barely entertaining enough that we didn't leave) and this is the metaphor for life, it is a movie that you would have chosen not to see if you knew how bad it was going to be, but once you've paid for a ticket, you generally decide to see it through . . . but Benatar believes you should definitely not drag anyone else to see the movie, thus you should not procreate and bring children into this awful world-show . . . I tend to disagree (especially since I just got back from circumnavigating the park in the snow, my dog bounding ahead of me from snow pile to snow pile, which-- despite my plantar fasciitis-- is a big check mark on the pro side of existing in the universe) but I still enjoyed employing the term "anti-natalist" in Philosophy class on Friday, when we were discussing Peter Singer and animal rights . . . more specifically, we were discussing the Douglas Adams bit in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe about the cow that wants to be eaten (and can express this desire eloquently) and the ethics of breeding animals that either desire to be eaten or-- even better-- are decerebrated vegetables with no consciousness at all (or perhaps even growing meat in chemical vats) and this leads to the question of whether being delicious and stupid and plump (and essentially of no nutritional value) is a good thing for chicken-kind or a bad thing for chicken-kind; numerically, the chicken species is doing fantastic-- couldn't be better-- as there are zillions of them, but fitness-wise and experience-wise they are doing atrociously . . . and so I think as far as chickens go, I'm an "anti-natalist," because the life of a modern chicken is so chock full of suffering that it's certainly better to have never been born (hatched?) in the first place rather than to have to endure living in a tiny box with fatty legs that can't support your obese chicken body while you're force-fed a disgusting diet full of hormones so that you grow at an exponential rate into a giant infantile avian ripe for slaughter . . . anyway, that's the word of the day over here: anti-natalism.

Passive Aggressive Punning

Once again, Stacey was repeatedly spritzing her lunch with her bright yellow bottle of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter brand spray butter, and-- once again-- I was complaining about her repeated spraying-- because if there's one thing I can't stand, it's the sound of butter substitute being sprayed . . . and if there's one thing Stacey loves, it's dousing her food with multiple iterations of moist and oily butter substitute (we even had an intervention about this habit on The Test) and while I've resigned myself to the fact that Stacey and I share a lunch period this year and the spray butter fetish is the only truly annoying thing about Stacey and it's also her right, as a red-blooded American citizen, to apply as much butter substitute to her lunch as she pleases and so I'd best just get used to it and live and let live (plus, I tend to chew too loudly and with my mouth agape so who am I to talk?) and so I was quite proud today when-- after four spray butter sequences-- I didn't freak out and rant and rave . . . instead I tried to lighten things up (while still conveying my disgust at the sound of her aqueous condiment) and so I said to her, "Okay, enough butter already . . . let's call it a spray."

Putting It On Wax (Museum)

Over the course of my life, I have  purchased, with sincerity, three audio formats: vinyl records, cassettes, and CDs-- in fact, in 1989 I was so forward thinking that I bought the Cult album Sonic Temple in CD format before I even owned a CD player . . . I sensed the demise of the cassette format and I knew I was going to have to purchase a CD player, so in order to listen to this album, I had to visit other rooms on my freshman dorm and impress these stereo systems in the name of Ian Astbury (and it's a good thing I purchased the album on CD, because there were a few songs-- notably "Wake Up Time For Freedom"-- that were absolutely horrible and the CD format made it easy to skip over them) but, for whatever reason, I never bought any 8-Track cartridges, despite the fact that the gray two door 1985 Buick Skylark I drove during high school had a working 8 Track cassette player . . . instead I bought an 8 Track to compact cassette converter, in order to keep up with the times; I'm not sure what the point of this sentence is, other than I wish I was forward thinking enough to sell all my CDs before that format became defunct, and also how reflecting on these formats allows me to actually understand the hipster mentality of purchasing vinyl albums-- despite the irony and the environmental waste-- because it is nice to have an object associated with something as resonant and emotional and abstract as music . . . I don't think kids today have as much attachment to albums as those of us that grew up before the digital revolution, nor do I think kids wrap their identity so closely with bands and musical artists and this may have something to do with the fact that they haven't had to buy their music in a particular tangible format (or perhaps it's because of Snapchat and YouTube and Facebook, youngsters-- and perhaps all of us-- have become more image based, as opposed to auditory).

The Treachery of Dave

This sentence is not a pipe (nor is it a spoon . . . because there is no spoon).

Dog Lovers Should (Not) Read This

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

The kids and I decided to go cheap and painful this year with my wife's birthday gift: next week, we are going to do all the cooking, cleaning, and dishes so that Catherine can put her feet up and live like a queen while we slave away . . . and this present doubles as a tactically preemptive strike that might deter another two week cooking strike (and while Catherine loved our utilitarian present, our friend Melanie trumped it by sending Cat this fabulous 90's picture of young Dave and Cat about to embark on a bar crawl called Just Hair-Do It).

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).

All Hail Professor Truck

Finally got this song to sound the way I imagined it in my head.

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).

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.

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.”