Dave Becomes Even More Insufferable (Thanks Charles C. Mann!)
I just finished the new Charles C. Mann book The Wizard and the Prophet (including both appendices) and now I'm chock full of facts and leaking whole lot of half-assed opinions; the Wizard is represented by the so-called father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, and the Prophet is symbolized by conservationist and ecologist William Vogt . . . Prophets prophesy doom unless we "cut back! cut back!" and Prophets preach conserving wetlands and open spaces, reducing consumption, utilizing bottom up energy solutions, and basically halting constant economic growth and development, which comes at the cost of the earth's resources; Wizards are the "techno-optimists" and they are sure that we will think our way through all these problems, often with large scale projects-- whether they be to harness wind, sun, and tide, desalinate the oceans, or curb global warming by putting sulfur-dioxide in the air; there's also a lot about wheat in the book, Norman Borlaug painstakingly bred super-wheat in order to feed the starving masses (a fun fact, wheat is incredibly diverse genetically and thus there are infinite variations to breed, while humans are incredibly similar genetically-- chew on that, racists!-- and two humans who look nothing alike are more similar genetically than two chimpanzees from the same troop) and Mann describes this wheat breeding in great detail . . . I definitely skimmed this portion of the book-- it's more intense than the corn section of The Omnivore's Dilemma-- but I'm certain that if you select for extra rubisco, throw in a little Haber-Bosch, then you're feeding the billions . . . but a planet with ten billion humans will not resemble our current conception of earth (although we are rapidly approaching this future as far as biodiversity is concerned, see various posts on The Sixth Extinction) and the Prophets worry that super-wheat will simply exacerbate the population bomb . . . and there's a chance that both the Wizards and the Prophets are wrong and Lynn Margulis is right; Margulis, one of the most prominent researchers in the field of microorganisms, believes our planet is a Petri dish, and like most other species, we will breed and exceed-- we will use up all our resources until calamity strikes . . . there are a few indications that she could be wrong-- but nothing to write home about-- violence is at an all time low, in an exponential sense, and there have been some bottom-up successes in Burkina Faso that indicate that we could reforest the desert, creating a giant carbon sink, reinvigorated soil, and a more humid landscape . . . anyway, the conflict in the book, between the Wizard's desire to create technology "to soar beyond natural constraints" and the Prophets hope that we can learn to live in a "steady state" negotiation with our planet, is going to come to a head in our lifetime and Charles C. Mann does a fantastic job with an even-handed look on how things might change (I also highly recommend his two other noted books, 1491 and 1493, which describe the Americas before and after the Columbian exchange).
Several Surefire Strategies
My wife is in the home stretch of a "Biggest Loser" style weight loss gambling ring with a bunch of other women in town, and she's got a shot to win the cash but final weigh-in is this Friday . . . I've cooked up a couple of strategies for her to bring home the bacon-- check them out:
1) she could do some serious sweating: either put on layers and layers of clothing, turn the heat up, and do some Zumba or she could head over to Island Spa . . . the Korean super-spa down the road (I went for the first time today; it's weird and relaxing and a lot of fun; warning: there's certainly a lot of same-sex nudity in the hot-tub room and you wear odd cultish brown uniforms, but the massage was great--if painful-- and they've got all these little themed sweat lodges with temperatures ranging from 122 F to 160 F, perfect for sweating off a bunch of pounds) but
2) if she really wants it, there's one certain path to victory: earlier in the week, Alex had a killer stomach virus which gave him the shits for four days-- he couldn't eat a thing-- so if she licks his toothbrush, she's golden.
1) she could do some serious sweating: either put on layers and layers of clothing, turn the heat up, and do some Zumba or she could head over to Island Spa . . . the Korean super-spa down the road (I went for the first time today; it's weird and relaxing and a lot of fun; warning: there's certainly a lot of same-sex nudity in the hot-tub room and you wear odd cultish brown uniforms, but the massage was great--if painful-- and they've got all these little themed sweat lodges with temperatures ranging from 122 F to 160 F, perfect for sweating off a bunch of pounds) but
2) if she really wants it, there's one certain path to victory: earlier in the week, Alex had a killer stomach virus which gave him the shits for four days-- he couldn't eat a thing-- so if she licks his toothbrush, she's golden.
Tigger Dad (Tigger is Scottish, Right?)
If you want some ideas on how to get your son to excel in academics, read the first couple chapters of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography.
One More Sad Tale
Yesterday when my wife got home from the grocery store, she saw Ian in the kitchen and asked him where I was and he said, "Dad is out walking the dog" and when she came back in with the next load of groceries, Ian was bawling because for a moment he had forgotten that the dog was dead and gone and then reality hit him like a ton of bricks.
Falling to Pieces (Central Jersey Style)
I feel like I'm living in some tri-state, upper-middle class version of a country song: yesterday we put the dog down; while I was digging his grave in the backyard, I ran into some drainage pipes and an old slate patio-- making the excavation far more difficult than I imagined; my oldest son has had the shits for three days, my youngest son can barely walk (due to a Sunday afternoon soccer collision) and while I was rushing home from work today to check on my sick son and then drive him to the orthodontist (despite his stomach ailment) I got a text from a colleague that read: "Did you leave? We have a meeting and you are presenting."
And Thus the Whirligig of Time Brings in His Revenges (Upon Dave and Many Many Others)
I got my just desserts for stripping the joy from NCAA gambling bracketology-- a couple of days ago, I decided filling out brackets for a NCAA tournament pool is akin to a very very slow lottery drawing-- but that's not entirely true, because if you had Virginia to win it all (as I did in one of my brackets . . . thanks Rob) then the tournament just became a very very fast lottery drawing . . . and, as expected, you lost (did anyone pick UMBC?)
My Wife is No Mantis Shrimp (or is she?)
The mantis shrimp has the most sophisticated visual system in the animal kingdom-- they have from 12 to 16 different kinds of rods and cones (dogs have two kinds of photoreceptors and we have a measly three) but paradoxically, they are absolutely awful at differentiating between colors . . . I'm not even going to attempt to explain why, other than to point out that it might have something to do with communication between mantis shrimp . . . very specific colors might mean things to them but the shades in between certainly do not . . . you can read this or listen to the new Radiolab to get the some of the details (scientific investigation is still underway on the root cause of this contradiction) but I will offer an analogy: while my wife is much better than me at seeing, perceiving, and visually assessing nearly everything in the real and/or aesthetic universe, she did think the shirt I was wearing this morning was green (when it was clearly blue) so I sent her a picture to clear things up.
A March Metaphor
The lottery has been often labeled a "tax on dumb people" and while picking brackets for the NCAA tournament is akin to this kind of gambling, the very important difference is that it's a very very slow lottery drawing . . . it's as if they did one of those old-fashioned ping-pong ball style drawings over the course of two weeks instead of two minutes, so that you have to time to develop all kinds of emotions and feelings about the balls drawn and the numbers on them, your mental state experiencing ups and downs, highs and lows, before you are (almost inevitably) eliminated along with everyone else.
What About Dad?
When I catch kids using cell-phones in class, why are they always texting their mother?
March Sadness
My dog-- ailing from Lymes-- still likes to walk, but he no longer wants to kill cats.
Talking to Women is Damn Near Impossible (for Dave)
Last night during dinner preparation, I noticed something out of the ordinary: my wife was listening to some decent music (Andrew Bird) and she had consciously selected this music, so I wanted to compliment her on her choice, but apparently when you compliment someone, not only is the sentiment itself important but you also have to watch your tone . . . she decided there was some sarcasm in my amazement at her great leap forward in musical taste, but when I vociferously insisted that this was not the case, she still thought the compliment was backhanded-- she inverted the statement and considered it a general condemnation of all the other music she listens to (and while she may have been right in this assumption, I readily admit I'm not crafty enough to couch my true intentions with lies and deception) and so then I tried to ameliorate the situation by discussing this nifty chart correlating SAT scores and musical predilection . . . on Google Play Music, if you play Andrew Bird, then the #1 suggestion is Sufjan Stevens, who is associated with high SAT scores . . . I think this tangential internet foray may have blunted the impact of my failed compliment, but the moral here is when you're talking to women about music, you have to watch your step.
Why? Why Why Why Why Why?
Insert Daylight Saving Time rant here (and also, I really hate these people, who obviously don't have a clue about the most important and-- in modern times-- the most neglected element on Maslow's hierarchy: sleep).
Once You Get In, You Never Get Out
Canceling a gym membership is like trying to retire from the mafia.
Sometimes You Eat the Toe, and Sometimes the Toe Eats You
While The Big Leboswki is hands down my favorite movie, I still don't pretend to understand the plot . . . like Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, the joy of the story is within the strands . . . the ins, the outs, the complicated what-have-you's and the new shit that eventually comes to light . . . but one thing I thought I knew was that Bunny Lebowski had all ten of her toes . . . until I watched the movie with my kids on Wednesday night; when Bunny drives by in her red convertible and you realize she has definitely not been abducted by nihilists, the camera pans across her feet and I always assumed it was to show all ten of her toes-- and that's because you later learn that the nihilist played by musician Aimee Mann has given her toe to abet the ransom scheme-- but Ian noticed that in the red convertible scene, Bunny's little toe on her right foot appears to be missing-- and if you review the clip, it's really hard to tell, it's a very ambiguous little toe-- and while there is a Reddit strand on this topic, it provides no definite answers . . . so it's time to draw a line in the sand and unravel the truth: is Bunny missing a toe?
Preparing For St. Patrick's Day (and the End of the Anthropocene)
1) there is no inflatable floor, so it's not even a bouncy inflatable Irish pub . . . if it were bouncy, you could get some exercise, mosh to The Pogues, perhaps "inadvertently" bounce into that special lass or lad you've had your eye on . . . but nope, this is just a shed made of polymers, similar to the one in my backyard, which I never try to foist off as an Irish pub;
2) there's an inflatable fireplace inside, which is patently stupid because
a) it obviously can't hold a real fire;
b) no one wants to look at a fake fireplace while they're sweating their ass off in an unventilated polyethylene kiln;
4) there are no inflatable leprechauns inside this pub, and while I don't expect leprechauns in a real Irish pub (I am 48 years old) there's absolutely no reason not to have a few blow-up leprechauns in this inflatable abortion, leprechauns you could toss around, punt into the rafters, pretend to hump . . . whatever, in order to differentiate this product from a big plastic lawn tent, which is all it is . . . and so I've decided NOT to attend any parties that host one of these contraptions, in a quixotic (and probably misguided) attempt to take a stand for something, anything, in this absurd economy of ours, and I hope you will do the same.
The Machine Is Not Green
Green activist Paul Kingsnorth has given up, and he explains why in his rather grim, beautifully written, and occasionally cabalistic collection Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays . . . this is a heavy read, bordering on a manifesto, and Kingsnorth does not see a traditionally Green future for our planet; he has no regard for the techno-optimists, who very well might solve the major human environmental problems in our future-- climate change and floods and famines and disasters and feeding the burgeoning population-- but he sees very little hope for the things that used to matter to traditional conservationists: biodiversity and wild places and an appreciation for ecology . . . he doesn't even think education is the answer; many people know the facts and most of those people would still rather escape into sleek digitized worlds of their own creation . . . he does have a few lists of what you can do, if you don't want to jump on the techno-optimism bandwagon, if you feel like you are living inside a giant machine, a machine built to drain your data and your bank account; a machine built to convince you to consume more than you need; a machine that persuades you to spend time in front of screens for more and more hours of the day; a machine that throws off your circadian rhythms, creates endless desires and constant jealousies, makes you care about things that you wouldn't ordinarily care about and makes you lose sight of what is important in life, a machine that keeps you from getting outdoors and enjoying what is left of the natural world . . . here are some things you can do:
1) withdraw . . . withdraw as a moral position and refuse to help the machine advance, withdraw "to examine your worldview"
2) preserve non-human life, in any local way shape or method you can
3) get your hands dirty and do some physical work
4) insist that nature has value beyond utility, beyond aiding and assisting the economic growth of mankind . . . and tell everyone this
5) build refuges from the oncoming storm;
and then at the end of the book he has eight principles of "uncivilisation" . . . here is a summary:
1) face the oncoming ecological unravelling with honesty and learn how to live within it
2) reject the paradigm of "problems" and solutions
3) change the modern story of progress we have been telling ourselves, because that has separated us from nature
4) make storytelling more than entertainment
5) recognize that humans are not the point of the planet
6) celebrate art and writing that is grounded in place and time, and not symbolic of the "cosmopolitan citadel"
7) no theories and ideologies, write with dirt under your fingernails
8) "the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop"
p.s. moments after I finished this post, the snowstorm disconnected our house from the machine and we spent an hour in darkness, contemplating "uncivilisation," which means my writing possesses miraculous powers (while I'm probably not the God, I'm certainly a god).
1) withdraw . . . withdraw as a moral position and refuse to help the machine advance, withdraw "to examine your worldview"
2) preserve non-human life, in any local way shape or method you can
3) get your hands dirty and do some physical work
4) insist that nature has value beyond utility, beyond aiding and assisting the economic growth of mankind . . . and tell everyone this
5) build refuges from the oncoming storm;
and then at the end of the book he has eight principles of "uncivilisation" . . . here is a summary:
1) face the oncoming ecological unravelling with honesty and learn how to live within it
2) reject the paradigm of "problems" and solutions
3) change the modern story of progress we have been telling ourselves, because that has separated us from nature
4) make storytelling more than entertainment
5) recognize that humans are not the point of the planet
6) celebrate art and writing that is grounded in place and time, and not symbolic of the "cosmopolitan citadel"
7) no theories and ideologies, write with dirt under your fingernails
8) "the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop"
p.s. moments after I finished this post, the snowstorm disconnected our house from the machine and we spent an hour in darkness, contemplating "uncivilisation," which means my writing possesses miraculous powers (while I'm probably not the God, I'm certainly a god).
Twelve Fourteen Split
Alex turned 14 last week, while his younger brother is still 12 (they are 14 months apart) and we saw the age gap in action this weekend: Alex went to an afternoon party at a girl's house-- and before he left he fixed the back of his hair so it wasn't all messy, on the advice of his friend's girlfriend; meanwhile, Ian went to his friend's house to play "Nerf" with some guys, a game of warfare, ever-changing rules, and the shooting of enemy combatants with Nerf bullets (and Ian was annoyed that Alex did not attend and instead chose to spend his time at a party with girls).
Is This Normal Small Town Stuff?
Does every town have a crazy white-haired lady with two little white dogs that yells "SLOW DOWN!" when you're driving 27 miles-per-hour in a 25 miles-per-hour zone and-- God forbid-- if you make a rolling stop at a stop sign (because you're creeping up so you can see around the parked cars) then this lady might walk into the middle of the road, creating a barricade because she is flanked by her two little white dogs, and then she might slowly, menacingly stomp toward your car, screaming vehicular epithets and instructions, while your son (who is the front seat) laughs at her?
A Couple of Books That the Unabomber Would Enjoy
Jonathan Moore's The Night Market is a sci-fi crime thriller that blends the byzantine plotting and tone of Raymond Chandler with some William Gibson/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type near future technology, and there's also plenty of Philip K. Dick-style paranoia (which is fully deserved) but the real impact of this post-noir San Francisco crime drama is that it is all too real-- the city is a burned out husk, as are most of the people who walk through it, because rampant consumption and a sinister form of advertisement has invaded the consciousness of the city and its inhabitants . . . the conspiracy is far-reaching and just and shallow and greedy as it should be . . . this is a book about giving up and giving in: the apocalypse is here and we are living in it-- and the fact that there is not much difference between the San Francisco in the novel and the world right now is beyond frightening . . . I was already primed for this novel because I've been reading Paul Kingsnorth's new collection of essays, Collections of a Recovering Environmentalist, in which he announces the death of the conservation movement and the promulgation of a new form of neo-liberal economic environmentalism, concerned with carbon sinks, global warming, eco-tourism, and market-based technological solutions for ecological problems, which is in contrast to the old school Green movement, which found intrinsic and sacred value in the beauty of biodiversity and wild landscapes, and celebrated the primal human attachment for natural spaces and places free of human subjugation . . . Moore's The Night Market is the end result of this shift towards data-driven market-based solutions, there is complete consumerism, complete consumption, and a world completely dictated by brands, corporations, markets, and the desire to replace the things that are important with things.
Poetry Birthday Week!
Yesterday, we went to happy hour at the Golden Lion in Milltown to celebrate my birthday and the gang from work gave me some lovely presents, including a laminated original poem in my honor which contains all my favorite allusions . . . I have hyperlinked them for your perusal:
All who know you, know you've got grit,
you always try your best to stay fit;
you teach your students with cunning and wit,
even Brady admits that your podcast is lit;
and even though you're hairy as shit
some might say you look like a homeless Brad Pitt--
so when you're old and grumbling about the difference between lie and lay
just comfort yourself with the butter you spray!
and they also presented me with my very own bottle of spray butter and a framed photo of faceswap Dave and Stacey where we look like Brad Pitt . . . the best gift was going to the Golden Lion in Milltown for the first time-- it's quite the dive, and has darts, two full sized shuffleboard tables, a nice back room pool table, and fantastic wings . . . I also learned an interesting piece of information: I knew the wings at the Golden Lion were fantastic because years ago, a regular used to bring them to the Park Pub all the time and we would feast on them-- I said as much to the bartender at the Golden Lion and she said, "Yeah, he was stealing those wings . . . that's why he got fired" and then she gave me a high five because I had eaten so many of those stolen wings; anyway, I'd like to thank all that attended, I had a great time and obviously left with my wife at the right moment: I was happily lubricated but not sloshed, and so Alex, Cat and I watched Fargo and went to bed early . . . meanwhile, the ladies closed the place (and we got there at 3 PM) but I guess once you turn 48, if you haven't learned something about alcohol consumption, then you're in serious trouble (the other thing I learned is the worst place to keep a valuable jewel is on a drunk woman's finger . . . why is that a thing?)
All who know you, know you've got grit,
you always try your best to stay fit;
you teach your students with cunning and wit,
even Brady admits that your podcast is lit;
and even though you're hairy as shit
some might say you look like a homeless Brad Pitt--
so when you're old and grumbling about the difference between lie and lay
just comfort yourself with the butter you spray!
and they also presented me with my very own bottle of spray butter and a framed photo of faceswap Dave and Stacey where we look like Brad Pitt . . . the best gift was going to the Golden Lion in Milltown for the first time-- it's quite the dive, and has darts, two full sized shuffleboard tables, a nice back room pool table, and fantastic wings . . . I also learned an interesting piece of information: I knew the wings at the Golden Lion were fantastic because years ago, a regular used to bring them to the Park Pub all the time and we would feast on them-- I said as much to the bartender at the Golden Lion and she said, "Yeah, he was stealing those wings . . . that's why he got fired" and then she gave me a high five because I had eaten so many of those stolen wings; anyway, I'd like to thank all that attended, I had a great time and obviously left with my wife at the right moment: I was happily lubricated but not sloshed, and so Alex, Cat and I watched Fargo and went to bed early . . . meanwhile, the ladies closed the place (and we got there at 3 PM) but I guess once you turn 48, if you haven't learned something about alcohol consumption, then you're in serious trouble (the other thing I learned is the worst place to keep a valuable jewel is on a drunk woman's finger . . . why is that a thing?)
Dave and Dr. Seuss Pontificate on the Meaning of Shared Birthdays (in a Universe That May be Experiencing the Nietzschean Eternal Return)
Me and the Seuss,
we share the same date:
coincidence . . .
or an act of fate?
I tend to lean
towards the stochastic
but perhaps our world
is finitely elastic,
so we run the same path
after every big bang
and the Doctor and I
share our groove thang.
we share the same date:
coincidence . . .
or an act of fate?
I tend to lean
towards the stochastic
but perhaps our world
is finitely elastic,
so we run the same path
after every big bang
and the Doctor and I
share our groove thang.
Sirius Gives Alex a Birthday Gift
Rollercoaster week for the dog: Monday we had "the talk" with the kids, as Sirius's health appeared to be headed downhill-- he had a couple urination incidents in the house (which never happened before . . . what a dog!) and he was totally lethargic and miserable; after we discussed the reality of his situation, Ian curled into a ball and cried, then he went upstairs to take a nap, I cried when I tried to console him, Catherine cried and hugged me and told me that we'd never have another dog like him (she's had a lot of dogs) and I had a couple of sleepless nights trying to figure out when to put him down (I was hoping he would make it through the week, because today is Alex's birthday and tomorrow is my birthday . . . that's no present) but Sirius must have heard us planning to shuffle him off his mortal coil and decided he'd rather be than not be, because yesterday he started wagging his tail, he greeted me like normal when I got home from work, and he actually ate some dog food, today he properly pooped and actually jumped up when I was getting ready to walk him-- his usual behavior-- and then he wouldn't let me bring him home-- he just wanted to keep walking around the park . . . the vet said that some of these medicines might take a while to work, so we are now cautiously optimistic that something good is happening inside his body and perhaps the kidney infection is abating . . . but at the very least he's not going to head into that undiscovered country on my son's birthday (or mine, I hope).
Fake Weather!
The sentence is cancelled today because of absurdly unseasonable weather . . . I'll get back to you when it's forty degrees and raining.
Sketchy Restaurant Review
This Kids in the Hall skit sums up our experience at Flavors of Manila, a Filipino restaurant Catherine and I went to Saturday night while our kids were playing tennis.
In This Instance, Content Defeats Style
I'm always chastising my wife for beginning her stories with expository topic sentences:
the funniest thing happened!
you won't believe how annoying!
as these kinds of statements not only destroy the drama of the narrative, but they also set up the audience to be in a contradictory position-- we'll see just how funny this thing is . . . so when the boys and I walked in yesterday and she said, "I saw the craziest thing!" I was not only skeptical, but also annoyed at her anecdotal style, but for once the story actually lived up to the opening; the rain finally let up and so Catherine took the dog for a walk in the park, along the river, and she saw a giant tree floating downstream-- the Raritan is tidal by our house, so sometimes-- when the tide is coming in-- the current runs upstream towards New Brunswick, but most of the time it runs downstream towards Perth Amboy and the Raritan Bay, which leads into the Atlantic Ocean; when she took a good look at this giant floating tree, she noticed a seal perched upon the trunk, a seal which apparently got swept up in the storm current and ended up far from the ocean and was now wisely hitching a ride on a makeshift deciduous raft back to its home, unfortunately she did not have her phone and so there's no proof of this bizarre happening, but I believe her because it's too weird a thing to invent.
the funniest thing happened!
you won't believe how annoying!
as these kinds of statements not only destroy the drama of the narrative, but they also set up the audience to be in a contradictory position-- we'll see just how funny this thing is . . . so when the boys and I walked in yesterday and she said, "I saw the craziest thing!" I was not only skeptical, but also annoyed at her anecdotal style, but for once the story actually lived up to the opening; the rain finally let up and so Catherine took the dog for a walk in the park, along the river, and she saw a giant tree floating downstream-- the Raritan is tidal by our house, so sometimes-- when the tide is coming in-- the current runs upstream towards New Brunswick, but most of the time it runs downstream towards Perth Amboy and the Raritan Bay, which leads into the Atlantic Ocean; when she took a good look at this giant floating tree, she noticed a seal perched upon the trunk, a seal which apparently got swept up in the storm current and ended up far from the ocean and was now wisely hitching a ride on a makeshift deciduous raft back to its home, unfortunately she did not have her phone and so there's no proof of this bizarre happening, but I believe her because it's too weird a thing to invent.
Mozart Would Love This Shit
I don't like scatological humor but I do feel obligated to take note of the incidents that happened today at lunch; we went to Shanghai Dumpling House, despite the fact that it's impossible to get a table there on a Sunday, and we lucked out-- we were only fifteen minutes early but it was raining and there were a few noobs hanging around that didn't realize that you could go inside before the place opened and a get a handwritten number scrawled on a scrap of paper, as a "reservation," and so Alex went in and got #9, and he counted the tables and thought we might get seated in the first round, depending on the breaks, and we did-- we got the last table, the weird one to the right of the door, by the drink cooler; this table is pretty much inside the kitchen and you can see the old ladies rapidly making dumplings as you eat; Catherine came with us and she was perplexed and amused by the reservation system and the complete insanity surrounding the restaurant as we ate-- the place was packed, there was a big line, and people were jammed everywhere; we ate a lot of food: various dumplings, spicy pork noodle soup, soup dumplings and some kind of sliced beef wrapped in a scallion pancake with plum sauce and Ian was trying to finish off the last steamed juicy bun but he took a bite and then flipped the dumpling the wrong way and the pork meatball fell out, bounced off his plate, and rolled onto the floor . . . and that's when the silliness began; Catherine started singing the "on top of spaghetti" song about the itinerant meatball, Ian joined in, Alex expressed complete embarrassment and said, "Can you guys stop? I'd like to come back here, it's my favorite place" and then Ian saw where the meatball landed, under the table, and said it looked like a "little poop," and so I ushered everyone out-- as I'd like to return as well-- and Ian looked up the lyrics to the meatball song on his phone and sang it in the car-- which really impressed Catherine because she thought he was doing it from memory (she was driving) and then Alex and Ian recounted their "ten favorite poops," including Taco Bell poop, liquid poop, sharty poop, and ten pound elephant poop . . . and then Catherine added seepage poop and we finally arrived home and I was able to get away from the scatological humor, which is more appropriate for Mozart and the Germans, who both find that kind of filth funny.
Last Gun Thoughts: Grandfather Some Shit
They say sunlight is the best antiseptic and this gun control issue is certainly getting some sunlight; this morning a bunch of dudes of various ages, ethnicities, races and political persuasions in the LA Fitness locker room were discussing guns, so I offered my two cents; I think most were reacting to the news that several armed deputies and guards did not enter the school while the Parkland shooting was underway, and instead hid behind their vehicles with weapons drawn . . . while anecdotal, this is does point to broader statistics that show that "good guys with guns" don't usually have an impact on an active shooter situation, even if they've been trained; these guys that didn't enter the building weren't cowards, they were typical . . . so here are my last thoughts on this issue, my friend Paul thought one of them is brilliant (though we had been drinking when i came up with it)
1) grandfather some shit in . . . tell the gun-owners who have lots of semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 that they have proven responsible and they can keep them; most of these folks are mega-gun owners, who live the gun lifestyle and firmly believe that civilians need military grade weapons to fight the government if it becomes too tyrannical . . . 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns and were just going to have to assume these super-owners are doing a good job with it and we have to divide them from the general populace while the time is ripe; start NOW with semi-automatic laws for new gun purchases . . . the next shooter does NOT necessarily have his gun already, as Parkland vividly proves, so concede the guns to the older owners and start fresh with these younger owners;
2) then, as these gun-collector/nut/super-owners age and die, the government can institute and Australian style buy-back program;
3) don't forget that conservatives can change their minds about things . . . at the start of the millenium, conservatives were all hot and bothered by gay marriage . . . I can remember some relatively intelligent conservative friends of mine using the slippery slope argument about this "abomination" and positing that if you could marry someone of the same sex, then "you could marry anything . . . you could marry a hat!" and this "marry a hat!" attitude was the typical conservative reaction to the suggestion of gay marriage, and then it was like they all collectively shrugged their shoulders and said, "Whatever . . . it's the 2010's . . . gay marriage is fine," and this seems to be the time to change things with gun control laws, even if it's just a start;
4) military gun ownership needs to be grandfathered and stigmatized, like smoking . . . you might let your grandfather smoke in your car, but once he dies of emphysema, that's it for people smoking your car-- when I was in high school, there was a smoking patio-- Patio C-- but we've now collectively decided that's ridiculous and if high school kids want to smoke, they have to do it just off the grounds; high school kids still smoke, but far far fewer and we don't let them do it on school grounds and we've raised the age when they can purchase cigarettes;
5) it will take a long time to change this culture, but eventually maybe some youngsters from this culture will take up other target sports, like darts and cornhole, to replace the void of the gun lifestyle.
1) grandfather some shit in . . . tell the gun-owners who have lots of semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 that they have proven responsible and they can keep them; most of these folks are mega-gun owners, who live the gun lifestyle and firmly believe that civilians need military grade weapons to fight the government if it becomes too tyrannical . . . 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns and were just going to have to assume these super-owners are doing a good job with it and we have to divide them from the general populace while the time is ripe; start NOW with semi-automatic laws for new gun purchases . . . the next shooter does NOT necessarily have his gun already, as Parkland vividly proves, so concede the guns to the older owners and start fresh with these younger owners;
2) then, as these gun-collector/nut/super-owners age and die, the government can institute and Australian style buy-back program;
3) don't forget that conservatives can change their minds about things . . . at the start of the millenium, conservatives were all hot and bothered by gay marriage . . . I can remember some relatively intelligent conservative friends of mine using the slippery slope argument about this "abomination" and positing that if you could marry someone of the same sex, then "you could marry anything . . . you could marry a hat!" and this "marry a hat!" attitude was the typical conservative reaction to the suggestion of gay marriage, and then it was like they all collectively shrugged their shoulders and said, "Whatever . . . it's the 2010's . . . gay marriage is fine," and this seems to be the time to change things with gun control laws, even if it's just a start;
4) military gun ownership needs to be grandfathered and stigmatized, like smoking . . . you might let your grandfather smoke in your car, but once he dies of emphysema, that's it for people smoking your car-- when I was in high school, there was a smoking patio-- Patio C-- but we've now collectively decided that's ridiculous and if high school kids want to smoke, they have to do it just off the grounds; high school kids still smoke, but far far fewer and we don't let them do it on school grounds and we've raised the age when they can purchase cigarettes;
5) it will take a long time to change this culture, but eventually maybe some youngsters from this culture will take up other target sports, like darts and cornhole, to replace the void of the gun lifestyle.
THREE! TWO! ONE! CLANG!
There's been a lot of discussion around my school about Trump's proposal to arm teachers so they can prevent classroom massacres and everyone I know with any kind of brain thinks this is a lunatic proposition; for those who don't think that, I have a metaphor that might explain why this gun-lover's fantasy is so preposterous . . . at every basketball practice, at least once a session, there's a kid who counts down THREE! TWO! ONE! and chucks a half-court shot at the rim; he's imagining the ultimate scenario, of course-- his team is down by two points with .6 seconds left in regulation and he hurls a shot from sixty feet and swishes it, winning the game; while this is a compelling fantasy, in reality the shot inevitably hits someone in the head; ruins the transition from one drill to the next; and sets everyone else off their game . . . while this scenario does occasionally happen in an actual game, it is very very rare, and not something that necessarily warrants practice, and the collateral damage when a kid does this at practice is usually fairly ugly, so coaches discourage it; of course, I empathize with the kids, it's fun to pretend . . . but I don't empathize with adults who indulge in such fantasies: they obviously imagine some perfectly romanticized school shooter scenario where they spot a mad gunman in the distance, lining up innocent school girls in his sights, and this shooter doesn't notice the heroic marksman, the good guy with a concealed weapon, who takes careful aim with his well-maintained, carefully oiled piece, calmly fires, and drops the shooter in his tracks . . . THREE! TWO! ONE! . . . just before the shooter does any damage; I'm not sure if this scenario has ever happened, but I do know for certain that the more guns are the present, the more deaths happen, whether by suicide, accident, or collateral damage, and the chance that even an armed and trained person would come the the rescue is pretty slim . . . so let's leave the fantasizing to the children and recognize that the answer to gun violence is not more guns; there are good people and there are bad people, and-- as Neil Postman reminds us: there are good technologies and bad technologies . . . it took a while to recognize cigarettes as a bad technology, and as much as the 2nd Amendment folks hate to hear it, it's time to admit that guns are not a technology to embrace and worship either
They Can't Remain Innocent Forever
Tonight my wife decided the kids were old enough to know the truth . . . she explained to them that the much anticipated and celebrated "your choice night" is just a euphemism for leftovers.
Cheers to Tennis (in February)
I am drinking some celebratory beer tonight for several reasons:
1) we got through a carnival of a workshop day in school . . . there were twenty teachers from area schools, various administrators and the associate director of the Rutgers Writing Program, all present to watch me and my colleagues teach the Rutgers Writing course; things went off without a hitch, partly thanks to our excellent and competent department chair and my wonderful teammates Brady and Strachan but mainly due to my charm and good-looks . . . a dozen adults sat in one of my classes and then one of my students endured an essay conference with ten random people watching; it was a wild and busy day made more interesting by the threat of a student walk-out and the news vans and helicopter hovering on the periphery of our school because our township decided to put armed police in every building, fueling a media frenzy (I should also note that on Monday-- President's Day-- after playing some tennis with the kids at my school, as I was driving across the empty parking lot . . . as it was a day off from school, a beautiful blonde woman flagged down my van, and so-- being a male-- I stopped to investigate and found that she was just as pretty I surmised, and that's when I noticed the CBS jacket and the microphone . . . I declined to make an official comment but I did chat with her for a while, just to look at her thick lustrous hair, pearly white teeth, and TV quality facial symmetry, I think her name is Natalie Duddridge)
2) despite some grim blood test results, our dog is still eating, walking about, and wagging his tail;
3) though my foot hurts, I taped it up and was able to compete a bit, but the beer might alleviate some of the pain;
4) I'm pretty sure my kids and I played the most outdoor tennis by a central Jersey family in February ever, in the history of planet . . . I played with my buddy Cob after school, Alex played his buddy Liam, then Alex played my brother, then I went out and hit with Ian under the lights, despite the fact that my foot hurt, because I know we won't get this chance again anytime soon.
1) we got through a carnival of a workshop day in school . . . there were twenty teachers from area schools, various administrators and the associate director of the Rutgers Writing Program, all present to watch me and my colleagues teach the Rutgers Writing course; things went off without a hitch, partly thanks to our excellent and competent department chair and my wonderful teammates Brady and Strachan but mainly due to my charm and good-looks . . . a dozen adults sat in one of my classes and then one of my students endured an essay conference with ten random people watching; it was a wild and busy day made more interesting by the threat of a student walk-out and the news vans and helicopter hovering on the periphery of our school because our township decided to put armed police in every building, fueling a media frenzy (I should also note that on Monday-- President's Day-- after playing some tennis with the kids at my school, as I was driving across the empty parking lot . . . as it was a day off from school, a beautiful blonde woman flagged down my van, and so-- being a male-- I stopped to investigate and found that she was just as pretty I surmised, and that's when I noticed the CBS jacket and the microphone . . . I declined to make an official comment but I did chat with her for a while, just to look at her thick lustrous hair, pearly white teeth, and TV quality facial symmetry, I think her name is Natalie Duddridge)
2) despite some grim blood test results, our dog is still eating, walking about, and wagging his tail;
3) though my foot hurts, I taped it up and was able to compete a bit, but the beer might alleviate some of the pain;
4) I'm pretty sure my kids and I played the most outdoor tennis by a central Jersey family in February ever, in the history of planet . . . I played with my buddy Cob after school, Alex played his buddy Liam, then Alex played my brother, then I went out and hit with Ian under the lights, despite the fact that my foot hurt, because I know we won't get this chance again anytime soon.
Somebody Thought of That? Dammit . . .
Today in Creative Writing class, we were extra-creative and came up with a pitch-perfect name for a bluegrass Bon Jovi cover band: Banjovi . . . but the downside of internet access is that it often makes you realize that you're not as creative as you think.
If You Want Blood (You Got It)
Some irate Parkland students addressed President Trump on "Face the Nation" and made an impassioned plea for him to do something about gun control-- one student was very clear on Trump's passing the buck on this issue . . . he said to Trump: "You sicken me"; the message is clear, Republicans have the blood of our children on their hands, and anyone who has voted Republican has the blood of our children on their hands, and all the politicians that have taken money from the NRA or allowed NRA lobbyists to exert control over the nation's gun laws have blood on their hands and so does the NRA and the gun sellers and the gun makers and the people who think that it's a right to buy assault weapons and the whole crazy gun-toting gun-caching lot of them . . . but of course the Republicans will argue that the Democrats have blood on their hands as well, fetal blood, because the Democrats support abortion and mass infanticide and then-- if you want to get bipartisan, there are the meat-eaters, which have animal blood all over their whiskers-- I wish I wasn't one of those folks, but I am . . . the meat industry has got its hooks in me deep-- and if you didn't vote Green, then your hands are coated with endangered species blood, panda blood and yeti blood and ocelot blood . . . and God forbid you voted for or supported or fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then just wading through blood, but if you didn't do anything in Syria and let ISIS take over . . . or just sent drones to do your dirty work, well then your drones are covered in blood, so even Obama isn't unassailable . . . and if you do eschew meat and walk to work and vote Green, you're still probably buying clothes made in a country that has no child labor laws or environmental codes and your phone runs on rare earths torn from the belly of our rapidly-being-raped planet, so your cell-phone is covered with rich oxygenated Earth-blood . . . we're all stained like Lady MacBeth and it's a bloody mess out there.
Dave Drops a Grotowski
Years ago-- for about thirty seconds-- I contemplated writing a book about the rise of the amateur . . . I was stupefied with the sheer mass of amateurism online: Soundcloud and Youtube and Ebay and all the online photography and blogging and art and animation and how to videos and Pinterest-type sites . . . and then the idea passed, but I was pleasantly surprised when I was browsing through the new non-fiction section at the library to see a book entitled The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield; I always try to bring a couple of books home from the library that I did not intend to take out, as a way to fight the algorithmically-curated society in which we live, and while I rarely finished these, I read this one cover-to-cover; Merrifield is a socialist and the book is something of a manifesto . . . he sees modern life as a battle between a professional data-driven technocracy designed to make you a passive consumer-- if you've got the cash and/or credit-- and the possibility of amateurism . . . literally doing what you love; in his mind the bean-counters are winning, government has been captured by big business; public spaces have been sanitized; and the bottom-up, emergent nature of cities and towns has been eradicated (although he sees hope in countries like Greece, where things have fallen over the edge and anarchists and radicals occupy public/private spaces, similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement) and the main value and purpose of many people is their job, their career, even if it is meaningless, because we are identified by what we do professionally-- that is how we achieve our status (and our health insurance, in America) and Merrifield, slightly impractically, speaks of the happily unemployed and a new way to live; he seems to think there is no refuge for the amateur in any profession-- even in academia you must publish and publish, and the more you are cited, the more you succeed . . . I would beg to differ, being the ultimate amatuer, a high school teacher: I happily teach a course in Philosophy, of which I know nothing about, and a course in Shakespeare, though I'm an awful actor, and now I'm an amateur Rutgers Professor as well-- but I digress (so does Merrifield, personal anecdotes are scattered through the book) and so I'll get back to the review; Merrifield calls on his favorite books to help his case, as many of them are my favorites: Dostoevsky and his Underground Man, Laurence Sterne and Uncle Toby's Hobby Horse, Kafka's Trial and Castle . . . and this reminded me that I used to read much more radically, and lately I've been consuming a lot of economic stuff, trying to understand what the hell is going on when there is perhaps no way in to the bureaucratic technocracy and it's better to work at the micro-level, as Merrifield proposes, and that we all become political animals in whatever way we can, and influence whatever micro-milieu we can influence; I hope Merrifield reads this, as I think he'd be proud of my amateur spirit; I've stopped watching sports and now only play and coach them, and I've resisted the club/professional training route in youth sports, the "next level" so many parents are eager to achieve-- instead I'm coaching the kids in town, and I'm coaching them really well because I'm an amateur, not a professional, because I love it . . . nothing has made me prouder than the fact that my kids are competing with year-round tennis kids on Saturdays at the local racquet club, not because they're decent players-- which they are-- but because my brother and I taught them everything they know about tennis . . . they'd certainly be better if they took year-round lessons from professionals, but that would be costly and also ridiculous; I'm also making my own music and my own podcast, writing this blog, trying to stay abreast of town politics (at least at a sporting level) and generally trying to avoid consumer culture unless it has to do with one of my hobbies-- I feel the press of what Merrifield is talking about and it's easy to succumb, there's a lot of shows on Netflix and a lot of credit out there, and your job can consume you and then you feel good, in a sort of anesthetized way, but we all know that productivity is on the rise and college costs more and more-- which is why I've been hinting to my kids that if they really like something, they don't need to go to college to pursue it . . . college seems to be for smartish people who don't know exactly what they want to do, it's a great (but expensive) failsafe that leads you right into the technocracy, burdened with debt, ready to become a productive worker; this has been heavy, so I'll get out of here with one last idea from the book, which would be amazing and fun to drop on an aspiring actor; Merrifield mentions radical Polish director Grotowski, who calls theater with lights and a stage and props and costumes "rich theater" and this Polish auteur denigrates "rich theater" for aspiring to be film or television, then he makes a case for "poor theater," where actors become themselves in the scenes, no lights or settings, just an improvisation where you push the actor/spectator gap and the existential limits of the stage in a search for conflict with others . . . while I don't fully understand the theory, I would still love to "drop a Grotowski" on an actor (and if I remember, I'll do it to my friend Jack) when they are telling me about some performance they are in . . . I imagine I would say, "Oh so you're still doing rich theater? How antiquated and pathetic . . . Grotowski would so so disappointed in you."
Retro Saturday of Stuff to Appreciate
An old school Saturday that reminds me why we bought a house in Highland Park, had kids, and rescued a dog . . . successful soccer practice in the AM at Bartle gym-- two blocks away-- followed by some successful tennis training with Ian at Donaldson Park-- five hundred feet away-- then the boys got on their skateboards and rode to the comic book store (and purchased some retro-ish comics: Invincible and some new series related to Watchmen) and ate pizza, they returned with the pizza crust, which our dog ate-- a good sign, because he's lost his appetite lately-- and then Cat and I walked for some coffee with the dog and he made it all the way to Main Street and back, the longest walk he's taken since his illness . . . and now both boys are upstairs reading, and they'll be fast asleep soon enough-- at least In will be, he reads three pages and falls asleep every Saturday afternoon-- and there's a snowstorm on the way (and indoor tennis tonight for the boys) so I'm declaring today a celebration of mundanity, small town life, kids, dogs, sports, marriage and all that normal regular stuff that I often forget to appreciate . . . and I keep extending this sentence because I don't feel like going on the Mid New Jersey Soccer Portal and fucking with spring registration stuff for the travel team, because that is some small town banality I could do without.
Some Situations Require Delicacy That Only a Mature Adult Possesses
If one child is napping upstairs, it's not a good idea to send the other child to wake him up for dinner.
A Photo in which Dave and Catherine Pretend to Be Veterinarians
A Valentine's Sentence for my Wife
Not Real versus Real
Not real:
"Nosedive" . . . a glossy, fun, and satirical social-media-dystopia episode of Black Mirror . . . which is tragic for the main character, but also sort of silly because these people have bought into the app and the ratings only for the results and have basically brought things down on themselves
versus
real:
Alipay Sesame Credit . . . China wants to control it's wild and poorly regulated economy, where purveyors often purvey such delicacies as rotten meat and toxic baby formula, so they dream of implementing a government social credit score; meanwhile e-commerce giant Alibaba has created a private version of this: you get a social credit score from 350 to 950, based on mountains of data, both financial and behavioral-- earn points for advanced degrees and lose points for playing too many video games . . . and like the Black Mirror episode, part of your score is determined by the scores of your friend-- so if you're buddy drops out of college and starts playing video games, it's time to shun him . . . perks for a high scores include better train and plane seats, smaller deposits for hotels, screening on dating apps .. . and the plan is to feed facial data into the score as well with a surveillance program called Sharp Eyes, so then if you frequent bad neighborhoods or shady areas, the algorithm will factor this into your score . . . and if the algorithm makes a mistake, you're screwed, but that's not the scariest part of this . . . the scary part is that attaching social scores with credit scores is the killer app; this will curtail crime and it will get people to behave "better," both financially and socially, and it will get people to fall in line in regards to the government . . . the utilitarian trade-off for a better society might be just enough that this system is adopted completely and irrevocably . . . and while I'm highly critical of this now, I'm sure it won't be long before I'm welcoming our new insect overlords, because I don't want to ride third class on the train or be unable to get a home equity loan . . . so the winner is . . . by a landslide:
reality (yikes).
"Nosedive" . . . a glossy, fun, and satirical social-media-dystopia episode of Black Mirror . . . which is tragic for the main character, but also sort of silly because these people have bought into the app and the ratings only for the results and have basically brought things down on themselves
versus
real:
Alipay Sesame Credit . . . China wants to control it's wild and poorly regulated economy, where purveyors often purvey such delicacies as rotten meat and toxic baby formula, so they dream of implementing a government social credit score; meanwhile e-commerce giant Alibaba has created a private version of this: you get a social credit score from 350 to 950, based on mountains of data, both financial and behavioral-- earn points for advanced degrees and lose points for playing too many video games . . . and like the Black Mirror episode, part of your score is determined by the scores of your friend-- so if you're buddy drops out of college and starts playing video games, it's time to shun him . . . perks for a high scores include better train and plane seats, smaller deposits for hotels, screening on dating apps .. . and the plan is to feed facial data into the score as well with a surveillance program called Sharp Eyes, so then if you frequent bad neighborhoods or shady areas, the algorithm will factor this into your score . . . and if the algorithm makes a mistake, you're screwed, but that's not the scariest part of this . . . the scary part is that attaching social scores with credit scores is the killer app; this will curtail crime and it will get people to behave "better," both financially and socially, and it will get people to fall in line in regards to the government . . . the utilitarian trade-off for a better society might be just enough that this system is adopted completely and irrevocably . . . and while I'm highly critical of this now, I'm sure it won't be long before I'm welcoming our new insect overlords, because I don't want to ride third class on the train or be unable to get a home equity loan . . . so the winner is . . . by a landslide:
reality (yikes).
Sirius: Not Dead Yet
We thought it was curtains for our beloved family dog Sirius but after a three day stay at the pet hospital (don't ask about the bill) it seems he's got some life left in him; he's definitely in dire straits and I think everyone in the family has shed some tears about his predicament, he's got two tick-borne diseases (lyme and ehrlichia) and his kidneys are screwed up and infected (possibly due to the lyme disease, but maybe not) and he's got all kinds of high-levels of bad stuff because of the kidney malfunction-- too much phosphorus and proteins and all kinds of junk-- and he wasn't eating so he lost a bunch of weight; but he perked up a bit today and he actually ate a bunch once he got home; he's on eight different medications-- two antibiotics, an appetite stimulant, an antacid, blood pressure medicine, stuff to get phosphates out of his body, an anti-nausea slurry, and subcutaneous fluids (which we have to administer) and so if he continues to eat, we'll be able to get this stuff in him and he has a chance to recover . . . which would actually be a miracle, considering the state he was in last week.
Viewing Habits of Man Children
Quite a juxtaposition of streaming video consumption: last month my kids were watching the first season of Breaking Bad and now they're obsessed with an adorable kids show called Gravity Falls (it's actually tolerable for adults . . . funny and fast-paced, but the recommendation algorithm is going to struggle with what to suggest next).
Ghosts, Music, White People and Black People
I am a man of reason and so-- of course-- I don't believe in ghosts, I don't believe in a spirit world, lurking just beyond what we can see and sense . . . but that doesn't mean I don't occasionally enjoy a ghost story (Hamlet, for instance) and Hari Kunzru's new book White Tears is primarily a ghost story, and the ghosts in this tale often manifest themselves sonically and they have been badly put down by the white man; if you like music and musical production, then this is the ghost story for you . . . it's about two white kids who want to find and create "authentic music," it's about race and cultural appropriation, it's about obsessive collection, money, power, desire, and oppression . . . and mostly it is a very very weird, fragmented, well-written, surreal, and slightly self-congratulatory version of the 1986 film Crossroads . . . the middle section of the book loses some momentum, but the pay-off is vivid and tragic and moving and it will connect you with the spectre of racism way down in Mississippi in a very real way (and if you want something lighter to read with a musical theme, check out this Quincy Jones interview, it's amazing).
Symbolic Wall Will Cause Real Damage
The brilliance and horror of Trump's "build a wall" campaign promise is that it's largely symbolic, of course; because of the Bush Adminstration's Secure Fence Act of 2006, fences and walls are constantly being built along the US/Mexico border so all Trump has to do is point to some of this work and fund it a bit more and he's a hero to the folks who want to seal America up into some kind of dystopian ethnically safe consumerist theme park . . . but the consensus among anyone who has actually studied border walls is that they don't work . . . it's expensive and difficult to build a twenty foot wall, and it's even more expensive to maintain and patrol it-- but it's really cheap to build a 21 foot ladder (or dig a tunnel or go some where the wall isn't) which would be fine, if this wasn't our tax money going towards this gigantic quixotic concrete patriotic emblem . . . but that's not the worst of it, the worst of it is that the Secure Fence Act usurps all environmental laws . . . so while the wall isn't going to curtail immigration, and it's going to cost us money, those are just stupid human problems-- and we are especially stupid these days-- but the fact that it's going to do irreparable damage to delicate ecosystems, endangered species, and the movement and breeding of wildlife is just heinous . . . if you can stomach more on this, check out this episode of 99% Invisible.
George Saunders Can Read
Cunningham, Powers, Brady, my wife and I went to see George Saunders at the Rutgers Student Center last night, and I'm happy to report that not only can Saunders write great stories and sentences, but he's also a thoroughly entertaining reader . . . he reminded me of a miniature and less profane version of George Carlin; here are a few of the interesting things he said about writing in the Q & A:
1) a short story needs to be a "powerful mechanism" . . . which is certainly true these days, as the literary short story is basically a forgotten and ignored art form, and to capture someone's attention in this format requires something deliberately compelling and evocative; boilerplate isn't going to do it when you can watch Black Mirror;
2) Saunders described the Hot Wheels track he had as a kid and the "gas stations" that ran on batteries that he would carefully place in certain sections of the circuit, so that they propelled his cars just far enough to reach another gas station, and so on and so forth, until he had created a track that would race the car for an infinite amount of time (or until the batteries ran out) and he likened this to writing a short story: you need enough "gas stations" to keep the reader going;
3) he said it was a revelation in his writing when he realized that dialogue shouldn't sound like how people talk-- people talk in abrupt half finished sentences that rely on tone and body language to convey meaning-- but dialogue in a story should sound great on it's own, be rhythmic and fast-paced, and most importantly, avoid being too on the nose . . . people tend to "talk past each other," they half-listen, but then inform their reply with whatever is brimming in their brain . . . this is how I imagine this lesson in a concrete format;
do you believe in God?
why yes I do . . .
it would be better to write:
do you believe in God?
how can there be a God when property taxes are this high for a 1500 square foot house?
1) a short story needs to be a "powerful mechanism" . . . which is certainly true these days, as the literary short story is basically a forgotten and ignored art form, and to capture someone's attention in this format requires something deliberately compelling and evocative; boilerplate isn't going to do it when you can watch Black Mirror;
2) Saunders described the Hot Wheels track he had as a kid and the "gas stations" that ran on batteries that he would carefully place in certain sections of the circuit, so that they propelled his cars just far enough to reach another gas station, and so on and so forth, until he had created a track that would race the car for an infinite amount of time (or until the batteries ran out) and he likened this to writing a short story: you need enough "gas stations" to keep the reader going;
3) he said it was a revelation in his writing when he realized that dialogue shouldn't sound like how people talk-- people talk in abrupt half finished sentences that rely on tone and body language to convey meaning-- but dialogue in a story should sound great on it's own, be rhythmic and fast-paced, and most importantly, avoid being too on the nose . . . people tend to "talk past each other," they half-listen, but then inform their reply with whatever is brimming in their brain . . . this is how I imagine this lesson in a concrete format;
do you believe in God?
why yes I do . . .
it would be better to write:
do you believe in God?
how can there be a God when property taxes are this high for a 1500 square foot house?
Three History Lessons (Two of them Scary)
We did some rare Monday/Tuesday TV watching this week-- normally there is no screen-time for our kids from Monday through Thursday-- but I invoked the "documentary rule" twice on two consecutive days; both of these stream on Netflix:
1) Alex and I consumed about half of the documentary Fed Up, which documents the rise of fat-free foods, added sugar, sugar addiction, and the big sugar lobby . . . it's important information but presented in an incredibly sad manner, from the perspective of a number of morbidly obese children and their families . . . the lesson is that companies are pushing hyper-palatable processed foods with tons of added sugar and so unless you eat real food and avoid soda and juice, you're going to be consuming a lot of unwanted sugar; a calorie is not a calorie-- 100 calories of nuts is processed totally differently than 100 calories of gummy bears . . . the scariest statistic is that there were zero cases of childhood "adult onset" diabetes in 1980 and now there are 60,000 cases; unfortunately, even if you do eat real food, chicken isn't even chicken, so you're pretty much screwed unless you have your own organic farm;
2) Ian and I watched Command and Control, a PBS documentary that recounts the Titan II nuclear missile silo explosion that happened in Arkansas in 1980; it's a gripping story, with plenty of footage of nuclear blasts, wild anecdotes from old time rocket scientists, Cold War context, and a detailed narrative of the Arkansas catastrophe-- including the surrounding media carnival; not only are there plenty of moving moments and tales of heroism, but there's also frustrating ending-- the soldiers involved were treated quite shabbily by the Air Force once the incident was over and there's still plenty of room for error with our current nuclear arsenal . . . I think I'm going to read the Eric Schlosser book that inspired the film;
3) and here's a history lesson that's a little less heavy . . . although I guess D. Boon's demise even puts a tragic spin on this jazzy and light-hearted punk number.
1) Alex and I consumed about half of the documentary Fed Up, which documents the rise of fat-free foods, added sugar, sugar addiction, and the big sugar lobby . . . it's important information but presented in an incredibly sad manner, from the perspective of a number of morbidly obese children and their families . . . the lesson is that companies are pushing hyper-palatable processed foods with tons of added sugar and so unless you eat real food and avoid soda and juice, you're going to be consuming a lot of unwanted sugar; a calorie is not a calorie-- 100 calories of nuts is processed totally differently than 100 calories of gummy bears . . . the scariest statistic is that there were zero cases of childhood "adult onset" diabetes in 1980 and now there are 60,000 cases; unfortunately, even if you do eat real food, chicken isn't even chicken, so you're pretty much screwed unless you have your own organic farm;
2) Ian and I watched Command and Control, a PBS documentary that recounts the Titan II nuclear missile silo explosion that happened in Arkansas in 1980; it's a gripping story, with plenty of footage of nuclear blasts, wild anecdotes from old time rocket scientists, Cold War context, and a detailed narrative of the Arkansas catastrophe-- including the surrounding media carnival; not only are there plenty of moving moments and tales of heroism, but there's also frustrating ending-- the soldiers involved were treated quite shabbily by the Air Force once the incident was over and there's still plenty of room for error with our current nuclear arsenal . . . I think I'm going to read the Eric Schlosser book that inspired the film;
3) and here's a history lesson that's a little less heavy . . . although I guess D. Boon's demise even puts a tragic spin on this jazzy and light-hearted punk number.
Super Fans Abound
Until you are confronted, it's easy to forget about the existence of actual sincere New England Patriots supporters, and it's also easy to forget-- until you catch some cable news at the gym-- that there are people in this country actively rooting for Armageddon.
He Warned Me . . .
My buddy Whitney told me not to consume stuff like this, as it just makes my head explode, but I ignored him and this is what I have to report: the new episode of This American Life, "Words You Can't Say," will probably make both liberals and conservative flip out-- the episode is composed of two stories, one from a liberal vantage point and the other from a conservative one; they are fantastic on their own, but together they add up to an insane yin/yang yo-yo that will pervade your consciousness and bounce eternally . . . each story contains a twist that is almost too good to be true and if you thought things were bad and weird and polarized and unfathomable in our country, then this episode will confirm your worst suspicions (and then some) so I'd advise you to listen to Whitney, as curiosity killed the cat (but I'm sure he had an incredibly compelling and dramatic time dying).
The Test 106: The Nine Billion Names of Todd
In honor of the Super Bowl, this week on The Test we have a high-scoring extravaganza . . . tune in, take a shot, and see if you can outscore the ladies.
Dave Crushes It at the Gym
Lately-- due to my foot injury-- I've had to resort to using the various aerobic exercise machines at LA Fitness; my favorite contraption is the rowing machine but I can't row for a sustained length of time due to a dire and rather discomfiting situation: the machine is lacking an infographic diagram on an essential technique, a necessary procedure in arrangement that I just can't seem to master-- and apparently many people share this same problem-- what happens is that I'm rowing along, minding my own business, but every third stroke or so I squash my testicles.
What We've Got Here is a Failure to Communicate
My buddy Rob has written a sincere and excellent post over at Gheorghe the Blog about grappling with the difficulties of our times-- the thrust of it is that our current government, who are behaving like "third world banana republicans" are something of a kleptocracy, redistributing wealth to the rich, at the expense of the uninsured, the immigrants, the rule of law (especially the powers of the FBI) and the "darker, the weirder, the more foreign among us," and people of good conscience are going to have to take a stand against that behavior; I have something to report on this issue and I'm not going to do it justice so I suggest you read the articles, but several Indonesian immigrants are taking sanctuary in a church around the corner from me in Highland Park-- one of the immigrants, Harry Pangemanan, has been here since 1993 (he entered on a temporary visa) and has been involved in a project rebuilding homes devastated by Hurricane Sandy since 2012 (he won the 2018 Martin Luther King award in HP for this) and while this has been a terrible time for these people, I'm proud of the role my friends and the the community have played in the situation . . . meanwhile, while the immigrants were seeking sanctuary, someone got wind of their absence and their homes were vandalized and ransacked, and passports and money was stolen-- it's still hazy how this happened, if ICE leaked information as to where they lived, or if people saw the homes on the news (but not all of them were on the news) and took action-- but there's something awful going on in this country and everyone needs to have a frank discussion about it . . . as usual, I have a couple of recommendations if you want to get deeper into this issue: The Weeds "The White Genocide Episode You've Been Waiting For" explains how some of the current immigration policy being considered offers concession for "undocumented immigrants" but there is a push to curtail legal immigration, especially to families . . . the subtext is the discussion that needs to be had: it seems the ethnic constituency of America changing too much and too rapidly for many people in the nation and there have been previous, restrictive and rather racist policies to preserve the racial constituency of America (most notably the Immigrations Acts of 1917 and 1924) so we've done this before . . . I live in central New jersey, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places in the world, and I thought this debate was over in my area-- but the vandalism and ransacking of the homes of the immigrants seeking sanctuary obviously refute this . . . this is an issue on the purpose of America: is it a place for immigrants to come and thrive or are we building a wall and locking our doors; the interesting thing is that economists universally accept that immigration, legal or illegal, is a boon to the economy-- more workers, more jobs, more consumers, more people to pay taxes and buy property, etc. etc. a more diverse economy-- but it seems that certain white people are willing to take the hit to the economy to preserve the racial integrity of the country (or what's left of it) and if you really want to take a deep dive on this cultural divide, check out the second season of The United States of Anxiety, a podcast that does a fantastic hob tracing the roots of the current dichotomy; the climate change episode is especially informative, as it traces the evolution of conservative climate change skepticism, which did not exist twenty-five years ago when Bush Sr. announced that we would all have to band together and solve this global and existential problem, but then became a conservative bona fide once the Republicans realized it was not an environmental issue, it was a political issue . . . thinking about this stuff is going to make you angry and depressed and indignant, but we have to discuss it as a nation because there's actually a reasonable middle ground on issues like climate change policy and immigration (unlike, say, nuclear war) and if we can get beyond the rancor and the hatred and the utter disdain that people are feeling for those with different opinions, maybe we can elect some people that will hammer our some reasonable policy . . . I remain optimistic that people are not as stupid and narrow-minded as the folks representing them in our government right now.
The Irony (and the Stupidity)
After limping around for several weeks with what I thought was plantar fasciitis (self-diagnosed, of course) I finally went back to the podiatrist to get checked out and he quickly diagnosed my ailment as a sprained tendon on the inside of my ankle, just under the ball of my foot (this tendon has a fancy anatomical name, but you're not going to remember it and neither am I, so I'm not going to bother to look it up) and this is great-- he give me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory and said I'd be better in two weeks but the irony (and the stupidity) is that all the crazy stretching I was doing to alleviate my self-diagnosed plantar fasciitis was actually aggravating this sprained tendon, causing me a great deal of pain, and making me depressed and me cynical about the rest of my boring, monotonous life, sans basketball, tennis, and soccer.
Luigi Explains Capitalism For Da People!
Get ready, this is a really long one . . . I just finished A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity and it's one of my favorite books . . . not just because it's written by a guy named Luigi Zingales and I'm an Italian-American hailing from North Brunswick (home a da Carnivale Italiano! you gotta getta some zeppole) although Zingales' perspective, as an expatriate Italian, is essential to his critique of the current American Italian system-- he's like Tocqueville in that he can see things we take for granted . . . here are a dozen things I took away from his analysis and his solutions:
1) the thesis of the book is that the US free-market system has degenerated into crony capitalism, and Zingales uses Silvio Berlusconi as the paragon of this model; Berlusconi ran an insulated system of business and government corruption and comparisons between Berlusconi, who essentially ran Italy like his own private business, and Trump are inevitable and easy to make, so while the book was published pre-Trump, in 2012, Zingales does make the Berlusconi/Trump analogy in this episode of Conversations with Tyler . . .Trump succeeded in the real estate business, where it is more important to have strong relationships with government entities rather than creating something new in the market (and he's always relied on bankruptcy and the kindness of that system) and like Berlusconi, Trump has rewritten what is appropriate for a politician and member of the government;
2) Zingales starts with the proposition that fair markets are hard to manipulate and markets- while not perfect-- establish more efficient and accurate measure of value than say, an academic committee creating tenure requirements or statist regime doling out consumer products;
3) the problem is when large institutions, corporations, conglomerates and firms become "too big to fail" and both politicians and institutions recognize this because politicians, who aren't in office forever, would rather quell the chaos during their term-- avoid Armageddon, even if it's only a five percent chance of Armageddon-- with a bail-out, rather than be the person who lets the economy tank . . . but this doesn't allow the markets to do their job and accurately measure value;
4) he then explains how institutions that get "too big to fail" and understand this decimate the system-- he explains this with an analogy: if you play roulette yourself, you've got the same pay-out odds and vigorish whether you bet red/black or bet on a single number . . . for every hundred dollars you play, over time, you are likely to collect back $94.73-- the $5.27 is the amount the 0 and 00 extract . . . but if you pay an agent to play for you and promise him 20% of the winnings, but he doesn't have to pay anything if he loses, that agent is going to take risks and hope for a big payout . . . if he bets red with the $100 dollars, he only makes twenty bucks, but if he bets a single number, he stands to $700 . . . and if he loses, he loses nothing; so managers of funds take big risks, and the big investment banks encourage this because they know that either the lenders will lose out, as they are over-leveraged, or the taxpayers will bail the entire mess out;
5) lobbying is a monkey wrench in keeping markets fair and keeping large financial institutions and the government from becoming inexplicably intertwined-- and Zingales proposes something scary-- since the government controls trillions of dollars in subsidies and monies, the 3.5 billion spent by companies to lobby Congress and the 2.5 billion spent in political contributions may grow larger and larger, as business learns just how important it is to control the government . . . and this political climate of winner-take-all and fuck the other party isn't helping things;
6) with all this lobbying and bailing out and government/business intertwinement, we're not getting the beneficial long-term consequences of markets-- the accurate measurement of value and the benefits of competition . . . imagine that any time your kids are acting up and there's a conflict in the family, grandma and grandpa rescue the kids from any discipline . . . in the short term, these interventions lead to harmony and happiness, but in the long-term, you end up with spoiled kids and unhappy parents . . . Zingales uses another analogy to explain this analogy-- you gotta love all dese metaphors!-- he says that at the Grand Canyon, there is a sign warning people not to feed the wild animals, as if you do they lose their instincts and their ability to feed themselves . . . now the animals would love if people fed them but we need to "protect" them from the corruption of free food, for their own good . . . Zingales has seen this go down in Italy, and he sees America headed down the same road;
7) cronyism and unfair markets lead to winner-take-all scenarios, instead of healthy diversity and competition, and this is especially prevalent in the race to get into college-- while the number of people attending colleges in the US has skyrocketed, the size and amount of colleges has not . . . so there's winner-take-all competition to get admitted to the best schools and parents are spending much more time and resources on their children in order to get them in . . . this hasn't happened in Canada, where the admissions process isn't as competitive; so a tiny head-start when you are young can be very very important and wealth ensures this; Zingales uses a sports analogy-- if you allow professional teams to spend as much as possible, the riches teams will amass the best players and defeat everyone handily, which is great for one team but not particularly fun as a spectator or participant, so a salary cap-- which sounds non-competitive-- actually preserves competition . . . this is true for education and for lobbying, if money can buy success, then lots of money will be spent to ensure success and rules and social norms must be enacted to prevent this and encourage competition;
8) Zingales is certainly more conservative than me, and he's in favor of school voucher systems-- which I am not, for various reasons-- but I understand the logic of why he is in favor of the system, he brings up Finland, which has a much more rigorous method of selecting teachers-- in essence, they have to be smarter than American teachers-- and this means you're going to have to pay teachers more to attract smarter people; I do agree with him on this account-- if we could just get rid of the worst teachers, the bottom ten percent, that would help things enormously; I think it's hard to measure the difference between fairly good and good teachers, because it depends on the metric . . . some teachers are better at improving test scores, others at making kids passionate about a subject, others at letting kids learn on their own . . . but there's no question that some teachers are just terrible and probably get too much protection from the union, and it's also true that the best teachers tend to be in richer schools, so vouchers can change this balance and create a "salary cap" situation that makes things more fair and competitive for more students;
9) if you can wrap your request for subsidies and protection in a noble cause, you'll really screw up the market . . . Zingales uses student loans and Pell grants as an example-- government-backed subsidies that have helped make the price of college double, as there is more demand, space constraints at elite colleges and a high cost and difficulty in starting new institutions;
10) the SEC and other regulators have had trouble enforcing inside trading, and Zingales sees the onus of responsibility for stamping out this on business schools and alumni networks: they need to publicly shame and disavow people who participate in these practices, instead of only celebrating whoever makes the most money . . . it's tough because those are the people that donate;
11) Zingales is in favor of fewer regulations and simpler regulations-- but not the Trumpian dismantling of all regulations without a counter-balance; the way to offset the removal of regulations is with Pigouvian taxes . . . so instead of having insanely complex environmental codes, which leads to employment for lobbyists and lawyers, and costs the taxpayers money in the form of the government agency and all the market distortions caused by the big-business lobbying . . . instead, tax pollutants, tax the amount of harm a factory does, and you are much more likely to capture revenue (or curb pollution) so this is a compelling example of a conservative thinker proposing a "good" tax . . . as opposed to a bad subsidy; subsidizing ethanol enriches ethanol producers, but a tax on gas could curb driving, could lessen greenhouse gases, could capture revenue, and could incentivize the electric car industry . . . without redistributing wealth and enriching the ethanol producers for doing nothing more vital than having a noble idea . . . I'm sure no conservative thinker has made it this far in the post, but this is a really important concept which Trump and his lackeys seem to be totally ignorant;
12) while it is in a voter's best interest to remain uneducated in most political forums-- it's not worth the time and effort-- Zingales does illustrate how shame, muck-raking, and a little bit of knowledge can go a long way in affecting policy and political outcomes . . . and deep into the book, he acknowledges that some people have an interest in public affairs, or they wouldn't have read his book, which tackles a complex subject in a detailed manner . . . anyway, these ideas are really important to understand; we need to harness the power of markets in America, often by separating big business and government; as anyone involved in sports knows, making things fair and competitive means more than simply removing all the rules . . . it takes thought, creativity, flexibility, and rigor; Zingales makes a fantastic case for a market-based ethic and hopes that breaches of this, in the form of cronyism and incestuous relationships between business and the government, will someday be stigmatized the way smoking is today . . . I hope he's right.
1) the thesis of the book is that the US free-market system has degenerated into crony capitalism, and Zingales uses Silvio Berlusconi as the paragon of this model; Berlusconi ran an insulated system of business and government corruption and comparisons between Berlusconi, who essentially ran Italy like his own private business, and Trump are inevitable and easy to make, so while the book was published pre-Trump, in 2012, Zingales does make the Berlusconi/Trump analogy in this episode of Conversations with Tyler . . .Trump succeeded in the real estate business, where it is more important to have strong relationships with government entities rather than creating something new in the market (and he's always relied on bankruptcy and the kindness of that system) and like Berlusconi, Trump has rewritten what is appropriate for a politician and member of the government;
2) Zingales starts with the proposition that fair markets are hard to manipulate and markets- while not perfect-- establish more efficient and accurate measure of value than say, an academic committee creating tenure requirements or statist regime doling out consumer products;
3) the problem is when large institutions, corporations, conglomerates and firms become "too big to fail" and both politicians and institutions recognize this because politicians, who aren't in office forever, would rather quell the chaos during their term-- avoid Armageddon, even if it's only a five percent chance of Armageddon-- with a bail-out, rather than be the person who lets the economy tank . . . but this doesn't allow the markets to do their job and accurately measure value;
4) he then explains how institutions that get "too big to fail" and understand this decimate the system-- he explains this with an analogy: if you play roulette yourself, you've got the same pay-out odds and vigorish whether you bet red/black or bet on a single number . . . for every hundred dollars you play, over time, you are likely to collect back $94.73-- the $5.27 is the amount the 0 and 00 extract . . . but if you pay an agent to play for you and promise him 20% of the winnings, but he doesn't have to pay anything if he loses, that agent is going to take risks and hope for a big payout . . . if he bets red with the $100 dollars, he only makes twenty bucks, but if he bets a single number, he stands to $700 . . . and if he loses, he loses nothing; so managers of funds take big risks, and the big investment banks encourage this because they know that either the lenders will lose out, as they are over-leveraged, or the taxpayers will bail the entire mess out;
5) lobbying is a monkey wrench in keeping markets fair and keeping large financial institutions and the government from becoming inexplicably intertwined-- and Zingales proposes something scary-- since the government controls trillions of dollars in subsidies and monies, the 3.5 billion spent by companies to lobby Congress and the 2.5 billion spent in political contributions may grow larger and larger, as business learns just how important it is to control the government . . . and this political climate of winner-take-all and fuck the other party isn't helping things;
6) with all this lobbying and bailing out and government/business intertwinement, we're not getting the beneficial long-term consequences of markets-- the accurate measurement of value and the benefits of competition . . . imagine that any time your kids are acting up and there's a conflict in the family, grandma and grandpa rescue the kids from any discipline . . . in the short term, these interventions lead to harmony and happiness, but in the long-term, you end up with spoiled kids and unhappy parents . . . Zingales uses another analogy to explain this analogy-- you gotta love all dese metaphors!-- he says that at the Grand Canyon, there is a sign warning people not to feed the wild animals, as if you do they lose their instincts and their ability to feed themselves . . . now the animals would love if people fed them but we need to "protect" them from the corruption of free food, for their own good . . . Zingales has seen this go down in Italy, and he sees America headed down the same road;
7) cronyism and unfair markets lead to winner-take-all scenarios, instead of healthy diversity and competition, and this is especially prevalent in the race to get into college-- while the number of people attending colleges in the US has skyrocketed, the size and amount of colleges has not . . . so there's winner-take-all competition to get admitted to the best schools and parents are spending much more time and resources on their children in order to get them in . . . this hasn't happened in Canada, where the admissions process isn't as competitive; so a tiny head-start when you are young can be very very important and wealth ensures this; Zingales uses a sports analogy-- if you allow professional teams to spend as much as possible, the riches teams will amass the best players and defeat everyone handily, which is great for one team but not particularly fun as a spectator or participant, so a salary cap-- which sounds non-competitive-- actually preserves competition . . . this is true for education and for lobbying, if money can buy success, then lots of money will be spent to ensure success and rules and social norms must be enacted to prevent this and encourage competition;
8) Zingales is certainly more conservative than me, and he's in favor of school voucher systems-- which I am not, for various reasons-- but I understand the logic of why he is in favor of the system, he brings up Finland, which has a much more rigorous method of selecting teachers-- in essence, they have to be smarter than American teachers-- and this means you're going to have to pay teachers more to attract smarter people; I do agree with him on this account-- if we could just get rid of the worst teachers, the bottom ten percent, that would help things enormously; I think it's hard to measure the difference between fairly good and good teachers, because it depends on the metric . . . some teachers are better at improving test scores, others at making kids passionate about a subject, others at letting kids learn on their own . . . but there's no question that some teachers are just terrible and probably get too much protection from the union, and it's also true that the best teachers tend to be in richer schools, so vouchers can change this balance and create a "salary cap" situation that makes things more fair and competitive for more students;
9) if you can wrap your request for subsidies and protection in a noble cause, you'll really screw up the market . . . Zingales uses student loans and Pell grants as an example-- government-backed subsidies that have helped make the price of college double, as there is more demand, space constraints at elite colleges and a high cost and difficulty in starting new institutions;
10) the SEC and other regulators have had trouble enforcing inside trading, and Zingales sees the onus of responsibility for stamping out this on business schools and alumni networks: they need to publicly shame and disavow people who participate in these practices, instead of only celebrating whoever makes the most money . . . it's tough because those are the people that donate;
11) Zingales is in favor of fewer regulations and simpler regulations-- but not the Trumpian dismantling of all regulations without a counter-balance; the way to offset the removal of regulations is with Pigouvian taxes . . . so instead of having insanely complex environmental codes, which leads to employment for lobbyists and lawyers, and costs the taxpayers money in the form of the government agency and all the market distortions caused by the big-business lobbying . . . instead, tax pollutants, tax the amount of harm a factory does, and you are much more likely to capture revenue (or curb pollution) so this is a compelling example of a conservative thinker proposing a "good" tax . . . as opposed to a bad subsidy; subsidizing ethanol enriches ethanol producers, but a tax on gas could curb driving, could lessen greenhouse gases, could capture revenue, and could incentivize the electric car industry . . . without redistributing wealth and enriching the ethanol producers for doing nothing more vital than having a noble idea . . . I'm sure no conservative thinker has made it this far in the post, but this is a really important concept which Trump and his lackeys seem to be totally ignorant;
12) while it is in a voter's best interest to remain uneducated in most political forums-- it's not worth the time and effort-- Zingales does illustrate how shame, muck-raking, and a little bit of knowledge can go a long way in affecting policy and political outcomes . . . and deep into the book, he acknowledges that some people have an interest in public affairs, or they wouldn't have read his book, which tackles a complex subject in a detailed manner . . . anyway, these ideas are really important to understand; we need to harness the power of markets in America, often by separating big business and government; as anyone involved in sports knows, making things fair and competitive means more than simply removing all the rules . . . it takes thought, creativity, flexibility, and rigor; Zingales makes a fantastic case for a market-based ethic and hopes that breaches of this, in the form of cronyism and incestuous relationships between business and the government, will someday be stigmatized the way smoking is today . . . I hope he's right.
A Sentence Wherein Dave Preserves His Retinas
The sentence is canceled today: I used up my allotted screen time during exams.
LA Fitness: The Nexus of the Vector
My son Ian got braces this morning, and while they were being installed, I went to the gym . . . otherwise known as "the place where we all agree to get together and efficiently spread the flu."
The Test 105: Stacey's Songs #5
This week on our podcast The Test, another one of Stacey's inscrutable song quizzes: listen to the seven audio clips, identify the artists, contemplate the lyrics, and then endure the haphazard, illogical guesses that Cunningham and I make about the overarching theme . . . when you hear the answer, you'll kick yourself, as it makes perfect sense.
Dave Spends $5 Dollars on Future Human Capital
I recently showed my college writing class The Big Short-- we just finished a paper on Karen Ho's illuminating (but rather long and repetitive) essay on Wall Street culture in the aughts: "Biographies of Hegemony: The Culture of Smartness and the Recruitment and Construction of Investment Bankers" and I wanted to show them what happened to this insulated system that Karen Ho critiques-- and my son Alex saw the cover of the DVD and decided he wanted to watch it . . . I told him it was a great movie, but long and complicated, and he said, "My favorite movie is Inception, Dad, I think I can handle it" so I sweetened the deal and told him if he endured a short lecture from me before the film started-- on mortgages and subprimes loans and stocks and bonds-- and then, at the end of the film, if he could explain the systemic failure and how the financial crash of 2008 actually happened, I would give him five dollars, and-- withour irony and in the spirit of the movie, he agreed to this; Ian also watched and endured several of my financial asides, but when it was all over (and they watched the entire thing last night) Ian declined to try to explain it for five dollars (though he claimed to understand the plot) and also declined to make a sidebet on whether Alex would be able to successfully explain the origins and nature of the crash, but Alex rose to the challenge and gave me a fairly accurate portrayal of the crisis, including mortgage backed securities, CDOs, credit default swaps, fraudulent ratings, how to short the market, premiums eating into your account, the big pay-out and the bail-out . . . the only thing he had trouble with (which the movies glosses over) is the idea that the banks were unloading toxic securities they had created onto investors before they accurately marked the price, then shorting those same investments in order to attempt to balance their books -- creating a crazy conflict of interest feedback loop . . . you can learn about it in this special episode of This American Life, "Inside Job," which details the arbitrage, fraud, and corrupt strategies and tactics that Magnetar used during the crash-- and Alex was suitably annoyed with the result, a taxpayer bailout that funded the very institutions that created the crash and paid big bonuses to many of the engineers of the bubble, a bailout that so enormous that it might be incalculable and probably resulted in the election, oddly, of Donald Trump . . . because, as Jared Vennett clairvoyantly explains at the end:
In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating-agency executives went to jail . . . the SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivative industries . . . just kidding! . . . banks took the money the American people gave them, and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform . . . and then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers . . .
In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating-agency executives went to jail . . . the SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivative industries . . . just kidding! . . . banks took the money the American people gave them, and used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform . . . and then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers . . .
the end of that little bait and switch speech surprised both my students and my children-- but it makes sense, as it too boring and complicated to completely understand the forces tearing apart our economy-- so it's much easier to blame the other, the barbarians at the gate and the freeloaders within; anyway, I'm proud of both my kids for making it all the way through-- Ian could have defaulted to The Walking Dead and Alex has decided he's going to read the book . . . maybe if enough youngsters understand what went wrong, they'll vote some people into office that will enact some policy to prevent this kind of thing . . . or maybe they'll blow all their savings on cryptocurrency and we'll all have another great movie to watch.
Two Hipster Recs
There are two kinds of people, those who listen to my hipster recommendations and those who don't . . . here are two for the weekend:
1) the comic book series Saga . . . here are ten reasons to read it . . . my kids love it (and so do I) but it's probably not appropriate for them;
2) the jazz trio The Bad Plus . . . if you don't like jazz with piano, give these guys a try and see if it that changes things.
1) the comic book series Saga . . . here are ten reasons to read it . . . my kids love it (and so do I) but it's probably not appropriate for them;
2) the jazz trio The Bad Plus . . . if you don't like jazz with piano, give these guys a try and see if it that changes things.
Dave Beseeches the Millenials to Fix This Shithole Country
One of the strangest things about the political divisiveness of our times is that amidst the misinformation and the acceptance of idiocy, amidst the low standards of morality, veracity, accountability and the ignorance of facts and the denial of science-- amidst all this gross unfiltered miasma of shit, there is so much intelligent debate and discussion and so much astounding art and literature that grapple with these very same issues in a non-partisan, intelligent fashion . . . I'm not sure if I find hope and solace in this duality, or if it's a phenomenon like the Weimar Cabaret . . . art, satire, and intellectual freedom didn't stop Hitler-- but that was before the Internet . . . so if you need a refuge from Trump America and the 24 hour stupidity cycle and if you want to actually think about some of the issues and the logic behind them-- which apparently plenty of people do-- here are three things:
1) The new Sam Harris episode (#114 Politics and Sanity) is excellent, mainly because Sam Harris doesn't talk much-- he mediates a debate and discussion between two logical, well-spoken, reasonable conservative thinkers (David Frum: senior editor at the Atlantic and speechwriter for George W. Bush, and Andrew Sullivan: who edited The New Republic and founded The Daily Dish) and they discuss topics as various as Trump, hyper-partisanship, Henry Kissinger, religion, and the legalization of marijuana . . . listening to the quality of this thought and discourse among folks with different political persuasions and the fact that Harris's podcast is quite popular will give you some hope for America (Conversations with Tyler is another hopeful indicator);
2) but not too much hope . . . I just finished Brian Alexander's new book Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town and I'll be honest, I thought this was going to be an easy and clear read that would give me some insight into Middle America, like Sam Quinones' Dreamland and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy . . . but while Alexander's book has elements of those texts, it does something that's less fun to read and probably way more important to understand-- it details the exact reasons that the town of Lancaster was decimated and went from one of the most desirable places to live in America (as long as you were white) to an underfunded town with a rampant drug problem, lack of jobs and human capital, and a sharp and vast divide between the haves and the have-nots . . . he delineates the entire Anchor-Hocking glass factory story in inglorious detail: the investment from private equity, the battles with the unions, the leverages, the buyouts, the lack of maintenance, the safety issues, the methods used to turn a piece of a conglomerate around and make a quick profit, the detached executives from companies like Cerberus and Global Home Products, the debt, the gutting of salaries and pensions, and the effect of global economics on an American factory; the change from factory that could make great ware for far less than it cost to sell it, things like Pyrex bakeware and auto headlight glass, and then share that profit with skilled workers in the form of salaries and pensions, into a entity in a weird conglomerate, bought by corporate raiders, put on the books in any number of ways . . . and all this for the American pursuit of cheap stuff, something of which we are all guilty-- Americans have been shopping harder and harder for the cheapest stuff-- and though apparently, if things are working well, we can make glass products in the United States and sell them here-- mainly because glass is heavy and breakable, so it's tougher to ship from overseas-- but not with the global race to the bottom fueling things, the nadir of prices, wages, and detachment; there's a short version of this story in The Atlantic, with the reminder at the end that it's not about making a product any more, it's about making money-- I'd probably recommend reading the article over the book, which was a bear-- but there is a poignant moment at the end of the book that's worth checking out:
"Corporate elites said they needed free trade agreements so they got them . . . manufactures said they needed tax breaks and public money incentives to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them . . . banks and financiers said they needed looser regulations, so they got them . . . employers said they needed weaker unions-- or no unions at all-- so they got them . . . private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them . . . everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them . . . what did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs . . ."
and so you had the lawyers and consultants plotting the sale and break-up of the Anchor-Hocking plant and getting paid one hundred times more an hour than the lowly $12 and $14 dollar an hour glass-workers, in a town where at one time everyone rubbed elbows, the factory workers, the company board, the doctors, the lawyers, and they weren't separated by a vast economic chasm . . .
3) which brings me to The Big Short-- you should read the book, of course, but Mark Baum's speech near the end of the film really sums this up; Baum is based on a real person (Steve Eisman) and played brilliantly by Steve Carell . . . he says:
"For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked . . . not once; eventually you get caught, things go south . . . when the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did"
1) The new Sam Harris episode (#114 Politics and Sanity) is excellent, mainly because Sam Harris doesn't talk much-- he mediates a debate and discussion between two logical, well-spoken, reasonable conservative thinkers (David Frum: senior editor at the Atlantic and speechwriter for George W. Bush, and Andrew Sullivan: who edited The New Republic and founded The Daily Dish) and they discuss topics as various as Trump, hyper-partisanship, Henry Kissinger, religion, and the legalization of marijuana . . . listening to the quality of this thought and discourse among folks with different political persuasions and the fact that Harris's podcast is quite popular will give you some hope for America (Conversations with Tyler is another hopeful indicator);
2) but not too much hope . . . I just finished Brian Alexander's new book Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town and I'll be honest, I thought this was going to be an easy and clear read that would give me some insight into Middle America, like Sam Quinones' Dreamland and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy . . . but while Alexander's book has elements of those texts, it does something that's less fun to read and probably way more important to understand-- it details the exact reasons that the town of Lancaster was decimated and went from one of the most desirable places to live in America (as long as you were white) to an underfunded town with a rampant drug problem, lack of jobs and human capital, and a sharp and vast divide between the haves and the have-nots . . . he delineates the entire Anchor-Hocking glass factory story in inglorious detail: the investment from private equity, the battles with the unions, the leverages, the buyouts, the lack of maintenance, the safety issues, the methods used to turn a piece of a conglomerate around and make a quick profit, the detached executives from companies like Cerberus and Global Home Products, the debt, the gutting of salaries and pensions, and the effect of global economics on an American factory; the change from factory that could make great ware for far less than it cost to sell it, things like Pyrex bakeware and auto headlight glass, and then share that profit with skilled workers in the form of salaries and pensions, into a entity in a weird conglomerate, bought by corporate raiders, put on the books in any number of ways . . . and all this for the American pursuit of cheap stuff, something of which we are all guilty-- Americans have been shopping harder and harder for the cheapest stuff-- and though apparently, if things are working well, we can make glass products in the United States and sell them here-- mainly because glass is heavy and breakable, so it's tougher to ship from overseas-- but not with the global race to the bottom fueling things, the nadir of prices, wages, and detachment; there's a short version of this story in The Atlantic, with the reminder at the end that it's not about making a product any more, it's about making money-- I'd probably recommend reading the article over the book, which was a bear-- but there is a poignant moment at the end of the book that's worth checking out:
"Corporate elites said they needed free trade agreements so they got them . . . manufactures said they needed tax breaks and public money incentives to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them . . . banks and financiers said they needed looser regulations, so they got them . . . employers said they needed weaker unions-- or no unions at all-- so they got them . . . private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them . . . everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them . . . what did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs . . ."
and so you had the lawyers and consultants plotting the sale and break-up of the Anchor-Hocking plant and getting paid one hundred times more an hour than the lowly $12 and $14 dollar an hour glass-workers, in a town where at one time everyone rubbed elbows, the factory workers, the company board, the doctors, the lawyers, and they weren't separated by a vast economic chasm . . .
3) which brings me to The Big Short-- you should read the book, of course, but Mark Baum's speech near the end of the film really sums this up; Baum is based on a real person (Steve Eisman) and played brilliantly by Steve Carell . . . he says:
"For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked . . . not once; eventually you get caught, things go south . . . when the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did"
and that is the final reminder: we did all this to ourselves, we created these systems, and it does not have to be like this . . . we are in control of how we run our government and our economy, we are in control of how we treat our workers and our citizens, and while it might be too late for my generation to fix things, perhaps if enough of the Millennials take advantage of all this clear, logical, and quite profound art, thought, and discourse that is readily available, they will change things.
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