Last Time I Listen to Him . . .
My son Alex told me a few weeks ago-- after a debacle with a used Chinese cell-phone-- that I should not offer him any options, I should just tell him the right thing to do and he promised he would listen to me; now I did warn him about buying a used cell-phone from China and I suggested he just purchase one from our provider (Cricket) but I didn't forbid him from buying a phone from China-- I thought it might be an interesting experiment and it was a good deal on a cool phone-- but the phone didn't work properly and though the seller issued a refund, it still cost us a bunch to ship the broken phone back to China (because of this crazy secretive system) but I told Alex that I couldn't just tell him the right thing to do because most of the time I had no clue what was right, so all I could do was offer suggestions . . . which drives him crazy; anyway, nearly a month ago we returned from our first summer trip to Sea Isle City and when we arrived back in Highland Park, Alex suggested that we just leave the car packed and drive it like that for a month so we wouldn't have to pack for our second trip down to the beach; while this wasn't feasible for the entire car, I did take his advice as far as the giant bag on top of the car was concerned: I left it up there, packed full of umbrellas and beach chairs and the beach cart and buckets and nets, but a few days ago I started wondering just what was happening inside that rubber sack-- especially since it rained pretty much every day since our last vacation, and when it wasn't raining, it was humid as all fuck . . . so today-- the first sunny day in weeks-- I got up there and unzipped the sack and I'm sorry to say that it was gross, lots of water, and the beach chairs were moldy and the beach cart smelled and the standing water was putrid and gross, so I took everything out and dried it in the sun so that it's ready for our ensuing beach vacation and that's the last time I'm going to take advice from someone who buys a used phone from China on Ebay.
Beauty Happens . . . It Really Does
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World -- An Us by Richard O. Prum is one of those books like Guns, Germs, and Steel . . . it's so well argued and supported and compelling and significant that it might change everyone's brain; I'm not an evolutionary biologist, so it was easy enough for me to buy Prum's theory-- but apparently there are some old school hold-outs that aren't done with their holding out (I guess if you die while still holding out, you never have to acknowledge you were wrong) but basically Prum argues that Darwin theorized about two kinds of selection and one of them has been tragically long neglected and ignored:
1) everyone knows about natural selection . . . the grinding statistical journey that a species embarks on in order to survive in an ecosystem . . . if you've read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins then you know how this works: the goal isn't necessarily to be "red in tooth and claw" but simply to do anything as an organism that makes your genes get to the next generation-- you can be a shark or a lichen or an ant or human, cooperate or kill, hide or clone yourself, become parasitic or symbiotic, whatever works;
2) then there is sexual selection . . . and Prum argues that-- for various reasons, some cultural, some intellectual, some political, some uglier-- sexual selection has been conflated with natural selection, and hard-core natural selection advocates argue that mate choice is always connected to fitness, but Prum-- an renowned ornithologist-- sees it differently (or more like Darwin) and argues that sexual selection is often aesthetic and totally disconnected from a species fitness, and the ornamental physical features and mating displays (of which the peacock's tail is the most famous) are the result of a runaway feedback loop of sexual selection and can be contrary or detached from the fitness of the species to survive;
the old way to interpret this is the handicap system-- if a male peacock can support a big crazy tail and survive then "wow!" this bird must be really really fit and females are choosing the big tail based on that criteria but this handicap idea just doesn't hold up-- creatures would then have costlier and costlier ornaments, that would cancel out fitness-- he uses the "With a Name Like Flucker's, It's Got to Be Good" SNL skit to illustrate the logical problem with the handicap system of selection . . . but you could also imagine that a trait like acne would then be sexually attractive in humans, because it does indicate hormonal fitness to mate and it is a handicap but it's not selected for sexually-- the peacock's tail is on a separate loop from fitness, and it is based on female choice-- which was the big political problem with Darwin's theory of sexual selection-- it gives females autonomy and a decent amount of control in how a species evolves . . . folks were able to swallow one part of Darwin's idea-- male vs. male mating rituals . . . because when a couple of elk butt heads you can imagine that they are demonstrating physical fitness, a trait that could be significant to survival, but when a female bowerbird peruses the male's blue bedecked bower and decides that it seems safe to investigate, that's giving the female too much power in an aesthetic pathway that is rather arbitrary and not linked precisely to genetic fitness . . . many many years ago I made a terrible choice for a presentation topic at a job interview-- the evolution of the wing-- this always fascinated me: what good is half a wing? but the theories that were prevalent in the early 90's said that each step of the way the wing was naturally selected-- there were heat collecting benefits to half a wing and gliding potential and the possibility of looking bigger than you were . . . but now there is evidence that feathers preceded the wing on the evolutionary timescale and that they might have been selected for-- as happens with the Argus pheasant--
because they are beautiful and the wing evolved from there-- so it started as a sexually selected trait and then became genetically useful to the species and thus naturally selected for . . . this is a lot to think about, especially since evolutionary biology was developed in a period where Prum claims "every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler" but we now know that people certainly don't make their mating choices based on genetic fitness-- sturdy women with wide hips and strong ankles and wrists are what the eugenic proponents recommended-- in fact, mating choices changes with the times and the place and the context: so you can have "heroin chic" European models and nearly obese Khoisan women and both are considered incredibly attractive in their culture . . . we're not doing eugenic calculation in our brain, we simply find someone or something beautiful, and Prum believes the birds he observes operate in the same manner, and then when you've found something beautiful and you mate with it, your children will have a genetic predilection to find the same things beautiful and increase the likelihood of that trait being propagated, even if it's not the most utilitarian thing for the genetic survival of the species as a whole . . . and a few million years of this arbitrary wackiness and you've got the peacock's tail (which was so absurd that it made Darwin sick) but the same could be said about human female breast tissue-- humans are the sole animals that keep this tissue year-round-- and it drives some men wild . . . but really offers no genetic fitness, it's much more convenient to just have temporary breast tissue (as women with big boobs who play sports must know all too well) and that's how the rest of the mammals do it, but this isn't a "mistake," it's a trait that has been sexually selected for and offers nothing but attraction and beauty . . . and this theory also explains why we find art beautiful and music, because we have the capacity to find things beautiful, and so do animals, and that choice-- which is politically charged and intellectually difficult-- is what fuels this other type of selection: Prum explains that it was easier to just have one method of selection, and think about everything through that lens, but it just doesn't make sense for a lot of behaviors and traits . . . so I highly recommend this book, it's a big one and it will change how scientists view the world, there are detailed descriptions of bird mating rituals that you can skim, but it's generally an easy and compelling read and the ideas are ground-breaking.
1) everyone knows about natural selection . . . the grinding statistical journey that a species embarks on in order to survive in an ecosystem . . . if you've read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins then you know how this works: the goal isn't necessarily to be "red in tooth and claw" but simply to do anything as an organism that makes your genes get to the next generation-- you can be a shark or a lichen or an ant or human, cooperate or kill, hide or clone yourself, become parasitic or symbiotic, whatever works;
2) then there is sexual selection . . . and Prum argues that-- for various reasons, some cultural, some intellectual, some political, some uglier-- sexual selection has been conflated with natural selection, and hard-core natural selection advocates argue that mate choice is always connected to fitness, but Prum-- an renowned ornithologist-- sees it differently (or more like Darwin) and argues that sexual selection is often aesthetic and totally disconnected from a species fitness, and the ornamental physical features and mating displays (of which the peacock's tail is the most famous) are the result of a runaway feedback loop of sexual selection and can be contrary or detached from the fitness of the species to survive;
the old way to interpret this is the handicap system-- if a male peacock can support a big crazy tail and survive then "wow!" this bird must be really really fit and females are choosing the big tail based on that criteria but this handicap idea just doesn't hold up-- creatures would then have costlier and costlier ornaments, that would cancel out fitness-- he uses the "With a Name Like Flucker's, It's Got to Be Good" SNL skit to illustrate the logical problem with the handicap system of selection . . . but you could also imagine that a trait like acne would then be sexually attractive in humans, because it does indicate hormonal fitness to mate and it is a handicap but it's not selected for sexually-- the peacock's tail is on a separate loop from fitness, and it is based on female choice-- which was the big political problem with Darwin's theory of sexual selection-- it gives females autonomy and a decent amount of control in how a species evolves . . . folks were able to swallow one part of Darwin's idea-- male vs. male mating rituals . . . because when a couple of elk butt heads you can imagine that they are demonstrating physical fitness, a trait that could be significant to survival, but when a female bowerbird peruses the male's blue bedecked bower and decides that it seems safe to investigate, that's giving the female too much power in an aesthetic pathway that is rather arbitrary and not linked precisely to genetic fitness . . . many many years ago I made a terrible choice for a presentation topic at a job interview-- the evolution of the wing-- this always fascinated me: what good is half a wing? but the theories that were prevalent in the early 90's said that each step of the way the wing was naturally selected-- there were heat collecting benefits to half a wing and gliding potential and the possibility of looking bigger than you were . . . but now there is evidence that feathers preceded the wing on the evolutionary timescale and that they might have been selected for-- as happens with the Argus pheasant--
because they are beautiful and the wing evolved from there-- so it started as a sexually selected trait and then became genetically useful to the species and thus naturally selected for . . . this is a lot to think about, especially since evolutionary biology was developed in a period where Prum claims "every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler" but we now know that people certainly don't make their mating choices based on genetic fitness-- sturdy women with wide hips and strong ankles and wrists are what the eugenic proponents recommended-- in fact, mating choices changes with the times and the place and the context: so you can have "heroin chic" European models and nearly obese Khoisan women and both are considered incredibly attractive in their culture . . . we're not doing eugenic calculation in our brain, we simply find someone or something beautiful, and Prum believes the birds he observes operate in the same manner, and then when you've found something beautiful and you mate with it, your children will have a genetic predilection to find the same things beautiful and increase the likelihood of that trait being propagated, even if it's not the most utilitarian thing for the genetic survival of the species as a whole . . . and a few million years of this arbitrary wackiness and you've got the peacock's tail (which was so absurd that it made Darwin sick) but the same could be said about human female breast tissue-- humans are the sole animals that keep this tissue year-round-- and it drives some men wild . . . but really offers no genetic fitness, it's much more convenient to just have temporary breast tissue (as women with big boobs who play sports must know all too well) and that's how the rest of the mammals do it, but this isn't a "mistake," it's a trait that has been sexually selected for and offers nothing but attraction and beauty . . . and this theory also explains why we find art beautiful and music, because we have the capacity to find things beautiful, and so do animals, and that choice-- which is politically charged and intellectually difficult-- is what fuels this other type of selection: Prum explains that it was easier to just have one method of selection, and think about everything through that lens, but it just doesn't make sense for a lot of behaviors and traits . . . so I highly recommend this book, it's a big one and it will change how scientists view the world, there are detailed descriptions of bird mating rituals that you can skim, but it's generally an easy and compelling read and the ideas are ground-breaking.
Something Uplifting for the Young People
I've been spinning my wheels lately in my digital music studio, working on lots of projects but never quite finishing anything, but I wrote this song last week and was determined to get it done before going on vacation-- it's a motivational piece designed to inspire all the young people to achieve great things in their collective lives (before they decay into senescence and senility).
Donald Trump Needs to Clean My Toilet
The married couple from Nicaragua that cleans our house, who sought political asylum here in 2005 and have been issued yearly work permits for the last 13 years, were recently told that their permit would not be renewed this year and they must leave the country by September (despite the fact that they have three children enrolled in the New Brunswick school system and one set of in-laws that are US citizens).
Every Thundercloud Has a Silverish Lining
For the past month, the weather in Jersey has been hideous: a damp, hot subtropical mess, but I keep telling myself: wildfires are worse than humidity, wildfires are worse than humidity.
Gene Hackman Needs to Coach My Kids (on How to Enjoy Hoosiers)
We watched Hoosiers this afternoon-- my kids just completed a week of basketball camp, so I thought it would be the perfect flick . . . plus it streams free on Amazon-- but I think I waited too long to show it to them; all the things that I find moving in the film: the scrub making his free throws, the town drunk rising to the challenge, the coach's unorthodox methods, the last second heroics in every game-- my kids, jaded and ironic teenagers that they are, found these tropes cliched and hackneyed, and were constantly predicting the next beat, instead of appropriately enjoying the cheese (and while even my annoying children agreed that the basketball is shot fairly well . . . it almost looks like they let the kids play and then cherry-picked the best moments for the movie, the music is atrocious 80's synth-pop, which does not fit the 50's timeframe whatsoever).
The Subtle Art of Naming a Canine (part II)
My son Alex and his friend Jack decided they approve of dogs with human names-- so our dog Lola and Jack's dog Walter fit the bill-- but the human name should be old school and not particularly common: you can't have a dog named "Michael," for instance . . . that's weird; every time you called for the dog people would think you lost a child.
Facebook Doesn't Want You To Read This (or Does It?)
Many liberals believe we need the government to protect us from the power of corporations and corporate lobbying, and many conservatives believe we need corporations, capitalism, and competition to protect us from unchecked government power-- and, in modern America, whether you think the corporations or the government is winning this battle is often determined by your political persuasion; Republicans are desperate to repeal Obamacare and end this heinous government intrusion into our personal lives and the Trump administration has given corporations a healthy tax cut, meanwhile Democrats lament the death of the EPA and how corporations will now be able to pollute with impunity, no check on externalities such as lead, carbon emissions, toxic air pollutants such as benzene and dioxin, and the return of invasive coal mining and believe the government is the only referee who can prevent greedy business and lobbying interests from destroying our air and water . . . and obviously there is truth to both sides and-- ideally-- there will be checks and balances between the two (although conservative economist Luigi Zingales argues that big corporations and the government are one and the same in America now, especially under Trump, who is running America the same way corrupt business tycoon Silvio Berlusconi ran Italy) but Franklin Foer, in his ominously titled new book World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech believes that in the realm of technology, the scale has irrevocably tipped towards the giant corporations (referred to as GAFA in Europe . . . we all know them: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) and their power and consequence is unlimited and while these companies promote a utopian ideal of efficient networks and unfettered information-- and argue that monopoly is the only way to realize this-- they are actually moving us towards a drone-like existence in a hive-mind, where there is no individual genius; here are a few of his points and rhetorical methods:
1) he compares the industrialization of the internet to the industrialization of the food industry-- while the technology of convenience produced wonder and efficiency, it also contributed to obesity, diabetes, our sedentary lifestyle, and a terrible environmental toll . . . Nabisco and Kraft and such food conglomerates studied us the way Facebook and Google do now, figured out how to create processed foods that would never sate our appetite and sold them to us for next to nothing (for a great book on this subject that will totally freak you out, read The Dorito Effect) and these companies essentially created food that was not nutritious but pandered to the taste of the masses; Foer sees the content of GAFA, especially in journalism, as analogous to this and worries their dominance and monopolistic tendencies will squash diversity and create homogenization . . . think about how hard it is to buy actual free-range tasty chicken now, it's impossible . . . chicken flesh has become an industrialized homogenized hormone laced water filled nutritionless fungible commodity . . . and he is worried that the same is happening to our arts and culture;
2) he also sees hope in this metaphor . . . the counter-culture food movement, which has now pervaded much of middle-class America (or at least around here) and lauds organic, local, home-grown, slow-food and encourages people to really think about and understand what they are eating offers an alternative to the industrialized food industry . . . he hopes the same can happen with the internet;
3) he worries about the power of algorithms and the fact that "data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear"
4) he points out that the "Victorian Internet," otherwise known as the telegraph, followed a similar pattern as today's internet; Abe Lincoln was obsessed with commanding his armies in the Civil War by telegraph-- the Union army strung 15,000 miles of wire, to the rebels paltry 1000 miles, and this proved to be an enormous tactical advantage . . . Western Union was best positioned to privatize this network and did so, swallowing "the weaker firms" and becoming an "implacable behemoth" that dominated for the next hundred years;
5) Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon want the same sort of monopoly and they are lobbying hard to do so . . . they barely pay taxes, they are monopolies, the government does not seem interested in breaking them apart, they own our data, they own the media, they produce the journalism that most people read on a daily basis, they have pushed the value of the written word down to free, they don't particularly care about intellectual property or copyright law, and their hope is to produce AI that denies us our autonomy . . . but they sure are easy to consume;
6) Foer certainly has his own axe to grind-- he witnessed the demise of print journalism first-hand, from the inside, and he laments this; he notes that the New Republic paid $150 dollars for a book review during the Great Depression, and it still pays the same amount today for the same length review for the Web Site; in 1981, the average author made 11,000 dollars a year (35,000 when adjusted for inflation) and by 2015 that amount dipped to 17,500 a year . . . and he blames the big companies that run the internet and promote small news stories written for free and push anything that is behind a pay-wall down the search list . . . who has the time for that?
7) his solutions are fairly simple and practical, though they may never happen . . . the government needs to enforce anti-trust laws again; we need a new agency to protect us from these monopolies-- we got one after the 2008 crisis (the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to protect us from rapacious banks determined to make a profit in any way possible) and while this can't happen under this administration-- for some reason, Republicans hate consumers and the rights of citizens to be protected from corporations (just look at what's happened with the EPA) but perhaps it will happen soon enough, it will just take a big enough hack, or enough foreign meddling in our news and elections, and it will have the political impetus to move forward;
8) his final solution is one I espouse-- the refuge of print on paper; Americans are still reading books-- and the Kindle has not supplanted the actual book-- and when you're reading an actual book, the big companies can't get to you . . . you are alone with your thoughts, without advertisement, distraction, and consumer agenda; he hopes that perhaps this can happen again with journalism, that Americans will find room for long-form, intelligent, paid journalism . . . with intelligent gatekeepers, lots of gatekeepers, not just four big ones, some method of vetting and editing, and some moral purpose behind the print . . . so stop reading my stupid, poorly edited blog and pick up a copy of the New York Times or a good book and sit down and think your thoughts, without the all-knowing eye of GAFA watching your thoughts . . .
9) Franklin Foer also wrote How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, which I recommend.
1) he compares the industrialization of the internet to the industrialization of the food industry-- while the technology of convenience produced wonder and efficiency, it also contributed to obesity, diabetes, our sedentary lifestyle, and a terrible environmental toll . . . Nabisco and Kraft and such food conglomerates studied us the way Facebook and Google do now, figured out how to create processed foods that would never sate our appetite and sold them to us for next to nothing (for a great book on this subject that will totally freak you out, read The Dorito Effect) and these companies essentially created food that was not nutritious but pandered to the taste of the masses; Foer sees the content of GAFA, especially in journalism, as analogous to this and worries their dominance and monopolistic tendencies will squash diversity and create homogenization . . . think about how hard it is to buy actual free-range tasty chicken now, it's impossible . . . chicken flesh has become an industrialized homogenized hormone laced water filled nutritionless fungible commodity . . . and he is worried that the same is happening to our arts and culture;
2) he also sees hope in this metaphor . . . the counter-culture food movement, which has now pervaded much of middle-class America (or at least around here) and lauds organic, local, home-grown, slow-food and encourages people to really think about and understand what they are eating offers an alternative to the industrialized food industry . . . he hopes the same can happen with the internet;
3) he worries about the power of algorithms and the fact that "data, like victims of torture, tells its interrogator what it wants to hear"
4) he points out that the "Victorian Internet," otherwise known as the telegraph, followed a similar pattern as today's internet; Abe Lincoln was obsessed with commanding his armies in the Civil War by telegraph-- the Union army strung 15,000 miles of wire, to the rebels paltry 1000 miles, and this proved to be an enormous tactical advantage . . . Western Union was best positioned to privatize this network and did so, swallowing "the weaker firms" and becoming an "implacable behemoth" that dominated for the next hundred years;
5) Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon want the same sort of monopoly and they are lobbying hard to do so . . . they barely pay taxes, they are monopolies, the government does not seem interested in breaking them apart, they own our data, they own the media, they produce the journalism that most people read on a daily basis, they have pushed the value of the written word down to free, they don't particularly care about intellectual property or copyright law, and their hope is to produce AI that denies us our autonomy . . . but they sure are easy to consume;
6) Foer certainly has his own axe to grind-- he witnessed the demise of print journalism first-hand, from the inside, and he laments this; he notes that the New Republic paid $150 dollars for a book review during the Great Depression, and it still pays the same amount today for the same length review for the Web Site; in 1981, the average author made 11,000 dollars a year (35,000 when adjusted for inflation) and by 2015 that amount dipped to 17,500 a year . . . and he blames the big companies that run the internet and promote small news stories written for free and push anything that is behind a pay-wall down the search list . . . who has the time for that?
7) his solutions are fairly simple and practical, though they may never happen . . . the government needs to enforce anti-trust laws again; we need a new agency to protect us from these monopolies-- we got one after the 2008 crisis (the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to protect us from rapacious banks determined to make a profit in any way possible) and while this can't happen under this administration-- for some reason, Republicans hate consumers and the rights of citizens to be protected from corporations (just look at what's happened with the EPA) but perhaps it will happen soon enough, it will just take a big enough hack, or enough foreign meddling in our news and elections, and it will have the political impetus to move forward;
8) his final solution is one I espouse-- the refuge of print on paper; Americans are still reading books-- and the Kindle has not supplanted the actual book-- and when you're reading an actual book, the big companies can't get to you . . . you are alone with your thoughts, without advertisement, distraction, and consumer agenda; he hopes that perhaps this can happen again with journalism, that Americans will find room for long-form, intelligent, paid journalism . . . with intelligent gatekeepers, lots of gatekeepers, not just four big ones, some method of vetting and editing, and some moral purpose behind the print . . . so stop reading my stupid, poorly edited blog and pick up a copy of the New York Times or a good book and sit down and think your thoughts, without the all-knowing eye of GAFA watching your thoughts . . .
9) Franklin Foer also wrote How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, which I recommend.
Meta-tears
Once again, the season finale of GLOW got me all choked up . . . which is ridiculous, considering I was watching a completely fictitious representation of a real women's wrestling league from the '80's . . . which was itself fabricated, of course . . . and so the wedding/battle royale in the final episode was not only contrived and plotted within the show but it was also plotted by the writers of the show; despite all this meta-manipulation, the underdog story still got the better of me (plus there are some amazing plot twists) and so whether it's South Korea knocking Germany out of the World Cup or (spoilers ahead) a chick in a weird leotard with a fake Russian accent and a broken leg cruising into the ring on a zip-line, it still gets me teary-eyed.
Shooting the Shit (head) at the Dog Park
One of the joys of having a dog is visiting the dog park and chatting with the weird mammals that bring their pets; a few days ago, during an early morning visit, I spoke with a nice heavyset lady with a frilly white hat, who was accompanied by her demurely dressed teenage daughter; the nice lady with the hat informed me that her dog's name was Bash-- short for Sebastian-- and she said that Sebastian was the name the shelter gave this Bassett hound but that was NOT a good name, too long, but that Bash was a good name, so they shorted it-- but I thought to myself, that's not good name . . . a good dog name has two syllables, so when you call the dog you don't sound like an idiot: Lola is fine . . . LOOOO LAAAAAA . . . but Bash doesn't work . . . BAAAAA -- AAAAASH . . . it's awkward-- and then she alluded to their original idea for a name for their hound, and she called this original idea the "bad name" and she turned to her daughter and said, "Should we tell him the bad name? No, we probably shouldn't," and I left the comment alone-- it was weird-- but the lady in the frilly hat seemed determined to perseverate on this topic of the "bad name" and though I feigned disinterest, she told me anyway; "We were going to call him Blow-Dog but we decided that wasn't very nice," and then she turned to her daughter and said, "Right? Blow-dog wouldn't be a nice name . . . but it's funny!" and I didn't know how to react-- it was 6:45 AM and this nice lady in a frilly hat was talking about fellatio in front of her daughter, so I said, "Reminds me of the name of the dog in The Jerk . . . that movie with Steve Martin?" but the allusion was lost on them so Lola and I beat a hasty retreat out the gate.
You're Welcome, David Sedaris!
The new David Sedaris memoir/essay collection Calypso is darker and perhaps more candid and sincere than anything he's written previous; it may be his best work (though not his funniest . .. that would be Naked or Santaland Diaries or Me Talk Pretty One Day) but be forewarned-- you're going to deal with death and the afterlife and eldercare and mental illness and suicide . . . you'll still laugh and there's plenty of wry observations on mundane events (plus he feeds his benign fatty tumor to a bunch of turtles . . . though not to the exact turtle he wanted to feed his tumor too, the turtle with a tumor on his head because that turtle died before Sedaris could toss his tumor off the bridge) and I'm also pretty sure that Sedaris has either been reading my blog or stealing my thoughts, because his essay "Boo-Hooey" is about how he can't stand people talking about ghosts and dreams and how he does not believe in the significance of either topic and fans of Sentence of Dave know I've been writing about the same for many many years.
Where Is Kurt Russell When You Need Him?
Yesterday, we drove to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, wandered around a bit (I had a green tea donut at the Doughnut Plant) and then went on the 11:15 "Shop Life" tour in the Tenement Museum-- I highly recommend doing this, whether you have kids or not . . . the tour is immersive and fun and there's plenty of sitting . . . I especially enjoyed sitting in the replica of John and Caroline Schneider's 1870s German lager saloon-- and then we walked over to Chinatown and ate at the Nom Wah Tea Parlor, a famous dim sum place that has been operating since the 1920s and looks like a vintage Asian diner inside (the food was good and cheap for New York, but I would say you go more for the ambiance than the dumplings . . . my kids and I agreed that the food is better and more authentic at our favorite local Asian joint, Shanghai Dumpling) and then we got caught in a storm, drank some coffee and bubble tea, played Connect Four (I crushed both my kids), browsed dried sea cucumbers (too pricey) and went to Mission Escape Games and did the "Escape the Nemesis" room, which my kids thought was the greatest thing ever-- while the room can hold eight people, no one else had booked in our time slot, so it was just the four of us and there was a lot to do: we finally completed the mission, but needed a few hints-- you get three-- and an extra two minutes (thanks to the staff for that!) and it was fairly frantic and very fun . . . but while we were very proud that we came together as a family and solved all the mysteries, puzzles, and riddles inside the brig of the Nemesis, escaping from that situation was nothing compared to escaping New York City on a Friday afternoon at 4:45 PM . . . it took us an hour to drive the .6 miles from the lot on Allen Street to the Holland Tunnel and then it was fairly brutal all the way through Jersey City but the traffic broke up once we got to the Turnpike . . . and I really can't decide the best way in and out of the city: we made great time in the morning (and driving in is far cheaper than buying four train tickets) but leaving Manhattan on public transportation is kind of nice because you don't have to worry about traffic and--more significantly-- you can nap.
Put the Secret Token in the Phantom Tollbooth?
Andrew Lawler's new book on the Lost Colony of Roanoke is far more intricate than I imagined; I thought The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke would be an archaeological mystery in the vein of The Lost City of Z and it is, complete with hoaxes, red herrings, buried treasure, amateur sleuths, cryptic maps and invisible ink but I didn't realize that the book was going to use what Lawler calls "the Elizabethan equivalent of the Apollo program" and the surrounding history and mythology surrounding Sir Walter Raleigh's venture to create a permanent settlement in America as a lens to look at America itself; at times the story is confusing, the history is far more variegated, complex and violent than the boiled down version-- there are aborted missions, Algonquian assassinations, deserted slaves, shipwrecks, Sir Francis Drake, Spaniards, disease, reconciliation, two Indians of opposite purpose (Manteo and Wanchese) and a host of other history before we get to the simple story of a bunch of colonists, left to themselves for three years while their supplier and governor (John White) was waylaid in England by war with the Spanish and when he returns, with the hopes of being reunited with his daughter and grand-daughter (Virginia Dare . . . first English person born on American soil) he finds them gone, and a secret token on a tree (Croatoan . . . which we now call Hatteras) and so I'll leave you with a few quotations from the book to whet your appetite for the layers of whirling insanity layered on top of that archetypal American story:
1) According to historian Brent Lane, "The Roanoke voyages have nothing to do with Virginia Dare and the poor lost white people-- the lost cause of the sixteenth century and all that gothic shit . . . the real story is geopolitics, colonization, the advancement of science, and development of investment"
2) The bickering of historians, professional and amateur, over the fate of the Lost Colony resembles the scene from Life of Brian about the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's front . . . "Willard's dramatic outburst-- 'I will fucking run you over!'-- seemed to sum up the relations among the researchers . . . Lucketti and Horton were quick to criticize each other's research, while Noel Hume and the National park Service had fought to a bitter standstill about the earthwork . . . Evans's First Colony Foundation had refused to participate in a public panel that included Horton and Prentice, and organized their own symposium . . ." etc. etc . . .
3) some folks currently living in this area of North Carolina are consumed by their family trees and genetic history; Lawler describes genealogy obsessed Clyde Miller as a man "engaged in something more than a quixotic effort to trace his relations back to ancient Judea via Tudor England . . . it was as if, using his convoluted and tangled family tree, he were attempting to stitch together the black, red and white parts of his splintered past, the "mongrel" remnants that so many Americans share to some degree, a reality largely lost amid the nation's standing racial divides";
4) most historians now accept the fact that the Lost Colonists, if they survived, simply "melted" into the Native population . . . and this could have been true for the serval hundred abandoned African and Indian slaves abandoned by Sir Francis Drake, the three men abandoned by Lane in his haste to leave the area, and the fifteen men left by Grenville . . . the colonists were only "lost" to the Europeans who searched for them-- the Algonquians absorbed them (and they may not want to have been "found" by the white folks . . . it's embarrassing to be found when you've gone native, taken a native husband or wife, and are living in native ways . . . and this happened quite often in this time period-- white folks went native, but the reverse was very very rare)
5) despite the fact that the folks living in the area are a "mongrel" mix of black, Native American, and European, white supremacists and racists adopted Virginia Dare as a symbol of white unsullied American purity and turned her into a chaste and beautiful huntress who survived on her own and did not mix with the "half-naked Indian savages"
6) Lawler analogously points out that there are people "in eastern Europe who were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, grew up in Czechoslovakia, spent their teenage years in the Third Reich, lived out middle age in the Soviet Union and died in independent Ukraine-- all without leaving their village" and the people of Roanoke are similar-- they were designated English, white, black, Native America, and they designated themselves whatever was politically or practically expeditious, without worry over the truth of the matter . . . and so no DNA test will ever untangle this knot and no story will ever make everyone happy . . . the truth will never out on this and the legends will be shaped by the context: a great read, especially if you are headed for a vacation on the Outer Banks!
1) According to historian Brent Lane, "The Roanoke voyages have nothing to do with Virginia Dare and the poor lost white people-- the lost cause of the sixteenth century and all that gothic shit . . . the real story is geopolitics, colonization, the advancement of science, and development of investment"
2) The bickering of historians, professional and amateur, over the fate of the Lost Colony resembles the scene from Life of Brian about the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's front . . . "Willard's dramatic outburst-- 'I will fucking run you over!'-- seemed to sum up the relations among the researchers . . . Lucketti and Horton were quick to criticize each other's research, while Noel Hume and the National park Service had fought to a bitter standstill about the earthwork . . . Evans's First Colony Foundation had refused to participate in a public panel that included Horton and Prentice, and organized their own symposium . . ." etc. etc . . .
3) some folks currently living in this area of North Carolina are consumed by their family trees and genetic history; Lawler describes genealogy obsessed Clyde Miller as a man "engaged in something more than a quixotic effort to trace his relations back to ancient Judea via Tudor England . . . it was as if, using his convoluted and tangled family tree, he were attempting to stitch together the black, red and white parts of his splintered past, the "mongrel" remnants that so many Americans share to some degree, a reality largely lost amid the nation's standing racial divides";
4) most historians now accept the fact that the Lost Colonists, if they survived, simply "melted" into the Native population . . . and this could have been true for the serval hundred abandoned African and Indian slaves abandoned by Sir Francis Drake, the three men abandoned by Lane in his haste to leave the area, and the fifteen men left by Grenville . . . the colonists were only "lost" to the Europeans who searched for them-- the Algonquians absorbed them (and they may not want to have been "found" by the white folks . . . it's embarrassing to be found when you've gone native, taken a native husband or wife, and are living in native ways . . . and this happened quite often in this time period-- white folks went native, but the reverse was very very rare)
5) despite the fact that the folks living in the area are a "mongrel" mix of black, Native American, and European, white supremacists and racists adopted Virginia Dare as a symbol of white unsullied American purity and turned her into a chaste and beautiful huntress who survived on her own and did not mix with the "half-naked Indian savages"
6) Lawler analogously points out that there are people "in eastern Europe who were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, grew up in Czechoslovakia, spent their teenage years in the Third Reich, lived out middle age in the Soviet Union and died in independent Ukraine-- all without leaving their village" and the people of Roanoke are similar-- they were designated English, white, black, Native America, and they designated themselves whatever was politically or practically expeditious, without worry over the truth of the matter . . . and so no DNA test will ever untangle this knot and no story will ever make everyone happy . . . the truth will never out on this and the legends will be shaped by the context: a great read, especially if you are headed for a vacation on the Outer Banks!
The Test 112: What's in a Name?
This week on our podcast, Stacey proclaims that this is the "stupidest test ever," but I still found it very difficult (unlike Cunningham, who decided it was her favorite and awarded herself a perfect score-- seven out of seven, though there were eight questions).
Hot Potato
There are studies that show that female teachers with math anxiety pass that anxiety to their female students and I get that-- because right now I'm trying to teach my kids to make tacos and I'm passing my cooking anxiety unto them (we only had to call my wife once).
Gourmandise
My 88 pound son made and ate one dozen fresh strawberry/raspberry-blackberry jam/chocolate syrup/whipped cream crepes this morning (meanwhile, Catherine and I are are forging ahead with the low carbs and no sugar diet, so we ate zero fresh strawberry/raspberry-blackberry jam/chocolate syrup/whipped cream crepes this morning).
OBFT XXV
The 25th Annual Outer Banks Fishing Trip is in the books, another fantastic one-- thanks Whit!-- here are some of the things that happened:
1) we spent Wednesday night at Whitney's mom's place in Norfolk-- he is living there now-- and his mom and step-dad had just rolled into to town from Florida, but were sleeping elsewhere because we had a house full of fishermen, and so they were showing up in the morning and Whitney's step-dad said he needed to do some work on the house, out back in the little courtyard connected to the garage, so when I woke up at 7:30 AM and heard some banging I figured he was doing aforementioned work, but I also heard the TV, and I figured I would go downstairs and and say hello and help with whatever was going on-- I turned in early and no one else was awake so I went downstairs and the TV was on and no one was watching and the banging was coming from the back door-- it was Johnny G. who yelled "Dave! My savior!" when I opened the door-- he went out for a cigarette at 3 AM and Whitney had just locked the door-- so Johnny was locked out and had to sleep in the car in the garage . . . shades of the McGrant incident at the Weeping Radish;
2) many of us ate salad with a slab of rare tuna on it at Tortuga's and it was good;
3) Hookey was a popular new addition to the usual array of games-- you throw rubber rings at hooks on a circular piece of wood that is hung on the wall and then do lots of math to figure out who wins (and many people, including myself, said the line, "I was told there would be no math," which is paraphrasing, and though I said it, I had no idea where it was from . . . here's the actual origin)
4) the water was NOT good . . . cold and rough;
5) Bruce painted a picture (or commissioned someone to paint a picture-- same difference)
6) Jon (Yes-man) showed up, after a twenty-three year hiatus (he attended the first trip and never came back until this year) and Billy interrogated him as to why;
7) Jon (Lunkhead) attended for the first time ever;
8) Charlie brought back the cooking-- we had fish one night and a tenderloin the next-- there were also some bacon wrapped scallops . . . the long and short of it was it was easy to avoid carbs (and vegetables) because there weren't any;
9) Johnny woke up Friday morning and couldn't find his pants or his wallet;
10) the debut of the pantsless griffin;
11) Rob slept next to his mattress on the back porch;
12) Marls brought his tennis racket but I did not;
13) Scott and I played some guitar together . . . he's really good so I kicked Whitney out of the band;
14) Bruce told a joke and I reciprocated with the Willie Nelson joke (which I also apparently told last year . . . these things are really starting to blur);
15) we all made playlists but I don't think anyone played their playlist;
16) Whitney was a fabulous host for the 25th year in a row . . . already looking forward to XXVI.
1) we spent Wednesday night at Whitney's mom's place in Norfolk-- he is living there now-- and his mom and step-dad had just rolled into to town from Florida, but were sleeping elsewhere because we had a house full of fishermen, and so they were showing up in the morning and Whitney's step-dad said he needed to do some work on the house, out back in the little courtyard connected to the garage, so when I woke up at 7:30 AM and heard some banging I figured he was doing aforementioned work, but I also heard the TV, and I figured I would go downstairs and and say hello and help with whatever was going on-- I turned in early and no one else was awake so I went downstairs and the TV was on and no one was watching and the banging was coming from the back door-- it was Johnny G. who yelled "Dave! My savior!" when I opened the door-- he went out for a cigarette at 3 AM and Whitney had just locked the door-- so Johnny was locked out and had to sleep in the car in the garage . . . shades of the McGrant incident at the Weeping Radish;
2) many of us ate salad with a slab of rare tuna on it at Tortuga's and it was good;
3) Hookey was a popular new addition to the usual array of games-- you throw rubber rings at hooks on a circular piece of wood that is hung on the wall and then do lots of math to figure out who wins (and many people, including myself, said the line, "I was told there would be no math," which is paraphrasing, and though I said it, I had no idea where it was from . . . here's the actual origin)
4) the water was NOT good . . . cold and rough;
5) Bruce painted a picture (or commissioned someone to paint a picture-- same difference)
6) Jon (Yes-man) showed up, after a twenty-three year hiatus (he attended the first trip and never came back until this year) and Billy interrogated him as to why;
7) Jon (Lunkhead) attended for the first time ever;
8) Charlie brought back the cooking-- we had fish one night and a tenderloin the next-- there were also some bacon wrapped scallops . . . the long and short of it was it was easy to avoid carbs (and vegetables) because there weren't any;
9) Johnny woke up Friday morning and couldn't find his pants or his wallet;
10) the debut of the pantsless griffin;
11) Rob slept next to his mattress on the back porch;
12) Marls brought his tennis racket but I did not;
13) Scott and I played some guitar together . . . he's really good so I kicked Whitney out of the band;
14) Bruce told a joke and I reciprocated with the Willie Nelson joke (which I also apparently told last year . . . these things are really starting to blur);
15) we all made playlists but I don't think anyone played their playlist;
16) Whitney was a fabulous host for the 25th year in a row . . . already looking forward to XXVI.
Shit I'm Watching With the Kids #3
If you want to scramble your children's brains, sit them down and watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . . . my son Alex's favorite movie is Inception, and I promised him that this was a combination of Inception and Romeo and Juliet . . . both Alex and Ian really enjoyed it, once they figured out that Clementine's hair color is the key to following the plot.
Shit I'm Watching with the Kids #2
The kids and I watched Breaking Bad this winter and then I got sick with the flu and watched a few episodes of Better Call Saul and I loved it but I decided to wait to continue until the kids were ready for more of the crew from Breaking Bad . . . we're now three seasons in and we've decided that in some ways we like the show better than Breaking Bad because it's so much less stressful-- it's a prequel, so you know who's going to make it through the show, which makes it a lot easier to enjoy the exploits of Slippin' Jimmy.
Shit I'm Watching With the Kids #1
I hope I'm in Norfolk by now, and here is some promised drivel to peruse while I'm attending OBFT XXV . . . I consider TV a social experience and the only thing I'll watch alone is a sporting event (you're part of the crowd) and I'm not watching The Handmaid's Tale with My Wife (not enough jokes) so I'm watching stuff with the kids-- I'll dole out exactly what we're watching day by day until my return from the Outer Banks; right now we're hooked on The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt . . . it's my second time through and it's just as funny and-- despite all the 90's references, which I'm constantly explaining-- my kids love it.
The Joe DiMaggio of Something
I always get a bit anxious right before I make the trip down to the annual Outer Banks Fishing Trip at my buddy Whitney's place in Kill Devil Hills-- this is year XXV and I've never missed one . . . it's a streak only matched by the host himself and our fraternity brother Rob (aka Squirrel) and I know that streaks are made to be broken and anything could happen-- I nearly missed last year's, I got sick on Friday and drove home Saturday with a 102 fever . . . if I had come down with that virus a few days earlier, I wouldn't have gone-- and since I don't believe in voodoo or jinxes, I'll be honest: anything could happen between now and tomorrow: I could break my leg at soccer practice tonight, or get hit by lightning; someone in my family could come down sick or worse (I have a 95 year old grandmother) and there's car troubles and house troubles and dog troubles . . . this is a solo trip, not a family vacation, and so it's dispensable if need be . . . so wish me the best of luck-- I'm getting all packed up today; I just purchased the giant sized bottle of Espolon Tequila-- my wife says it looks like a joke prop-- it was on sale and the sale was so good I'm not going to reveal the location, and when the young lady with a nose-ring behind the counter got a look at the bottle, she said to me: "Planning to get messed up?" and I'm bringing lots of other leisurely beach stuff as well: guitar, tennis racquet, Spikeball, corn-hole bags . . . so hopefully things will go well and I'll make it down without incident . . . thirty-one more years and I'll equal Joltin' Joe (and I apologize in advance, there will probably be some drivel here for the next few days).
Forget the Media, Keep Your Eye on Andrew Wheeler
The phrase that keeps running through my mind when I hear all this Trump insanity on the news-- the Iranian posturing, the Russia investigation, the trade war with China, Scott Pruitt's inane corruption, the immigration issues, and the latest and greatest . . . Trump's dismissal of U.S. intelligence about Russian meddling in the election and then his Orwellian reversal of the word "would" to "wouldn't"-- all I keep thinking is "wag the dog . . . wag the dog," because all of these things are smoke and mirrors, barely important, compared to the policy changes happening beneath the 24 hour news cycle veneer: the new EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, is a coal lobbyist and was a legislative aid to Senator Jim Inhofe-- who referred to global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people" and Wheeler is better politically prepared to wage the attack on our air, water, and land than Pruitt, and so much more scary; National Geographic is keeping a running list of the anti-regulatory changes and agenda of this administration, which seems determined to roll back pollution standards, auto emission standards, car mileage standards, the endangered species act, the clean air and water acts, and a host of other . . . long after all this other bullshit is forgotten-- immigration is an issue that doesn't effect very many people, it's just a great metaphor for bipartisan America; the Russia investigation is going to point to things we already know-- Trump is corrupt and crooked; if you're a true liberal, then the trade war with China is fantastic, because it means people are consuming less stuff; of course Trump is beholden to Putin; we're not going to go to war with Iran; etcetera . . . none of it matters, but it's all making people miss the existential stuff, the stuff that will take years and years to reverse . . . if the damage is reversible at all.
Ant-Man is no Einstein
We went and saw Ant-Man and the Wasp today and while it's certainly an entertaining movie-- Paul Rudd does his usual spot-on job at playing a charmingly ditzy do-gooder dad/minor-superhero-- there are some black hole magnitude plot holes though out (and teenage boys are quick to spot these . . . you can't just magnify a building on any piece of land, large buildings need foundations . . . and plumbing and electrical hook-ups; you also can't shrink a human body down smaller than its constituent molecules, that makes no sense) so if you want something a bit more technical and profound on the topic of the infinitesimal then I recommend Jim Holt's collection of mathematically inspired essays When Einstein Walked with Godel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought; he discusses incredibly tininess, the infinitely large, the expanding universe, the Copernican logic-- which asserts that we are very likely not special at all, in any way-- quantum physics in a nutshell (don't look: waves, look: particles) quantum entanglement and spooky action, lots of Alan Turing and Charles Babbage and Leibniz and the philosophical development of the idea of a computer (my wife and kids made fun of me when, struggling with my son's cellphone, I said, "I can't turn on this little computer!" but I contested that little computer is way more accurate than "phone" and I'm going to start calling cell-phones "little computers" as a regular practice in my classroom, to hammer home just what they've got distracting them) and there's also an essay on the weird and slightly scary behavior of moral saints and Holt coincidentally (from my perspective) mentions a book I was recently discussing with a British friend Ashely-- Nick Hornby's How to Be Good-- but much more interesting than that conversation was that Ashley revealed to us that when he was growing up in Zambia-- his dad worked in the copper industry and so he lived there until age 13, until it got too dangerous for white people to be in the country . . . several of his neighbors were executed-- but until this time he had a pet monkey, which would drink tea with sugar and had the run of the house . . . anyway, Holt mentions the speech at the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man (the book came out in 1956 and the movie in 1957) and it's quite a different tone than the fast-paced action of Ant-Man and the Wasp . . . while there are moments when the Marvel folks try to capture the madness at the heart of the universe (there is some mention of "quantum entanglement" to explain the connection between Scott Lang and Janet Van Dyne but it's not explained in nearly the detail or tediousness of Ghost's backstory) but there's nothing to compare to the pathos of Scott Carey's final speech before he shrinks away to a scale imperceptible to humans:
"So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet - like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!"
You Are Where You're At
I finished two powerful and poignant books (and thoroughly enjoyed both) on vacation that hammered home the exact reason you go on vacation-- because when you locate yourself to a different place, you become a different person-- there are many conservative folks that bristle at this, people who believe in choices and autonomy and free will, and while I will acknowledge that it certainly might be good to believe you have control over your life, it probably isn't true;
1) Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy, uses one South Angeles murder to look at the big picture-- black-on-black violence in traditionally African-American enclaves like Watts and Compton are generally under-policed and justice is rarely meted out . . . Leovy turns cause and effect on its head, proving that it's not because these places are inhabited by gang members that make them difficult to police . . . instead, because they have never been policed with much intensity and intent-- unlike white neighborhoods in the same city-- the denizens have learned to solve their problems outside the aegis of traditional authority, witnesses-- fearing injury or death-- have learned not to testify, and it has come to be understood that in these places-- whether it be the Wild West, the territory of the Yanomami, or South LA-- that the state does NOT have a monopoly on force and violence . . .
"take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened . . . signal that no one cares and fail to solve murders . . . limit their options for escape . . . then see what happens"
and if the book sounds depressing, in the end it is not-- because there are select police that work homicide in the ghetto in an inspirational manner, and this details such a case and the men that solved it-- and this is a case that has to be solved, because it is the murder of Bryant Tennelle-- 18 years old-- the youngest son of a highly respected Los Angeles detective Wallace Tennelle . . . a principled officer that chose to live where he worked and paid the ultimate price for it; the book might change your mind about how gangs work (far looser and more disorganized that you might think) and how murders are handled when they are insular and comprised only of African-American men, and it will remind you that you really can't control where you are born and where you live . . . or often not until it's too late;
2) Sherman Alexie tells a similar story of growing up in a difficult, possible barren and futile environment in his YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian . . . my wife coerced me and the kids to read it for a family "book club" and we all loved it; Alexie tells the semi-autobiographical story of Junior's life on the Spokane reservation and his daring "escape" to the nearest white high school off the rez-- 22 miles away-- because Junior recognizes that though he loves his family, his people, the land, and his best friend Rowdy, that the setting is inevitably hopeless, fostering alcoholism and endless repetition of the same losses and drama . . . this is the story of his commute and his very real adaptation to a new setting-- Alexie says the book is 78% true and it rings true, it's gross, sincere, candid, hysterically funny, and really moving (plus it has lots of basketball, so I was getting choked up fairly often, because sporting stories are the only ones that make me cry).
1) Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy, uses one South Angeles murder to look at the big picture-- black-on-black violence in traditionally African-American enclaves like Watts and Compton are generally under-policed and justice is rarely meted out . . . Leovy turns cause and effect on its head, proving that it's not because these places are inhabited by gang members that make them difficult to police . . . instead, because they have never been policed with much intensity and intent-- unlike white neighborhoods in the same city-- the denizens have learned to solve their problems outside the aegis of traditional authority, witnesses-- fearing injury or death-- have learned not to testify, and it has come to be understood that in these places-- whether it be the Wild West, the territory of the Yanomami, or South LA-- that the state does NOT have a monopoly on force and violence . . .
"take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened . . . signal that no one cares and fail to solve murders . . . limit their options for escape . . . then see what happens"
and if the book sounds depressing, in the end it is not-- because there are select police that work homicide in the ghetto in an inspirational manner, and this details such a case and the men that solved it-- and this is a case that has to be solved, because it is the murder of Bryant Tennelle-- 18 years old-- the youngest son of a highly respected Los Angeles detective Wallace Tennelle . . . a principled officer that chose to live where he worked and paid the ultimate price for it; the book might change your mind about how gangs work (far looser and more disorganized that you might think) and how murders are handled when they are insular and comprised only of African-American men, and it will remind you that you really can't control where you are born and where you live . . . or often not until it's too late;
2) Sherman Alexie tells a similar story of growing up in a difficult, possible barren and futile environment in his YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian . . . my wife coerced me and the kids to read it for a family "book club" and we all loved it; Alexie tells the semi-autobiographical story of Junior's life on the Spokane reservation and his daring "escape" to the nearest white high school off the rez-- 22 miles away-- because Junior recognizes that though he loves his family, his people, the land, and his best friend Rowdy, that the setting is inevitably hopeless, fostering alcoholism and endless repetition of the same losses and drama . . . this is the story of his commute and his very real adaptation to a new setting-- Alexie says the book is 78% true and it rings true, it's gross, sincere, candid, hysterically funny, and really moving (plus it has lots of basketball, so I was getting choked up fairly often, because sporting stories are the only ones that make me cry).
Sentence Postponed
I will write something when the weather down here in Sea Isle City returns to its senses.
Dave Rallies!
We've had fantastic weather at the beach this week-- so there's been plenty of skimboarding and boogie-boarding, tennis and basketball, biking and running, open water swimming, spike-ball, etc. and today after running on the beach in the morning and then playing a very competitive doubles tennis match (Ian and me versus Alex and my brother . . . we lost) my body gave out-- I could no longer walk, or move in general-- but I took some Advil, ate a cheesesteak, and found myself able to drag the beach cart to the beach, set up the umbrellas, and participate in the double-elimination random selection all-the-cousins cornhole tournament all afternoon, an impressive vacation rally!
You Haven't Read "Ask the Dust"? That's Sad . . .
Our friend, colleague, and book club participant Nicole is heading to California with her husband, to teach in LA, and so for my book club choice, I wanted to do a classic book set in the City of Angels, because then Nicole could Skype in to book club and offer her opinions-- and everything I read online touted John Fante's 1939 novel Ask the Dust as the quintessential LA story-- it is regarded as "The Great Gatsby of the West Coast"-- so now when she gets out there she can immediately brandish some elitist Jersey-douchebaggery and say to natives, with feigned shock: "You haven't read Ask the Dust? Really . . that's so sad, it's the quintessential LA novel, the Great Gatsby of the West Coast . . . you should check it out . . . I can't believe you've never read it" and I'm even recommending this book to people that live on the East Coast, while I can't offer my thoughts (those are reserved for book club) I will tell you that my wife said it is "the best book I've ever recommended to her" and she loves it as much as I do.
The Turkish Star Wars of Alternative Rock?
My experience with The Strokes is probably similar to most: I loved Is This It (both the music and the album cover--but complained that "Last Nite" was an "American Girl" rip-off) and then pretty much forgot about them (I might have listened to Room on Fire once or twice) but I was pleasantly surprised by Julian Casablancas's new album with The Voidz . . . it's the first alternative rock album I've heard in a long while that I immediately wanted to listen to all the way through again-- it's dense and weird and scattershot, a post-modern collage with the perfect tone for a guy who is never going to achieve the fame of his first album . . . Pitchfork gives the album a 6.9 and obtusely refers to it as the Turkish Star Wars version of The Strokes: "a proudly low-rent, audacious, bizarro-world transfiguration that’s equally admirable and repellent" and-- though I have not watched the Turkish Star Wars in it's entirety-- I suppose I concur.
Vacation Hygiene Confessions
One of the simple pleasures of a week at the shore is utilizing the outdoor shower-- I've already used ours numerous times . . . after an early morning run in the sand, after swimming in the ocean, after a game of pick-up basketball, etc. but I must confess that I haven't remembered my toiletry bag once and so the only washing I've done so far on this vacation has been with a half inch by half inch piece of soap that I found on the (algae covered) concrete floor in the aforementioned outdoor shower.
First World Problem #23,444
I've taken a perfectly good first world car (a 2008 Toyota Sienna minivan) and turned it into a vehicle that would look appropriate driving the streets of war-torn Aleppo . . . several parts of the car are taped together, it's missing a hubcap, the car possesses a multitude of dents and scratches, and now-- finally- the electric motor on the back door latch has finally gone kaput (it's been sketchy for a while) and this happened yesterday afternoon while I was starting to pack the car for our trip to Sea Isle City, which is a very involved packing job-- but I figured out how to get the back hatch open and closed, I opened a panel on the inside of the back hatch and got access to the (broken) motor, and there's a little lever you can pull in there to manually open the latch and I lassoed the lever with a shoelace, pulled the slipknot tight, and hung the lace from the ceiling of the car and now if you crawl into the back and pull up on the shoelace, it releases the latch and you can open the hatch . . . so that's how we'll roll for this vacation and then I can hopefully get that motor replaced and have a power latch again.
Dad Gives His Son Advice: Don't Be That Guy
My kids were all wound up this week, cooperating, rolling dice, painting miniatures and talking with each other in some arcane language . . . they were preparing to attend Dungeons and Dragon night at Comic Sanctuary in New Brunswick-- which happens on Thursdays from 7 PM to 10 PM and the shop is conveniently near the hipster bar and restaurant Inc, which has all day happy hour on Thursdays and makes the best whiskey sour in the area-- so a win/win for the entire family . . . the kids would play D&D and all the adults would drink cocktails and eat yucca fries and steamed buns; before we left for the night, I noticed that Alex was wearing his Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt and I told him he could not wear a D&D shirt to a D&D event . . . I told him not to be the guy wearing a Radiohead shirt at a Radiohead concert . . . you could wear a Radiohead t-shirt to a Gorillaz concert, or vice-versa and I told him you could probably even get away with wearing a Lord of the Rings shirt to a D&D event, but you can't go right on the nose, that's ridiculous . . . and Ian asked me if this were a law and I told him not exactly but close and Alex actually followed my advice and changed his shirt but then he said that his friend Max did wear a D&D t-shirt and the dungeon master complimented him . . . but I said he was just humoring him (or possibly so nerdy that he was unaware of this near law that you don't wear the thing to the thing) and the important thing is that the kids had a great time playing with all these college kids, who were welcoming and really into the game (and I didn't see the crowd, but my wife did-- they were in a group of 13 at one table and there was another table with 9 people and my wife reported that these people looked and behaved exactly as you would expect a group of people who still play Dungeons and Dragons in college and beyond to look and behave, so that's awesome as well).
Lebron James: Crucified For All Our (Basketball Viewing) Sins
Planet Money 427: LeBron James is Still Underpaid makes a strong economic case that James doesn't make nearly what he's worth-- he's underpaid for his talent, he's underpaid for his effect on ticket sales and TV revenue for whatever team he plays for, and he deserves money for his global effect on the league-- but the owners and the players like it that way . . . LeBron suffers so they can all prosper (and LeBron himself might like it that way as well, because without the odd profit sharing, parity generating practices of the league, he might have nowhere to showcase his talents) and while I recommend listening to this entire podcast, if you just want a quick laugh, go six and a half minutes in and listen to the description of the NBA draft and just how strange it really is . . . imagine if "the best software engineer at MIT," a guy who could go to Silicon Valley and make millions with Google, had to throw his name into a pool and then be selected by one of the worst companies in the country, to work for a prescribed salary, and one day got a letter in the mail saying he was assigned to the IT department at Best Buy.
Republicans Should Start Surfing
After some very sketchy research and a few stereotypical assumptions that are probably statistically true (conservatives ride motorcycles, liberals ride bikes; conservatives hunt, liberals surf) I've determined that if you're a conservative then you are way more likely to die doing a leisure activity-- 33 skiers died last year, but only 12 snowboarders; there were 55 cycling deaths as compared to a whopping 5000 motorcycle deaths; 80 hunting deaths but zero soccer and tennis deaths (soccer and tennis seem to be sports that skew the most towards Democrats) and 200 people die each year angling while surfing deaths are extraordinarily rare.
Lady in Red
I am in an awful relationship with the hot sauce from Taco House, our new favorite hole-in-the-wall authentic taqueria in New Brunswick-- when you get tacos to go, they give you a couple sauce containers of green salsa, which is zesty and just a little bit spicy, you can use as much of it as you want on your tacos and they also give you a couple containers of the red sauce, and a couple containers of this stuff is overkill because you can't use very much of it, as it is very, very hot (but also very very tasty) and so once the tacos are done, there is still plenty of red sauce, which I always place carefully in the refrigerator so I can consume it later . . . and then my wife and kids watch me eat the red sauce in various amounts for the next few days and these endeavors always end in tears-- I'm crying, my kids are yelling at me to stop eating the sauce, and my wife just shakes her head in bewilderment-- and then last night, after dipping chips in the sauce while we watched an especially stressful episode of Better Call Saul, my stomach gave out and I threw the sauce away (after Alex ate some . . . he's an idiot too, but he drank some milk-- yuck!-- and it assuaged the pain) and I'm still suffering the consequences of the sauce this morning, but if it were still in the fridge, I would pour some on my eggs . . . this is one of those reciprocally abusive relationships where the only answer is a clean break, the next time I get tacos from Taco House, I'm going to have to refuse the red sauce.
The Test 111: This Is Your "Go To" Test
This week on our podcast The Test, Cunningham investigates how Stacey and I exude so much charm and charisma, and we reveal our "go to" moves to avoid socially awkward situations . . . and we imagine what it would be like if I had cancer of the eyes.
Book Review and Team Name Suggestion All Wrapped Up in One Sentence
Florida, Lauren Groff's collection of geographically related short stories, plunges you into the all the dangers the state has to offer: hurricanes and sinkholes and floods; camping gone bad, rural abandonment, homelessness; then there are the creepy-crawlies: panthers, bugs, gators, and loads and loads of snakes-- coral snakes and moccasins and black snakes, the book is literally crawling with snakes-- the time-periods and narrators are various and the writing is surreal and vivid and it's a crying shame that there is no minor league baseball team in the Sunshine State named The Florida Sinkholes (I especially like the Sarasota Sinkholes).
What?
We drove home from Cape Cod today and we are (ironically) enjoying the cool weather, low humidity, and much lighter traffic here in Jersey.
Serena Wins, Mesomorphs Rejoice
There's a tennis court on the premises where we are staying on the Cape, and I've been playing a lot of tennis with my kids-- several times a day; my knee hurts, my right shoulder hurts, my back hurts, and the only proper analgesic when you're on vacation is beer . . . but after watching both Venus and Serena play this morning, I was inspired and ready to get back out there; I was especially motivated by Serena because-- now that she's had a kid-- she's got nearly the same build as me: she's my height, she's got the Kirby Puckett core, and she's got short arms, unlike her sister Venus, who is long and rangy (my older son is built like me and hits the ball with the same compact stroke, my younger son is skinny and lanky and hits a two-handed backhand with a languid limber stroke that makes both Alex and I very jealous) but then I watch Serena and realize you don't need a long and tall build to play tennis-- her short powerful stroke absolutely murders the ball, and I've been modelling my serve off of her form-- no hitches, very few moving parts, chopper grip, bring it back slow and get into position and then hammer through the ball and when Ian and I went out this afternoon to whack it around after Serena's victory over the slender and lithe Kristina Mladenovic, I hit a couple serves in her honor and I'm proud to say I drilled them, even my son Ian was impressed . . . so thanks Serena, because we can't all look like Ivan Lendl and Maria Sharapova.
Smart Phone, Smart Kids, Slow Dad
I'm not sure if this is a generational thing or if my son Alex is impulsive and rude, but whenever I'm screwing something up with my phone, he grabs it from me and fixes it instead of using his words and communicating to me how I can fix it myself.
We Try To Be an Out-To-Breakfast Family
Perhaps because of the enormous vacuum in my life due to lack of World Cup games until Friday, or perhaps because we like to humor mom once a year . . . whatever the reason, we decided to go out to breakfast this morning-- and we are not an out-to-breakfast-family . . . you know this kind of family, jovial, chubby and good-natured, drinking orange juice while waiting for their pancakes kind of people . . . every once in a while Catherine decides we should be that family and go out to breakfast and it never works out-- this morning Ian and I played tennis and it was hot and he took a game from me again (it's getting frustrating) and then we jumped in the pool and then we decided to bike to the Hangar B Eatery, a critically acclaimed hipster breakfast joint located at the Chatham Airport-- we started biking at 9:30 AM, made out way down the Chatham Rail Trail spur and get to the place at 10 AM and it was small and packed-- we thought everyone would be at the parade but that was not the case-- and we were hungry . . . which is one of the reasons we're not an out-to-breakfast family, as the boys and I get really hangry, but we decided to endure the 35-minute wait and we killed some time listening to a pilot tell us about the biplane and the biplane tours (apparently, this biplane is built from the 1930 specs-- though some of the materials are modernized-- but it's still impressive that some guys in 1930 designed something as complicated as an airplane that well) and we saw a helicopter take off and then we were seated and I think they lost our ticket or got slammed or something because it took a good forty minutes for us to get our food and it was hot inside-- they did give us a free donut and apologized-- but we didn't get our food until after 11 AM and I was really proud of myself and the boys, no one complained and we all endured the wait stoically, despite our hangry status . . . and I thought the food-- when it finally came-- was quite good, but Catherine didn't love her meal and I doubt she'll try to get us to go out to breakfast for a long time.
Check Your Head
Many years ago, I recognized that adult snowboarders were all wearing helmets and so I bought a helmet-- I'm not sure why adult snowboarders didn't wear helmets before this tipping point, but once I saw other people wearing them, it made sense to make the switch; now I'm seeing adult recreational cyclists wearing helmets-- not mountain bikers or serious road bikers, but just regular folks going for a leisurely ride on the rail trail (my wife is included in this group, she says she wants to set a good example for our children) but I am not succumbing to this fad . . . my brain just isn't that valuable.
Random Vacation Notes, Cape Cod 2018 Edition
We've only been up at the Cape since Saturday, but I've already got quite a few thoughts:
1) after an early morning bike ride on Sunday, I walked into the wrong unit-- we're number 28 but I entered number 29 (despite the fact that they have a totally different entrance and door) but I beat a hasty and undetected retreat when I noticed the sneakers in the foyer were the wrong colors . . . this made me remember an incident we witnessed on Saturday morning, we were stuck in standstill traffic just before the mess of an intersection that leads to the Bourne Bridge and a car stopped on the other side of the road and beeped and a guy-- correction, a dude . . . this was definitely a twenty-something bearded sloppy dude-- this dude ran out of the ramshackle house just to the right of our car and darted through the traffic and got into the car on the other side of the road-- he was catching a ride, either from a friend or Uber, and the traffic around his house was severe, and so he ran out of the house so quickly that he didn't notice that the front door caught on the rug and bounced wide open . . . so we were laughing at the fact that the guy didn't notice he left his door wide open and drove away into the traffic and then the plot thickened; another dude wandered out of the wide-open door-- and this dude was definitely not in the same room as the other dude (this house looked like some kind of filthy crash pad) and this second dude was really offended by the wide open front door, he was like: what? who just dared to open our door? I will fuck up whoever opened this door! and he was looking all around for the perpetrator but couldn't find anyone and then he slammed the door shut and it caught on the rug and popped open again and he had this great look of epiphany on his face, and then the traffic started moving and we dove off, properly entertained despite the jam;
2) though in the old days we were stuck drinking Golden Anniversary Light, Massachusetts now has a bewildering array of craft beers and so I used my phone in the beer store and decided on Night Shift Brewing Whirlpool American Pale Ale and it's delicious;
3) The Great Island Trail is a real winner at dead low tide: after a quick walk through the woods and over the dunes, it's all sandbars and tidal pools, and the water is the perfect temperature-- a mix of the Atlantic and Cape Cod Bay . . . you can see Provincetown to the north; we spent three hours out there, my kids netting sea life and watching hermit crabs fight over a snail, and I brought back some nice rocks for my yard;
4) if you're 48 years old and you eat donuts for breakfast, and fried fish, raw oysters, and onion rings from Arnold's for lunch, then your stomach is going to hurt (but, on the bright side, Alex ate a couple of raw oysters and loved them)
5) I have officially gotten my money's worth out of my Sevylor Samoa Inflatable Paddleboard . . . I paddled it up the Oyster River this morning and it still works-- I'm not sure when I bought it but I found a post about it from 2011;
6) the fact that it's unbearably hot in New Jersey this week makes me appreciate the weather here that much more-- it's been in the high 70s-- and the Cape Cod weather-people keep warning folks of the humidity, but I'm like: what humidity?
1) after an early morning bike ride on Sunday, I walked into the wrong unit-- we're number 28 but I entered number 29 (despite the fact that they have a totally different entrance and door) but I beat a hasty and undetected retreat when I noticed the sneakers in the foyer were the wrong colors . . . this made me remember an incident we witnessed on Saturday morning, we were stuck in standstill traffic just before the mess of an intersection that leads to the Bourne Bridge and a car stopped on the other side of the road and beeped and a guy-- correction, a dude . . . this was definitely a twenty-something bearded sloppy dude-- this dude ran out of the ramshackle house just to the right of our car and darted through the traffic and got into the car on the other side of the road-- he was catching a ride, either from a friend or Uber, and the traffic around his house was severe, and so he ran out of the house so quickly that he didn't notice that the front door caught on the rug and bounced wide open . . . so we were laughing at the fact that the guy didn't notice he left his door wide open and drove away into the traffic and then the plot thickened; another dude wandered out of the wide-open door-- and this dude was definitely not in the same room as the other dude (this house looked like some kind of filthy crash pad) and this second dude was really offended by the wide open front door, he was like: what? who just dared to open our door? I will fuck up whoever opened this door! and he was looking all around for the perpetrator but couldn't find anyone and then he slammed the door shut and it caught on the rug and popped open again and he had this great look of epiphany on his face, and then the traffic started moving and we dove off, properly entertained despite the jam;
2) though in the old days we were stuck drinking Golden Anniversary Light, Massachusetts now has a bewildering array of craft beers and so I used my phone in the beer store and decided on Night Shift Brewing Whirlpool American Pale Ale and it's delicious;
3) The Great Island Trail is a real winner at dead low tide: after a quick walk through the woods and over the dunes, it's all sandbars and tidal pools, and the water is the perfect temperature-- a mix of the Atlantic and Cape Cod Bay . . . you can see Provincetown to the north; we spent three hours out there, my kids netting sea life and watching hermit crabs fight over a snail, and I brought back some nice rocks for my yard;
4) if you're 48 years old and you eat donuts for breakfast, and fried fish, raw oysters, and onion rings from Arnold's for lunch, then your stomach is going to hurt (but, on the bright side, Alex ate a couple of raw oysters and loved them)
5) I have officially gotten my money's worth out of my Sevylor Samoa Inflatable Paddleboard . . . I paddled it up the Oyster River this morning and it still works-- I'm not sure when I bought it but I found a post about it from 2011;
6) the fact that it's unbearably hot in New Jersey this week makes me appreciate the weather here that much more-- it's been in the high 70s-- and the Cape Cod weather-people keep warning folks of the humidity, but I'm like: what humidity?
The Challenge of the Changeling
I don't read much challenging non-fiction these days-- back in my twenties, I remember tackling Gravity's Rainbow (with a reader's guide) and reading Joyce's Ulysses and the Odyssey simultaneously, in hopes of unlocking the symbolism, and stumbling through the gargantuan meta-fictional works of John Barth-- but these days, I generally read challenging non-fiction, which means the substance is more difficult to comprehend than the style . . . a recent exception is The Changeling, by Joy Williams; the book was out of print for a long time, probably because of it's perverse, stylistic insanity, but after 40 years, it has been reprinted and if you're looking for something strange and surreal and unpredictable, with sentences that will stun you into hypnotic submission, give this book a try . . . you will certainly start to think that, "No one who has private thoughts going on in his own head is quite sure of their not being overheard" and you will think these thoughts and so will the children, and the children from Lord of the Flies will pale and wither in the shadows of these half-human juvenile/half-mythical beasts, that slowly start to subsume the fallen adults on their island, only Pearl, the naive dipsomaniac, straddles the adult world and "the secret society of childhood from which banishment was the beginning of death" and she does it partly by being oblivious and partly by being numbingly drunk, which turns out to be the only way to survive this cryptic, corrupt journey.
First World Problem # 745
We were on the road this morning before 5 AM (4:54 AM to be precise) but we still hit standstill traffic at the Bourne Bridge.
Open Sesame, Mind
Two podcasts that opened my mind and altered my thoughts on political issues:
1) The Daily: Justice Kennedy's Last Decison . . . I assumed that the 5-4 vote in Janus vs. Federation of State, a case years in the making by conservative lobbying groups and their wealthy donors, we a real blow to workers-- as now people who enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining by their union do not necessarily have to pay the fees associated with these costs-- if you don't join the union, you don't have to pay anything to them, even if they are doing services for you-- but maybe not being able to automatically collect dues will end some union complacency and make the unions cater to what the workers want-- or else there will be "wildcat" strikes (such a great term, teachers bucked the union in West Virginia and went on a wildcat strike) so perhaps greater transparency in union fees and membership will galvanize supporters and lead to a better deal for workers;
2) This American Life: It's My Party and I'll Try If I Want To . . . I used to think single payer healthcare-- Medicare for All-- was impractical and impossible, a figment of Bernie Sanders' imagination, and that no real politicians were considering this . . . but I might be a victim of a political system captured by wealthy donors and their benefactors; this podcast tells the story of Jeff Beals, a progressive Democrat trying to win New York's congressional district 19; Beals has visions of trying to fix a rigged economy and truly believes that Medicare for All is an achievable goal . . . but the wealthy donors would rather he talk about LGBT rights and gun control and abortion and stay away from the economy . . . the donors who control who runs and how much money they get tend to be moderate and pro-business, and this is causing a rift in the Democratic Party . . . you can't change won't you don't discuss and that very well might be why Clinton, who outspent Trump, lost to him-- instead of making speeches to Goldman, she should have addressed the elephant in the room.
1) The Daily: Justice Kennedy's Last Decison . . . I assumed that the 5-4 vote in Janus vs. Federation of State, a case years in the making by conservative lobbying groups and their wealthy donors, we a real blow to workers-- as now people who enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining by their union do not necessarily have to pay the fees associated with these costs-- if you don't join the union, you don't have to pay anything to them, even if they are doing services for you-- but maybe not being able to automatically collect dues will end some union complacency and make the unions cater to what the workers want-- or else there will be "wildcat" strikes (such a great term, teachers bucked the union in West Virginia and went on a wildcat strike) so perhaps greater transparency in union fees and membership will galvanize supporters and lead to a better deal for workers;
2) This American Life: It's My Party and I'll Try If I Want To . . . I used to think single payer healthcare-- Medicare for All-- was impractical and impossible, a figment of Bernie Sanders' imagination, and that no real politicians were considering this . . . but I might be a victim of a political system captured by wealthy donors and their benefactors; this podcast tells the story of Jeff Beals, a progressive Democrat trying to win New York's congressional district 19; Beals has visions of trying to fix a rigged economy and truly believes that Medicare for All is an achievable goal . . . but the wealthy donors would rather he talk about LGBT rights and gun control and abortion and stay away from the economy . . . the donors who control who runs and how much money they get tend to be moderate and pro-business, and this is causing a rift in the Democratic Party . . . you can't change won't you don't discuss and that very well might be why Clinton, who outspent Trump, lost to him-- instead of making speeches to Goldman, she should have addressed the elephant in the room.
Dramaturgy How To, Ready Break!
The film Ladybird is sweet and touching and funny and true (and apparently quite emotional if you're a woman and you were mean to your mom when you were a teenager) but the thing I'll take away from the film is this scene, which is exactly how I will teach blocking in Shakespeare class for the rest of my career.
It's Already 6 PM? Yikes! How Did That Happen? What Are We Going to Do About Dinner?
Most educated people are dimly aware that time is relative-- clocks run slower when gravity is stronger and movement, confounded by the speed of light, makes time go faster as objects diminish in size-- but these ideas are generally categorized as impractical abstractions, necessary to our understanding of the medium-sized Newtonian physical world which we inhabit; however, James Holt brings up a more mundane example in his essay "Time-- the Grand Illusion?" (which is included in the entertaining and excellent essay collection When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought) when he points out that research indicates that people in their twenties, when asked to estimate three minutes of time, are quite accurate, but people in their sixties, when asked to do the same task, miss the the mark by an average of forty seconds-- their internal clocks are running relatively slower in comparison to the young folks-- and so three minutes and forty seconds feels like three minutes of clock time . . . the older you get, the more prevalent this phenomenon is, which is why really old people drive so slowly-- anything over 22 MPH and they're in a subjective Indy 500-- and it's why when you are young, a summer can feel like eternity . . . Holt makes the (rather depressing) claim that by the age of eight, "one has subjectively lived two-thirds of one's life" and so that whole "I'm 48 years young" euphemism is complete bullshit . . . I'm 48 years old and that's incredibly old, in the scope of my subjective life, and even though it is summer, time is hurtling by for me, while my kids are experiencing each day in a more accurate sense-- they are 13 and 14-- and in a much less epic sense than when they were 6 and 7 . . . but, of course, there is no accurate sense-- everyone's time is relative to their age and metabolism and internal clock, so Einstein's theories aren't so far out and abstract, after all.
My Modules Think, Therefore My Modules Are (Some Sort of Non-reductionist Emergent System)
Michael S, Gazzaniga is one of our most celebrated neuroscientists and his new book certainly demonstrates this; The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind tackles the hardest problem in the universe: where are all these thoughts coming from? do they exist? are they a product of my neurons or are my neurons influenced by my thoughts? is there a spook in the machine? is there a machine at all? and on and on and on . . . Gazzaniga first gives a quick history of the evolution of thought on consciousness, from Descartes to William James to Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, and then gets you up to date with the modular, non-dualist, non-reductionist ideas that are floating around now . . . his ideas about modularity remind me of the seminal AI book Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky-- this is a book you should read-- and his use of brain-damaged patients as case studies to explain the pervasive modularity of consciousness remind me of one of the best books I have ever read-- Phantoms of the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran-- but Gazzaniga tackles bigger fish than these books, he works through protocols all the way down to quantum physics, and notes that the brain is not a machine, the human brain is something that allowed us to build machines, and then we made a metaphor between machines (and computers) and brains, but they are not all that similar-- the machine is built, while the brain evolved, many modules in concert, and the brain builds itself, with RNA and DNA and phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes -- with operations all the way down to the quantum level, immeasurable without subjectivity (because what tool could you use to measure atomic particles, except a measurement device made of atomic particles, which influences the very particles it is trying to measure) and so there is a metaphysical inspirational epiphany at the end of the book . . . we don't have to worry about strong AI because computers are in no way like our brains, in the same way that inert matter is nothing like life, because life evolved at the atomic level-- binary ones and zeroes will never approximate this-- and consciousness is an emergent property of an immensely complex modular system, symbols bubbling up and influencing other symbols, and this is reflected on so many physical levels that it boggles our capacity to think . . . luckily, Gazzaniga writes clearly enough about these topics and he intersperses entertaining moments throughout, my favorite is a cameo from Neil Young, who perfectly describes the unique subjectivity of personal consciousness and the desire to recapture personal experience; Young says, "I still try to be that way but, you know, I am not twenty-one or twenty-two . . . I am not sure that I could re-create that feeling, it has to do with how old I was, what was happening in the world, what I had just done, what I wanted to do next, who I was living with, who my friends were, what the weather was."
That Dog Thinks It's a Car!
Our new dog is learning to run alongside me while I bike (she's attached to the bike by a bungie cord) and while she trots along at a pretty good clip, I think the dog I saw today from my car window would be an even better biking partner: this dog had no back legs and instead of them, she had a cart with two wheels which the rear portion of her body rested upon . . . so if she were attached to the bike, she could just pull up her front legs and basically become a sidecar.
The Test 110: Abracadabra (This Test Will Reach Out and Grab Ya)
The Test is back and better than ever (or maybe exactly the same as ever) and for the start of this new season, I take one for the team, throw away all artistic sensibility, and administer a quiz on something the ladies love-- something silly, absurd and cheesy . . . that's right, we're talking magic; I'll admit that in the end, I enjoyed learning a bit about this subject, and while I don't believe in magic (like Cuningham) nor do I care all that much that people can learn to do tricks (which inspires Stacey) I do enjoy giving the ladies some "bonus lectures" on what magic is all about, so give this one a listen before it disappears.
Imagine How Tired I Would Be If I Actually Played
I'm too exhausted from the Germany/Sweden game to write anything decent.
Dave Gets It (Slowly But Surely)
When I first got my Father's Day T-Shirt, I was confused-- Tantalum? Cobalt? What?-- but then I noticed that the abbreviations-- "Ta" and "Co"-- spelled out the word "TaCo," and I love tacos, so that made perfect sense . . . and then the day after Father's Day, I held up my Father's Day T-Shirt and said, "This reminds me of the credits on Breaking Bad," and my wife and kids looked at me like "Duh" and I said, "And I love Breaking Bad . . . this is a great t-shirt!"
Once More unto the Breach, Teach
Thinking It vs. Communicating It
I'd like to thank my dedicated readers for pointing out yesterday's gaffe; I thought the word "tone" to myself while writing yesterday's sentence, but I didn't actually type the word "tone" and instead wrote this objectless phrase: "the anthemic and triumphant of a Bruce Springsteen song," and while there's no excuse for not proofreading, I think I actually re-read this sentence and imagined that the word was there . . . I also have this trouble when I speak to my wife-- I think a bunch of thoughts and I think that I said some of the thoughts as a preface to my actual spoken statement, but really I uttered some cryptic, out-of-context gibberish.
Same County/Parallel Universe
The setting of Drown, Juno Diaz's collection of short stories about Dominican immigrants making their way in America in the 1980's and 90's, is the same county I grew up in and now live-- Middlesex County, New Jersey; there are references to Old Bridge, Sayreville, Perth Amboy, New Brunswick, South River, Spotswood, etc. -- but I was able to experience the grittiness of 80's New Jersey from a position of stability, while the world Diaz writes about is one of lost jobs, fractured relationships, transitory and multiple families, and the constant pull of the Island, of the Dominican Republic homeland . . . it's a side of New Jersey worth exploring, but be forewarned, the book doesn't have the anthemic and triumphant tone of a Bruce Springsteen song.
Better Luck Next Year? Not If It's a Quadrennial Event
If you want to thoroughly wallow in the fact that the U.S. didn't qualify for this World Cup, spend your time in between games listening to American Fiasco-- Roger Bennett (of Men in Blazers fame) narrates the compelling story of the rise and fall of the U.S. Men's National team from 1994 to 1998 in a 10 part podcast.
Dads of the World Rejoice
Three world cup games and Father's Day are a good combination (I think there's a some local golf tournament going on as well).
Activities > Socializing
Yesterday I did 6 AM basketball and then played in a corn-hole tournament at our end of year party, and today is a block party on the street over from us and we are wheeling up our ping-pong table and bringing corn-hole . . . socializing is so much better when there are competitive activities.
Time . . . Best Not to Think About It
Despite all the physics and quantum science, the final message of Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time is that our perception of time and its passage is a "great collective delirium of ours" which has worked reasonably well to get us to this point, but is in no way indicative of what time is and how it actually works . . . and that is fine; near the end of the book he calls upon the Indian epic the Mahabharata to illustrate this: the oldest and wisest god, Yudhistira, explains the greatest mystery of the universe: "Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals" . . . so you can mull that over while I head to our staff party to drink beer, play some cornhole, and splash around in a pool.
Breaking News: Dave is 6' 1"
It's weird . . .the older and grouchier I get, the more the students like me-- and while I'm honored and flattered for the recogntion (especially since The Test has swept the "Favorite teacher" superlative this year) what I really love about this photo is that I look taller than Stacey, who is definitely six feet tall . . . so I am now billing myself as 6'1" (6"9" with the afro).
Mom Always Figures It Out (Except for the Stolen Bike)
Yesterday was my son Alex's class trip to Dorney Park and my wife suggested that he not bring his cell-phone because he would surely lose and/or damage it and when Alex and Ian were walking out the door together, she saw he had complied with this-- the phone was on his desk, charging . . . and the two boys left, together-- which was odd-- and then Ian ran back inside and up the stairs and told her she was right and that it was too hot for pants and he changed into shorts and then he went into Alex's room for a moment and she asked him where his bookbag was and he said, "Alex is holding it for me," which was odd-- they normally bicker over civilized favors such as waiting for each other or helping each other in any way-- and then Ian was gone, before Catherine could process what had happened (she was getting ready for school as well) but then it struck her-- Alex had paid Ian to go back into the house and smuggle his cell phone out-- and when she went into Alex's room, sure enough, the phone was gone . . . so later in the day she texted Alex this message, "To whoever stole Alex's phone, please return it" and then on the ride to the soccer game, Ian confirmed that he had smuggled the phone out of the house for his brother and he asked my wife if they had made a deal, did Alex still have to hold up his end, even though they got caught, and she said, "Of course he does, you got the phone for him" and Ian revealed that Alex had promised to pay him a dollar if he got the phone and then we got home from the game and Alex was a sunburned mess because he had taken his shirt off, and my wife hadn't sunblocked his chest, and he said that they needed their phones so they could check in with their chaperones-- why he didn't communicate this to my wife and instead hatched a furtive and deceitful plan to liberate his phone is beyond me . . . but the moral here is we should always be wary when the boys are behaving cooperatively.
I Knew There Was Something Weird About My Left Shoe
Stepping in dog poop no fun unless you don't notice until you've walked all the way across the house.
Wheels in Your Mind Keep on Turning
Friday, Ian rode his bike from school to the Friday Farm Market, locked his bike to a tree, bought two servings of pad thai at the pad thai stand (he wanted a second serving for dinner) and then he met his friend Ben and then went to some wall and played some kind of wall ball and then he walked home with Ben and his giant styrofoam container of pad thai and he totally forgot about his bike, still chained to a tree near Main Street, and this morning, when he remembered about his bike and went to retrieve it, it was gone-- stolen-- but the lock was still there, wrapped around the tree, locked, and he swears that he did actually lock his bike to the tree and that he did actually scramble the combination . . . but there's something weird about the story-- perhaps someone picked the lock?-- but then why would they reattach the lock to the tree?-- and I think we're going to have to chalk this up to the fallibility of human memory . . . that's the theme of the newest Revisionist History podcast, "Free Brian Williams," a fascinating story about how easily human memories get distorted-- and while I must warn you that Malcolm Gladwell is at his most annoying in this episode, I will also admit that it's a fascinating and compelling story and I'm glad I finished listening to it right before I heard my son Ian's story, because it made me a bit more empathetic to his tale of woe (also, we're in the market for a used bike).
We Put the Man in Manhattan
Here are a few shots of the intrepid crew that circumnavigated Manhattan on Saturday, it was a long haul and backtracking was anathema . . . so when a macadam bike path in Inwood Park turned into a weedy foot trail and then finally petered out, there was no way we were turning back-- we had to get south to Fort Washington Park-- right under the George Washington Bridge (pic below) and there was a hole in the fence that led to the train tracks, so we ducked under and walked the tracks, hobo style, until we could finally duck back into the forest . . . we made it down without having to evade a train and we didn't run into any local police, but next time I suppose we won't try to stick so close to the shore of the Hudson River.
anDave Gets His Steps in (For the Week)
I just got home from a 20+ mile hike from the top of Manhattan (207th St) down the western side of the island to Battery Park . . . epic and scenic and my feet hurt.
Eyebrows Off Fleek
One of my student's Twitter account went viral this week with this quick clip of a girl taking off her fake-eyelashes at prom (to her date's surprise) and the video became so popular so quickly that NBC phone-interviewed her about how it feels to ride the fifteen-minute wave of exponential internet popularity . . . while this couldn't have happened to a nicer girl, I would like to point out that I teach this student in Shakespeare class, and that Shakespeare's complex, character-driven five act masterpieces of comedy, history and tragedy-- which may be the ultimate expression of human emotion and motivation in dramatic form-- are probably a better indicator of the artistic capabilities of humankind than a 4 second clip shot on a cell-phone at prom on a whim . . . but you can't argue with the internet.
Dave Keeps the Barbarians at Bay
This morning I pulled into the high school parking lot, got out of the car and went around to the passenger side, opened the door and grabbed my lunch cooler, and then noticed that I did a terrible job parking the van-- not only was I too far over on the right side of the spot, my wheels on the painted line, but I also hadn't pulled all the way in, so my rear bumper was sticking way out into the lot . . . normally, I look at a parking job like this and think to myself Wow, I'm awful at parking and then blithely head into the building, but I'm proud to say today was different-- I got back into my car and revised my parking-- and this time I did it right-- and if that's not the height of civilization, I don't know what is.
No Time Like the Present
I got my seniors amped up for graduation today by reading them an excerpt from Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time-- a book connects perfectly to both Hamlet and their own lives, as it points out that though we want the universe to be comprised of things on an orderly timeline, it is actually composed of relativistic occurrences and events, in constant fluctuation and change . . . a war is not a thing, it's a long sequence of events; a cloud is not a thing, it's a bunch of condensation in the air; even things are not things, they are only semi-permanent perturbations of quantum forces, and-- of course-- a person is not a thing, though we are under the illusion that we are a character, an entity, a static personality but we are actually a sequences of events and circumstances with some distorted memories that connect us to the past events that were experienced by a few of our molecules (but not most of them, as they are constantly regenerating) and so while Hamlet starts the play with the ultimate ambition: "The time is out of joint, O cursed spite that I was ever born to set it right" he ends the play realizing that "we defy augury" and that there is no sorting out time and the universe, because-- as Rovelli explains-- the time is always out of joint-- time is different in every location and just a construct designed to give us some idea of the constant flux and change in the universe . . . Hamlet know this by the end of the play when he says "If it be now, tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all" and that is the attitude the seniors must adopt, high school is over, all is change, flexibility is paramount, and "the readiness is all."
Can You Write Off Gummy Stuff?
It's bad enough that Ian purchased and ate Gummy Lifesavers (he has braces and was explicitly told never to eat anything gummy) but the sillier part of his dental transgression is that he left the receipt for the gummies in his book-bag, so that my wife could discover it (when I asked him why he kept the receipt he claimed he didn't want to be a litterbug).
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