I'm back! while I'm glad I made an attempt to have a real website of my own, with independent hosting, I now know it's not for me.
It turns out Wordpress is incredibly powerful and customizable. It's also rather annoying. It loads really slow, and while I think there are some tweaks to make things faster, I don't feel like messing with it. The problem might also be Bluehost, which is really cheap but might also be really slow. It was easy enough to migrate posts back and forth, and while now I don't own my content, I can back it up when necessary. And I've given up on the privacy thing. I just got a real phone-- a Nokia 6.2!-- and I clicked bunch of things during the set up and I think all my information is everywhere. Why fight it?
Not only that, there are a bunch of footie blogs called "Park the Bus."
So I've added an "S" and this has given me the freedom to write multiple sentences. The power of the written word! The pen is mightier than the sword!
Hopefully Google will keep blogger updated. It loads and works so much faster than Wordpress, and now I know that's all I want out of a blog: convenience and easy posting. Tomorrow I'll write something more entertaining-- I still need to screw around with the layout and themes.
I have jury duty today in New Brunswick. Coincidentally, my wife had it yesterday, and she reported that it was hot and crowded. At one point, she had to sit on the floor in a small crowded room for two hours, before -- luckily-- she was released without having to serve on a trial.
My kids had an early dismissal from school yesterday, and so they went out to lunch with their friends. This would have been fine, except that my wife had made them both delicious sandwiches. Bacon and cheese on a bagel.
BOTH Alex and Ian conveniently "forgot" that their loving mother had prepared them lunch in the morning, and not only that-- they were too stupid to dispose of the evidence. So both of them had untouched lunches in their book bag when they returned home. Catherine was rightfully indignant. Spoiled ingrates. And not even considerate enough to at least pretend they had eaten their sandwiches. So she told from here on out, they could make their own lunch.
Ian just walked in from school, and I asked him what he packed. At first he refused to tell me-- he's annoyed that I'm making him look bad-- but I read him the post and he couldn't deny a word of it. He brought pasta and a green apple for his lunch and he's now eating a snack because he's hungry. I'll keep you posted on how long Catherine sticks to her guns-- if I know her it's going to be a while-- and if my kids start getting more creative with their lunches. Hopefully it will make them appreciate dinner more.
This cold but lovely (Black) Friday morning, I took our dog Lola to the Rutgers Ecological Preserve for a run. Unfortunately, the Preserve was closed. The parking lot had signs and some plastic blockades barring entrance and the side entrance had a blockade in front of it as well. I assumed this was because of the recent coyote attacks (and I was right). But I also assumed that the attacks were over, because the aggressive coyote had been euthanized by some Rutgers police. And the coyote was tested and came up negative for rabies. So I figured it was safe to head into the preserve, despite the signs and blockades. There were rumors that there was entire coyote den on the premises, but coyotes were nocturnal-- plus, Lola is a tank. She would run them off.
After running for about twenty minutes, I stumbled over a root obscured by fallen leaves and went flying face-forward into the mud. Luckily, I was wearing gloves, so I was able to somewhat break my fall. My bad shoulder held up, I didn't sprain my wrists, and I didn't cut my hands. The only thing to suffer was my left knee.
I really did hit the ground hard, and I must admit-- and this appropriately dates me-- that just after I hit, this is what I thought to myself:
This is just what you deserve, sneaking into the preserve when it's obviously closed to the public-- now you've broken your neck and no one is coming to help you, no one is going to stumble across you and save you-- because the preserve is closed-- and for good reason!-- and you ignored the signs and now you're going to be eaten by coyotes, ironically less than a mile from the technologically miraculous Bridge Evaluation and Accelerated Structural Testing lab-- which is affectionately known by the acronym The BEAST®-- maybe Lola will protect me, but for how long? and the nights will be cold . . . I'll have to drag my way down the trail to the road . . . etc. etc.
It totally skipped my mind that I was listening to my podcast (Flash Forward: Time After Time) on my cellphone, a device which enabled me to communicate and interact by various means with the world outside of the Rutgers Preserve. I got up, dusted myself off, and started running again-- thinking that I had just evaded certain death . . . and it didn't dawn on me until twenty-five minutes later, when I got back to the parking lot next to The BEAST®, that I had not evaded certain death-- that I owned a cellphone -- mainly because my mother called just as I was loading the dog into the back of the car and this reminded me that my podcast and music player also had communication capabilities.
As a side note, there's still some weird coyote stuff going on in the vicinity of the preserve. A small dog was mauled a couple days ago, after the original aggressive coyote was euthanized. So maybe I was in some danger. If a pack of coyotes got to me before I remembered that I had a cellphone, I might have been eaten alive (while listening to my podcast).
This morning, my wife insisted I taste her mashed turnips. She always makes a batch on Thanksgiving, in honor of her mom. So-- for fear of offending the dead-- I couldn't refuse to take a bite.
I told her that I found the turnips bland and mushy, two food characteristics that don't sit well with me. My wife was shocked. She thought they were tasty and delicious. But she also likes mashed potatoes, and I think that removing the skin and then smooshing a potato to mush (with some milk! yuck!) is sinful.
Mashed turnips taste and look the kind of food you'd eat if you were voyaging to Mars, to start a new colony. The kind of food they might give you a dollop of in the big house. The kind of food you'd eat if you'd broken free from The Matrix and were riding around on with the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar.
So apparently Catherine would fare better than me in space. And in jail. And as an American colonist in the 1600's. I'm thankful for many things, but Thanksgiving food isn't one of them.
Cave crickets (otherwise known as camel crickets, spider crickets, and sprickets) are an invasive species from China that may now outnumber people in the United States. They love basements and sheds and other dank places. They're fairly big and kind of scary, but they do not have fangs and can't bite humans. Despite their lack of biological weaponry, they are more dangerous than you might think.
Most of the camel crickets I encounter live in my bike shed. They are scavengers and provide a valuable service, eating all kinds of gross debris, so most of the time I ignore the giant herd of them that lives on the walls and ceiling of the shed. But I occasionally clean out the bike shed with our leaf blower, and during those rare occasions, I relish blowing the crickets to the four corners of the earth (though I know they'll be back soon enough). It's fun to show them who the boss is. No one can withstand my might wind! The problem is, if I flush them out of the bike shed, then they're going to migrate to my basement.
This is probably what happened Friday morning. I went down into the basement to throw in a load of wash, and saw two crickets by the stereo. I grabbed a manila folder, swatted one of them cleanly and then took aim at the other. I was in a weird position and when I swatted this one, a sharp pain rocketed through my shoulder.
So this camel cricket was the symbolic straw that broke the camel's back. Or the swatting at the camel cricket was the symbolic straw. And I broke the camel cricket's back, but the camel cricket broke my shoulder. Or something like that.
My shoulder has been injured since August, when I tried to resurrect my one-handed backhand. I've been in denial about it. Avoiding the doctor, trying to rehab it myself, and generally screwing it up. I finally recognized that this was the end of the line. I was done in by a harmless insect. Or I was done in playing tennis, and swatting at this stupid creature revealed just how screwed up my shoulder is.
I called my doctor but I couldn't get an appointment right away with the sports medicine guy. So I did some self-diagnosis.
These Bob and Brad guys seem really friendly and credible, and according to them, I probably do not have a rotator cuff tear.
Judging by this video, it seems to be an impingement.
They've even suggested exercises.
I can't wait to see if my self-diagnosis is correct. I go to the doctor on the 20th, and I'm going to be chock full of information.Thanks Bob and Brad!
I covered a Drivers Ed class this morning, but there was a student-teacher so I didn't have to do anything but sit there (legally there has to be a licensed teacher in the room).
I ate my snacks and read the new issue of The Atlantic.
Drivers Ed class offers really specific and useful information about how to obtain a driver's license. Keep both hands on the steering wheel. Bring six points of ID to the road test. Do NOT laminate your permit!
Perhaps there should be some discussion and debate about this during Drivers Ed class. Why save the controversy for Environmental Science? There's certainly enough time to produce well-informed possible drivers and bring up the possibility of NOT driving. The course is a part of Health class, and there are few things less healthy for all parties involved than driving a car. They advise the kids not to do drugs, not to have unprotected sex, and not to do things generally bad for your body and mind, but when it comes to cars, we put on the blinders.
I'm a fan of Malcolm Gladwell, but even if you're not, his newest book is a good one. It's called Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don't Know and it begins and ends with the Sandra Bland/Brain Encinia West Texas traffic stop and ensuing tragedy.
The book then barrels through various interactions with strangers that go awry: Cuban double agents, diplomatic meetings with Hitler, SEC investigations of Bernie Madoff, the Jerry Sandusky and Amanda Knox trials, Brock Turner's rapey encounter at Stanford, the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the motives and methods behind Sylvia Plath's suicide, and the Michael Brown/Ferguson MO debacle.
As usual, Gladwell is as good at narrative as he is at research. And the examples hang together particularly well (which doesn't always happen in his books).
It turns out that humans are ill equipped to deal with strangers, often at a systemic level. We default to believing we are being told the truth, and when the default doesn't work, we struggle. We either get things wrong, or we design systems that don't help matter.
We might not understand how much place and environment have to do with suicide and crime. Sylvia Plath might have killed herself because of the easy access to poisonous "town gas." We might overvalue getting answers, to the point that we destroy and distort a person's memories. We might be in a drunken haze, thus making the possibility of understanding a stranger's intentions even more difficult than it already is. We might be fooled by appearances. Madoff fit the bill as a savvy investor, so he passed muster. All parties involved had trouble indicting Sandusky. And they had trouble trusting Amanda Knox, because she was goofy and weird. Many nervous and anxious folks always appear as if they are lying, even when they are telling the truth. And even folks trained in reading people's emotions can get it very wrong, e.g. Neville Chamberlain. Whoops!
So what should we do?
We should try to have patience and humility and empathy when dealing with people we don't know. We should realize that environment is more important than what we judge as "character." We should realize that it's really easy to judge emotions when we are watching Friends, but that's because those folks are professional actors, trained in making incredibly emotive and easy to read facial expressions. The real world is more difficult to read.
Once we realize all this, we should carry on using truth as the default. We should design our systems in this way as well, except under the most extreme circumstances (and then we should train the hell out of people that are going to implement an aggressive system that does not default to trust).
Gladwell summarizes his argument in the last chapter:
Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative-- to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception-- is worse.
This past weekend, I was up at 3 AM three nights in a row. Each night was a different adventure. While it makes for good content, this is not a streak I want to continue.
3 am Adventure #1 -- Friday Night
Friday night, my son Alex was over on Busch Campus at Rutgers with his fellow members of the Highland Park Rocket Propulsion Lab. They got some kind of a grant and use the Rutgers facilities: the 3-D printer and the modeling software and the soldering equipment. These are really smart kids (who also play tennis-- that's how Alex met them). And something went wrong with Arduino mini (a piece of electronic equipment). The wires weren't grounded and they fried the circuit board.
So when Catherine and I got home from dinner with friends at 11 PM, Alex wasn't home yet. We texted and he said that they were trying to fix the circuit board and needed to stay later.
I reminded him that he had Model UN at 8 am at Franklin High School. He had to be up at 7 am. Then I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up at 2:30 am. Alex had not come in. I texted him. Things were not going well. He said they might not get done until 4 or 5 in the morning.
This was absurd. I told him he needed some sleep before his Model UN event and drove over to Busch Campus to find him. It wasn't easy. He had to run down the road to flag down the van. And-- though we didn't know it at the time-- we were near the spot where a Rutgers employee had been bitten by a coyote! Just one night previous (at 4 am).
I was so sleepy I missed the exit for Highland Park. Alex managed to get up and put on his coat and tie for Model UN the next morning. Impressive.
3 am Adventure #2 -- Saturday Night
Saturday afternoon, I attended the Rutgers/Ohio State game with my buddy Alec. We drank some beer before the game and then we drank some beer during the game. Then when I got home from the game I ate some of my wife's delicious Thai coconut curry chicken soup (and drank another beer). A little bit later I made a rash decision and decided to have ice cream, with a healthy dollop of whipped cream on top. This is not a combination of food my stomach can handle.
So this one was my fault. I was up at 3 am Saturday night with gas. I fell back to sleep, but couldn't really sleep late because of my son's Model UN event.
3 am Adventure 3# -- Sunday Night
Sunday afternoon, I took my son Alex to the Edison skate park. I brought the dog, so I could walk her while Alex skated. The adjacent fields were covered with goose poop and Lola ingested some. Yuck.
At three in the morning Sunday night (Monday morning?) we heard that distinctive retching sound of a vomiting dog. Lola was puking on the landing at the top of the stairs. Pretty minimal. Probably because of the goose poop. I got her outside and Catherine cleaned up the mess. We put down a towel in case she threw up again.
Thirty minutes later, she did just that. It was just a tiny bit, and she did it on the towel. I waited for a moment, to see if she was going to throw up more (since she was doing it on the towel). Catherine rushed by me, her thought being "get the dog outside." In her mad rush in the darkness, she flung her arm at my face. Her fingernail cut the inside of my nostril. Ouch! She drew blood!
Ian and Alex slept through all of this.
The next morning, I tried to find the spot where Lola defecated in the yard at 3 am. I hate leaving dog poop in the yard, because it always comes back to haunt you. I couldn't find the poop-- because I had stepped in it. I took off my clogs and left them outside.
Then, on the way back from walking her to the park, I tried to find the remainder of the poop and I stepped in it again. Luckily, we got some rain so it was easy to wipe my shoes clean on the wet grass.
During the school day, I learned that a cut inside your nostril really hurts. It hurts when you sniffle, it hurts when you rub your nose, and it especially hurts when you eat spicy food (like the leftover Thai coconut chicken soup that I had for lunch).
Anyway, I am hoping to end this streak tonight. Wish me luck.
My friend Alec got a hold of some tickets to the Rutgers/Ohio State game yesterday. His neighbor couldn't attend. The tickets were handicap accessible so we got preferred parking and a pair of seats surrounded by space at the top of the mezzanine (although the stadium was relatively empty-- you could sit wherever).
Ohio State was favored by 53 points. The largest amount for any away team ever. I wanted to be the game-- take Rutgers and see if they could cover-- so I signed up for the FanDuel Sports Book. Apparently if this app verifies that you are from a state where sports gambling is legal, then you can place bets. It took a while-- I couldn't get my computer to verify that it was in New Jersey, so I used my phone. It takes some doing to download the app-- you can't directly download it from Google so you have to change settings and find the file and install it manually. The app is terrible. Slow and glitchy and impossible to find anything.
Before the site tried to verify my location, I loaded one hundred dollars into my account while I was on the computer-- they'll take your money THEN tell you they can't verify your location, so you can't bet your money. Very annoying.
Once I got on my phone, I was able to navigate the site a bit. There's no search bar, so you have to scroll through everything-- super-annoying-- and I couldn't find the Rutgers game. I searched and searched, but no luck. I decided they weren't taking bets because the spread was so huge. So I put my hundred dollars on William and Mary, my alma mater, and closed the stupid app. Even if I lost the bet, FanDuel was supposed to refund me the money-- they do this for your first bet up to $500 dollars-- so you can bet it again.
I placed a bet with my friend Alec-- he was willing to take Ohio State and give me 52.5-- and we drove over. We had a few drinks in the parking lot and then went in. Ohio State capitalized on two quick Rutgers turn-overs and scored fourteen points in the first three minutes. It looked like they were going to cover. But then Rutgers fought back and actually played some football. Unlike Willaim and Mary, who got clobbered. And we met a mutual friend (Sleepy Dan) who informed us they now serve beer at the stadium. Fabulous! He also informed me that the reason I couldn't find the game on FanDuel is that you're not allowed to bet on amateur contests happening in state. So no betting on Rutgers and Princeton. Makes sense, I suppose, but I wish the site had some information about that.
We got some beers. Dan claimed that someone stole his extra beer, which he put on a chair behind us for safekeeping. Then it got real cold. Dan left. Alec and I asked some nice ladies in an apparel stand where the warmest place in the stadium was. They only had a tiny space heater. The older lady put her hand on my face and said, "I'm freezing honey." Then she told us to go upstairs and try to get into the stadium club.
"Walk in like you own the place!" she advised us.
We walked up the ramp, saw the enormous bouncer turn his back to the entrance, and walked through with lots of confidence. We nearly made it to the bar when he caught us. "You can't come in here! You don't have the credentials!"
Alec showed him his ticket. While it got us preferred parking and handicapped seating, it did not get us into the club. As fast as we were in, we were out. Back out in the cold. We made it to the end of the third quarter and then headed to my house for some of Cat's homemade Thai coconut curry chicken soup.
And Rutgers beat the spread!
Today, FanDuel refunded my first bet, plus five dollars. I'm eager to be done with this sports gambling stuff, so I bet it all on the Patriots. I figure Brady and Bellichick wouldn't lose two in a row. I was right. My son was angry with me for betting $100 dollars until I explained to him that getting two bets for the price of one is something you have to exploit, but then you have to take the money and run. I've already cleaned out my account-- so if you add together the $25 I won on Rutgers and the $105 I made on my bet refund, I'm up $130. And I'm retiring from sports gambling (aside from March Madness pools). I don't need that kind of stress.
If I could tell you one thing, it would be this: go see Bong Joon Ho's new movie. It's called Parasite. The title is both literal and metaphorical (unlike the time I had giant intestinal roundworms . . . that parasite story is completely literal).
My wife and I took the kids Wednesday night. A weeknight movie! I was worried it would stop playing in the theater by my house. The movie began and we didn't breathe for two hours and twelve minutes. Then it ended, we all exhaled, and said-- in unison-- "Wow! That was so good."
Best movie I've seen since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
I'm not going to say much about the movie, other than you should see it on the big screen, for the colors. My wife was watching This Is Us the day after we saw Parasite, and it looked so cheesy-- because of the lighting and the color palette (I'm pretty sure the show is cheesy . . . if my wife is watching something like that, I leave the room before I say something offensive).
The only clue I'll give you about the content of Parasite is that it is the ultimate, most epic upstairs/downstairs story ever told. Like Downtown Abbey, without the sucking.
You should also watch Snowpiercerand The Host, two other movies directed by Bong Joon Ho.
And speaking of movies starting with the letter "P", Platoon is streaming on Amazon for free (if you've got Prime) and it's a great one to watch to celebrate Veterans Day. It's grim-- and like Parasite-- it's got a class element . . . but unlike Ho's twisted vision of class mobility in Korea, there seems to be some kind of cathartic camaraderie between Chris (Charlie Sheen) and the lower class gang (King and Big Harold and Rhah). So American. Fist bumps and sing-alongs and communal drug use and such. Despite this, things don't turn out so well for the "crusaders," especially Willem Dafoe's character (Sgt. Elias).
My son Alex said the greatest Vietnam movie ever would be a mash-up; it would start with the basic training in Full Metal Jacket and then move to the Vietnam action in Platoon.
I agree . . . although my kids haven't seen The Deer Hunter yet.
I'm turning 50 in March, and I'm trying to preempt the stereotypical mid-life crisis-- so I've been running more in an attempt to improve my mile time. This might be an exercise in futility. I'm certainly building up my endurance, and also, by running more, I'm playing basketball less, so preventing injury. But it might not matter.
I'm still heavy. I ran an 8 minute mile in the summer, and I weighed 195+. Now I'm down to 192 or so, but I'm still too heavy to really move around the track. So I've got to shed a few pounds, but I refuse to diet. I do too much exercise. I'm hungry all the time. And I love food. And beer. I try to drink less beer, but it never lasts. Tequila and seltzer is light and less caloric and it tastes great, but it's not beer.
Then, yesterday, my friend and colleague Stacey pointed out that the worst food to eat was potato chips. I did not realize this. I knew they weren't good, but I didn't know just how bad they were. And, if you exercise a lot, they can be useful. They contain potassium. But when you get old, there are better ways to obtain this mineral. And you probably only need a few chips. That's not how I eat chips.
Because I am addicted to potato chips. I eat them all the time. Almost every day. If they are in the house, I eat them. Inhale them. If I stop for coffee at Wawa, I get a pack. I eat them without realizing it. I eat them all, the whole bag, no matter the size.
I got up Thursday morning with the best intentions. I had been up late at the local open mic the night before (there was a guy proficient at beat-boxing) and had drank too many beers and eaten some late-night quesadillas.
No school on Thursday, and my wife was away at the convention: working it. So I was living it up.
Thursday morning, the house was quiet. The kids were sleeping, and I wanted to run off the beer. I loaded Lola into the car, and we headed to the Rutgers Ecological Preserve. There's rarely anyone there, so I can let Lola off the leash (once it gets cold and the ticks hibernate) so she can chase deer and squirrels while I run the maze of trails.
But when we got to the bottom of the hill, at the intersection of Cleveland Avenue and River Road, traffic was at a standstill. I just needed to get over to Cedar Lane, but I wasn't going to do it in my van. So I drove back up the hill and parked near the Birnn Chocolate Factory. Back in the old days, when I could really run, I used to cut through the woods, cross the railroad tracks, and make my way through a playground behind the Cedar Lane Apartments, and this would lead me to Cedar Lane. From there I could make my way into the Ecological Preserve.
Lola and I managed to find our way across the railroad tracks without getting hit by a train (and a number of them passed through) but then we ran out of luck. We tramped through some tick and briar filled brush, but could not find a gap in the Cedar Lane Apartment fence. There was no good way to the playground that didn't involve bushwhacking and a machete. We followed some other unused railroad track, wandered by a hobo tent, and then took a long run alongside what I later learned was the Middlesex County Water Plant. There was lots of construction going on, and a giant fence.
Lola was sort of freaking out, due to the construction vehicles on our left and the occasional passing trains on our right. Though I was listening to music on my phone, I never thought to actually look at a Google map of where I was. I figured if I just kept going there would be a gap in the fence. But then the Water Company fence abutted against another fence and I admitted defeat.
We ran back to the car-- which involved more brush and trail blazing-- and drove home. We ran for another 30 minutes in Donaldson Park, the lovely park right next to my house, which I will appreciate a great deal more in the future.
George Orwell wrote what is arguably the best narrative essay in the English language. "Shooting an Elephant" was published in 1936, and its profundity-- both politically and psychologically-- in addition to its vivid subject matter and subtle symbolism make it something special. It's certainly the best thing ever written about an elephant.
Orwell knew all along that he didn't have to shoot the titular elephant. This recently rampaging creature had just experienced the hormonal surge of musth-- the elephant version of heat-- but was now calm. The elephant needed to sow his wild oats, but he couldn't find a female elephant to sow oats with, so he trampled a coolie and wrecked some bamboo huts. It's understandable. But shooting a working elephant is a big deal. Orwell only did it to preserve some semblance of colonial rule.
Eighty years later, Jacob Shell has updated Orwell's piece. His new book Giants of the Monsoon Forest is the definitive and comprehensive guide to "living and working with elephants." The setting is still Burma, which is now known as Myanmar. Elephants still work in tandem with mahouts, mainly in the teak industry (although elephants are also employed as transportation during the flood and monsoon season, and used by paramilitary forces deep in the forests and jungles of politically ambiguous territories).
But the mahouts have learned their lesson about musth. Working elephants are allowed to roam the forest at night, in search of fodder and possible mates. They often interact with wild herds. The working elephants have loose chains on their forelegs, so they can't run away, but they have a certain measure of freedom.
This keeps them happy enough, although they sometimes engage in high jinks to avoid coming to work on time. They double back and hide-- which is absurd for such large critters-- and they stuff their neck bells with leaves to muffle the ringing.
While the dying elephant in Orwell's essay represents the ugly end of the British Empire, the loosely chained elephant in Shell's book symbolizes the difficult and ethically tangled plight of the Asian pachyderm. It's painful to even detail it. Basically, working elephants have a somewhat rough road. The capturing and training period is brutal. The work is hard. They are generally treated well, because they are valuable, but they are not free.
There are only 40,000 Asian elephants left on the planet (there are 500,000 African elephants). Many of these Asian elephants are working elephants. If working elephants were not allowed, the population would drop to precipitous levels.
Animal rights purists would prefer for all Asian elephants to be free and wild, there doesn't seem to be enough forest left to support a thriving population. Ironically, the working elephants may actually be cooperating with humans in order to survive. These are VERY smart animals.
One of the things I realized while reading this book is probably pretty obvious, but I had never thought about it. Elephants are NOT domesticated. They're not like horses and dogs. We haven't bred the wildness out of them. When an elephant cooperates with his mahout, the elephant is doing it because it wants to cooperate. They can kill their mahouts or anyone else in the vicinity anytime they like. These are creatures who mourn their dead, have distinct personalities, do medical procedures with their trunks, show empathy towards other elephants and humans, understand up to 100 human commands, and have a language of their own.
Jacob Shell's book is a tough read. It's WAY too much for a layman to learn about Asian elephants, the history of elephant domestication, elephant and human relationships, Burmese politics, the teak industry, monsoons and floods, and political unrest. It's another world, an entirely different universe. And this is just a human perspective of a place on our planet where elephants and humans interact.
Slough House is not in Slough (but-- the joke is-- it might as well be). Slough is something a of laughingstock location. It's the Scranton of England (and the setting of the original Office). In Mick Herron's fictional spy series, Slough House is where the misfits of the MI5 are warehoused.
I recently read Slow Horses and Real Tigers and enjoyed both of them. I'm not sure I got all the jokes and satire, and I certainly didn't understand the London geography, but it didn't matter. When there's a band of screw-ups, led by a jaded fat man (who might have a heart of gold, if he could stop farting) and they just might show the powers that be what's what, you know who to root for.
Warning: these books are dense. They are not fast reads. You've got to pay attention to Byzantine plots; machinations and and manipulation;, a bevy of characters-- all with secrets-- and a plethora of perspectives. There are seven books in the series, and I'm not tackling another one for a couple months, being an operative takes a lot of skill, memory, and thinking.
We've had a dog in our house since January 2012. First was our beloved black lab and Weimaraner Sirius. He was a great dog, and he died too young (of tick diseases).
Then in May of 2018, we rescued Lola. She was billed as a lab/Rhodesian Ridgeback mix, but once we saw a real Rhodesian Ridgeback we realized she might be a faux-desian pitbull. She's a little nuts, but I treat her like the daughter I never had. And she's been vaccinated against Lyme's disease, so hopefully the ticks won't do her in.
Lola turned two today, and she's enjoying something Sirius never had: outdoor lighting. A few months ago, I strung some Sunthin outdoor patio lights on our back porch. Two 48 foot strands. There's even a remote control. All those years of taking the dog out back before bed, and I never did it with any kind of lighting. Sometimes I would take a flashlight. But now we do it in style.
I was doing a big clean out down in my study-- otherwise known as Greasetruck Studios-- and I decided I would take a crack at solving the mystery of the phantom reeking toolbox.
The haunted article looks like your typical yellow plastic snap-it-shut tool chest.
Aside from the fact that it's inhabited by a spirit . . . a nasty smelling vinegary spirit. It's been that way for many many years. At least a decade. So, inspired by last week's successfully delayed genius, I forged ahead with my exorcism . . . or, if I liked puns, I would call it a stenchorcism.
I emptied the tool chest on the porch table, hoping sunlight would be the best antiseptic. It was not. The smell was pervasive, pungent, and did not dissipate.
I had my son Ian confirm this.
I started smelling stuff. Wrenches and pliers and wire-cutters and box-cutters and tape measures and vises and screwdrivers. I finally located the source of the stink. It was the screwdriver handles. I had my son Ian confirm this.
I decided it must be the little rubber strips on the handles. They must have decayed. So I removed them.
And the smell is coming from inside the house. It's not the rubber strips, it's the material the handles are made of: cellulose acetate butyrate. Apparently, if screwdrivers with handles like this sit in an enclosed space, and there is the right humidity and bacteria levels, the handles decay and outgas. And it smells bad.
It's not so easy to get rid of the film of butyric acid. I washed the handles with some soapy water and sprayed them with 409, but I think the smell might linger for eternity. My older son, sensing the reek, added two items of his own which have the phantasmagoric funk of teen spirit to the tableau-- his cleats and shin guards.
Here is a table full of stuff which will never give up the ghost, and all of it will head back into the house later in the day. Yuck.
Every year at the end of October, there is a hellish week of school that combines two things that do not belong together: parent conferences and "spirit week."
For some godforsaken contractual reason we have four days of parent conferences in a row at East Brunswick. Two of these are night sessions, which run from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM. So teachers either stay at school for 14 hours straight, or-- as I do-- run home to other events and that head back to school for a second time to chat with parents. It's exhausting.
In the midst of this awful week of conferences are the events and preparation for the Homecoming football game and dance. Every day at school is some absurd spirit day, Hippie Day, Hall Decorating Day, Hawaiian Day, Twin Day, etc.
The end of this silly and taxing week culminates with the pep rally. The pep rally is very very loud. Only people who are full of pep enjoy it. Football coaches, cheerleaders, and student council folk.. Soccer coaches are generally not full of pep.
Some teachers have drawn the unlucky duty of having to supervise the students in the bleachers of the stadium, where the amplification of pep is at it's loudest. For the last decade, I have been blessed with a quieter duty, what is known as "flagpole duty." Year after year, the same four teachers and I convene at the flagpole, and I rarely see these teachers during the school year, so "flagpole duty" has the feel of a reunion.
The flagpole is at the entrance to the stadium, far from the pep. The other "flagpole duty" teachers and I have the very important job of directing the sophomores to the left and the juniors to the right. The seniors are already seated in the stadium, as they arrived early for their senior class picture.
East Brunswick High School has over 2000 students (and we don't have any freshman in our building) so this means we need to direct 1400 kids in the right direction. We've always done this by shouting and pointing.
"Sophomores! This way!"
"Juniors! This way!"
We get the herds moving in the right direction, the juniors across the turf to the far section of the bleachers, and the sophomores on the perimeter path, to the near section.
But after ten years of this, my brain said, "Enough!" I was taking a walk around the school-- getting prepared for the pep-- and my brain gifted me with an epiphany. This flagpole session, we didn't need to yell, or even talk at all. I went back to my room and wrote the words "Sophomores" and "Juniors" on a large sheet of paper. I then put a marker in my pocket, and carried my half-completed sign out to the flagpole. Once I had confirmed which grade needed to go which way needed, I drew the arrows. And then I sat on the concrete planter, holding my sign, and everyone walked in the correct direction (except one sophomore, who asked me what a "sophomore" was . . . I told him a 10th grader, and he walked in the proper direction . . . and learned some vocabulary to boot).
Once upon a time, there were opium wars. And reefer madness. The hippies and Timothy Leary did LSD. The disco folks snorted coke, and Marion Barry did crack. The ravers took Ecstasy. College kids wandered around high on magic mushrooms. Junkies and rock stars did heroin. You occasionally heard about some lunatic doing PCP or mescaline or horse tranquilizers like ketamine, but for the most part you could keep track of the recreational drugs people were using on ten fingers (maybe you'd need your toes for pills like Valium, Xanax and Percocet) .
Then I read Methland (and wrote this fabulous review of it) and watched Breaking Bad. Scary stuff. Next came the opioid epidemic, and the ensuing plague of heroin addiction. I read Dreamlandand Dopesick. I thought I was well-informed on the state of illicit drug use and abuse in America.
I was wrong. And like to recommend a book that will explain. I think it's a must read for parents and teachers and coaches and psychonauts.
Fentanyl, Inc. How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic, by Ben Westhoff, comprehensively covers the new drug scene. And there's no way to fight it. The only way to win the war is Gandhi-like pacifism, in the face of a wave of chemicals so powerful and various that no top-down institution can keep track of them.
Called NPS . . . which-- depending on your SAT verbal score-- either stands for "new psychoactive substances," or the slightly the more advanced "novel psychoactive substances."
Fentanyl analogues such as carfentanil (which is used to tranquilize elephants and rhinos) and acetylfentanyl and benzoylfentantanil.
Synthetic cathinones, such as Meow Meow (4-MMC) and Ice Cream (3-MMC) and Flakka (a- PVP).
Synthetic cannabinoids like Spice and K2 and JWH-018 and 5F-ADB.
Fentanyl precursors, which can be bought from China, so that you can manufacture various new fentanyl cocktails.
And pages of others. But you get the point.
So your heroin, which is hard to make-- you need fields of poppies-- is most definitely laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl is notoriously strong-- a pinhead's worth could kill you-- but it's easier to manufacture than heroin. This is how Lil Peep and Tom Petty and Michelle McNamara all met their maker (fentanyl combined with sedatives, which is a deadly combination). Prince and Mac Miller too.
Westhoff goes to China to investigate where all the precursors are coming from, and he finds it remarkably easy to buy them. Chinese companies will even ship in mis-marked bags, as banana chips or whatever, to disguise them.
The Opium War has flipped. Surprisingly, there's plenty of fentanyl abuse in China, as well, despite the fact that they execute drug dealers there. This is strong, addictive stuff. And nobody knows what they're taking, even the psychonauts that make the stuff.
The only "successes" in this minefield of chemical lunacy have been the harm-reduction agencies like Bunk Police and DanceSafe that go to raves and clubs and festivals and offer chemical analysis of drugs for partiers, so that they know what they're taking, and can make an informed decision. This has worked incredibly well in Europe, where laws allow these companies to operate, but they are not exactly legal in America, because of the Rave Act. In 2017, the United States-- population 326 million-- had seventy thousand drug overdose deaths. The European Union-- population 510 million-- had only 7600.
This book gave me the feeling that everyone is on drugs. The math is crazy. Many of you know the story of Kermit, West Virginia . . . a town of 400 that was prescribed 5 million opioid pills. That's awful enough. But at least they knew what they were getting. This new stuff is scarier: more potent, more random, more volatile, and often quite cheap. I hope and pray my kids figure out a way to avoid it.
Democrats can't talk about this as progress because they are loath to admit that anything good can happen during the Trump presidency. That's silly, because the President doesn't have that much power and influence over the economy to begin with. Trump has hindered the economy with his trade wars and the general insanity and uncertainty around his policy. Markets like stability. That's enough to condemn Trump.
Republicans can't talk about the success of low wage earners because their wage increase is mainly due to regulated minimum wage increases. This is anathema to dyed-in-wool conservatives. State and federal mandated minimum wage increases-- according to supply-side conservatives-- will destroy the labor market, make people lose jobs, ensure that there will be less jobs in total, destroy small businesses, and redistribute income until we are a socialist commune. Conservative logic dictates that the job market should not be so tight, because of this enforced wage increases.
But it is. So the Republicans won't bask in the glory of low wage increases because it contradicts their favorite economic theory.
Instead, we get stories of wage stagnation, despite the tight job market. That's because middle class wages are stagnant, and middle class people are the people who matter. They are the voters. And the people who matter haven't seen wage increases, despite the tight job market.
But income is getting redistributed, and poor people are less poor, and that means they can take part more in the economy. That's a good thing for a lot of people, not just low wage earners. But nobody in politics is going to admit it.
Progress.
Good for everyone except the media and the politicians.
This morning-- as a result of telling a co-worker that she was dressed like a real-estate agent-- I was forced to defend my fashion sense. I was wearing my usual black pants and gray golf shirt (unbuttoned, to show maximum gray chest hair).
But there was an unexpected wrinkle. Or perhaps several.
I'm proud to say that my fashion tactics totally blew Cunningham's mind. First we traded insults. I disparaged her ruffled brown and burgundy fall ensemble, and she proclaimed that I wore a similar outfit every day. I told her my outfit wasn't similar, it was the same. I was wearing the same clothes I had worn yesterday.
My reasoning was that Tuesday and Wednesday were both half days (because we have conferences in the evening). So I had only worn my clothes for half the time, so I had to double up. Not only did we have half days, but we were also in block scheduling, so I only saw half of my students each day. So they wouldn't realize I was wearing the same clothes. So it was only fair to my students, my clothes, and the environment that I wear these clothes a second time. None would be the wiser (except that I told everyone).
There was another problem I didn't anticipate. One of my students has me two periods a day, in the morning and the afternoon, so she saw me both Tuesday and today, wearing the same outfit.
I still think it's a legitimate reason to wear the same outfit two days in a row.
Last night, at Frankie Feds-- a thin crust pizza joint in Freehold that you should visit-- my son Alex said something inadvertently resonant. He said it to me, and my wife did not hear (it was really loud-- there was a kid's birthday party, and the kids were young and screaming, and the parents were drunk-- as you need to be when you've got young kids-- and they were screaming over the kids. Two large tables of loud adults and one large table of shrieking children. The wait staff gladly moved us as far away from them as possible, but you could still hear them. Also, everyone had a pumpkin).
Anyway, down at our end of the table, my father was telling Alex and Ian he had an atlas for them-- someone gave it to him-- and Alex made a wisecrack about how many atlases we have around the house (though I've cleaned out my books, I just can't seem to part with the atlases) and then he thought for a moment and asked a serious question. "Could I tear pages out of the atlases and put the maps on my wall? Over the Lego Star Wars?"
Alex has an amazing Lego Star Wars mural on his wall, painted by the artistic sister of a friend way back when he was into stuff like that. But now he's a sophomore in high school.
If he's ever going to kiss a girl, it's probably time to obscure the mural.
My younger son Ian chose a slightly more classic theme in his room: a jungle tree full of stylized animals.
Ian should be fine with the ladies. The King himself had a jungle room.
I made Alex walk over to the other side of our big table and repeat the question to my wife.
"Mom, can I cover my Lego Star Wars wall with maps? We have all these atlases . . ."
My wife laughed. The apple does not fall far from the tree. When she first met me, I lived in a disgusting flophouse in East Brunswick, right on Route 18. It was old-- historic-- with lots of little rooms. A bunch of my friends had rented it for cheap, and we were primitive. I slept in a sleeping bag on a camping pad. I shared the room with my buddy Ryan. He agreed to my cartographically themed decorating plan.
I raided the old National Geographic magazines in my basement, and I took all the maps. I covered every surface of our room with them. Walls, doors, closets, and ceiling. And for some reason that I can't recall now, I hung all the maps with toothpaste.
This worked.
Sort of-- until it didn't.
Then the maps hung in assorted ways on the walls and ceiling, corners flopping and flapping. And the room smelled like mint. It's shocking that my wife continued to date me, as a room with no mattress, a sleeping bag, and an array of maps on every surface is a stone's throw away from a serial killer's den (maybe not even a stone's throw, maybe closer than that, maybe a shot-put toss away from a serial killer's den).
So Catherine laughed at Alex's request to cover his walls in maps. She had been there before.
I told him to go for it. In my limited experience, chicks who dig maps are cool.
The episode was inspired by a Twitter event, as Reply All is ostensibly about the internet and all the weird stuff that happens there. I like to listen to Reply All (and read Wired) in order to get some simulacrum of internet life, without actually having to spend time there.
Willie McNabb made a feral hog based non sequitur reply to the typical gun control debate and Twitter went bananas. PJ Vogt called it an internet "snow day."
Vogt talks to McNabb and a number of other people involved in feral hog America, and he comes to the conclusion that the feral hog epidemic is one of the top ten problems in our country. The hogs are invasive, but old school invasive. The hogs brought over by Hernando Soto, and the Spanish released them into the forest, where they could fatten up and then be killed for food. A portable pork larder. But soon enough the hogs went wild. Hog wild. The rest is history. Feral hogs are incredibly fecund-- they can have litters of up to 14 every six months-- and they are incredibly destructive. They destroy crops and ponds and wildlife and forests. They are large-- normal wild porkers weigh up to 300 pounds, but there are occasionally hogs that are larger, much larger. They are also intelligent, and teach each other how to avoid traps and electric fences.
The paradoxical problem with the hogs is that while most states have loosened hunting laws so that they can be eradicated, this has worked in two directions. Some people tried to hunt the hogs out of existence, but others realized that they are really fun to kill. And so while farmers might be trying to rid their lands of hogs, other folks were just as quickly introducing hogs-- stocking their land with them so they could hunt. But feral hogs reproduce really fast, so the population is out of control. They are estimated at 6 million strong and their range is rapidly expanding.
Vogt talks to the guys that made this video, in order to promote hog eradication-- because of the millions of dollars of crop damage they are responsible for. But the video instead inspired people to hunt the hogs in more extreme and creative ways. You can shoot feral hogs from a helicopter.
Texas nearly started using a very dangerous poison-- Kaput-- to kill the hogs, but there was enough backlash to put a hold on this plan. Kaput kills hogs in an incredibly painful and disgusting manner, and then the flesh is tainted and the hog must be buried, or animals who eat the dead hog might also die.
This is a problem so weird and crazy that it's outside my liberal central Jersey mentality and morality. I'm not a hunter, I don't own a gun, I couldn't imagine shooting any large animal-- let alone dozens in a night-- and I can't imagine thousands of poisoned carcasses, toxic and bleeding from every orifice, littering the countryside. There's no obvious way to solve this problem. There probably needs to be a ban on hunting the hogs, so that people stop introducing them to new lands, but there's got to be a dispensation for farmers and such. Poison seems an awful alternative, unless a more precise agent could be developed. I just can't imagine dealing with this, which is why I don't live in Texas.
In the meantime, there's a weird part of me rooting for the hogs. They're truly American. Invasive, persistent, corpulent, destructive, environmentally obtuse, omnivorous, at home in the country and the suburbs, clever, and willing to use their right to assemble (in groups of 30 - 50).
As a teacher, sometimes it's good to plan ahead-- make a syllabus and stick to it, give your students a schedule and some order in their busy lives . . . but there are also times when you have to react quickly and come up with an emergency assignment. An assignment that might not make perfect sense, but you put faith in your students and see if they can figure it out.
Saturday, I listened to a couple podcasts about Daryl Morey and China, while I was running: The Daily and Slate Money-- and went down the rabbit hole into this controversy.
Today, I am torturing my students with the following rambling and insane prompt. Only two of the kids had knew about the Morey tweet. Most students had no clue what is happening now in Hong Kong. Some kids had never heard of the NBA. I'm really interested in what they come up with . . .
Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.
Daryl Morey
The Prompt
From Plato's "Apology"
Socrates: For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.
What are the consequences of being a gadfly? What are the moral implications? What conflicts might arise? What are the pros and cons of stinging the rump of the state, or any large institution?
Write two paragraphs explaining the controversy, the consequences of being a gadfly, and your ethical position towards the NBA, China, free speech, and the reaction of any or all parties concerned.
What is Daryl Morey's history as a gadfly? What is his stance now? Hong Kong as a gadfly? What does Mark Zuckerberg's behavior towards China have to do with this? What does money have to do with this? Feel free to connect any other gadflies to this issue.
Here are a few things great things I'd like to commemorate for time immemorial . . . or as long as the internet lasts:
1) My older son Alex scored the golden goal in overtime last week. He never scores and it was a wonderful shot-- he was a few yards outside the 18 and a cross bounced his way. He took his time, got his knee over it, and half-volleyed it into the far upper 90.
2) Alex's friend Tyler played me a sweet cross while we were doing a finishing drill at JV practice the other day I scored on a full volley. A cross so good even an old man could volley it in. An even better goal than my son's goal.
3) My younger son Ian finished Ruth Ware's slow burning Henry James modernization, The Turn of the Key. It's an adult-level book, both with pacing and structure. He loved it. It's fun and scary, but often subtle and tricky. He also seems to be doing his reading for school, Catcher in the Rye and The Sun is Also a Star. Being in a sling with a fractured elbow may be helping his literacy.
4) Alex finished Old Man's War, an awesome sci-fi book that I read this summer. If you confiscate their phones enough, kids can be literate.
5) My wife always brings it in the food department during soccer season. I know a cooking-strike is nigh, but as it stands right now, everyone in my department is jealous of my fabulous lunches and the boys and I are always treated to an excellent dinner when we get home from practice.
My wife moves fast and gets things done. A downside of this is that she sometimes misplaces her stuff. The very first blog post I wrote on Sentence of Dave addressed this:
I am shopping for a new digital camera because my wife has a habit of leaving things on the roof of our car.
I'm proud to say that I'm always supportive and understanding if she loses something. She has her fingers in a lot of pies. No time for serene transitions. She doesn't always have time to fully think through where she's putting her stuff down.
We were already having a wild week-- my car was in the shop getting a new crankshaft position sensor (a big job) and so we were down to one car: our Honda CRV. At some point on Wednesday-- a day we had off for Yom Kippur-- my wife lost her keys. She realized this Wednesday afternoon, but in a casual sort of way. She didn't think anything of it until Thursday morning.
Since my car was at the shop, I drove her car to work. My school is farther away. Her school is only two miles from our house, so she planned on biking there. I leave much earlier than her for work, and once I arrived, I started receiving frantic texts.
Apparently, she had really lost her keys-- the whole set. The house keys, the keys to both cars, the keys to her classroom . . . everything. She had looked everywhere. In the dark. In her pajamas. In the garden. In the garden compost. In our garbage. Yuck.
She assumed someone stole them.
This is what she surmised: she had left the keys on the ping-pong table in our driveway. She had been running around, from Zumba to yard work to acupuncture and then back to yard work. Unlike a normal person-- myself, for instance--she didn't take any breaks between these activities. No snack or cup of coffee or moment to put her feet up and read a magazine. Just one thing to the next. And she was sure that someone had filched the keys right off the ping-pong table and this light-fingered scuzzbag was planning on breaking into our house AND stealing both our cars. There had been a few robberies around town recently, so her thoughts weren't completely unfounded.
When she got home from acupuncture, she put her purse on the hook just inside the door, and then went outside for a moment to pick up the weeds and piles of brush from her garden. She had the keys in her hand, but then put them down so she could put on a pair of gardening gloves.
She also complained that lack of sleep from ear pain may have contributed to her miscue.
I tried to make her feel better about the whole thing. We all make mistakes.
But things went from bad to worse.
It was hard for me to imagine. I was at work, teaching class. I had a working car in the parking lot. I had keys, all kinds of keys. But I could feel it, like a splinter in my mind. My wife was in some weird circle of Hell.
What a morning is right.My wife does too many things! She has too many responsibilities! The horror! The least I could do was figure out a way to make her afternoon easier. I put some deep thought into it and came up with a plan.
A heroic plan.
My wife was appreciative about my solution. She told me that she loved me, and I felt good about supporting her in her time of need. She doesn't screw up very often, and when she does she always feels awful about it (unlike me, I've become inured to it).
So I left school early, drove home and unpacked the soccer gear from the car-- as I would have to lug it down to the field on foot-- then went into the crawl space and got the bike rack. On my way out, I smashed my shoulder on the low ceiling. It hurt, but sometimes heroes have to suffer some pain. I strapped the rack on the car and put my bike on the back of the CRV.
Before going to my wife's school, I dropped off the dry-cleaning. I was running some serious errands. Taking care fo business. Getting it done.
I drove the CRV to her school, parked it in the staff lot, dropped the keys off in the office, took my bike off the rack, and rode home. Now she had the car, which would make it so much easier for her to get to the allergist after gardening club. Mission accomplished!
I got home and dragged the soccer equipment down the hill and ran practice.
What a day.
When I got home from practice, I did a thorough search around the house. If I found the keys, this I would increase my hero status exponentially. It got dark. I took out a flashlight and looked all around the front yard. I hoped to see the glint of metal.
No luck.
Over dinner, we discussed changing our locks and purchasing a couple of Club brand steering wheel anti-theft devices. And the cost of fixing the mini-van.
Yuck.
Then Catherine had to run yet another errand-- she had to pick up Ian's allergy prescription at Rite Aid. On the way, she had a thought. In her brain. A thought about me, her loving heroic husband.
She remembered that I like gum.
And that on Wednesday, right before I went running with the dog, I asked if there was any gum in her car. And she said, "Yes. There is gum in my car." And I grabbed her keys, to get the gum. And I had the dog.
And I never came back inside.
She checked the CRV's center console storage compartment-- the place where she stores her gum-- and she found her keys.
I had hidden them. Subconsciously.
It was all my fault (aside from the bike chain, which was such an easy fix-- I can understand that she was in her work clothes and didn't want to get greasy, but still).
I was the cause of all the stress. My wife didn't have her finger in too many pies. My wife was fine. I had fucked up. I had lost the keys. I had caused her all the stress. It was all on me.
My only saving grace was the fact that I had been so kind and compassionate when she had lost the keys (even though she had never lost the keys). When we thought she lost the keys. I had been calm and levelheaded and empathetic. We all make mistakes.
RUDY GIULIANI (R), THEN-MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY: We do not want these cowardly terrorists to have us in any way alter our American way of life. This may go on for some time. We have to end terrorism. I believe the United States government is committed to that. And it's going to require us here in America to go about our way of life and not have them imperil it.
Giulani calls the terrorists "cowardly." He's not the only person to do so. I don't think this is an apt description of a group of of people that hijacked four commercial jet airliners with utility knives and then steered the planes-- kamikaze style-- toward symbolic American targets. While I understand the need to denigrate and insult the terrorists, the last thing they were was "cowardly." It shows a lack of understanding of the enemy.
These people were sanguinary and vengeful and zealous and fanatical and lacking perspective and empathy for other cultures. But mainly, they were true believers, blinded by a certain political position. They were haters, haters of American policy, American military deployment in their Holy Land, haters of American capitalist morality, and American unilateral success on the world stage.
But to call them cowards is to sell them short. It doesn't reflect just how fervently they believed in what they believed. They believed enough to kill and die. In doesn't reflect how dangerous it is to believe in something so strongly that you can't look at other points of view.
Whether it's Islamic terrorists, or our own homegrown right-wing variety of fanatic, you need to accurately assess the motivations of these people. And these people aren't cowards. They are willing to commit violent acts, and often willing to die for their beliefs.
Shakespeare understood this, and Giulani would be well served by re-reading the Bard's most famous soliloquy, the one in Hamlet that begins "to be or not to be."
The context of the speech is that Hamlet is royally fucked up, and he's been royally screwed over. He's been through enough betrayal and heartache that he contemplates suicide. He acknowledges-- correctly-- that his life is a shitshow and that he should probably "take arms against a sea of troubles" and end it. It's "a consummation devoutly to be wish'd."
He doesn't kill himself. In fact, the play goes on another two hours. Hamlet might be a coward-- that's another post-- but more significantly, he recognizes why most people don't commit suicide-- and why he's not going to commit suicide. People don't behave that rashly because of "the dread of something after death."
The unknown.
He doesn't want to rush headlong into the undiscovered country" that "puzzles the will." He's not sure what will happen in the afterlife, "what dreams may come" once his life is over. And he's not going to risk it.
Obviously, he has not heard about the 72 virgins.
Hamlet is religious, but still rationally skeptical. The 9/11 terrorists-- and guys like Patrick Crusius-- do not have this fear. It's scary, how strongly they believe in their convictions. There's no shadow of a doubt in their minds.
Most normal folks-- and even folks like Hamlet, folks that are struggling but still rational-- let their "conscience" turn them cowardly. We lack fervor and unshaking faith, and so our "resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." This cowardice is a blessing in disguise because "enterprises of great pitch and moment . . . lose the name of action."
A lot of these enterprises are downright crazy, and could use reflection and reconsideration. Hamlet takes this to the extreme, and we love him for it.
There are plenty of applicable insults to aim at terrorists. They are rabid and crazed and virulent. But they certainly stand by the courage of their convictions, and that is the problem. They are the anti-Hamlet. They actually complete these suicidal actions, and this -- according to Shakespeare-- is the reverse of cowardly. All us cowards go on living our day to day lives, suffering "slings and arrows," not sure what is to come. That's civilized behavior
Though being devoted is often considered a positive trait, I believe we all need to be a little less loyal, a little less faithful, and a little less principled. It leads down a dangerous road. Instead, let's try to be a little more capricious, a little more detached. Let's be skeptical and occasionally disinterested. Maybe even a little more cowardly. If the terrorists adopted a few of these negative characteristics, the world would be a better place.
We have off this Wednesday for Yom Kippur, and since I'm not Jewish, I don't have to worry about fasting and atonement. It's just a day off. Because of this mid-week break, I declared to my wife this morning that it was "mini-Thursday."
A cause for celebration.
I explained that tomorrow (Tuesday) is mini-Friday, and that our day off (Wednesday) is a mini-weekend, and then it's normal Thursday, normal Friday, and the regular two-day weekend. An excellent week (or two weeks mini-weeks).
My wife did not buy this. She told me that it was Monday and there was no getting around it. I ignored her, and it cost me.
I got it into my car to go to school, and all the check engine lights came on. One said "TRAC OFF," another cryptically informed me "VSC" and the regular engine block light came on. Then the temperature gauge starting floating from past the H to below the C. Back and forth, back and forth.
This is not the kind of stuff that should happen on mini-Thursday.
I got to school and found out we had a faculty meeting. I had no idea. And I had to coach a game after school. There are never meetings after school on Thursday, but apparently mini-Thursday is fair game. I talked to my boss and we agreed that I would stay for a little bit and then race home to coach soccer.
I ran over to the library on my free period, to pick up a couple of reserved books, but the library was closed. On Mondays it doesn't open until 10 AM. Most mornings it opens at 9 AM. But at least my car was driving fine, despite all the cautionary lights. I called my mechanic and made an appointment for Wednesday (the mini-weekend).
Before the faculty meeting, I ran to the library a second time. Then I watched an especially boring presentation about proctoring the PSAT (which I could ignore-- my son is taking it, so I am not allowed to proctor-- so sweet). Then I raced out of the meeting so I could get home to Highland Park to coach.
On Route 18, my van starting making a weird sound. It stalled out on the stretch of highway through New Brunswick, but I managed to get it going again. Then it stalled again on the hill up to Highland Park. I got it started but it was ugly. It stalled for a final time in the road in front of my house. I was trying to pull into my neighbor's driveway to turn it around, so the van was perpendicular to the road. I had to coach in twenty minutes. Some guy walking by helped me push a bit, but we needed more people. Something about the car smelled really bad. Something was burned out. My van was dying. On mini-Thursday! My son Ian showed up. He's wearing a sling (fractured elbow) so we put him in the driver's seat. We pushed more, to no avail. There was no power steering. Ian couldn't turn the wheel (with his one good arm). Then my son Alex showed up. This was manpower (kidpower?) to get the job done. We pushed the van into a parking spot on the street (facing the wrong way) and then unloaded the car of all the soccer equipment: balls, corner flags, pinnies, cones, my giant coaching bag, etc. We carried all the equipment down to the park for the game. It's lucky I live walking distance to the field. Most coaches would have been totally screwed.
My wife managed to get the car started and drive it to F&F Auto (highly recommended). She said it was about to stall the whole drive, but she caught all the lights. My team played poorly, and my son-- who was the hero of the game on Friday and scored the winning goal in overtime-- didn't get goal-side on a couple of key plays. Yuck. Friday he was a hero, but this was Monday kind of stuff.
I'm drinking a couple of beers now and pretending it's truly a (mini) Thursday night, but it's hard to get into the Thursday night groove. Too much Monday stuff happened. Hopefully tomorrow-- mini-Friday-- will have better karma.
The new episode of "Making Sense," a conversation between Sam Harris and Andrew McAfee, is generally positive and inspirational (despite how boring Harris can be . . . you've got to get past his introductory bombast).
McAfee discusses what he calls "the great uncoupling," which the modern phenomenon of progress with less resource consumption. Bits not bolts. Once upon a time, progress came with incredible costs. The industrial revolution wreaked havoc upon the environment, cities, families, and society. But, according to McAfee, now things are different.
The discussion runs the gamut: technology, UBI, the future of developing world, global warming, nuclear power, and the pros and cons of capitalism. And while capitalism has been getting a bad rap of late, it does seem to be the best way to raise all ships-- as long as there is a responsive government to deal with externalities. And one of the biggest externalities to capitalism and market economies is pollution. Your pig farm may be doing incredible business but if your pig shit rolls down the hill into my backyard, I need to be compensated for my loss.
Air pollution is one of those externalities, and McAfee explains that there is a legitimate question about such an externality.
Has the Clean Air Act of 1970 gone too far? Are the costs more than the benefits? Are the regulations hurting business and the economy more than they are helping people avoid asthma, lung cancer, and other respiratory diseases?
And he explains that we have definitely answered that question. The answer is:
While you can't do much about the lunatic in the white house, you can help the problem. Burning wood fires is a major contributor to air pollution as well. I'm sure Trump supporters will react to this with disdain, but it's another externality. If my neighbor lights his fireplace, my kids suffer. So cut it out. Hang some LED lights on your deck like I did, and enjoy clean low wattage smoke-free lighting. And support nuclear power, because despite the excellent entertainment value of HBO's Chernobyl, the next generation of nuclear is the next step in the great uncoupling.
I walk our dog every morning at 6 AM. It's pitch black. I take her down to the park because the lights by the tennis court are always on, so I can let her loose and usually see where she defecates. Lola loves to chase deer, so when we find a few in the soccer field adjacent to the courts, so I let her loose. It's a little scary when she vanishes into the darkness, but once she runs off the deer, she always returns.
This morning, the deer were on our neighbor's lawn. They ambled away when they saw Lola, but not very quickly. Could they sense she was on the leash? They trotted into the park and we followed them. I shined my flashlight down the hill and into the darkness, looking to see if the deer were there. They were gone.
We went down to the spot, and I let Lola roam a bit. Then, as we were walking home, a group of three runners passed us. Young Asian guys. I had seen them before, but I still forgot what I should have remembered.
We reached the point where the running path met the sidewalk and it happened. Again.. These runners leave their water bottles on the edge of the sidewalk. And it's dark. And they are unattended. So morning after morning, we stumble upon the water bottles, and-- almost every time-- Lola licks them before I can steer her away.
At first I felt bad about this. I wondered if the runners could taste dogbreath and saliva when they hydrated. But now I've decided that it's on them. You shouldn't leave a water bottle unattended in the park! If you do, dog saliva could be the least of your concerns.
I might have to stop these kids and explain this, but I'm sure I'll come off super-creepy. "Hey dudes? If you leave these water bottles here, my dog might lick them, or you might get roofied and abducted by a guy in a van. And no one will ever know, because it's so dark down here."
As far as coaching goes, I have a pretty sweet deal. I now coach my hometown JV team. The field is two hundred yards from my house (sometimes I forget the corner flags on the field and run down there the next morning to grab them). My children are both in high school now, one is a freshman and the other is a sophomore, and I am coaching the two of them (and many of their friends). I am lucky as a coach and as a dad. I know this probably won't ever happen again.Many years ago, I coached girls soccer at Spotswood High School with my friend and fellow English teacher Kevin. We would teach our classes at East Brunswick, then race over to Spotswood to coach. Now that I coach for my hometown, Highland Park, we occasionally play Spotswood. It's always nostalgic to head back there, as that's where I spent my formative coaching years. You never forget that stuff-- especially coaching high school girls. They are nuts (and far more civilized than boys).
Last Wednesday, we had an away game against Spotswood. It's always a good test for Highland Park, because Spotswood is out of our division and twice our size. So I was excited for the game. I also wondered if I would remember anyone-- even though I hadn't coached there for fifteen years.
While I didn't recognize any coaches or administrators, the fields were the same. Both the varsity and the JV took early leads, so it looked to be a nice afternoon. Then my younger son Ian-- who's barely 100 pounds and has been getting killed this year-- got tripped from behind and went flying. The ground was rock hard (lack of rain). I knew as soon as he hit that he didn't land well. His right arm crumpled as it hit the dirt. I assumed it was a bad break.
I jogged out to him-- the injured player jog is the worst jog in sports-- and found Ian was in a lot of pain. He also thought his arm was broken. The trainer checked it this way and that and thought it might be fractured. Then another trainer drove over in a golf cart, and also gave Ian a second inspection. In the middle of it-- I was kneeling on the ground and he was bending my son's wrist-- he looked at me and said, "Is your name Dave?"
I nodded.
"Didn't you used to coach here?"
Someone remembered me!
My mom was at the game, so she received the chore of taking him to the urgent care for x-rays (Catherine was at Back to School Night). They couldn't tell if his elbow was fractured and recommended an orthopedist. Ian went yesterday, and he's got a small fracture in his elbow. He's in a sling for two weeks.
After they carted him off the field, it was hard to coach the rest of the game (we did pull off a nice victory) but in retrospect, it was good to be there, in the thick of it. There's only a few more years of this, and I enjoy seeing all of it close-up and personal. I'm hoping he makes it back for the tail end of the season, but even if he doesn't, it was still great to coach some games where my kids were passing the ball to each other.
This had better be the end of summer (not that threatening the Weather Gods has ever been successful or mentally healthy). I really tried to make the most of the hot weather over this long weekend, but I'm done with it. I strung some lights on our porch, in anticipation of cool fall nights. I used up the final harvest from my wife's garden: I made green salsa and slow cooked pork and tomatillo tacos. Here's the recipe, it's an easy one (if you have a shitload of fresh tomatillos).
I took my son out to Sandy Hook today, to do some surfing. The waves weren't great, but the water was warm. The dog had a great time. We made it home for soccer practice and the turf was scorching hot. Tomorrow we have a game, and it's supposed to be 90 degrees. Thursday, the meteorologists say that fall is coming. I am ready for it. Enough fresh vegetables and hot weather, I'm primed for the mosquitoes and the ticks and the leaves to die. I'm fortified for cold barren dark days. I want the horde of cave crickets in the bike shed to freeze. I'd like some frost on the pumpkin, and some ice on the Raritan. One more day . . . that's all I can tolerate. One more day. You hear that, Weather Gods? One more day . . .
The other day, a couple of guidance counselors came down to my classroom and explained the ins and outs of applying to college. Once they were through with their very thorough presentation, I said to my students:
"You could go to college . . . or you could read this book. It explains EVERYTHING about the world. And it's a lot cheaper."
I held up Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World.
The book is rather deterministic in its thesis: you can't escape the rivers, mountains, flatlands, harbors, oceans, and jungles in your country. And they will determine how you interact with your neighbors and how you will interact within your own country. You may have great natural resources, but no rivers and easily built roadways with which to interconnect your cities and towns-- which is much of South America. You may be at the mercy of the flatlands to your east, which is why Russia is always mucking about in the Ukraine. You might be-- like South Korea-- constantly worried not only about the threat of war, but also about a massive flood of refugees. In Africa, rivers don't go very far before they plummet downward in waterfalls. In the Middle East, borders were drawn up after World War I and don't correspond with geography (not to mention the Sykes-Picot agreement).
In America, our rivers are navigable and they lead to safe harbors. We also don't have ot worry about out neighbors (unless you're Donald Trump). Canada doesn't have enough people and there is too much desert between us and Mexico for that border to be a military threat.
And as the ice melts, there will eventually be employment in Greenland.
While Marshall's unabashed realpolitik might annoy some advocates of free will, I didn't mind it.
The best thing about the book is it contains lots of maps. I love looking at maps, and I don't have a very good visual memory. I can look at a map, and then two paragraphs later, I'll have to turn back a page and look at it again. Where is Sweden? Oh there it is. Got it. Wait? Where is it?
