The Gang Storms Bolton Valley

Last weekend, I received a most excellent early birthday present: old friends and shitloads of snow.

Neil, John, Mose and I ventured up to Bolton Valley Vermont to see our buddy Rob, who is now damn close to being a Green Mountain native (although real Vermonters say you need seven generations to qualify . . . which is absurd. In Jersey, we take anyone).

 

This trip set the bar for a men's outing. We arrived Wednesday night and Rob had already set up the condo he rented for us. Food, beer, snacks, PA system, guitars, amps, wah pedal. You name it. Plus, we all had our own space. Good for sleeping and flatulence.

                                                     

We drove up in Neil's Land Rover. Total luxury. And as we arrived it started snowing, and it did not stop for the duration of the trip. Thirty inches of snow fell while we were there. Freak lake effect storm off Champlain. Best conditions in years. Outrageous.

Not that everything was perfect. You need some suffering to recognize how good you have it. We lost power on Thursday. The lifts stopped running, and we got stuck down at the lower Timberline Lodge. But folks at Bolton are really nice. It's a small, family-oriented livable mountain community. The lady working at the Timberline Lodge gave us a lift back up to the upper lift. She gave us a lift, not a Lyft. 

On the ride she told us all about her plans to be a primitive biathlete, skiing with a recurve bow.

After riding down to the condo from the upper lodge, we had to wait out the power outage in the condo. We passed the time enjoying the gas-powered fireplace and forgetting that various appliances (coffee maker, electronic drums) needed electricity to function. Occasionally, the guys grabbed snacks from the fridge-- cavalierly opening the door and letting all the cold air out. I had to lecture them on food safety, which they endured (barely). None of these lunatics knew about the two-hour rule. Or listeria. Total animals.

Once the lifts got going again, we ventured out on the mountain. Deep and heavy snow. The only option was to barrel down black diamond trails, otherwise, you'd lose momentum and get stuck. 

There was only one place to eat and drink after boarding, the James Moore Tavern. Perfect place. All the Vermont beers on tap. Some of our favorites were: Fiddlehead, Focal Banger, Catamount, Switchback, and Zero Gravity.  Plus good food. And a great view of the slopes.

Best of all, the slender and lovely bartender totally understood my frustration with the boys' disturbing lack of awareness of food safety and decay. 

                                                    

                                                     

                                                      

 At night, we played music. 

                                      

We also played music in the morning. You can tell it is morning because Neil is wearing his pajamas.

                                       

Friday morning, there was even more snow. We put a lot of time in on the Vista Peak. Then we went to the tavern. 

                                                

After downing a few beers, we went back out on the mountain (which is not always recommended). I decided I wanted to head back to the condo to make coffee and go to the bathroom. I separated from the gang (which is also not recommended, especially in a blizzard). I needed to cut across the mountain toward the Timberline Peak and then dive into the woods off the Timberline Run and find the third set of condos. We had done this once, with our tour guide Rob, and I thought I could manage it on my own.

I screwed up the first time down, and the gang saw me from the lift. At this point, things were still comical.

"I went the wrong way!" I yelled up to them. We all laughed.

Then I took a shortcut and ended up in some very deep snow. I was trapped. I got my snowboard up even with my hips-- a real abdominal work-out-- and spent a long time trying to unstrap. I was lying on my back, in a depression of snow, the board above my head, blindly trying to finagle my way out of the bindings.

Eventually, I got it done. I was free. I tried to step forward. The snow was up to my nipples. And my right foot went through a layer of snow and I felt . . . nothing. Air. One of my feet was in some kind of weird pocket of air under four feet of snow. I was going to fall through and suffocate. And die. I was going to die alone in the snow, and I really needed a bathroom and a cup of coffee. This was no way to go.

I leaped forward and got both my arms on top of my board and crawled forward. The board kept me afloat. I was able to inchworm to a cliff under the lift line. I strapped in and took a long rest. I was winded. Some people riding by on the lift inquired as to my state of being.

I yelled up to them: "I'm fine! Just got caught in some deep snow."

"Ok, just checking!"

Nice folk at Bolton.

I plunged down the mountain, turned onto the Timberline Run, counted condos, and suddenly found myself down at the Timberline Lift. Fuck! I had missed our condos. The woods were impenetrable. Lovely, dark, and deep. And impossible to navigate.

I went to the bathroom in the lodge, and then I called Mose. No answer. I texted him. Perhaps he could come to pick me up?

No response.

I sent him another text that said: "Fuck it. Don't come. I'm going back up the lift." I came down again, tired as fuck, and missed the condos again. I tried one more time, and missed them again (I later realized because I was on some kind of spur that hit the Timberline Trail below our place). It was 3:45 PM. The lift shut down.

I started stomping up the mountain road in my snowboarding boots. It was less than a mile. I was tired and annoyed. At this point, Mose got my text and was heading out, but then a Bolton employee in a station wagon asked if I needed a ride. Very nice of him. I made it home alive.

Then we went out to see Rob's son little Dom compete at the rail-jam. Rob was already up the hill, watching him. The rest of us were all too tired to hike up the mountain to the snowboarding park, so we rooted for him in spirit in the tavern. When we were leaving, Neil nearly fell on some ice in the parking lot. I laughed. Then my legs went flying up into the air and I landed flat on my back. The wind was knocked out of me, but other than that, I was just drunk enough to not suffer any major damage.

We went to bed early. Just after midnight, a crew of Bolton folks stopped by, looking to party. Rob had gone home hours ago to sleep. Everyone in the house was also sleeping. By the time I roused myself, brushed my teeth and put some pants on, the party train was gone. Back to sleep.

Saturday morning, we had boiled eggs for breakfast. I cooled them off with fresh snow.

Saturday's riding was more of the same. Just incredible. So much snow. We focused on the Wilderness Peak. No one out there but us. Then we hit the tavern, and this time John got lost in the deep snow. Same story: a few too many beers, separated himself from the pack, got lost, and got stuck. The moral here: do NOT leave the group during a storm of this scope.

That afternoon, Rob's wife Tammy was kind enough to bring us groceries and beer, so we were able to cook a big meal Saturday night. Pasta and pesto sauce. The knives were very dull, but Neil heroically chopped the basil.

Saturday night, we put on an epic rock show and stayed up late enough to get a knock on the door and a complaint from the neighbor . . . a very Vermont complaint:

"Hey, I'm in a band, so I get it . . . you know, volume creep . . . but it's pretty late and it's a little bit loud."

No f-bombs. Very civilized.

Sunday morning, it was still snowing, but time to head home.

My son Alex was turning 16. And reality beckoned for everyone except Rob.

Big thanks to all involved in the trip:

Rob, for setting up the condo, setting us up with cheap lift tickets, guiding us around the mountain, and letting me abuse the wah pedal;

Tammy, for groceries and general goodwill;

Little Dom, for tearing it up on the mountain and providing so much good humor and charm;

Neil, for the ride up and back, the drum kit, and the inspirational old-man alpine snowboarding;

Mose, for the rides back and forth from the tavern, holding down the fort, and all the information about music gear and whatnot;

John, for meeting us up in Albany so I didn't have to complain about going into NYC, and for getting fucked up in the deep snow so I didn't feel like the only idiot;

my wife, for dealing with everything on the homefront while I was gone-- she said she didn't stop moving from when I left until I got home (I probably wouldn't have been much help, anyway)

and the Weather Gods, who provided some of the best conditions I've ever ridden in. 

I hope we get this thing together again next year. 

Dave Turns Fifty, Theodore Geisel Would Turn 116 (If He Wasn't Long Dead)

The Doctor and me, we share the same date--

Inevitably, we'll share the same fate.

As alive as he was, all the places he went,

In the end, he found out that his life was but lent.

I AM alive, I have places to go--

But since I'm now fifty, I'll just move kind of slow.

There is a lesson to be learned from the demise of the Seuss:

the best case with the reaper is an uneasy truce.

The Lamest Advice Ever

I am loath to admit that my dental hygienist was right. Years and years ago, she told me I should invest in an electric toothbrush. A Sonicare. Each visit I would pretend to entertain this notion (because she's very attractive). We'd chat about the merits of the device. She'd admonish me about my gum-line-- and then she'd set to work on my filthy plaque-covered teeth. I'd cringe and bleed and try not to cry (because, as I mentioned earlier, she's very attractive). She'd finish up, remind me again that an electric toothbrush might solve some of these issues, and we'd part ways.

Once I'd left the office-- slightly traumatized and a little sore-- I'd ponder her advice for a moment and then summarily dismiss it.

I'm a man! A strong man. I don't need assistance to brush my teeth. And once I started flossing regularly . . . watch out! Then my teeth and gums would be fine. And it didn't hurt THAT much.

A couple months ago my wife came home from Costco with a pair of Sonicare electric toothbrushes. They take some getting used to. If you open your mouth while brushing, there's going to be a big mess. It feels likes you've released a buzzing insect loose on your teeth. But I kept with it.

My last visit to the dentist, my normal (and very attractive) hygienist was out sick. It's too bad, because she could have gloated and said, "I told you so." The other hygienist-- who is very nice-- said my teeth looked great. All my gums grew back! There was barely any plaque! A couple scrapes and she was done. Easy-peasy. The dentist came in, took a quick look and said, "A+!"

I was like: what the fuck?

So the best advice is often the lamest: get enough sleep, drink in moderation, don't eat fried food, a yellow light doesn't mean step on it, lift heavy objects with your legs, women like flowers . . .

and get an electric toothbrush.

Schrödinger's Sock: A Quantum Laundry Room Game for the Whole Family

I'm sure you've been in this situation: there's a sock on the laundry-room floor and there are two possibilities:

1) The sock fell out of the dryer when you were unloading.

2) The sock fell out of the laundry basket as you were putting dirty clothes into the washer.

If it fell from the dryer, it's clean. If it fell from the laundry basket, it's dirty. If you've got kids who play sports, it's filthy reeking dirty.

The sock is lying there, prone and lifeless, in one state or the other.

You may have heard of the infamous Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. If you haven't, you can read Wikipedia's short summary. I included it below.

The basic idea is that you can set up a quantum scenario where something is in a superposition-- in two states at once-- until an observer breaks the spell and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

Schrödinger's Cat Thought Experiment

Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor (e.g. Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. 

Schrödinger's Sock Experiment (This Shit is Real)

The only way to collapse the superposition of the sock is to pick it up and smell it. The problem is that fifty percent of the time, it's going to smell really bad. But that's the cost of living in a universe dictated by quantum probability.

I've reenacted yesterday's version of the sock experiment.  I got my son to take the photos--though at first, he balked, calling this "the stupidest idea of all time." He then saw the title of the post, "Schrödinger's Sock," and remarked, "That's so cliché . . . everyone knows about "Schrödinger's Cat. It's not that funny."

I think my title is genius, but he's about to turn 16 and doesn't understand how awesome I am. And if you search up "Schrödinger's Sock" on Google, you get absolute crap. Stupid shit about disappearing socks and even stupider shit about Christmas presents. This is the only Schrödinger's Sock post that contains an accurate parallel analogy to Schrödinger's thought experiment. Someday soon my son will appreciate this. Or not.

Anyway, I rolled the quantum dice. I smelled the sock. Unfortunately, I crapped out. It was a dirty sweaty sock full of teen spirit.

Into the wash with it.

A lesser man wouldn't bother to collapse the superposition of the sock. A lesser man would just toss it into the wash without smelling. "Better safe than sorry," this lesser man would say. But the universe would be a less interesting place for it. It's more interesting to collapse the superposition and ascertain the truth, even if it means smelling a gross sock or seeing a dead cat. It's all part of dealing existentially with a universe built from chaos, probability, and reality TV.

Holy Triple Miracle Thursday!

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I am involved in miraculous incidents on a frequent basis. Whether or not I cause these miracles is something the hagiographers will certainly debate for many years after I shuffle off this mortal coil. But for now, I'm sure that we can all agree that I am blessed, sacred, and luminous.

Today was especially magical. I bore witness to three miracles in a matter of three hours. And the miracles ascended in magnitude and beatific brightness.

Miracle #1

A lovely young lady was presenting a lovely Rupi Kaur poem in Creative Writing class for our daily "Show and Tell."

I asked her how she had stumbled upon this and she told a quick story about how her friend recommended it to her, while they were writing a song for Biology class.

"A song for Biology class?" I said. "Like about the Golgi apparatus or something?"

"Yes," she said.

"Yes, you were writing a song about the Golgi apparatus?"

"Yes, about the Golgi apparatus."

Weird. A minor miracle. I could have said flagella. But I was just getting started.

Miracle #2

Moments later, after the class commended me on my miraculous clairvoyance, I lost my shit. I was looking down at my computer monitor, and I noticed something. I started yelling.  I was joyous and shocked and angry all at once.

One of my students said it looked like I had seen a ghost. In essence, I had. The ghost of a long-dead lock.

A red and silver lock that had inexplicably disappeared months ago. A lock that was so lost I had given up looking for it. A lock that eluded a search party of twenty philosophy students. A lock that denied the laws of existence and perception.

The lock was in front of my face the entire time! Like the purloined letter. Just sitting there, under my computer monitor, looking like something vaguely electronic. It was too obvious too notice.

I ranted and raved to my class about mental blind spots and schema and schotoma and how hard it is to find the mustard in the fridge, even though it's right in front of your face. And most of these were new students, who did not have me when I lost the lock (there were a few kids remaining from that semester class-- and they really understood the context of my insanity . . . the rest of the kids must have thought I was delirious).

Once I had fully processed the miraculous recovery of the lock-- and my cognition-- then I went forth and spread the good word throughout the school. I told teachers and I told students. The event was blessed.

But I spaketh to soon.

Miracle #3

Two periods after I found the lock, a girl from the previous semester ran up to me in the hall. A girl who had witnessed the loss of the lock, and took part in the search for the lock.

"Did you see the lock!"

"Yes!" I said, but just as I was about to explain the miracle, Tyra confounded it.

"I found it down the hall by the stairs. I found it!"

"YOU put it on my computer?"

"Yup."

"Tyra! Why didn't you leave a note? I almost lost my mind. I thought I had gone crazy-- that the lock was sitting there in front of my face for two months. My class thinks I'm insane! I thought I was insane! When you find a lost lock, you leave a note!"

Tyra apologized for neglecting to leave a note (she didn't have time) and once I recovered my wits, I thanked her profusely for finding the lock.

This is where she found it:

At the bottom of the stairs, a good fifteen yards from my classroom door. What kind of crazy miraculous adventures did that lock have for the past two months? More importantly: why have I been chosen to witness and testify to so many myriad miracles?

This event has also provided tomorrow's Creative Writing lesson: describe the epic journey of this lock. Alexander Pope would dig the pun. As would the deepwater monster of Scotland.

A Valentine's Adventure, Athletic Odds and Ends (plus Poop Tire Epic)

I was really looking forward to doing some athletics on this three day weekend. Indoor soccer on Sunday, indoor tennis on Monday, and then the weather was supposed to warm-up so I figured I could rollerblade or bike with the dog Monday afternoon. Best laid plans.

Valentine's Day preceded these best laid plans, however. Good thing. My cold finally dissipated Friday and my wife surprised me with a one day Valentine's celebration and vacation. She booked a room at the Heldridge in New Brunswick and got tickets to see Bret Ernst at the Stress Factory. We walked in, went to Clydz for Happy Hour and drank some martinis, attended the show-- which was packed-- and then had a beer at The Ale House while watching a rerun of the first Deontay Taylor/Tyler Fury fight. And then we didn't have to trek home, we stumbled right over to our room. Perfect night. The kids and Lola manned the fort back in Highland Park.. We even swam in the hotel pool in the morning (it was cold).

Sunday morning, I was excited that the weekend was not nearly over and headed to indoor soccer. I had played well the week before, even in the midst of a disgusting cold, so I thought I would really feel great this Sunday. Twenty minutes in, something happened to my calf. A little tweak. I stopped immediately. I've been through this before. I limped off, went home, took naproxen, and elevated it. Dammit.

This morning, I wrapped my calf up and went to the racket club with Ian. I was moving slow, but able to hit. I finally bought a new racket: an arm friendly Yonex Ezone 98. Wow. What a difference. So much power and it doesn't hurt my shoulder (very much). I can serve again and hit my one-handed cut back-hand. But I can't sprint. If it's not one thing, it's another. It was still fun (and mainly, we worked on Ian's serve-- which is a mess right now). I guess this is the way athletics are going to be for me here on in. I'm almost fifty.

When I got home, the weather had really warmed up. I decided to take Lola for a bike ride, but when I wheeled the bike out of the bike shed, I rolled it through some poop. We all know what to do when we step in dog poop, but having a bike tire slathered in the stuff is a different animal altogether. I attached Lola to the bike, hopped on, and went about the proper method: first I rode very slowly on the grass-- if you bike too fast with a poop tire the rotation of the tire will fling the poop right into your face. Then I found some mud puddles and went through those-- again, slowly-- and then, before I spattered myself with poop water, I rode through a sandy area to coat the tires. Then, when I got to the dog park, I wiped away the excess poop with a stick. 

This was probably my best athletic performance all weekend.

Marriage Story + American Factory = Uncut Gems

Here are two Oscar-nominated (and depressing) movies about how messy and expensive it is to do stuff in America:

Marriage Story

American Factory

Both movies are ominous and engrossing, but American Factory is the better film. It's a documentary (with no narration) that tells the story of an Ohio-based GM plant that closed down in 2008, leaving thousands jobless, only to rise from the ashes in 2015 as a Chinese owned auto glass factory. The new American employees do not have the backing of a union, and they are expected to work to the standards of their Chinese counterparts. Instead of thirty dollars an hour-- the amount many made at the old plant-- they now make $12.74 an hour. To handle hot glass. At times the movie is humorous-- especially when the Chinese labor leaders characterize Americans: you have to train them over and over, they have fat fingers, they like to take weekends off, they drive big cars and dress casually and say what they mean. They can make fun of the president and not go to jail! But mainly the story is frightening-- are American workers going to be able to compete on the world stage? We may be too fat, lazy, slow, and overpaid.

It's harder to care about the costs in Marriage Story. The movie would work better if it were a couple of factory workers getting divorced, instead of a guy who won the MacArthur genius grant and a successful television actress. Then the expense of all those lawyers and all the plane flights and trying to pay rent in two cities would really hit home.

American Factory won the Academy Award for best documentary and Marriage Story was nominated for best picture.

Meanwhile, Uncut Gems, the second-best movie of the year (behind Parasite) combined BOTH of these themes and got nominated for nothing. Such a shame.

Uncut Gems deals with global trade-- an Ethiopian opal on the market in New York City-- and a character under economic duress. There's looming divorce, the money it costs to keep a mistress, and constant obsession with work and money. And there's a variety of social classes represented: from the hustling Demany (LaKeith Stanfield) all the way up to Kevin Garnett.

It's WAY more fun than American Factory and Marriage Story.

Hey Trump! Huge Bigly News!Solar Is Winning! The Bums Won!

You probably haven't heard the hugely great news, the most important incredible wonderful bigly news for our planet. In fact, if our Toad-in Chief were to have his druthers, you'd believe this is The deal:

                

Beautiful mining accidents? Beautiful exploding mountaintops? Beautiful polluted rivers and streams? Beautiful particulate caused asthma? Beautiful waste and disposal issues?

It's impressive how sincerely Trump can use words like "clean" and "beautiful" in such a bigly and hugely opposite manner of all past precedent. He's going to give the OED practical usage team some homework.

Anyway, I'd like to implore Trump to revise his earlier tweet. It's fake news. The first thing Trump is going to need to do is to acknowledge that the war on coal has not "ended," it has just begun. And so has the war on natural gas and fracking. Actually, the term "war" is a bit violent for something so positive . . . for a transition to something so clean and beautiful. And cheap. America loves cheap. If Trump embraces this, he could change the world. I'd even have a modicum of respect for him, if he could set the record straight.
 
The big news? Solar power has just crossed the threshold. It is now cheaper than coal. Beautiful, clean solar energy-- the hippies' dream-- is now affordable.

If you want a nine-minute overview of this amazing economic moment, check out The Indicator's "Why Cheap Solar Could Save the World." We did it exactly as Ha-Joon Chang describes-- with a combination of government subsidies that incentivized the technology and manipulated the market, leading to technological innovation. Not exactly the way Adam Smith envisioned. Things are a little more complicated than the conservative's wet dream of simplistic supply and demand/invisible hand capitalism.

But I digress. And that stuff is way to hard for Trump. All he needs to do is Tweet the news and apologize for his errors.

But even if Trump did that, it doesn't guarantee victory. We live in America. Even if Trump disappears, the folks who voted him in won't. Big energy has a lot of lobbying power. Trump and his followers have a brand attachment to coal which defies environmental logic (but makes perfect political sense). After coal, the next battle will be frakking. It could be the key to the election.

Conservatives struggle with the associations surrounding solar power. It's hippy dippy. But we are way past the days when Reagan removed the solar panels on the White House. If the Blackstone Group is investing heavily in solar power, then the hippies have won.

We need to pass the news to Trump (who certainly won't hear about this on FOX News). And the Dude needs to pass the news along to The Big Lebowski. The revolution isn't over. The revolution has just begun. The bums didn't lose.

The bums won!

Dave's Literary Celebration of BHM Continues

In Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress, Easy Rawlins inhabits the same sun-drenched and seedy Los Angeles as his predecessor-- the knight in the powder blue suit: Philip Marlowe. The big difference is that Easy Rawlins is black. He's on the same kind of search for knowledge as Marlowe-- and in this underworld, knowledge equals power and sometimes even trumps the looming threat of hard-boiled violence. Unfortunately, like Chandler's The Big Sleep, there are a Byzantine array of characters and double-crosses.  The relationships between all the people in the book are intricate.

Not only does Easy Rawlins have to figure out how to use each piece of information he acquires, who he can present it to, who he must keep it secret from, and when he should reveal it, but he also needs to figure out where this knowledge and power place him in the hierarchy of white, black and mulatto gangsters, crooked politicians, wild women and molls. This keeps him from being as romanticized a figure as Marlowe.

He ain't no knight.

Easy Rawlins is a classic noir detective: he's got his flaws. He likes to drink, he's got a libido, he's out of work because he won't kowtow to his Italian boss, he's haunted by his WWII tour of duty, and he's got a number of shady figures in his past (some of whom resurface).

The book starts as a fun read, and then gets pretty dark. I had to remind myself it was just a book at one point, when Easy was getting worked over by some cruel white police. It was rough reading. That's an accomplishment for Mosley. And after that scene, things get even uglier. Chinatown ugly.

I've yet to see the movie, but I'll probably check it out.

Next up on my BHM literary queue:

Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy 
by David Zucchino.

Dave's Surefire Recipe For Getting Sick

Here's my recipe for getting sick. I've perfected it over the years. You'd think by this age, I'd know better, but I just did it all again (although I have learned about the power of Mucinex).

1) Start with a sore throat. Attribute this to talking too much. Everyone at work will insist you are getting sick and tell you to stay home. Ignore this advice. Get some Swedish fish and a big cup of coffee from Wawa on the way home and decide that is all you needed.

2) Totally lose your voice, but go to school anyway. Write things on the board and point at them. Behave like a mime. At this point, your friends and colleagues will begin to shun you. They will sanitize all surfaces you come in contact with and leave the office when you enter. Insist that you are fine. Go to Wawa on your free period and get some decaf coffee.

3) Go downhill fast. Waste your Saturday sleeping and complaining. Your eyes hurt. Your face hurts. Take Nyquil. Sleep a bunch. Wake up feeling dry and hazy. Nyquil only masks the symptoms.

4) Start taking whatever prescription drugs are leftover from the last time you were sick. Especially those Benzoanate pearls.

5) Mucous and more mucous. Go to the store and by some Rite-Aid brand Mucinex. The real shit is too expensive.

6) Feel a bit better. This is due to the drugs, but decide you are totally healed. Participate in some kind of intense sporting event. (this time it was indoor soccer). Play pretty well. Feel pretty good (aside from the mucous).

7) Get home from the sport and collapse. But your knees feel less sore than normal because of all the naproxen and ibuprofen in your system. This is a perk.

8. Acknowledge you are sick and stay home from work--finally-- and rest. Watch a depressing movie, because you are going to die soon. (This time it was Marriage Story . . . pretty depressing and great acting but I didn't need another story about actors).

9. Take lots of hot showers and use the Neti pot.

10. Miraculously recover! And then watch the rest of your friends and family come down with the virus you have wrought upon them.

Kickin' Off BHM with a Classic (by a white lady)

To kick off Black History Month, I read Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is a melodrama, and surprisingly entertaining: dramatic, humorous, action-packed, tragic, and evocative by turns. And a little bit racist . . . but that comes with the territory. Stowe (and her characters) definitely throw some generalizations around about the African race, but they are always couched in their peculiar and horrible American predicament. And she certainly meant well.

There's also a lot of deepfelt Christianity, probably because the novel primarily functions as a persuasive tract, and-- as Annette Gordon Reed explains in her New Yorker piece “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN” AND THE ART OF PERSUASION: How Harriet Beecher Stowe helped precipitate the Civil War:

By the eighteen-thirties, Southerners were offering the country a new vision of slavery, as a positive good ordained by God and sanctioned by Scripture. Naturally, abolitionists in the North believed that the Bible told them the opposite: slavery offended the basic tenets of Christianity. Each claimed moral authority, hoping to win over the vast majority of citizens who were not activists on either side. Nothing would change in either direction without the support of these uncommitted and wavering citizens. They had to be persuaded that slavery, one way or another, had moral implications for everyone who lived on American soil.

This was the country that Harriet Beecher Stowe addressed in 1852 when she published “Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly,” one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history. Stowe’s novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the peculiar institution. Nearly every consideration of Stowe mentions what Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met the diminutive New Englander: “Is this the little woman who made this great war?”

You can read all day and night about the merits and flaws of this novel. I read the book because Tyler Cowen mentioned how excellent it is, and I trust him. But opinions vary. One thing I can say for certain is that the derogative term "Uncle Tom" has been decoupled from the character in the novel.

Currently, "Uncle Tom" is a black person who sells out his race and is excessively obedient and servile to the powers that be. Even Urban Dictionary recognizes that this is a bastardization of the term. This is probably because of the many piss-poor overly melodramatic stage performances of the novel that made Uncle Tom into a fawning sycophant.

The "real" Uncle Tom is only servile to his faith, to Jesus and Christianity. He dies a martyr, at the hands of the wickedly callous slaveholder Simon LeGree, because he refuses to give information about Cassy and Emmeline (a pair of runaway slaves). LeGree whips him to death because Tom won't give in to his power . . . because Tom won't be servile to his master. Tom's faith enrages LeGree and causes him to destroy a valuable asset. 

James Baldwin was pissed off about Uncle Tom's passivity in the face of evil-- and this foreshadows the whole Malcolm X vs. MLK conflict over tactics in the Civil Rights Movement. Passive resistance vs. violent uprising. The high road vs. vengeance.

Stowe presents a colorful continuum of slaves and slave-owners. There are slaves escaping to Canada to work and be self-sufficient. Slaves escaping into the swamps, slaves crossing icy rivers by way of slippery floes. There is Sambo, a slave that terrorizes other slaves so that he can have some modicum of power. There are slaves being sold down-river, slaves being separated from their wives and children, slaves at market, slaves in the field, and slaves living in luxury in lavish homes. Slaves are sold for economic reasons and slaves are sold because their benevolent owners die.

There's also a wide variety of owners. The Shelby's are kind, especially Mrs. Shelby, but when push comes to shove they have to sell Tom to keep the farm. Then there are the typically callous and calculating slave-traders. The portrayal of Augustine St. Clare, the effete Southern Gentleman from Louisiana, who loves poetry and learning but can't seem to find faith is particularly affecting. He treats his slaves extraordinarily well, but can't find the moral compunction to free them. He embodies all the paradoxes of the Southern Man, civilized and kind, but he dies in a knife fight. And there's heroic little Eva and sickly, self-centered and abominable Marie.

St. Clare illustrates the powerful irony of the peculiar institution. He spoils his slaves and lets them have the run of his luxurious mansion. But in doing so, he allows the institution to carry on. He can't bring himself to take action, to become moral and faithful, despite the pleading of his Vermonter cousin Miss Ophelia (who grapples with and defeats prejudice of her own). If all owners were repugnant like Simon LeGree, the slaves would revolt and the abolitionists would have had all the fodder they needed to end the practice. But the benevolent owners actually did the cause harm, and Stowe points this out with the irony of St. Clare's character.

Controversial and stereotypical or not, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a novel full of memorable people-- and that's all you can ask for in a book. It may be intended more as a persuasive missive, the language is sometimes flowery, and the scenes can be overly-long-- little Eva's dying takes forever!-- but the book is well worth the time. The characters-- based on actual stories from Stowe's life and experience-- are larger than life. That's why they became stereotypes-- they are profound, abundant in American culture, and resonant-- and it's important to spend some time with the origin of these stock roles, not just the generative simplification and deterioration of them that time inevitably produces.

In the end, the book will make you contemplate the ultimate question: what is freedom? You could have been born a slave. You could have been born a battery in the Matrix. You could have been born a king or a queen or a serf or an untouchable. And once you are born, how much control do you really have over your fate? Do we deserve any of our gains? The very freedom to succeed, persevere, and accomplish is based on the fact that we are indeed born free, born into freedom. It didn't have to be this way. And-- not very long ago-- it wasn't a definite.

If you want to join my Black History Month book club, I've just gotten started on Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress. I plan on reading most of the Easy Rawlins sequence of novels. I might even do it before February ends-- it's a Leap Year.

I've Had It With These Motherf@3king Snakes in This Motherf$5king Time War

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's short sci-fi novel This is How You Lose the Time War is the opposite of Shane Carruth's independent film Primer. This could be a good thing . . . or not, depending on how you like your time travel.

Carruth likes it "realistic," which is utterly absurd. The movie is called Primer because-- if you've got the focus and intelligence-- you'll learn all you need to know about the ethical ramifications of a very specific type of team travel.

This is How You Lose the Time War is far more psychedelic. And it's a love story. We follow two female time-operatives through the myriad strands of time warfare. Red works for Agency and Blue works for Garden. Each faction is trying to create the best possible future for themselves.

In the midst of this, Red and Blue fall in love, and learn to communicate in odd and creative ways. The novel alternates between narrative and epistolary modes. It's fun, but a bit repetitive. Nothing much is explained. Red and Blue are certainly cyborg-like post-singularity entities. They occasionally land in past events that are recognizable (sort of). Shakespeare's London-- but Romeo and Juliet might be a comedy or it might be a tragedy. Depends on the thread. Dinosaurs. Atlantis. The time of Caesar. And other time periods that have mutated beyond recognition.

The book is an earnest version of Rick and Morty. It especially evokes the latest episode:"Rattlestar Ricklactica." 

When I watch Rick and Morty, I usually don't worry about the plot too much. The time travel plot in "Rattlestar" is especially insane. But apparently, it can be explained, and this nice man does it in the video below. It takes him 24 minutes! To explain a 24 minute show. 

If this video isn't enough, there are a bunch of others that break down the episode. Wild.

Some Good Listening

I while away a lot of time listening to B+ podcasts-- every episode of The Indicator and Planet Money and Reply All and Freakonomics-- and I'll be the first to admit that they get a little repetitive and tend to cover the same themes.

Once in a while, however, I stumble upon something more profound, such as the new six-part Radiolab story.

It's called "The Other Latif" and it's about when Radiolab producer Latif Nasser . . .

discovers that there's another person with the same name as him.

This guy:

Who happens to be Guantanomo Detainee #244. 

Except that he was cleared for release in 2016. So he's not supposed to be detained any longer. But then along comes this guy:

                                     

and he Tweets this:

                              

The first installment is extremely compelling. Much better listening than election run-up bullshit. 

Screw You 47.2

To continue with the weekly theme of aging and decay, you might want to listen to the newest episode of The Indicator. It's called "Peak Misery and the Happiness Curve," and-- according to Dartmouth Professor David Branchflower-- the peak of misery (or the nadir of darkness and despair) occurs at age 47.2. Your happy when you're young, and you become happy again as you get older-- but you won't be as happy as you were at 18 until you reach your 60s.

I've passed 47.2, and I'm feeling good about it (aside from the weather and the copious goose-shit in the park). My shoulder is serviceable, my knees don't hurt too much this week, and I'm still ambulatory and with some mental faculties.

I checked back to May of 2017-- when I was 47.2-- and I didn't notice much depression. The saddest post was about the death of Chris Cornell (and the consequent death of grunge). I checked to see if Cornell's suicide occurred when he was 47.2, but no such coincidence-- he was 52.

I did a word cloud of that fateful month's posts and there's nothing unusual. Soccer, Ian, Catherine, beer. And "China" and "Chinese." That's weird, but not depressing.



If you're somewhere in the vicinity of 47.2 years of age and looking for something nostalgic to listen to, this podcast tells the story of E.T. the video game and how it led to the demise of Atari and a slump in the entire home video game industry.  It's a compelling tale (and I never heard the story-- my family had Intellivision).

Dave vs. The Looming Specter of his Mortality

I was in a lousy mood last week. January really dragged-- lots of gray and damp weather. No joyful snowfall. The park is a muddy goose-shit filled swamp. The ticks haven't even gone dormant. And I was scheduled for an MRI on my shoulder on Friday. I expected bad news, as the doctor suspected a tear in either a rotator cuff injury or a labral tear. A rotator cuff injury would require serious PT and a labral tear would most likely need surgery.

My shoulder has been injured since the summer. I hurt it during a tennis match, screwing around with a topspin one-handed backhand. I can't get any juice on my serve (and I can't chuck a football with any velocity either). This shoulder injury (and my impending 50th birthday) have been really weighing on me. I'm not ready to hang up my racket yet. Beating my kids is too much fun-- and I've only got a few years left where I'll be able to do that (consistently). Or perhaps my run is over-- my shoulder burnt out-- and I won't get a chance to fade away.

I played indoor soccer well last Sunday, which should have bolstered my spirits-- but when I was crossing the ball, I caught the lip of a gym door with my toe-- and while I didn't hurt myself enough to stop playing, my ankle and knees were sore for days. I felt really old all week (until I drank too much Thursday night . . . oddly, Friday morning my knees were no longer sore).

I'm no dummy, so I started preparing for the worst a couple weeks ago. There's only one way to fight the looming specter of mortality: keep busy. My first project was to use my left hand as much as possible. Brushing my teeth, driving, pulling the wet laundry out of the washer, etc. I even started shooting darts left-handed-- which actually works fine unless I'm trying to hit the bullseye-- and I played tennis left-handed a couple times with my son Ian. My groundstrokes are pretty much the same-- I could always hit a decent lefty forehand and a lefty two-handed backhand is similar to a righty forehand-- but learning to serve lefthanded is a bitch. I went down to the park and practiced and I felt like a spaz. This article inspired me to keep at it. My left shoulder still has a lot of gas left in the tank, but I'll need a lot of mental fortitude to develop the fine motor skills necessary to play well lefty.

I've been preparing in several other ways for my impending midlife crisis. I don't want to resort to the typical shit: prostitutes, alcoholism, drag-racing, and dog-fighting, so I've implemented a preemptive strike on my mid-life crisis.

Project #1:

I've switched my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) from a PC to an iMac. I'm using Logic now instead of Cakewalk Sonar. I'm watching tutorial videos at the gym and learning a lot. I still don't know what I'm doing with Smart Tempo and Flex-Time, but I'm trying. Learning the new platform is keeping me off the streets and keeping my brain away from early onset dementia.

Project #2:

I'm reading some big books. I normally value quantity over quantity (aside form War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, and Infinite Jest). I'm barrelling through Uncle Tom's Cabin-- it's gripping-- and then I've got Tom Jones queued up on my Kindle.

In meatspace, I'm reading this absurd book.

This is mainly to irritate my fellow Philosophy teacher Stacey-- I've claimed that once I finish the book, she's not allowed to teach the class any long (unless she refers to me as The Philosophical Overlord). When I know Stacey's about to come into the office, I like to put my feet up, read something obtuse aloud, and brandish my new knowledge. A.C. Grayling is actually pretty entertaining-- for a philosopher-- although I skimmed the section on Empedocles.

Project #3:

Apparently, Google Play Music is going extinct. I've already been through this once with Rdio.

Remember Rdio?

No?

Serendipitously, my buddy Whitney just gave me a gift voucher for Spotify, so I've switched over. It's great, but I'm transferring playlists and massaging the algorithm-- so I'm spending a lot of time "hearting" songs and putting them on various playlists. I'm impressed with what Spotify spits out once you spend a little time on it. This project is not keeping me off the streets-- I use Spotify while I'm walking and driving-- so I'm working hard not to screw around with it while I'm driving and to look up once in a while when I'm crossing the street.

Project #4

So I was all depressed Thursday, because of the MRI on Friday. I drank too much and stayed out too late, and by the time I raced out of school and got to University Orthopedics, I was groggy and tired and hungry. They had a cooking show on in the waiting room. Guy Fieri ate various kinds of barbecued meats. By the time they called me, I was salivating.

They took me in, I put my valuables in a locker, and the guy told me the machine was a little loud. He handed me a pair of earphones. I lay on the sliding bed, my shoulder in the cup, and he slid me in. He gave me a little emergency switch and told me if I had any problem, to press it. I wondered why. Until I got in there.

I'm not sure if being tired and hungover was bane or blessing. The top of the cylinder was an inch or two from my nose. And the machine was LOUD. Not a little loud. SUPER-LOUD! Science-fiction loud. Weird grinding and banging and revving noises. And the music in the headphones was awful. Cheesy piano, occasionally interrupted by ads. Yuck. I didn't press the little button (or move at all) but I wanted to. Twenty-five minutes later, I was out and on my way to talk to the doctor.

While I waited, I could see the inside of my shoulder on the desktop. Looked fine to me.

Turns out I was right. Sort of. Fairly good news. No labral tear, no serious rotator cuff injury. Some arthritis, some bone cysts, and some swelling. Routine stuff. I didn't even need PT. I just had to do a bunch of exercises. And the doctor said I could play tennis! Right-handed! He said it might hurt a bit, and we could try a cortisone shot-- but I wasn't going to rupture anything. I would just be sore. If I really hurt it, I would know it.

This made me happy enough to get back to a project I've been putting on hold. I need a new tennis racket, an arm friendly one. If my right shoulder still hurts with the new racket, then I may still pursue playing left-handed. But I don't have to. I went to the gym today and did a bunch of shoulder exercises and I'm sore as hell. But I've eluded the looming specter another day.

I also think I need to make a doctor's appointment-- the appointment you make when you turn fifty-- and I think this is the appointment when the doctor will stick his finger up my ass.

Can't they just stick my ass in the MRI machine?

Ideas Are Cheap (and Often Dumb)

When I was in high school, I had this absurd idea about making a guitar effects pedal that runs the electrical signal through water-- or some kind of liquid-- and that sloshy impedance creates distortion. My friends thought this was ingenious and silly. I had no electrical engineering skills, and so that was the end of the idea-- and I think most ideas meet the same pathetic demise. Ideas are a dime a dozen

But David Rainger (who might be Nigel Tufnel's doppelganger) not only had the same idea-- thus making me Alfred Russel Wallace and him Darwin-- but he had the engineering skills to implement it. Yes!

While I never brought that liquid pedal idea to fruition, I have fully implemented my "year as a week" metaphor with great success. Yesterday was the day after the end of mid-term exams, and so I pointed out to my mid-day classes that we were experiencing a "convergence." We had just climbed over the hump of mid-term exams-- and so we were just past halfway through the school year-- and we had also just moved past the middle of Wednesday-- the hump of the week. My arm hairs stood on end as I described this parallel coupling of both the week and the year. Heady stuff. 

The Club (Women Need Not Apply)

If you had your druthers (and you were a white man) where would would you choose to hang out on a Friday evening in the late 18th century?

The Turk's Head Tavern, a venerable London establishment located at 9 Gerrard Street-- just off the Strand-- would be a good choice.

This is where-- starting in 1764-- intellectual and artistic notables such as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith met regularly. Quite a crew.

Leo Damrosch describes this era in his tour-de-force book the Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age. He also includes a group excluded from club membership, but constantly present in these lives: the women.

Especially the prostitutes.

Boswell frequented a lot of prostitutes. And he recorded the encounters in his journal, which his wife would sometimes inadvertently stumble upon and read. He had a very forgiving wife.

 Boswell is the author of Life of Johnson, which is considered to be one of the greatest biographies ever written. A game-changer. It is a highly entertaining book. Boswell is Dr. Johnson's drunken sidekick and records everything that the great man says and does. But there's much more to this pair than meets the eye.

                                       

Damrosch thinks Boswell may have been bipolar. His mood swings are wild. He often self-medicates with copious amounts of alcohol and "promiscuous concubinage." Dr. Johnson exhibits symptoms of OCD, depression, and rheumatoid arthritis-- which leads him to become an opium addict later in life.

This is one of those books that I started thinking full well I wouldn't finish. But I made it all the way through, mainly because of Boswell's misadventures. Stuff like this:

Boswell seldom frequented the brothels around Covent Gardens. His usual practice was to rush out into the night after having plenty to drink, pick up a streetwalker, and grapple with her briefly in one of the parks or some dark alley. he may have enjoyed the sense of risk.

                                 

Boswell really struggled with his inveterate transgressions. He wanted to believe "in an authentic core of self," but David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature taught him otherwise. Boswell was happiest just going with the flow of impressions and perceptions of the moment, which made him such an amiable companion (but often a buffoon). Boswell's biographer insists that he wasn't a full-blown alcoholic-- because he could abstain from alcohol for long periods of time (as did other members of The Club . . . overindulgence and sobriety seem to be a pattern that has been around for a long time). But there are a lot of blackout injurious episodes that sound like they happened at a fraternity party.

After consuming five bottles of claret with just one companion, "I walked off very gravely, though much intoxicated. Ranged through the streets till, having run hard down the Advocate's Close, which is very steep, I found myself sudden bouncing down an almost perpendicular stone stair. I could not stop,but when I came to the bottom of it fell with a good deal of violence, which sobered me much." A later fall damaged his ankle so badly he was hobbling around for months.   

Boswell is constantly swinging between intellectual pursuits-- the law, writing, and pondering free will and determinism, and concupiscent and inebriated episodes, such as getting caught by his wife while fondling a "fresh, plump, and comely" fifteen-year-old.

While Johnson and Boswell are at the heart of the book, I really liked Damrosch's portrayals of David Garrick and Edward Gibbon. Garrick was the greatest actor of the age, and he perfects a naturalistic style that was quite different from the typical strutting and speechifying player of the time. "He could make every thought and gesture seem perfectly spontaneous." This sort of acting was appreciated by the critics, but out in the country, "naturalistic acting would strike provincial audiences as no acting at all. Garrick is also remembered for organizing the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769, which put Stafford-upon-Avon on the map and demarcated when Shakespeare went from being a competent playwright to a god. It also rained so much that Damrosch's description of the event smacks of a festival that happened two hundred years later: Woodstock.

For all their curiosity and intellect, Johnson and Boswell were men of their time. Johnson could often be religiously and politically conservative. His take on the American settlers was: "They are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging." Oddly, Johnson sympathized with the Native Americans more than the colonials (though he didn't think the colonists should give them their land back). He felt the same about the Irish, and Irish rights. Rebellion was to be punished severely, he explained to Irish clergyman Thomas Campbell. When they had the chance, the British should have burned the Irish cities and "roasted you in the flames of them."

Boswell wrote a weird poem extolling slavery, in which he surmises at the end "For slavery there must ever be, while we have mistresses like thee!" And both Boswell and Johnson loathed Edward Gibbon, who wrote the classic historical treatise History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. They found this work scandalous because Gibbon was skeptical about the spread of Christianity due to miraculous events. Gibbon argued that there were plenty of "secular explanations" for Christian promulgation. Boswell and Johnson referred to Gibbon as "The Infidel." This is too bad, because Gibbon changed how history was written in the same way that Boswell changed how biography was written. They laid bare the sources and the journey to knowledge, the personal references and ambiguity that accompany all non-fiction writing, which many authors tried to hide under the guise of omniscience. 

                                 

Damrosch's tour of the times is accompanied by many historical pictures. There are color plates in the center and various drawings, caricatures, portraits, and sketches throughout. This helps set the scene so much. The book alternates between great doings and anecdotes, so you get compelling portraits of men who are certainly great, but also flawed and silly (at one point, there is a description of Dr. Johnson imitating a kangaroo). And this is the same time as the framers were writing the Constitution. King George III actually makes a brief cameo. So it's a great view of what was happening on the other side of the ocean, as we were preparing to rebel. And there are a lot of prostitutes. What's not to enjoy?

The Straight Dope on Fake-Handwashing: You Can't Fake-out a Coronavirus

The Wuhan coronavirus is making its way out of China and spreading throughout the world. And my friends aren't helping matters. Last night I learned that several close compadres of mine, when they go to the bathroom, occasionally engage in "fake hand-washing."

After flushing the toilet, they run the sink for the appropriate amount of time that it would take to wash your hands . . . but they don't actually wash their hands. No soap. They don't even put their hands under the water.

I will preserve the anonymity of these folks, in case they wish to someday go into food service.

The male fake hand-washer does it out of laziness and social pressure to leave a wet sink.

The female fake hand-washer does it for more complicated and contradictory (and crazy) reasons. Just like a woman.

Here are her four reasons:

#1 Laziness.

#2 Dry Skin.

#3 The belief that germ exposure builds tolerance.

#4 The tactic that not washing your hands reduces your contact with bathroom fixtures-- faucets, soap dispensers, towels, blowers-- and thus lowers your chance of getting sick. Though contradictory with reason #3, logic is reasonable. Especially in winter, when viruses live longer because of low humidity.

Now I don't want to come off as a hypocrite.  I don't wash my hands every single time I go to the bathroom. Most of the time I do. This might be because I work in a giant filthy overcrowded bacteria-laden high school, and if I'm around a sink, I recognize that it's a good time to engage in some hand-washing. But there are the times when I'm in and out. I pee, nothing splatters, and I've got to get to class. So I leave without washing. It's rare, but I'm not going to lie and say it doesn't happen.

But when it happens, I don't pretend to wash my hands. I either do it-- the whole hog: soap, hot water, and singing "Happy Birthday"-- or I don't.

Hand-washing is such a simple way to prevent illness that it seems insane not to wash your hands when you have the chance. But that's how people are. They smoke cigarettes, do opiates, drive drunk, and watch The Bachelor. There have been numerous campaigns to get doctors to wash their hands. Doctors! They've always been a bit reluctant to wash up, and they work with sick people. Humans-- even highly educated humans-- are bizarre.

In 1846, Ignatz Semmelweis realized that his staff was dissecting cadavers and then delivering babies-- without washing their hands in between-- and this was killing both mothers and children. He launched a crusade to get doctors and nurses to wash their hands with soap and a chlorine solution. It worked. But Semmelweis got too angry when folks didn't comply with his rules, and he berated them. Eventually, he got fired, and the staff stopped washing their hands. Things went back to normal. Dirty stupid normal.

The CDC is STILL trying to get doctors and nurses to wash their hands. Apparently, emotional pleas work-- you can point out that patients are vulnerable and this might motivate doctors to scrub up. And they wash their hands when they are being watched (and hopefully they aren't faking it). And they wash their hands if they are shown pictures of gross bacteria. 

But they don't wash their hands because it's scientifically proven to help prevent infections. So we might as well welcome the Wuhan coronavirus with open arms.

And open (grubby and unwashed) hands.

Fair Play Tennis and Dirty Money

Lately, I've been reading more spy novels than usual . . . like David Mamet, I'm a big fan of well-executed genre fiction, but I tend to consume a lot of crime fiction: mysteries, thrillers, and Elmore-Leonard-esque stuff. And sci-fi.

But I'm trying to branch out.

I just finished John le Carré's 2010 novel Our Kind of Traitor. 

The last le Carré novel I read was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. That was 25 years ago, and I'll never forget it (there's also an excellent movie starring Richard Burton which has helped to cement this as THE archetypal Cold War narrative, in my brain, anyway).

In general, I really enjoyed this newer le Carré tale. He sets it in the aftermath of the financial crash, and while Russia is involved, it's in a more modern, financial way. Money, money, money. That's how politics work now that the Berlin Wall has fallen.

There's also plenty of tennis. Perry and Gail-- a young, educated British couple-- are on a tennis vacation in Antigua, and they get sucked into the world of a Russian money-launderer that wants to defect. He's willing to talk if it buys his family amnesty.

The Secret Service swoops in, and an unsteady alliance is made between the lovely British couple, the Russian criminal with valuable information, and a couple of morally complex, partially compromised agents. There's no Jack Bauer or James Bond stuff. It's slow and steady, with occasional exciting flashes. It's very well researched. It's the kind of stuff that happens when the billions of dollars floating in the black market surfaces in the financial system.

Crime fiction is generally about microeconomics. Decisions made on the individual level, that usually involve money. it's easy to get into the characters and their psychology. Spy novels tend to be macroeconomic. Large scale stuff. So it's harder to develop the characters. They are dwarfed by the enormous stage. Le Carré does a superb job handling this. It makes me want to go back and read some of his other Cold War classics.

Tragedies, Cars and Phone Etiquette: A Bad Combination (for Dave)

Yesterday while I was driving to pick my son from track practice, my wife called me. I'm not very good on the phone when I'm not operating a motor vehicle, and I'm even worse when I am. I shouldn't talk and drive. 

We had terrible news to exchange, so the conversation proceeded. I told her about the poor 8th-grade boy from East Brunswick-- the town where I teach-- who fell through the ice and died. Police and firefighters formed a human chain, but he slipped under. Awful awful story. 

She told me about a house fire in Edison, right by where she teaches. A five-year-old girl and her grandmother both died in the blaze. It turns out that in 2006 my wife taught the mom, who was at work when the fire occurred. My wife was pretty shaken up about that.

And then, while my wife was mid-story, my son walked up. And I had just pulled up to a busy intersection. The light turned green, and he was still throwing his bags in the back of the van and I got overwhelmed. Apparently, I was very rude to my wife. Apparently, I am a "jerk" . . . and the worst kind of a jerk, a jerk without phone manners. Because I said something in the manner of "I GOTTA GO!" right in the middle of my wife's tragic story. And then I hung up. 

My defense is that I was driving and things got hectic. My wife has decided that it is her fault. She knows the deal. She has promised never to call me again. 

I did send her a nice text today, thanking her for my salad and giving her some encouraging words about a parent meeting. I even included an emoji. But I struggle in real-time, and I certainly can't multi-task. So If you want to communicate with me, send me a text (or even an email).