My wife and I finally saw The Book of Mormon-- the tickets were a fiftieth birthday present but then the pandemic hit, so I took us nearly two years to see the show-- and despite the weather, we covered a lot of ground in the city yesterday; we took the train in and then walked down to the Rubin Museum, which is chock-full of Indian, Himalayan, Tibetan and Bhutanese religious art . . . it's an aesthetically pleasing meditative multi-story space (unless some lady doesn't read the directions and bangs the water-gong with all her strength, instead of gently tapping it, which knocked me right the fuck out of my hypnotic state) and then we walked back uptown and it was COLD so we stopped for a drink at Hellcat Annie's Tap Room-- a cozy pub with an excellent selection of local beers-- and so I broke the rule I had made earlier in the day and had two beers-- I wasn't going to drink any beer because I didn't want to have to pee or feel bloated once I was stuffed into one of the narrow Broadway theater seats but it was early; then we made our way up to Tacuba Cantina Mexicana, and we had a fantastic meal-- I hard chorizo and octopus tacos and some Mezcal de Leyandas-- both delicious-- and then we went to The Book of Mormon and our seats were good and unobstructed (some douchebag a couple rows over wore his lumpy ski-hat the entire play . . . I can't believe the person behind him didn't let him have it) and the play was ridiculously funny and --surprise! . . . set in Uganda?-- and featured a chubby young Mormon missionary that is pretty much a nicer and more sincere version South Park's Cartman brought to life . . . and while the play might not be totally accurate about Mormonism, it's not totally accurate about anything-- it's just profane and funny-- I'm glad I knew nothing about it, I was often surprised and always laughing and when the play let out, we knew if we wanted to catch the fast train, the 9:56 PM, we would have to book it down to Penn Station, which we did, despite the snow, slush and rain and we made the fast train, got out 20,000 steps-- which always seems to happen when you go to NYC-- and, bonus, Alex picked us up from the train station and we were home before 11 PM . . . which is pretty amazing, to see a 7:00 PM play on 49th Street and be back in Highland Park less than four hours later.
Longmire Does Philly?
In the third Longmire novel, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Craig Johnson inserts Sheriff Longmire, Henry Standing Bear, and Dog into Vic Moretti's world-- downtown Philadelphia; the usual violence, debilitating injuries, and Western-style detective work ensue-- with a healthy dose of Native American lore and trickery-- and, despite the urban setting, there will be some horses.
The Usual Saturday Tennis Notes
I beat my buddy Cob 12-3 today in the 7 AM Tennis League for the Insane, Obsessive and Otherwise Mentally Ill and here are my notes, reflections, and takeaways:
1) I was a bit nervous because my wife and I finally ate at Tasty Moment, a crowded and authentic Chinese place featuring Szechuan, Nanjing, and Yangzhou Chinese food . . . and the spicy crawfish with noodles was SPICY and the peppercorn fish was delicious but had an odd spice to it that made your lips numb . . . so i was a bit worried this morning that I might have intestinal issues during the early morning match, but I was ok;
2) I chewed gum the entire match, even though the racquet club prohibits this;
3) it was the first time I ever played on Court 7, which is in the far corner and has no doubles lines-- that's visually a little weird but I actually think I liked it-- less distraction from green areas you CAN'T hit into;
4) I really focused on hitting shots from deep on the baseline 3-6 feet over the net with lots of topspin . . . and I focused on hitting shallower shots when I was moving forward LOW . . . hit it high when you are deep and hit it low when you are moving in is a basic strategy that really helps me;
5) Cob and I had some epically long rallies-- 30 or 40 shots?-- and i was really patient and kept hitting the ball crosscourt over the low part of the net . . . it seems the most common error at this level is trying to go down the line off cross court shots and hitting the net-- you can go down the line when the ball is up the middle, but if it's crosscourt, be defensive and hit it diagonal and deep;
6) I actually starting pointing my elbow, whipping my arm and pronating-- so I hit some solid flat serves (and even a few on the T aces . . . which I need to do more often)
7) I didn't get to the net enough . . . although Cob hit a few beautiful lobs when I did . . . I finished an overhead or two but I'm still not sure how much I should be getting to the net;
8) I was hitting my two-handed backhand fairly well-- deep and with some topspin, but I'm not sure how much my wrists should be involved in the stroke-- I need to keep experimenting;
9) the key to my forehand is the left hand, it has to come back with the racquet and I need to catch the racquet with my left hand on the follow through . . . this ensures that I get a good turn (but not too much of a turn-- it helps to keep the racquet on the same side of your body on the pull back and follow through) and that and I need to always get a wide base and drive through it.
Escobar's Cocaine Hippos?
Today I learned something new-- and serendipitously complementary to the book I finished yesterday: Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar kept (among other exotic animals) four hippos on his estate . . . and while the elephants and zebras and giraffes were relocated after his death, the hippos remained . . . and they bred; now there are more than one hundred hippos in the vicinity Escobar's property-- in the nearby lakes and rivers-- and they are big dangerous animals that also-- according to some folks-- cause some environmental destruction-- they defecate too much in the water, which can cause algal blooms; they eat too many of the aquatic plants which makes it harder to catch fish; and they are a menace to fishermen and those who swim in the lakes and river . . . but other folks like the hippos, whether because they are charismatic megafauna (and great for tourism) or because they might fill an ecological niche that has been vacant since humans came to the Americas and hunted and killed most of the large herbivorous mammals . . . listen to "The Debate About Pablo Escobar's Hippos" for more information on this ginormous issue.
Bad Gulls Bad Gulls Whatcha Gonna Do?
Mary Roach's new book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law tackles man vs. nature in a legal, humanistic sense-- what is to be done when nature encroaches upon civilization?-- and the book begins in dramatic fashion, with charismatic megafauna: hungry bears in Aspen, killer leopards in the Himalayas, rampaging elephants in India, stealthy cougars in California . . . and these stories are exciting and dramatic and involve tracking and hunting and shooting and running and hiding and a fabulous live-and-let-live attitude from a shopkeeper about a grain-pilfering elephant in India . . .
"We just say, 'Namaste and please go away'"
and then the book takes a horticultural turn, detailing the dangers of killer trees and poisonous beans, and then there's the story of the albatrosses of the Midway and the epic (and ultimately futile) battle the U.S. Military fought against these birds because they were causing air collisions . . . and it is ultimately this futility that is pervasive in the book-- after all the hunting, trapping, scaring, and poisoning humans do to ride their homes and neighborhoods and field and airstrips of "pests," generally nothing works . . . the book ends with the mundane, stoats eating eggs and indigenous wildlife in New Zealand and the lowly mouse . . . and while the book is gross all the way through lots of defecating and vomiting and descriptions of how traps and poisons do their work-- this is certainly gallows humor, I had to put the book down several times when I made the bad choice of reading it while I ate . . . but it ends philosophically-- what do we owe these creatures? what makes a pest? can we actually preserve a habitat? can we rid an area of a certain animal? what happens if we do? do these animals actually do enough damage to warrant the campaigns against them? what is the most humane way to kill an animal?
and the book ends with some hope-- a farmer who keeps a few barn cats and barn owls to make sure the mouse population doesn't go through the roof but realizes that mice are going to eat a bit of his grain and it's not enough to start a land war . . . and Mary Roach takes the same approach with a roof rat that lives near her house-- instead of trapping and killing it, she blocks the way it was getting into her attic and calls it a day . . . a great read, detailed and dense and full of memorable characters that work in fields that don't get much press.
Dave is Killing It, Fruitwise
I'm killing it today, healthwise . . . I've already been to the gym-- where I played some basketball-- and I'm also killing it fruitwise, I've had an apple, an orange, and two kiwis.
Winter Gets Wintrier
It's frigid today-- so cold that Lola dragged me home from her walk-- after she did her business, she was like LET'S GO . . . WE COULD DIE OUT HERE! . . . so it was a good day to have remote school, and it was a good day for a drive-by COVID test for my son Alex . . . the pharmacist came out and handed him the nasal swab and he swabbed his nasal passages in the comfort of our heated car.
Winter Has Come . . .
Catherine tested negative for COVID . . . so she has the cold that I had; meanwhile, I am still on remote school, which feels oddly disembodied but I went to the Piscataway YMCA today on my long off period and it was great-- I shot baskets, watched old people play pickleball, and rowed on the upper level-- which has a great open-windowed view-- but the cold has settled in, Lola and I marched over to the dog park and the ground was frozen and icy, so while I don't like remote school, it will be nice to stay inside and bundled up tomorrow . . . perhaps remote school has its time and place, the dead of winter.
Longmire Heads South of the Border
In Craig Johnson's fifteenth Longmire novel, Depth of Winter, Sheriff Longmire's moral compass spins all out of whack when he heads south from his normal milieu of Wyoming deep into narco territory of Mexico, in order to rescue his kidnapped daughter-- this is more of an action novel, with a ragtag band of folks-- including a Tarahumara runner/sniper-- heading into very dangerous territory on an impossible mission and while Longmire uses the stock of his M-16 to knock out a fair number of bad guys, he's eventually got to do some shooting and killing, and it ain't pretty (and neither is he . . . like every Longmire book, by the end of the novel, he's a complete disaster).
Dave Beats the Guys Who Beat the Guy . . .
I beat Wayne this morning in the early morning tennis league 12 - 4 . . . he's a good player, especially at the net, but he made some unforced errors and double-faulted a couple of times . . . last week Wayne beat the champion of the league-- but apparently HE had an off day last week . . . so apparently anything can happen when you play tennis at 7 AM and I'm attributing my victory to the fact that I got to drive my wife's car, which has seat warmers (and though I had a resounding win, Wayne had the shot of the day . . . I hit a deep topspin shot which drove him to the curtain, and he basically struck his return while running into the aforementioned curtain and he somehow hit a perfect drop shot from back there, which just cleared the net and then spun back a bit, well out of my reach).
Thus Endeth the Streak . . .
Thus endeth the Wordle streak and thus begins the Wordle slump . . . and it's appropriate that the first Wordle I missed was the word "slump" . . . I put "slurp" instead . . . but there's always tomorrow.
You Can't Fight City Hall
You have to wear a mask while you work out at the East Brunswick Planet Fitness but you don't have to wear one at the Edison branch . . . and it turns out this is a town ordinance.
You Think Wordle is Hard?
My friend and I have all been enjoying Wordle-- give it a try, it's all the rage-- but the boys and I stumbled on an even more difficult game: find the good basketball . . . and though all three of us looked in the sporting equipment spot, none of us were able to find the ball-- so we took the lousy ball to the YMCA and shot around (wearing masks!) and then came home and accused my wife of hiding the ball somewhere obscure . . . whereupon she quickly solved the puzzle and found the basketball and called us all idiots-- can YOU find the basketball in this picture?
Why Online School Crushes Your Mind
Ezra Klein's interview with Annie Murphy Paul explains why I hate online school so much-- Paul's new book "The Extended Mind" dismantles the "computer model" of the human brain; computers are neat-- wherever you put them, as long as it's not too hot, they compute the same answer . . . your computer can be by a window, among lots of smart people in a coffee shop, on the floor of an industrial slaughterhouse, whatever . . . it will compute-- but our minds are extensions of what is around-- other people, a lovely landscape, white noise, an open office, gunfire, etc.-- and that totally influences our thoughts-- and being alone in a room staring at tiny muted icons of students on a screen destroys whatever creative groove I might occasionally find myself in . . . we are not designed to sit still (although school and work are often systemically based on this supposition) and we need a lot of tricks and stimulus and motivation to concentrate for any length of time . . . which is exactly what school is for: group work and making posters and switching classes and writing on the board . . . and-- for em-- pacing around, reading stuff aloud-- that's what I like to do (I did realize this finally, and put my computer on the counter and then paced a bit while I read something, and the students rejoiced but it's not the same) and while our classrooms need to reflect these ideas more, so that kids can learn better, online school doesn't reflect this at all . . . it's a mess and I hope we are back next Monday.
Here We Go Again?
The world is getting weird yet again because of the pandemic; yesterday I was tailgating at the Jets/Tampa game . . . partying with tens of thousands of (mainly unmasked) people, watching Tom Brady shatter dreams once again (he threw a game winning touchdown with 15 seconds left) but today I will be teaching on a computer, as my school has gone virtual (mainly due to lack of staffing, apparently not only do loads of students have COVID, but also loads of teachers and bus drivers and nurses, etc.)
Dave's Book List for 2021
1. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
2. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes To a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib
3. Mooncop by Tom Gaul
4. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh
5. Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
6. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
7. Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill (with Jake Rosen)
8. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh
9. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder
10. A Children's Bible by Lydia MilletFinal Pub Night of 2021
The final Thursday pub night of 2021 was oddly reminiscent of a pub night a year ago-- but there were some notable changes; we started at Ashley's for some smoked cheese and liquor-- he's got some glass contraption that you stick stuff under and it gets all smoky and Ashley-- who works in healthcare and was once nervous about the consequences of COVID, has now given up worrying-- his daughter just had it but Colleen and him didn't contract it from her and then we went to Steakhouse 85 for drinks and burgers and despite the record-setting COVID numbers, the place was packed and then we headed to Dan's for a fire and the release of another paper lantern balloon . . . something we did a year ago when we were in full lockdown and the bars and restaurants were not open (indoors) and I think we're calling it a day on this pandemic in New Jersey, the Omicron variants seems pretty harmless and most of the state is testing positive for it (or have been exposed multiple times) so I am hoping we can take out masks off and move on with out lives.
Four Bridge Day . . .
Yesterday my wife and I walked to the train station to catch an 8 AM train to Newark-- so we crossed the bridge over the Raritan to the train to the PATH to the Oculus-- and we went to the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit at Pier 36-- very immersive and very psychedelic, certainly dose yourself a bit with the drug of your choice before you go in-- and then walked across the Manhattan Bridge into DUMBO-- and the Manhattan Bridge was empty save for a couple fo diehard runners and we had great views of the city and Brooklyn-- and then went to Evil Twin Brewery for some delicious beers and ate lunch at another branch of the Westville Diner-- excellent vegetarian fare-- and then we saw lots and lots of people taking some iconic photos of the Manhattan Bridge and we walked back to the Oculus across the Brooklyn Bridge-- holy shit! what a difference from the Manhattan Bridge-- packed with throngs of people-- and they let you climb up over traffic?-- and people REALLY like taking pictures on the Brooklyn Bridge . . . and then back through the Oculus, back on the PATH and it would have been a perfect public transport day except there was an old dude on the single lane escalator and we were sprinting up it for the train and he was not walking and he wouldn't let us pass him until it was too late and the train pulled away as we got up the steps . . . so we had to wait a few minutes for the next one and then we walked back across the Raritan Bridge and collapsed.
Too Much of a Good Thing = Not a Good Thing
My wife wouldn't let me have any of the salad dressing in her Trader Joe's salad dressing packet because she wanted the rest for when she used the rest of that particular salad mix so she suggested that I use the blue cheese dressing but I informed her I had already put actual crumbled blue cheese on my salad and that I couldn't put blue cheese dressing on top of crumbled blue cheese, as that would be akin to wearing a Pixies shirt to a Pixies concert, very gauche.
In The Afterlife, You Could Be Headed for Digital Strife
I just finished Neal Stephenson's newish novel Fall, or Dodge in Hell and I read a good 750 pages and then I finally had to do some skimming before I read the final couple of chapters; the book tackles the subject of eternal digital life-- folks get their entire connectome-- or synapse map-- scanned right when they die and then upload this into an increasingly complex virtual reality-- but Stephenson deals with this in both a very realistic fashion-- the quality of your digital afterlife is really going to depend on how much computing power is available-- and in an entirely fantastic fashion: the digital afterlife grows in Biblical and surreal stops and starts, as the processes learn to control and traverse the land they create-- and some digital processes have more power than others . . . it's a giant mess of a book, with lots of wild ideas and a lot of words and a lot of descriptions and a lot of sub-plots and while I'm glad I read it, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who isn't a Neal Stephenson junkie.
Socks: Are They Conscious?
After some mild trepidation and complaint, the boys and I agreed to my wife's project: we poured out all three sock drawers onto the floor and while we watched Friday Night Lights, we paired up socks; disposed of threadbare socks, and traded socks . . . and-- for now-- all the socks are in their proper places . . . for now.
A Wonderful Boxing Day
Some people love the holidays and some people love the day after the holidays-- and I fall into the latter category; I went to the dog park early this morning, then Cat and I headed to Hacklebarney Park for a hike-- but we left the dog home so we could stop for a leisurely lunch . . . and we left the kids at home as well, because they were sleeping late (Alex went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and then stayed up very late last night building his Lego Seinfeld set) and so after our hike, we stopped in Somerville at the Village Brewery for a beer-- and I had the fried chicken banh mi sandwich and it was absurdly good and then we stopped and watched the boys playing tennis-- they were at Johnson Park-- and I was very happy that they were playing together without fighting and then I turned on the Giants-- bad idea-- and then Ian called me and asked if I wanted to play tennis because they DID end up fighting-- which always happens-- but I took a nap first and then I went out and hit with Ian under the lights-- it was still fifty degrees and when we were leaving, Alex and his buddy were pulling up to the courts to play and we have leftovers from Xmas Eve for dinner so no one has to cook so it's a very successful Boxing Day.
Happy Hyper-capitalist Environmental Destruction Day!
Although we consumed some wrapping paper and exchanged a few materialistic gifts this morning, my wife pointed out that one of our Xmas presents is environmentally conscious and we will use less plastic: a home-seltzer maker . . . so we won't go through so many bottles of seltzer; we also had a lovely Xmas Eve here with my parents and cousins and a few of my older son Alex's friends--but my brother and Amy and Amy's kids were laid up at Amy's house, quarantined, because Marc has COVID for a second time-- he's not very sick but still-- he's very annoyed-- and my friend Connell tested positive for a second time as well . . . so hopefully we'll avoid the virus for the winter break but who knows?
Winter Break!
An oddly festive school day considering New Jersey clocked over 15,000 positive COVID tests (including my brother, second time) as there was some lovely choral singing and orchestral music in the terminal hallway-- we all crowded together (masked) to listen and then a bunch of folks from the English department headed out to the Grove for a very early Happy Hour, including a very very pregnant Allie, and there was much talk of stretch marks and post-birth sepsis and umbilical strangulation and other exciting female topics and then we went on our merry way.
Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Worse . . .
School is pretty weird right now: I'm getting paid to cover classes almost every day because there's a staffing shortage due to covid and quarantines; we're missing a lot of students; my union rep handed me a N95 mask because I have "cafeteria duty" where I hang out with 700 unmasked students (I've yet to use it though, I can't breathe in those things) and now-- because a teacher died in a locked bathroom in a nearby district-- they've removed the locks from the inside of the two faculty bathrooms on our hall, so that they can be opened from the outside with a key-- and if 500 kids are walking down the hall it's going to be hard to hear someone knock, so the teachers are worried about being exposed to the masses.
Moderna! Summer is Winter in Florida
I was all for Pfizer when I got my first two shots, but yesterday I got a Moderna booster and I'm not suffering any side effects (besides a sore arm) and it turns out Moderna seems to fight off the Omicron variant-- so I'll switch teams to Moderna!-- because who cares, really, unless you bought some stock . . . also, Florida has really low case numbers right now and New Jersey is through the roof-- this could be because in Florida, summer is kind of like winter up here-- everyone congregates inside (in Florida because it's so hot . . . and right now in Florida, you can do everything outside, it's balmy, while we're congregating inside because of the cold) so perhaps some scientist needs to investigate this.
Dave Thumbs His Thumb at Resolutions
Aside from my usual New Year's Resolution: doing more of the same, I'm going to add a bonus resolution-- I'm going to try to text all year using my left thumb instead of my right thumb . . . yes, I'm a one-thumb texter (and I believe it's hurting my score on the mini) so I'm going to switch thumbs and then perhaps next year, I'll be able to text fluidly with both thumbs.
Pandemic Stuff
Michael Lewis's new book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story is not satisfying reading but it's sure as hell informative and interesting-- it's not satisfying because there's no end to this story in sight, and our country was ill-prepared, ill-informed, and barely organized in its response to the COVID pandemic; you'll learn why certain things went the way they did and you'll also learn that there isn't a "cabal of people at the top controlling this entire thing"-- which is what an old guy at a wake told me last Sunday-- because all the decisions came from the bottom up-- often from state and county employees referred to as "L6" because apparently, the answer to big problems doesn't come from top administrators-- you've got to go six levels down until anyone knows how to actually do anything . . . one piece of logic I learned was that when that first person died of COVID at the end of February, it was all over . . . because COVID kills about a helf of one percent of people and it takes a while to die from it, so that meant that 200 people had COVID 3-4 weeks before that person died-- so the genie was way out of the bottle, there was no reason to close the borders, the virus was rampant, no one had been contact traced and the rest was history . . . if this isn't enough, Sam Harris just did a major take on the lessons of the pandemic, and here are some highlights from the book:
The CDC was avoiding controversy
Charity could see that the CDC’s strategy was politically shrewd. People were far less likely to blame a health officer for what she didn’t do than what she did. Sins of commission got you fired. Sins of omission you could get away with, but they left people dead.
In a pandemic, you've got to utilize utilitarian thinking
Ahead on the tracks, you spot five people. Do nothing and the train will run them over and kill them. But you have an option! You can flip a switch and send the train onto a siding, on which, unfortunately, there stands a man named Carl. Do nothing and you kill five people; flip the switch and you kill Carl. Most college freshmen elect to kill Carl and then, wham, th professor hits them with the follow-up. Carl has five healthy organs that can be harvested and used to save the lives of five people in need of them. All you need to do is shoot Carl in the back of the head. Would you do that, too? If not, explain the contradiction . . .
All Thinking is Flawed
He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,”
Carter poked fun at the way Richard walked around saying important-sounding things, like “All models are wrong; some of them are useful,” but he felt the alchemy in their interactions.
Richard viewed models as a check on human judgment and as an aid to the human imagination. Carter viewed them more as flashlights. They allowed him to see what was inside a room that, until now, had been pitch-black.
My Job is a Hot Zone
“I couldn’t design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system,” he said after his visit. To illustrate this point he created a picture, of a 2,600-square-foot home, but with the same population density as an American school, then turned it into a slide. “The Spacing of People, If Homes Were Like Schools,” read the top. The inside of the typical American single-family home suddenly looked a lot like a refugee prison, or the DMV on a bad day. “There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses,” said Carter.
You Need to React Quickly
“Public Health Interventions and Epidemic Intensity during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” the piece revealed, for the first time, the life-or-death importance of timing in the outcomes of 1918.
Cities that intervened immediately after the arrival of the virus experienced far less disease and death.
Charity Dean Came From Another Planet: rural Oregon
They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders sent her a letter instructing her to drop out of medical school and return to Junction City.
It Could Have Been Worse
So little about it was known that a trained pathologist had stared at a picture of it and mistaken it for human immune cells. It had been detected only a few dozen times since its discovery—once in a dead four-year-old girl. No one knew what it ate when it wasn’t eating the brains of mandrills or humans. Asked to explain what he’d found, Joe would only say, “Balamuthia is an amoeba and it eats your brain, and there is no cure.”
Politics Played a Role
But then, on April 9, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton as his national security adviser, and the next day, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, and demoted or fired everyone on the biological threat team. From that moment on, the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation-states. The Bush and Obama administrations’ concern with other kinds of threats was banished to the basement.
Sometimes You've Got to Light a Fire to Escape
“Escape fire,” was what they’d call it. The event so captivated the writer Norman Maclean, best known for his only other book, A River Runs Through It,
In fire you could see lessons for fighting a raging disease. He jotted them down:
You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.
It Wasn't Just in Italy
On March 1, it announced that the United States would screen people arriving from other countries for symptoms of the virus. “I wouldn’t waste a moment of time on travel restrictions or travel screening,” Carter wrote. “We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe.”
Most of Us (Including Me) Had No Clue
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force. “He said, ‘Charity, you need to push these things through. You’re the only one who can do this.’ ” She was taken aback by his insistence. “He wasn’t pleading with me to do the right thing. He was yelling at me. He was basically implying that the White House is not going to do the right thing. The White House is not going to protect the country. So California needs to take the lead.”
Charity Dean realized just how lost and desperate the people at the top were.
half of 1 percent of the people who get the disease die, you can surmise that for every death, there are 199 people already walking around with it. That first death—which California already had experienced—was telling you that you had two hundred cases a month earlier.
In Park’s time with the federal government, he’d dealt with one technology crisis after another. He’d noticed a pattern that he’d first identified in the private sector: in any large organization, the solution to any crisis was usually found not in the officially important people at the top but in some obscure employee far down the organization’s chart. It told you something about big organizations, and the L6s buried inside them, that they were able to turn Charity Dean into a person in need of excavation.
Sometimes You Need the Government to Take the Lead
Far more often than not, some promising avenue of research would die as a failed company. He hated that; he hated the way financial ambition interfered with science and progress.
The absence of federal leadership had triggered a wild free-for-all in the market for pandemic supplies. In this market, Americans vied with Americans for stuff made mainly by the Chinese. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, flew in a planeload of materials from China to the UCSFmedical center with boxes of functional, though less than ideal, nasal swabs on board.
American government, circa April 2020, was just how different appearances on the outside could be from the understanding on the inside. Inside California state government, inside even the Trump administration, there was some logic to everything that happened;
“The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.” She wondered if perhaps they had undergone a process similar to her own—a descent, which
You have this burden of maintaining optics. It’s all optics.”
He finally more or less gave up on the state. “There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped,” Joe would later say. “There’s no one driving the bus.” And the CDC—well, the CDC was its own mystery.
Her conclusion had pained her some. Once she’d become a public-health officer, she’d imagined an entire career in public service. Now she did not believe that the American government, at this moment in its history, would ever do what needed doing. Disease prevention was a public good, but the public wasn’t going to provide anything like enough of it. From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.
Happy Media Manipulation Day!
600 kids were out at my school today (and it was the same percentage of kids out in Highland Park, my own children reported) due to some TikTok meme promising school shootings today . . . despite the fact that New Jersey has the lowest rate of school shootings of any state in the nation; they should call it antisocial media (but at least order has returned on the illness front, Lola is pooping solid again and I got a negative result for my Covid test).
Chinese Democracy?
A Chinese algorithm is proving to be excellent at school shooter terrorism . . . and many of us have let it happen, we opened the door with open arms, installed TikTok on our phones, and let our children do the same.
Covid Ruins Sick Days
I was really tired two days ago and went to bed at 7 PM and then I felt lousy yesterday and it turned out I had a 101.5 fever-- so I slept in the basement, in case I had covid, and I scheduled a PCR test for 9 AM this morning and then I woke up this morning and my fever is gone and I feel fine-- but I still went for the test and stayed home from school because that's what you're supposed to do now . . . but the imminent threat of covid certainly ruins what used to be a regular sick day (and the dog is sick as well, she puked all over the house two days ago and had diarrhea yesterday on the kitchen bench cushions-- so they are in the trash-- and now she's on rice and water and she got me up at 3 AM last night to go out . . . so maybe we have the same virus . . . is that possible?)
Do Animals Understand BEEP!
I was driving up South Adelaide Avenue early this morning-- it's a narrow street and it was still very dark-- and a deer darted from the shadows directly in front of my car and I reacted exactly as if someone had cut in front of me without using their blinker . . . I slammed on my brakes and beeped . . . BEEP! and then I realized how ridiculous it was to beep at a hoofed ruminant (but it did work-- the deer got out of the way and we didn't have a collision).
Weddings and Funerals . . .
Some people know how to wear a suit and a tie, but I am not one of those people (I have a thick neck or something).
Dave Revises His Expectations Mid-match
Today was my first match of the winter tennis league at the racquet club-- I'm playing in the A division, and most of those matches begin at 7:00 AM-- and I had to play an agile and skilled 29 year old this morning, but he made a few errors early on and I was serving well, so I went up 2-1 on him and I thought to myself you can do this but then he started getting to all my shots and running around any forehand that I didn't hit very deep and hitting an inside out diagonal forehand that pretty much angled off the side of the court (on my backhand side!) and I thought to myself there's no way in hell you can do this but it was still a fun match and we got a lot of exercise very early in the morning and I learned that I've got to hit the ball very deep on young players.
Rutgers! Gum!
I forgot my loose, breathable fabric mask at home today (it's drying on the handle of our exercise bike) so I had to grab a leaf-covered disposable garbage mask from the floor of my minivan and now I'm trapped inside this thing with tequila breath while I teach because we went out last night after the incredible Rutgers basketball victory over Purdue-- the first time Rutgers has beaten a number one team-- but luckily I have lot of gum (sorry Connell).
Silence!
The Feeling Is Mutual
While I was on my way to one of the few water fountains in operation in the school building-- most are closed down because of Covid-- I passed by a foods teacher who I rarely see . . . and we were wearing masks (of course) and she said, "I feel like we're living in an alternate universe" and though it was a transitionless non sequitur, I knew just what she meant.
It's Still Tuesday . . .
What Monday is to Garfield, Tuesday is to me . . . and despite having some good ideas at work, crushing the mini, covering a class for extra dough, and exercising at the gym for 90 minutes-- the entire time Ian was at tennis-- I'm still feeling disoriented and ready to surrender to the week . . . it doesn't matter how much I get done on a Tuesday, it's a drop in the bucket, an exercise in futility, a weak attempt at conquering an insurmountable amount of time . . . I'm going up to shower and read my book, certain that this week will never end (and when it does, I'll be attending a funeral for my Uncle Mike, a great guy who had the decency to pass away on a Sunday, not a Tuesday).
Cat and Ed Defile the Buddha
You can take the girl out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of the girl (or Ed) so despite my warnings of bad karma, there was some classless abuse of the Three Legged Buddha at Storm King . . . and if you haven't been there, it's epic-- Grounds for Sculpture on steroids . . . Jersey's version is 42 acres but Storm King is 500 acres of trails and lakes and an incredible variety of sculptures, set in a valley and on the side of a mountain-- we went for Cat's birthday, and a dozen of us stayed up in New Paltz in a big Air BnB right by the Rail Trail-- Cat looks a bit hazy in the photo below because she over-served herself tequila Friday night, but she recovered and we were able to bike around the enormous sculpture park and enjoy a good dinner Saturday night-- a great 50th Birthday weekend.
Sad Day (Hard to Recover After a Dart Like This)
It's going to be a sad Outer Banks Fishing Trip this year . . . as our main man Johnny G. passed away today-- I hope he's sleeping soundly in the big hammock in the sky (not on a picnic table in the courtyard of The Weeping Radish, unnoticed for several hours-- so that when he returned and no one batted an eye, he said, "What! Nobody even missed me?!") and this was a theme with him, as he went missing at Cat's Fortieth and OBFT XXV . . . anyway, whether it was playing poker or darts, shooting the shit about sci-fi, or our annual ride together from Norfolk to the Outer Banks, I always enjoyed spending quality time with Johnny and I know he will be sorely missed by the whole gang (he's to my right in the old photo-- I'm the one who looks like he's wearing a toupee . . . I used to have such thick luxurious hair) and I will never forget his favorite good-natured darting heckle, done in his gravelly voice: "it's hard to recover from a dart like that . . ."
Sexual Selection Defeats Survival of the Fittest
My wife turned fifty today and she received a pair of lovely diamond earrings . . . and this bowerbird mating video explains why this happened-- if you need a full explanation, listen to this Radiolab podcast.
Dave Reads Fifty Before Cat Turns Fifty
My wife is turning fifty tomorrow-- quite a milestone-- but more significantly, I just finished my fiftieth book of the year The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green. . . and judging by the number of passages I highlighted on my Kindle, it's a good one-- here are the highlights, with some fragmented commentary:
there's a lot of stuff on understanding the vastness of time . . .
Complex organisms tend to have shorter temporal ranges than simple ones . . .
When you measure time in Halleys rather than years, history starts to look different. As the comet visited us in 1986, my dad brought home a personal computer—the first in our neighborhood. One Halley earlier, the first movie adaptation of Frankenstein was released. The Halley before that, Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. The Halley before that, the United States wasn’t a country.
Put another way: In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.
John Green, who is very literary, actually missed an easy allusion here-- see if you know what I'm talking about:
Eventually, in what may have been the most entitled moment of my life, I called and requested a room change because the ceaseless tinkling of the Gatsby Suite’s massive crystal chandelier was disturbing my sleep. As I made that call, I could feel the eyes of Fitzgerald staring down at me.
he should have referred to the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg on the billboard over the valley of ashes-- as they were the eyes of God, staring at the corrupt and immoral wasteland of America . . .
on imagery
We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph"
on the stupid geese in the park . . .
Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather.
on the lawns which we mow, water, fertilize and manicure:
In the daily grind of a human life, there’s a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way. I mow the lawn of Poa pratensis as if lawns are natural, when in fact we didn’t invent the suburban American lawn until one hundred and sixty years ago. And I drive to soccer practice, even though that was impossible one hundred and sixty years ago—not only because there were no cars, but also because soccer hadn’t been invented. And I pay the mortgage, even though mortgages as we understand them today weren’t widely available until the 1930s. So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose.
on the past and the future
And I suspect that our choices will seem unforgivable and even unfathomable to the people reading those history books. “It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”
something that might be true (but would make me uncomfortable)
Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd. What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.
a sports essay that made me cry
Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming. I give Jerzy Dudek’sperformance on May 25, 2005 five stars.
and another sporting essay that made me cry-- this one on the yips-- I am a sucker for sports . . .
And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St.Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game.
Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel. I give the yips one and a half stars.
more on lawns . . .
more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio,or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer an pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.
Green writes about my favorite literary term, the pathetic fallacy!
There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to the nonhuman: the pathetic fallacy, which is often used to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.”
and he writes about my favorite poem . . .
There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge, And
Finished knowing - then -
and he writes about America's proclivity for large balls of stuff, like the largest ball of paint, which started as a baseball:
“My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too. Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons.
and he describes a photo I'd like to know more about and a novel based on the photo . . .
Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Dave Might Survive
I am the worst at being sick-- but now that I'm feeling better it all seems kind of silly; the Thanksgiving break started off well-- we saw a great Beatles cover-band at Pino's on Wednesday night, then on Thursday Ian and I played two sets of tennis-- and I can usually only make it through one set (Ian beat me 6-4 and 6-3 and he claims I will never beat him in a set again and he put a pound of quality chocolate on the line) and then we had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner at my parents and then Friday I got a BRUTAL massage from an old Asian lady (after I went to the gym) and then I played tennis with Ian later in the day-- though it was cold-- and then we went to the Rutgers women's soccer game that night and it was freezing and the game went into overtime RU won!) and the next day I felt kind of crappy-- glassy eyes and fatigue-- and then Saturday night I hung out at my parents' place with my dad and my cousins while the ladies went to a fancy Italian restaurant in Robbinsville-- and by the time the ladies got back, I was feeling really lousy, and I spent the night freezing cold and then burning hot-- with some stomach issues-- and I felt awful all day today (and I even went for a Covid test) but now my joints are no longer sore and my stomach doesn't hurt and I just might live . . . of course, I might not live-- and I've been reading John Green's new book (The Anthropocene Reviewed) which can make you into an obsessive hypochondriac (but in a fun way) and his chapter on the plague is pretty grim . . . but this doesn't seem like the plague (but only time will tell . . . and while the plague had some terrible suppurating and devastating symptoms, nothing is worse than glassy eyes).
Something For Which We Can All be Thankful
I just finished the third book in Ben H. Winters' Last Policeman Trilogy (Word of Trouble) and while I will offer no spoilers, I will say that the books remain mystery novels until the end-- the milieu might be apocalyptic but the thrust and theme of the novels are solving crimes, seeking truth, and answering questions-- and this Thanksgiving, I am thankful that a giant-civilization-ending asteroid is not headed for the earth any time in the near future (as far as we know).
If You're Wondering Why There's a Teacher Shortage . . .
This morning during first period I got the weird silvery aura in my right eye that happens sometimes when I look at a screen too much-- and I'm always looking at a screen these days, since they took away the printers and we migrated all our texts and work to Canvas: our digital learning platform-- and now our periods are 84 minutes long, instead of 42 minutes (because someone thought that was a good idea) so I was in for the long haul with this hazy eye (and oncoming headache) so I put on my blue-blocker screen glasses-- which I never use because I have to wear a mask and when I wear a mask and glasses, I fog up (probably because I wear a modified, very breathable, fake mask that barely touches my face) and after a second 84 minute period the silvery aura faded (I did some stuff where the kids wrote on the whiteboard, so I could avoid looking at a screen) and even writing this sentence is hurting my eyes a bit so I'm going to end it here.
Tragedy of the Viscid Variety
It's the end of an era, a cataclysmically tragic truncation of the most royal jelly . . . Birnn Chocolate-- our delicious town chocolate factory, a Highland Park institution-- no longer makes raspberry jellies-- the only raspberry jellies worth eating (because the jelly is homemade, firm and not that sweet) and they are discontinued due to lack of demand, and judging by the rather unconcerned reaction of old lady Birnn to my horror and lamentation at the loss of the jellies, I don't think they are coming back any time soon.
Don't Think About This . . .
If all the money spent on lobbying and campaign finance actually went toward infrastructure and scientific progress, we'd be living in an equally distributed sci-fi future.
Required Listening (Whether You Go Online or Not)
Whether or not you care for Joe Rogan-- and I love the guy, I think he's smart and curious and funny and knows how to let people talk-- but that doesn't matter, you need to listen to episode #1736 with Tristan Harris (of The Social Dilemma) and Daniel Schmacktenberger . . . and it doesn't matter if you go on social media like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, or whether-- like me-- the extent of your social media consumption is two blogs . . . here are some of the things they discuss:
the arms war between apps and beautification filters . . . if one app implements a filter then other apps have to follow;
the fact that China and Russia don't have to wage a ground war or an air war or a nuclear war, because they are stalling our progress from within, by creating polarization and political cynicism and obstructionism and they are doing it with troll farms-- the top fifteen Christian sites are troll farms, spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation and radicalizing folks-- and you don't even have to invite them on Facebook, if they invite you, then you will see their stuff in your feed;
this could even lead to stochastic terrorism . . . and awesome term that could be a punk band name-- it's really hard to get one particular person to commit an act of terrorism-- say Lee Harvey Oswald-- but it's easy to flood a country of 330 million with incendiary misinformation and eventually produce a Kyle Rittenhouse or whoever else, just through chucking shit at the dartboard and hoping some of it hits;
there tend to be two huge gutters that the bowling bowl of the internet is heading towards-- Orwellian autocratic dystopia and chaotic Huxleyian democratic catastrophe . . . Taiwan might be some middle ground;
China regulates its internet MUCH more than we do-- social media for those under 14 shuts down from 10 PM to 6 AM, if you game too long you will receive a reminder to get up, the scroll is not infinite, the TikTok algorithm promotes engineering, etcetera;
the fact that the CCP is providing the programming for American youth is scary . . .
according to Harris and Schmacktenberger, the problem is that we have "paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology" and they think the government needs to step in because the corporations have direct access to democracy, unlike an oil company that has to at least go through lobbyists;
Rogan believes the government isn't invested enough and it will have to come from individuals educating themselves and inoculating themselves against the evils of these platforms-- but he fully admits that unhappy people seek dopamine and purpose on the internet . . .
Harris wants to measure the success of a country not through GDP-- which goes up during times of addiction and war-- but through LACK of addiction;
Harris and Schmacktenberger are trying to imagine a new internet that nudges us in other directions than social media and the hyper stimulus for unreal dating, info, debate, gaming, connection;Sometimes a Cookie Is More Than a Cookie
After I ate lunch last Saturday, while my wife was on the phone in the basement, I had a hankering for something sweet and I remembered that last week there was some kind of half-eaten chocolatey cookie thing in her lunch cooler-- I had sampled it and it was pretty good-- and I checked her bag and it was still there and I didn't want to interrupt her phone call (and I was hungry) so I ate it (pretty much inhaled it) and then I took a nap . . . and at some point during my nap, my wife woke me up and asked "Did you eat the cookie in my lunch bag?" and I confirmed this and she got pretty upset-- I wasn't sure why-- but I fell back to sleep . . . and when I woke up, she told me that this was a special cookie that her co-teacher had brought back from DisneyWorld for her-- that you had to wait a very long time at some gothic bakery named Gideon's Bakehouse and she had been eating a little bit of each day . . . and when she got off the phone, her plan was to relax and have some tea and eat the remainder of this special cookie-- everyone else in the house was napping and she was trying to not get angry when everyone else was relaxing when there was shit to get done, so she was going to try to relax herself but I had ruined it by selfishly eating her cookie-- I violated her personal space, went into her lunch cooler, didn't ask permission, and I had eaten all her potato chips the day before, etcetera . . . and so I apologized-- but qualified my apology by saying that if I had known how important this cookie was to her, I wouldn't have eaten (but also pointing out that no cookie should have this kind of value) and then Catherine, Alex and I were headed to go see Dune at the Rutgers Theater . . which isn't as fun to watch when your wife is mad at you-- and Alex and I were of the same mindset: it's just a cookie! and so we watched Dune-- which is a decent movie but doesn't really capture the heat and grit and dust of the desert . . . it's more Star Wars than Fury Road-- and then when we got home, Ian was up in his bed and he had been eating candy in his bed and throwing the wrappers and empty boxes under his bed-- as he is wont to do-- and this is a fineable offense for him, because it's gross and unhealthy and attracts mice-- and I got mad at him for doing this again-- and because he was hoarding a giant bag of Twix in his room-- and then Catherine got mad at me for getting mad at him because she said the reason he hoards candy in his room is that if it's downstairs, I'll eat it-- because eat everything, without regard for the owner (which is kind of true) and so I started making some rules about how no one is allowed to bring more than one serving of candy into the house-- because I can't control myself and everyone was pissed off at me and I was pissed off at everyone and I was sick of being treated like some kind of monster because I ate a cookie and then next morning I took the dog for a walk and then when I got back Catherine wanted to talk about what happened and I made a rash decision-- I took back my apology for eating the cookie! and this was very stupid but I wasn't really thinking clearly but I said that it had been in her cooler since last week and she hadn't told me the value, etc. etc. and there was more arguing but then I realized that I was wrong-- although I did get Catherine to admit ten percent guilt in the altercation-- she should have told me about the cookie and she shouldn't have overreacted so much and I made a special shelf in the cupboard for Catherine and Ian's food-- a shelf I'm really going to try not to violate-- and I got her a special cupcake at the special cupcake store that was just for (and I even waited in line . . . about a minute) and I also assured her that the cookie, from what I could remember, didn't even taste that good (and I guess this kind of shit is happening the world over because my boss Jess came in with a similar story-- she has two young kids-- and she brought home two cookies, one for each of them, but her husband ate one without asking and so she had to split the other cookie for her children) and it seems there are two kinds fo people-- people like me and Alex, who don't really treat there possessions all that possessively-- and people like Ian and my wife, who want their stuff and think people shouldn't steal and eat it (and those two are ore vengeful . . . Catherine made a batch of cookies and she put a post-it on it doling out the amounts-- Alex, Ian and Catherine got eight each but I only got three).
That's Good Stuff
I've been grading Rutgers essays all week and procrastinating on posting my good content, but Larry David hasn't been holding back his best stuff: episode 4 of the new season (11) may be one of the best ever . . . check out the"The Watermelon" as soon as possible.
Stacey = Sherlock
It's always an exciting school day when you've got to solve a plagiarism case-- and Stacey and I did it in a period . . . she was lucky enough to get a full confession, which exonerated my student (it seems her paper was stolen and then altered slightly, sentence-by-sentence . . . but the transformation was not enough to fool Turnitin).
77 Days and Counting
Countdown City-- the second book in Ben Winters' Last Policeman trilogy-- is a little less of a procedural mystery novel and a little more of an apocalypse novel . . . which is fitting because now the asteroid Maia is only 77 days out and more and more people are losing their shit; I was completely satisfied with the tipping of the scales . . . Hank Palace is still on the case-- though the case is weird and obtuse and he's not even on the police force any longer (because they've disbanded all the divisions except street police . . .) but things are getting grim and there are larger concerns, conspiratorial concerns and survival concerns and I'm very excited to read the finale in the trilogy, and I've got no clue where it will go.
Ten Years of Scary Stories!
Another excellent Scary Story Contest last night, the tenth one . . . so the prompt was "Ten Years Later" . . . Stacy and I had to cut A LOT of words on Friday-- the deadline day-- in order to get it under the limit (2000) and though we didn't win, I'm very proud of how we pared down our piece, which was a 2030 Ten Year Reunion of the Class of Covid . . . and no one wanted to go, aside for murderous insane reasons and thinks got very very ugly (I was especially proud of my VR idea . . . someone had downloaded everyone's high school photos so everyone wore VR goggles and you appeared as you did in high school, which was cool-- aside from the fat girl with acne who lost a bunch of weight and kicked the drugs and sugar that were giving her skin trouble-- she was really angry that everyone was seeing the high school version of herself instead of the big reveal) and while our story got a lot of laughs, it was not the winner-- Cunningham won again, this time with a photorealistically described tale of a pair of hoarders, one of whom was dead and the other was arguing with the skeleton over the same stupid shit for ten years; I read Liz Soder's tale of a chimp named Garbo who led an absoutely inhuamne life in a lab-- and she came in second; and there was also a sell your soul to a healer/preacher/devil tale by Mooney; a tightly plotted Goonies style international mystery by Eric and a disturbing tale of molestation and revenge by Liz . . . I'm always impressed by how excellent the stories are and we've all gotten really good at plotting and developing under the 2000 word limit . . . and it's really a treat to get your story read aloud by a new reader . . . so thanks to the Soders for hosting, and for all who wrote and all who attended . . . it really is one of the best social events of the year.
I Like to READ Stories
Tomorrow is the 10th Annual Scary Story Contest and Stacey and I are still way over the word limit on our story and we are giving up and going to bed . . . we will finish this thing on the clock during school tomorrow-- and thus be professionally paid writers-- and I can't wait to get upstairs into bed and read my professionally written novel Countdown City . . . because I truly enjoy reading fiction far more than I enjoy writing it, and this stupid contest makes me appreciate the time, energy, logic, revision, editing, and passion that goes into writing a great book.
Rage, rage! Against the dying of the light!
My wife has banned me from ranting about Daylight Saving Time to her, so I'll do it here instead: New Jersey is experiencing the finest fall weather possible-- mid-60s and sunny and dry-- and this lovely sunlight has been stolen . . .. stolen! . . . by these bureaucratic time manipulators who need to justify their job by changing the clocks . . . I could be enjoying several hours of this beautiful weather after school lets out but because we decided to "fall back," now it gets dark at 4:30 PM . . . why? why? why not just leave the clocks on Daylight Saving Time, use lights in the morning, and enjoy tennis, hiking, dog-walking, etc. in the evening . . . this seems like a no-brainer-- plus we avoid the shitty feeling of feeling "off" because the clocks have been moved . . . I just don't get it.
The Midnight Library
I'm not sure if I accept the Borgesian premise of Matt Haig's novel The Midnight Library . . . but I'm also not sure if Nora the narrator-- or Matt Haig himself-- accepts the premise either . . . but the adventure of parallel universes and the many, many, many possible lives of Nora-- the rock star lives and the depressive lives and the addicted lives and the successful lives, the jobless lives and the Arctic lives, heaps and heaps of lives . . . and perhaps this is how the forking paths of time branch, but I think things might tend a bit more towards the mean-- I could be wrong of course, especially seeing the way my best friend and I met our wives (in the middle of the road in New Brunswick, after the bars emptied out) and understanding my life might be completely different if that moment didn't occur . . . but it's worth getting to the end and seeing how things resolve-- because maybe all these possible lives aren't that important anyway.
New Jersey . . . It's Dense
Soccer season is over . . . tragically . . . so Catherine and I went on an adventure today in our newly detailed (and dry) Mazda . . . lots of contrast in a small area:
1) we went to the Jersey Shore Outlets and I bought some golf shirts at the Under Armour outlet because they gave an additional 40% off to frontline workers-- including teachers!-- and a pair of running shoes at Saucony . . . most places are giving big discounts to veterans, teachers, hospital workers, etc . . . wild
2) then we hiked around the Manasquan Reservoir-- quickly-- because we didn't have the kids or the dog;
Sports (Can Be) Extra
Yesterday we played Middlesex in the second round of the state tournament-- they are the two seed and possibly the best team in the section-- they have two huge center backs and the best goalie in the county-- athletically, skill-wise, and in fashion-- and a number of skilled and physical players-- but we only lost 2-1 to them last time (and my son pulled his quad in that game and was out for two weeks) but yesterday we were playing them on their hilly grass field so it was going to be an ugly game-- they like to pack it back and play over the top, but they can also knock the ball around-- the first half we avoided a couple of scary opportunities and we had a couple of nice shots, which their goalie snagged, and so it was 0-0 into the second half . . . my son Alex went in at left-back and a few minutes later someone collided with him and kneed him in his bad quad and he had to be taken out of the game and our only other experienced defensive sub had a midl concussion, so we were down to no subs that could really deal with this level of physicality but we hung on and scored a nice goal fifteen minutes into the second half, to go up 1-0 . . . our big center back has been playing striker (Luke) and he knocked it over to Tekoa, who finished low and away on the super-keeper . . . everyone mobbed Tekoa-- I was so excited, I slipped and fell on the wet grass-- it was mayhem . . . and then, a few minutes later, the head ref decided the game with an absolutely abominable call . . . the ball was rolling into the side of the box and out big striker Luke was trotting after it and the goalie called it and came at it from an angle and he did something very clever: he scooped up the ball and then leapt forward into Luke-- so he initiated the contact (which was very mild) and the ref saw it differently and gave Luke a yellow card . . . it was his second yellow-- so he got sent off and we had to play with ten men-- and we were still generating chances-- our most skilled players, Robin and Matt, were connecting and getting shots off but to no avail and then the inevtiable happened . . . Middlesex scored on a bouncy shot to the corner from outside the eighteen and we were headed to overtime . . . Golden Goal . . . and we were playing with ten men and without our best defender/striker and a few minutes in, on a long free-kick, one of our defenders got thrown to the ground and three big guys got goal side and one of them scored on a header . . . a tough tough loss-- the kids were stunned, they sat in silence on the bench for fifteen minutes and it was an emotional bus-ride home . . ., especially for the seniors and the varsity coach; andf this would be the last away game bus ride I would take with these guys and my older son (aside from tennis season!) and they were truly a great crew to coach and while it was a hard way to go out, at least it was epic and against the best team in the section, but it was an emotional rollercoaster, yikes . . . and while we got knocked out this year, we all fondly remember our undefeated middle school season back in the day . . . sports, sports, sports . . . they're something else.
Valentine Street Massacre
This morning, my son and I absolutely annihilated a couple hundred frost-bitten lanternflies that adhered to the two small maple trees in the front of our house; I would post a picture but the carnage was too gross (and there were some giant wasps feeding on the carcasses . . . so we beat a hasty retreat once we were done with the squishing).
I Should Have Been a Bear
The cool weather is finally here (and wow did I eat a lot today . . . I guess my body is getting ready to hibernate).
Ritickulous
I thought it was cold enough to go for a walk with the dog at Rutgers Gardens this morning-- it was in the 40s-- but apparently the ticks were also enjoying the fall weather . . . one managed to get lost in my stomach hair and the other was on the outside of my sweatpants, making a parasitic bloodsucking beeline for some exposed flesh-- how far north do I have to go to avoid these critters?
The Last Policeman
The Last Policeman, a sci-fi/detective novel by Ben H. Winters, is the literary equivalent of David Bowie's impending-- but not too imminent-- apocalypse song "Five Years" . . . in The Last Policeman, a large asteroid will hit earth in six months time, most likely resulting in the end of civilization, but until then there are murders to solve and existential feelings to confront; the story-- like the Bowie song-- is a masterpiece of the mundane confronting the eschatological . . . but there's no big rush, yet (although plenty of folks are committing suicide or going Bucket List or taking early retirement or settling into a life of drugs and alcohol or embracing conspiracy theories, etc. but this is more background to the matters at hand: a murder and a cop who still believes he has a purpose).
The Water Paradox
Very Dark Shadows
Carol O'Connor's second book in the Mallory series, The Man Who Cast Two Shadows, dwells in darkness: the dark arts, Mallory's grim childhood, coerced abortion, feigned blindness, a litany of the worst of human behavior, and the possibility of deep deception at all levels of relationships, imagery, and motivation . . . but there is a kitty cat!
Whew . . .
When I got in my car yesterday after school, I thought I saw a giant spider on the driver-side floor mat, so I stomped it to death-- pretty scary-- but upon closer inspection, it was just a big wasp-- so I was very relieved.
Gladwell Does It Again . . .
I didn't think I was interested in the new Malcolm Gladwell book The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War until my friend Cunningham recommended it and i started reading it-- and then I was like: how does this guy do it?-- Gladwell claims he's not the greatest writer, but he's the greatest rewriter, and it shows-- he really knows how to take his material and revise it into something perfectly organized, juxtaposed and memorable-- in this one it's the battle of a moral idea in WWII-- let's bomb precisely so we can take out important wartime industries and avoid civilian casualties-- and a pragmatic approach to war: the shorter the duration the better it is for all nations involved . . . and you know what happened: the firebombing of Tokyo and the nuclear bombs Little Boy and Fat Man-- Curtis LeMay's barbaric practicality won out over General Haywood Hansell's faith in the accuracy of the Norden bombsight . . . the book is just the right length for a history book (I couldn't make it through Thomas Asbridge's definitive history of the crusades, though it's an excellent book, because it's just too damn long) and it lays bare the human error in tactics, strategy, and information during wartime . . . for a longer version of this, read Mark Bowden's book Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam . . . the moral of the story is, you had to be there, you had to be brave, you had to be flexible, and you might as well throw out all your convictions because you're involved in humanity's stupidest method of solving national problems.
The Good, The Bad and the Very Damp
I can't even keep track of all this stuff-- yesterday we played Rahway in soccer and had a nice 4-3 win; my older son didn't play because he was injured but my younger son got some minutes because the team is banged up and apparently he played great at the end of the game, won some headers, and threaded a through ball to get the game-winning assist-- but I had to attend the all-county selection meeting as a proxy so I missed the second half of the game . . . and when I drove home at 9:30 PM there was lots of lightning from the impending storm, which I had discussed throughout the day with my children-- but apparently this didn't sink into my older son's brain-- because when he was getting White Rose fries he opened the sunroof of my wife's newish Mazda CX-5-- which we purchased recently because my son totalled our Honda CR-V at the start of the summer-- and my son did not close the sunroof when he got home and this was the wrong night to not close the sunroof, because we had a torrential rainstorm-- whcich we all discussed and prepared for-- so this was a major mental error (unlike his first accident in the rain, which was more of a physical error) and so this afternoon we've been shop-vaccing the car and running a dehumidifier inside and this is on top of the fact that he spilled a bunch of epoxy rocket glue inside the minivan, so it smells like a distillery . . . so basically my son is destroying all our cars.
Wild Weekend
Quite a weekend in our house . . . no internet Friday night (the horror!) because a wire fell and then Homecoming on Saturday-- so our boys got dressed and went to a dance, while I cruised down to DC and met my rugby buddies and-- after many pints of Guinness at the newly gentrified Wharf area of the District, we went to see the New Zealand All Blacks do the haka and dismantle the US Eagles in 15 v 15 full side play . . . the final score was 104 to 14 and it was actually kind of wonderful to watch, the overlaps, the quick decision making, the great runs, the touch on the pop-kicks, etc. and then some tequila was consumed and things got hazy . . . but I'm back home and alive to tell the tale.
