Bloggers Unite!
John McCain may have thought he was being cute with a bunch of his constituents, but when he said, "Now we've got the cables, talk radio, the bloggers-- I HATE the bloggers," and this comment was followed by loud laughter from the crowd-- but that's the moment he lost my vote . . . yes, this was going to be the presidential election that I finally planned to participate in-- to get out and vote, to cast my ballot, to chime in politically, to pull the lever for democracy, but now I might just sit at home and blog about what a stupid comment that was, alienating the most intelligent, creative, energetic, egalitarian cutting-edge, diligent, gritty, inventive, sincere, down-to-earth and timely segment of the media-- the bloggers!-- who I now hope will go jihad on his ass and remind everyone that McCain once wanted to rid the country of the corn and ethanol subsidies but has now changed his tune, and I hope they will dig up all that great blogging scuttlebutt and hearsay and rumor and fact and spread it across the internet in a tsunami of searchable text that will wash away the slightly tech-savvy septuagenarians who recognized the word "blogger" as something liberal and elitist and having to do with computers and therefore deserving derision, along with the McCain campaign itself!
Camping Trip Gone Sideways (We Disgorge at Lake George)
Some of the things that happened on our first camping trip with the boys:
1) the first night at the site, Alex christened our new tent with vomit, and then he continued to vomit all night, so we didn't really sleep;
2) Alex recovered the next day, and so we thought maybe he vomited because he was drinking non-potable water out of his hands-- which were covered with ashes from the firepit;
3) I got everyone lost on the way to a hike along Lake George-- there are TWO route nines-- but Dom and Michell's GPS saved the day;
4) I had to carry Ian nearly every step of an "easy" 3.5-mile hike;
5) we saw a lot of amphibians: giant tadpoles, toads, tiny frogs, and a red eft;
6) we started an insurrection at a beach where the lifeguard was late, so that when he arrived, everyone was in the water
6.9) Alex took a shot to the eye from one of those old-school self-push playground merry-go-rounds (most of which have been removed because they're so dangerous-- I haven't seen one in twenty years)
7) we lost the 175-dollar flip-out key to my parent's new car, which they lent us for the trip, and spent hours searching for it, and even went so far as to have my father FedEX a spare before we found it in a place that I had only gave a perfunctory glance, but luckily I never vehemently blamed Catherine during the search, though she is usually the one to lose things
8) we left a day early because Catherine, Ian, and I all contracted the stomach bug that Alex had, and we all spent the night and morning throwing up and running to the bathroom-- which is really hard to do when you're sleeping in a tent, so we packed the car in the morning-- with much help because we were too weak to lift and shake the tarps-- and Ian was wandering around the camp-site in a daze, occasionally dry heaving, but luckily, he only had to use the bucket once in the car, and he slept for the bulk of the four hour ride, which was so eternal for Catherine and I that we switched driver/navigator roles four time, but we made it home in once piece and everyone was asleep before 7:30 (so this is ACTUALLY being posted at 5:30 AM, unlike the past few days, which were automatically posted while I was away, which I think is really cool-- I am always providing the best sentence content on the web-- but others think this is a little sketchy, but I didn't want to bring my lap-top on a camping trip, though I think there was WiFi, which is pretty ridiculous, but perhaps on the next trip I will bring it, because this trip I scorned everyone's air-mattresses and refused to sleep on Catherine's as a matter of principle, it makes the tent cluttered and the kids use it as a moon bounce, but then once I contracted the flu, sleeping on the cheap Thermarest pad made every part of my body sore, so I got my just desserts).
The Animal That Needs Rescuing is Me
My four-year-old son Alex frequently talks about moving to the rainforest so he can rescue animals-- like his hero, Diego-- but what he doesn't realize, is that in the summer in central New Jersey, the rainforest moves to you and the animal that needs rescuing is me, from the midges and the mosquitoes (maybe I should stop complaining and turn on the air conditioning).
The Fountain of Youth Contains Grape Juice and Vinegar?
I play soccer every Sunday, and my body hurts when I start and my body hurts when I finish, but there's a twenty-minute window when I feel young again, but that twenty minutes cost me-- I'm sore for a few days after I play-- and the effects are both physical (I limp on my left ankle) and mental (kind of like Charlie in "Flowers for Algernon," it makes me remember that I was once young and fast and limber, but now I'm headed in the other direction and, sadly, I realize it) unless, and I still haven't tried it yet, unless the home remedy I just learned about is truly a fountain of youth . . . the recipe is one part apple cider vinegar to four parts juice (grape and apple) and you drink a few sips of it, chilled, every morning and then you're never sore again.
Toddler Magic
My son Alex did his first magic trick the other day-- he took a penny, showed it to me, and then placed it behind his back and asked me to guess which hand it was in; I guessed his right hand, but he opened his palm and it wasn't there, and then I said, "Okay it's in your left hand"-- and then I heard the sound of a coin falling onto the wood floor-- and then he opened his left hand . . . and it was empty: magic!
Raise the Bar With Alcohol
War and People
We watched Persepolis last night (if you haven't read the graphic novel, now you don't need to-- someone animated it for you!) and I finished Willa Cather's One of Ours this morning; both works portray war as an awful thing, so they have that in common, but also, in both works, the war doesn't so much as change the main character as just show him or her (respectively Marjane Satrapi and Claude Wheeler) in a clearer light-- so I recommend both not as grim, cautionary tales, but more as character studies: they both have a light touch.
The Sea Breeze Doesn't Make It to Spotswood
Yesterday at the beach there was a cool enough breeze off the ocean that when you got out from swimming, it was downright chilly, and even when we got into the car (which was parked in the sun) the thermometer only registered 81F, but on the ride home on Route 18 it slowly and steadily rose, and a mere thirty-five miles later-- at the Spotswood exit-- the temperature had climbed to 95F: when we got out of the car, it felt more like disembarking from an airplane after taking a winter flight to somewhere tropical (and meeting Celine, fresh from Turkey, accentuated the feeling that we were in another country, and she dredged up many fond memories of haggling with cab-drivers in meter-less cabs).
You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry
King of Kong joins Hoosiers, Billy Elliot and Rescue Dawn as movies that have gotten me choked up and teary eyed-- but King of Kong (a documentary about a rivalry between world class Donkey King players) is almost too archetypal to be real, and I wonder how they got such great footage of Billy Mitchell-- the Darth Vader of the film-- because he came off as so enigmatic and secretive . . . I hope I'm not being manipulated by the film, because that wouldn't make me weepy, it would make me angry . . . very angry . . . and I'm trying to control my temper, though that's hard during the summer, since I spend all day with my kids-- and the only thing they respond to is anger-- but I'm trying to be a good model for my son Alex, who now talks about his anger in the third person-- e.g. this morning, after Ian destroyed his Lego spaceship Alex said, "I'm getting my anger, I think in a second I'm going to have my anger, my anger is coming" and then, as he predicted, it did.
The Sort is Happening and It Is Big
I can't put down this new book by reporter Bill Bishop called The Big Sort; the premise is that Americans are agglomerating into micro-geographical regions of similar people-- mainly because so many Americans have moved in the past thirty years and everyone realizes how important and controllable this choice is, but this exacerbates the division between Democrats and Republicans because there's a sort of feedback loop when you only interact with people of your own mind-set . . . and that whole idea that there are swing voters out there to be persuaded, that's a myth, there are almost no swing voters-- and actually, people's choices aren't changing the party-lines, the party lines are changing people's choices to be more in line with the party, because it's easier to conform to a group (which is now more homogeneous than ever) and instead of engaging in discourse and debate with media and people different than you-- as was much more the case in 1976, when statistics show that you were more likely to switch parties, live in a mixed party neighborhood, have people in your church of mixed party, etc-- instead your church is probably primarily of your political affiliation (and is the most accurate prediction of what party you are-- if you believe the Bible is the undisputed Word of God, then you are a probably Republican)-- and this just scratches the surface of the book . . . I read 250 pages last night because my parents took the kids, so it was a lot to digest, but one fact I remember is that if you belong to a mail-order movie rental club (like Netflix) you are probably a Democrat.
Plenty of Action After the Movie
The first half of Wall-E rivals films like Modern Times, Brazil, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (which it parodies in the second half) for pure aesthetic entertainment and memorable imagery, and though it has a message for the kids and a tacked on happy ending, the movie is really just about looking at the screen-- bring the kids (if you want to answer a thousand questions, especially if you're with my son, Alex, who has inherited my penchant for talking, questioning, commenting, editorializing, and crying in the movie theater) or, even better, leave them home (and maybe the wife too-- Catherine jammed her ankle yesterday, running after Alex, who was riding his big-wheel staright into the road, and when she tried to get up after the movie was over, she couldn't walk and it was dark, of course, and we were meeting my parents next door at Bertucci's but as she hobbled out of the theater it started down-pouring, but we couldn't run for the car because she couldn't run so we got soaked and when we were sorting things out in front of the restaurant, Ian, vigilant about his big-boy underwear, pulled his pants down and showed the restaurant and parking lot some full frontal nudity and I had to scoop him up and run inside to the bathroom, leaving my crippled wife in the down-pour with Alex).
Gust Avrakotos' War?
Despite Tom Hanks (who is a tool, and always plays himself) and Julia Roberts (who is weird looking and affected and always plays herself), Charlie Wilson's War is a good movie . . . fast-paced, well-told, and entertaining: a cross between Charlie's Angels and Syriana; typically, Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the show, but the original and more appropriate title-- Gust Avrakotos' War -- doesn't roll off the tongue very well.
And Groundhogs Will Try That Long Preserved Virginity
Yesterday, on the drive home from the beach, Catherine and I saw something neither of us had ever seen before: a fat groundhog perched atop a tombstone; this is nothing like seeing a vulture or an asp or raven perched on a tombstone . . . that's ominous, of course, but this tableau made death and decay seem kind of cute.
Willa Cather Knows Electric Cars?
I'm reading Willa Cather's One of Ours-- which was published in 1922-- and without any fanfare, in a line of description about the town miller's wife, Cather wrote "she dressed well, came to town often in her electric car, and was always ready to work for the church or public library"-- which makes me wonder . . . if an electric car was a commonplace item in turn of the century Nebraska, then: who killed it?
Dave Wrote This Sometime or Other
I want to assure everyone (especially super-fans Squirrel and Whitney) that these sentences are as fresh as if they were just plucked from the salty heart of the ocean-- and even when they are flash-frozen, the are just as tasty and delicious (and if this doesn't make much sense, it's because I'm nursing a hang-over and the after-effects of eating a Fat Dad at 2 AM last night).
Dave Exorcises Junk Food Demons (and Sinks the Shot)
Yesterday, there was a giant spread of junk food in the English office, and as usual, I was drawn to the worst thing on the table-- a box of glazed mini-crullers-- but just as I was about to put the donut in my mouth, some other impulse took hold--DEMONS OUT!-- and I whipped the box of mini-donuts as hard as I could across the room at the little metal trashcan and-- to the surprise of the people in the room-- it went right in . . . and I think my relationship with junk food will be different now: I have conquered the urge to be a glutton, and my reward is that I am now unerringly accurate (although two periods later I did eat six mini-muffins, and I cut each one in half so that I could have double the surfaces to coat with butter).
Flattery + Humor = Parody
Someone drew the notable events of the year on the message board in the English office, and the parody of my blog went like this: "So I went to the Amish market to buy some meat and we contracted cholera and I decided to write a song about it."
I Coin A Word: Tupperawareness
Time to get all sniglety: some people possess a special ability to precisely gauge which plastic container is the right size to store the leftovers from dinner -- and I call this ability to accurately choose the correct container "tupperawareness" and while I do not possess this ability, (not by a long-shot) I am interested in studying people who do: I would like to learn their secret.
Dave Gets a Little Smarter
Thirty eight years living on this planet, and still so much to learn-- in the last two weeks I learned three things:
1) there are flying squirrels indigenous to New Jersey;
2) St. Augustine (not Jamestown!) is America's oldest permanent European settlement,;
3) that funny looking trestle sticking out into Farrington Lake over by Sir John's Restaurant is not the remnants of an old train line . . . it was a trolley.
Fuck You, BB&T Banking
A proud moment: we received a post-card from BB&T Banking saying that we have only one more car payment on the Subaru . . . BUT if we are using "autodraft" then the final payment will not be drafted from our account-- we will have to initiate payment by mailing a check AND if it's not mailed on time then late fees will be assessed BUT there was no phone number or address specified on the postcard (nor was there a reason why they wouldn't "autodraft" the last payment) and so after some irate phone-calling-- where no reason was given by the customer service representative as to why BB&T refuses to "autodraft" the last payment, we got the information we needed-- but because of this underhanded and, quite frankly, despicable attempt by BB&T to incur late fees on their loyal and punctilious customers, I am calling for a jihad on all BB&T employees and products-- yella!
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