Infinite Rest

It's sick, but I've had David Foster Wallace's lengthy tour de force novel Infinite Jest lying around my house for years and years, and I've started it once or twice, but it's daunting, both in style and size (1000 pages plus end notes) but I've become more motivated to read it since he committed suicide last year-- I'm not sure why, but that's the fact-- and now I'm 43% of the way through (easy to compute because it's out of a 1000 pages) and once you get into the groove, kind of like Gravity's Rainbow, the book is a lot of fun: I just finished the tale of Eric Clipperton, the junior tennis player who played all his matches with a Glock 9mm pressed to his temple and threatened immediate suicide if he ever lost a match . . . the kids always let him win.

8/12/2009

Anyone who possesses male genitals might want to stop reading now . . . last week my son Alex was climbing a tree and he learned a hard lesson when both his feet slipped at the same time, and he fell, crotch first, onto a rough branch and then slid down it-- he bruised the tip of his member, bruised it purple, the sight of it nearly made me pass out, but the doctor said as long as he could urinate, it was fine . . . and this incident reminded me of something that happened to me a few weeks ago that was so painful and embarrassing that I guess I repressed it-- because I didn't tell my wife or write a sentence about it, but describing what happened to my son reminded me: I was in my boxers in the bedroom and I leaned over the dresser to look at something on my face in the mirror, and a drawer was slightly open, and this drawer was groin height, and the tip of my member must have slipped out of the fold in my boxers and into the slightly open drawer, and when I leaned in to look at the mirror, I shut the drawer on the tip of my member, and it really hurt and made a little bruise-- and it makes me wonder about two things . . . one, is this punishment for vanity and two, were Member's Only jackets really intended only for those who possessed a member?

Nothing Cheaper Than FREE

Chris Anderson-- chief editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail-- has written a new book called Free: the Future of a Radical Price; it's about how the cost of many products and ideas is essentially moving towards zero, and that the most effective way to deal with this is to round down-- think Facebook, Google, pirated music Ryanair, drinks at Casino's, naked women at strip clubs, Linux, many web applications, and often, even commodities once they become overly abundant-- and not charge people at all, and then make your money in other ways; this interests me because I write this blog for free, of course, and I'm also often hard at "work" making digital music, which I also distribute for free . . . I do it it for the fame (pretty minor) and because it's fun to have a creative outlet that connects people, but I'm also driving the price down of entertainment people pay for, because people have limited time and there is pretty much an unlimited amount of entertainment, so if you're choosing to read this sentence or listen to a Greasetruck song rather than read or watch or listen to something you have to pay for, essentially you are making those people figure out how to compete with FREE, and the only way to compete with FREE is FREE, and make your money elsewhere . . . e.g. you're famous and everyone pirates your music, so you don't make it there, but you can sell out venues that you never could because you're music has become so popular, the trick is to offer FREE product in a market that has been driven down to FREE and then figure out how to make your money elsewhere-- and this sentence has gone on too long, but you can read Anderson's book for FREE on-line, although I recommend doing what I did-- taking it out for FREE from the library (and, of course, FREE isn't always completely free, when you take a book out of the library, it has been paid for by tax dollars, but again, when you divide the price of the book by the number of tax dollars paid by East Brunswick residents to run the library, it's close enough to FREE that our brain just rounds down to zero, and Anderson, who has experience as an economist and a physicist as well as a writer, explains all this much more coherently than me . . . and he's not constrained by a single sentence).

8/11/2009

There comes a time, when you are older and grayer and your metabolism has slowed, that you need to look in the mirror and level with yourself . . . you need to take a deep breath and say: "I need to shell out some cash for a bigger skim board, as the one I have is too small."

8/10/2009

The six most eccentric pitching wind-ups: 1) Luis Tiant 2) Dan Quisenberry 3) Masatoshi Ishikawa's pitching robot 4) J.R. Richard 5) Hideo Nomo 6) Rudy Stein.

8/9/2009

Sometimes, when I'm on the computer and I don't get the anti-bot code correct (that distorted word puzzle that you need to enter into the box in order to prove you're human-- also known as a "captcha") I wonder if I am a replicant.

8/8/2009

You know you had a few too many the night before when you go to pour a cup of fresh brewed coffee and it's way too weak-- in fact, it's completely clear, because you ground the beans, but never transferred them from the little grinder into the coffee machine . . . and so, in essence, you made yourself a nice steaming container of hot water.

8/7/2009 Live from Sea Isle City

Some bad band names: 1) tonight in Sea Isle City at the Ocean Drive Bar (Fun Food and Music), "Burnt Sienna" is playing-- I suppose their name is in the same genre as Maroon 5, The White Stripes, The Black Keys, Goldfinger, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Green Day, Deep Purple, Blue Oyster Cult, Silverchair, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Black Crowes, Yellowcard, etc-- but I think they went for too obscure a shade 2) the other night at the Springfield Inn, Mike LeCompt opened with "Don't Pull Your Love," a groovy song from the seventies by a band that no one could properly name, and so I looked it up . . . and I can see why a one-hit wonder band who knew they were going to be a one-hit wonder band would want every member to get his or her due-- but it's not like they could predict the future, although with the name they chose they pretty much insured their future, but still, you'd think that the band would be more optimistic and at least try to come up with something catchier than Hamilton, Joe Frank, Reynolds & Reynolds (and though the second Reynolds isn't included on the youtube video, it is included on the Itunes MP3 version, which my cousin happened to have on his Ipod).

8/6/2009

Alex has discovered the artifice of modern art, and while he claims that his younger brother Ian draws "real things," he now only works in the realm of the "abstract"-- and it's my fault for teaching him the word-- so while his vocabulary is increasing , his art skills are regressing toward the primitive (and he's quite happy about it).

8/5/2009 Live from Sea Isle City

Some things you don't see every day: 1) two dudes running at a decent clip down the beach, each dude juggling three balls as he runs-- and occasionally, every three steps or so, one dude flips a ball to the other and the other dude does the same, so there is a mid-air juggling exchange, and this occurs without any break in their collective strides, which is quite impressive . . . but I'm not sure if this was flamboyantly gay behavior (not that there's anything wrong with that) or just a couple of circus clowns trying to keep fit 2) a sweaty mesomorphic and hirsute Italian man (yours truly) decides that he wants to swim after his run on the beach, to get near some dolphins, and he decides the beach is deserted enough that he can strip off his shorts and swim in his spandex . . . this was definitely flamboyant behavior 3) the same sweaty hairy man (but with his shorts back on, thank God, but shirtless) walks into the wrong condo unit because he's tired and thought he climbed three flights of stairs when it was only two, sees someone much younger than his wife on the couch, says "Sorry" and quickly retreats.

8/4/2009

Cheers to the chatty old optometrist who gave me an eye exam last week-- when I told him I hadn't gotten new lenses in eight years, and that I had gotten the lenses in Damascus, he said, without missing a beat, "Did the son check your eyes?"-- which is a reference to the fact that Hafez Assad's son, Bashar, who took over the job of supreme honcho just as we arrived in Syria, was originally trained as an ophthalmologist; now perhaps I shouldn't be so impressed, because maybe all optometrists know this little tidbit, as Bashar Assad may be the only oppressive dictator who was first trained in optical medicine, but still, this guy delivered the line so effortlessly (and he was pretty damn old!) that it was almost as if he had been waiting all these years for someone to mention Syria and optometry in the same sentence (this can't be typical conversation, right?) and so I am giving him the coveted Sentence of Dave Off-Handed Quip by Someone You'd Never Expect to Make a Joke Award, which has previously been awarded to no one, because most of the stuff people say (myself included) is drivel.

Live Update from Sea Isle City

Up until 2:30 last night watching the greatest cover band in the universe, fronted by Mike LeCompt, play their usual summer Sunday gig at the Springfield Inn: they played too many songs to list-- Beatles, Stones, The Who (Baba O'Riley, Pinball Wizard, Love Reign Over Me, Behind Blue Eyes) Bruce, Elton John (Levon-- who covers that?) Billy Joel, La Grange, Hamilton, Joe frank and Reynolds-- Don't Pull Your Love, Brandy, You're So Vain, So Lonely, Tom Petty, Styx, Maggie Mae, Suspicious Minds,and many others, unrecoverable because of the alcohol, but I figured out their trick-- they play every song faster, heavier, and better than the original-- I don't like Elton John, but I like LeCompt covering Elton John.

8/3/2009

Although Ipods, Itunes, file sharing, MP3s and digital music are vastly superior to compact disks in so many ways-- storage, accessibility, categorization, etc.-- there's still something to be said about making a snap judgment about someone's entire character from the glimpse of a couple of CD's in their car or on a shelf in their living room: Fine Young Cannibals? Lynch Mob? Steely Dan? Jethro Tull? Yanni?

8/2/2009

Some music commentary: 1) I am wondering if this is the demise of Wilco, though their new album is pretty cool, they get all eponymous and use their name in the first track-- and unless you're a hip hop artist, where dropping your name is de rigueur, this could be a bad omen 2) Charlie Mars alludes to my theory of why Pink Floyd has sold 7.7 copies of "Dark Side of the Moon" . . . on top of it being a great album, it's also a favorite with druggies and stoners, who often lose it while under the influence and then have to buy another . . . because what aficionado of psychedelia can do without it?-- and so the song goes, "If you want to come over, come over and get high, we can listen to the Dark Side of the Moon" but there's nothing in the lyrics about searching to find it while high, which would be a much better and more realistic song.

8/1/2009

Guinness is the only beer that doesn't make me poisonously flatulent . . . thank you Guinness!

7/31/2009

Ian has discovered the joy of lying: last week at soccer camp he had five kids (all older than him) searching the playground for a yellow poison arrow frog-- and I had to break it to the kids that Ian might have been fibbing, and that poison arrow frogs are not indigenous to South Brunswick, New Jersey . . . although, oddly enough, later that day Ian did find a big crayfish in the muddy grass on the soccer field, which isn't as anomalous as a poison dart frog in New Jersey, but it's still pretty weird, so who knows, maybe he did see one.

7/30/2009

I love this fact and now I've read it twice, so it must be true: the first personal computer was sold by Neiman-Marcus and it was called the Honeywell H316; it was intended for sorting recipes-- this was 1969-- and the thing had built in counter space, cost 10,600 dollars and had no monitor-- just toggle switches, so to categorize your recipes you needed to learn hexadecimal code.

7/29/2009

Catherine bought an antique dresser from the town furniture man (although she can't remember how old it is-- so who knows if it's really over a hundred years old . . . and I'll tell you what: if I bought something old I would at least inquire how old, just for conversation's sake) and he refinished it with a two tone marble type finish, tan with deep red fractal streaks and cracks, which looks pretty cool until your child says, "that dresser looks like a person bleeding with so many cuts" and then it looks more like something that belongs in The Amityville Horror (I've included an actual picture of the item, in case anyone wants to purchase it, as I can't really think of it as an inanimate object any longer).

7/28/2009

I've finished Robert V. Remini's slightly liberal A Short History of the United States (336 pages short) and I'm working my way (481 pages of 1000!) through Paul Johnson's much longer and slightly conservative A History of the American People, which is fun because it's from a British point of view, but for those of you who don't feel like reading 1300+ pages of American history, I am offering here, for the first time ever, a very special presentation from the people here at The Sentence of Dave . . . that's right, you guessed it, a One Sentence Summary of American History, so without further fanfare, here it is: once upon a time, there was a country filled with natives, but then new natives came and killed the old natives, and then the new natives killed the people who wanted them not to be native and then the new natives killed each other, and then they freed the natives from another place, and then more new natives came and worked hard and got everything organized when the old natives prohibited booze and a whole mess of the natives went overseas to help out and lots of them died and then folks were content for a while but then a bunch of new natives kept on coming but the old new natives didn't like that so much so they built a wall, but it didn't matter so much and then Britney Spears shaved her head.

The Real Hangover

I think Catherine and I were the last people on earth to see The Hangover, but no one ruined the gags-- and the movie is a rare thing, a comedy that is genuinely funny and also has a great plot, but I must warn you: it is extremely unrealistic, I am not sure if the writer of this movie has ever had a real hangover, it is difficult to make a cup of coffee, let alone drive a stolen police car . . . and (spoilers!) you never hook up with Heather Graham when you're in black-out mode, it's usually someone of lesser quality and greater mass, plus you can't take a punch from Mike Tyson the night after you've tied one on; so I'm thinking of writing a film called A Real Hangover, which will be very low budget and very boring, mainly consisting of a guy who spends a long time in bed, then moves to the couch to watch TV, then finally walks to a convenience store and manages to buy a bottle of ginger-ale, despite having the shakes, drinks it and takes a fitful nap-- who wants to finance it?-- I think all the budget calls for is a lot of beer and camera.