8/25/2009
Part Two: Sometimes when I read a book, I get really excited and forget there was ever a time before I had read that book, and want to implement all the ideas in the book immediately.
8/24/2009 Live Update From the Beach!
Yesterday, a particularly tenacious Herring gull, attempting to impress the coaches and secure a place on the 65 man roster, blocked a barefooted punt by yours truly, which knocked him into a tailspin, but the scrappy bird recovered gracefully, and was able to continue flying . . . and his effort severely affected the trajectory of the punt, making it land far short of its target.
8/23/2009
My son Ian, who loves the water and has a different swimming stroke for every animal (the caterpillar, the whale, the shark, the squid) often stays in too long, until his bladder is about to burst, but the kiddie bathroom is a bit dirty for his taste, so he insists on putting his crocs on before he goes, which makes for some good comedy . . . watching a kid who has to pee put shoes on, and yesterday, while we watched, Catherine yelled some encouragement: "hold it, hold it" and Ian looked at her and followed her instructions, literally, and grabbed his crotch.
8/22/2009
Whenever you have a party to get rid of excess beer in your fridge, you end up with more than when you started.
8/21/2009
Next summer, in order for Catherine and I to have some peace and quiet, and in order for the boys to have the activities and socialization they need, the boys are going to camp . . . space camp . . . in outer space.
I'm Sure I'll Pick It Back Up . . . or Maybe Not
I needed to take a break from the sardonic wit of Infinite Jest, lest I hang myself like the author did last year, and so I started (and finished, I raced through it, ha) Christopher McDougall's Born to Run: it is the exact opposite of David Foster Wallace's post-modern masterpiece . . . it is non-fiction, it is inspirational, it is clearly written, it is mainly about the Tarahumara, a tribe of Indians isolated in Mexico's trackless Copper Canyons who are notorious as fantastic distant runners, but it is more philospohical than anything else, and I would highly recommend it, especially if you are mired in the self-reflexive meta-futility of post-modern art, as the ideas in Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen will allow you to mentally transcend your body, instead of dwelling on its slow decay.
8/19/2009
62% of the way through Infinite Jest, which is set in the near future, when each year has its own corporate sponsor (Year of the Depend Undergarments, Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, Year of Glad) and there is a revolutionary new meta-treatment for cancer, the doctors feed the cancer lots of processed food products, encourage the cancer cells to smoke cigarettes and consume loads of Diet Soda, and voila, the cancer gets cancer and dies . . . but the treatment doesn't work on AIDS, because AIDS is a meta-disease . . . and I'm getting sick of reading meta-fiction: I may have to take a break and read something else-- something short and easy-- before I finish.
8/18/2009
When you want to play darts, the standard operating procedure at The Corner Tavern is to trade your driver's license for them-- and hopefully at the end of the evening, you're sober enough to remember to trade the darts back . . . but what if when you ask for your license back the youngster who took it says she can't find it?-- do you get to keep the tattered darts as compensation?-- do you leave, without your license?-- or do you watch the staff search for a while?-- or does someone finally realize that you should take a look at the license they do have . . . which turns out not to be you, but your wife, because she put her license in your wallet two weeks ago on vacation and never removed it, so you handed the bartender THAT license without realizing it, and then when you tried to trade the darts back, she looked for a guy's picture but could only find female license's . . . and so she was worried for her job and you were worried for your license . . . and who solved this mystery anyway, I don't think it was me . . .
8/17/2009
I debuted as a music producer this weekend, and although I wanted to channel the genius of Paul Martin or Brian Eno, or at least wave a gun around like Phil Specter, I ended up mainly getting stir crazy sitting in a chair clicking buttons, but in between the socializing, a diverse crowd (Whitney, Eric, Liz, Mary, Mose, John, Chantal, Keith) laid down a diverse number of tracks: violin, spoken word, melodies, harmonies, screaming, etc. and the final product should be available by Christmas.
Hypocrisy
I had a very interesting dream the other night: I was in a car with some college friends and we got lost near the Philly Zoo and then got involved in a jewel heist and had to bury some loot in an industrial zone in what looked to me like Secaucus, but when I tried to describe this very interesting dream to my wife, she silenced me with my own words . . . she said, "Aren't you the one that always says nothing is more boring than hearing someone else's dream?" and I said, "Yes, but this is my dream" and it was a very interesting dream and she's the one who missed out.
8/15/2009
I know it's a remnant of the agrarian calendar and it fuels tourism, but financially speaking, school recess should be in the winter, not the summer, as it is generally far cheaper to air condition a building (you usually only need to lower the temperature ten to twenty degrees to make it comfortable) then it is to heat a building . . . where in the Northeast you're talking about raising the temperature in the building between 30-60 degrees (I hope this happens for selfish reasons-- then I wouldn't have to pay for air-conditioning and I would also do a ton of snow-boarding).
Special Bonus Sentence!
Anticipating a weekend of recording music with Whitney, I partied like a rock star in South Amboy last night with Ed, Stacey, and Quackenbush (you heard me right-- his name is Quackenbush . . . and oddly enough-- and I'm just realizing just how odd this was-- we had a lengthy conversation about pet ducks and not once during the conversation did I make the connection between the content of what we were talking about and his name) and three things of note occurred: 1) a random guy told me he liked my new glasses and that I look good in them and that he wore the same pair for two years-- not that there's anything wrong with telling a random guy that you like his glasses and he looks good in them-- but still, it's a strange way to strike up a conversation with another dude . . . although when I mentioned this to my wife she called me a homophobe 2) I karaoked "Don't Pull Your Love," a song by Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds that's known for its melodic chorus and three part harmony, but, unfortunately, I am neither known for singing melodically nor for singing harmonically . . . and so I butchered it, but it was 2 AM and although I was pretty embarrassed by the time I was through "singing" it, I'm not sure anyone even heard me 3) when I walked to the Hess Station to buy a tin of chewing tobacco, I walked past "Bourbon Street," which is apparently, judging by the girls standing outside, a strip club and as I walked into the convenience mart an absurdly large breasted stripper walked out, so on my way back I tried to take a closer look at the girls, but while I was ogling I was also climbing over the metal divider between the parking lots and I banged me knee really hard on the top edge but I didn't even look down to see if I was bleeding because I didn't want to look like a wuss in front of the strippers, so I pretended like nothing happened until I was behind the dumpster and then I checked my knee for a large gaping flesh wound, but it was only scraped.
The Top Ten Montreal Expos
For no other reason than it has come up in conversation twice in so many months, here is my list of the top ten Montreal Expos:
1) Tim Wallach-- for his comment on summer in Canada: "I went 0 for four";
2) Gary Carter-- for the perm;
3) Tim Raines-- because doing a little blow won't keep you off this list;
4) Andres Galarraga-- for his nickname, El Gato;
5) Andre Dawson-- for being a triple crown contender year in and year out;
6) Otis Nixon-- like I said, doing a little blow won't keep you off this list;
7) Pete Rose -- he wasn't there long, but he did get his 4000th hit in Canada;
8) Al Oliver-- for the mustache;
9) Jeff Reardon-- for the beard;
10) Vladimir Guerrero -- for the talent and the Hispanic-Slavic name.
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.
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