10/21/2009

Although I regard cable television as an evil time squandering monopolistic specter, I may have to get it for social reasons-- we were all having a great time in the new kitchen last Friday when it came time for the Rutgers/Pitt game, and my 56 inch HD television, which I use to watch documentaries and award winning movies and high quality television (such as Battlestar Galactica and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) on DVD, so that I have control over when I watch and don't have to be influenced by commercials (except product placement) was suddenly useless, and we all had to trek out to New Brunswick to see the game, essentially abandoning my wife (but luckily some lady friends came over who didn't care about the game, which assuaged my guilt) and more than anything it just makes me angry that I don't have more control over what I buy from the cable company . . . I would love to be able to buy a channel for a day, or even choose five extra channels beyond 2-13 but apparently everyone wants a hundred channels to scroll through despite the fact that we are all pressed for time as it is and don't read enough or play enough amateur music or spend enough time with our kids or friends or families or travel to Europe enough or cook enough healthy meals, despite all this, no one wants any control over the amount of media that pours into their house and so I'm going to get stuck with the Cartoon network and QVC and the Game Show Channel and a thousand other complete wastes of time that will invade my families consciousness and suck them into a void of pixels.

10/20/2009

So I've been using my the patch of poison ivy on my forearm as a teaching aid (if you get the answer wrong, the threat is that I make you look at it up close, but no one has been subjected to this torture . . . I guess the method works) and it started kind of gross and bubbly, but now it has crossed the line into full suppuration-- I put my arm down on a napkin and I left a wet mark, which is beyond gross and into the repugnant neighborhood, and the pus is matting my arm hair as well, and I can't stop looking at it and in some strange way, I'm going to miss it when it's gone.

10/19/2009

My Asus Gigabyte motherboard has some compatibility issues with my NVidia GE Force 9500 video-card, possibly because the video-card shares an IRQ line with the sound-card, and so I had to restore the Vista sytem to a previous date, lower the resolution and the refresh rate and switch the priority of background services because I was experiencing drop-outs during audio recording . . . and this, cross my fingers, has seemed to work so far; I have also placed three smooth stones from a chicken's gizzard (which I then coated with my own blood and chanted over for two straight hours) inside my DVD drive.

10/18/2009

If you're looking for a drama about a high school teacher that's a little more intense than Welcome Back Kotter (even more intense than Head of the Class!) then check out Breaking Bad, which stars Bryan Cranston-- the bumbling amiable dad from Malcolm in the Middle, as a regretful chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer and needs to resort to cooking meth with a delinquent ex-student (Aaron Paul) to pay the bills and leave something for his family, as his wife, Anna Gunn-- from Deadwood-- is pregant and they also have a crippled son . . . and to add to the fun, Cranston's brother-in-law is a DEA agent; it sounds like a grim show and at times it is, but it's also deeply and darkly funny and there's chemistry lesson in every episode (hydrochloric acid will melt a dead body to jelly but it won't eat through a plastic container!) and so I give it nineteen Erlenmyer flasks out of twenty.

10/17/2009

The past two days my sentences have been egregious, and so to reconcile with you, my loyal audience, I will provide a sexy picture of Farrah Fawcett for you to enjoy . . . despite the fact that she is now food for worms, and her lovely body, which was riddled with cancer when she died, has liquefied by now into a viscous jelly . . . but a very sexy viscous jelly.

Meta Failure

This is hardly a sentence.

10/14/2009

My five year old son Alex let me in on the plan that he and his two friends concocted at school-- they are going to build robot replicas of themselves and send the robots to school in their stead; I asked him why he wanted to do this and if he didn't like kindergarten any longer, and he said, "I still like school, I just get tired in the middle of the day and want to take a nap," which-- I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree-- is exactly how I feel about teaching school.

10/13/2009

So it was a lucky day in the ISS (in school suspension) room-- no students-- so I had an empty room to myself in which to grade papers and otherwise relax . . . in fact, I was so relaxed that I let loose with a bout of flatulence (hard to do anywhere else in the school, since you're always on display) and, of course, like in a bad movie, immediately after I let'er rip, not ten seconds later, the school police officer walked in with a girl that obviously had some major problem and had to be escorted from class and he walked right into my poison cloud and then the girl came to my desk to sign in, and I was half embarrassed and half wanting to giggle like a sophomore, but no one accused me of anything, so I'm hoping they were secretly blaming it on each other.

10/12/2009

At bedtime, I've been reading my kids a children's version of Moby Dick (which, honestly, is hardly a bedtime story-- people die every other chapter) and Ian asked why Ahab wanted to kill the whale and Alex told him, "because the whale ate his leg off" and then Alex made a good point; he said, "Ahab really only has to cut off one of Moby Dick's fins, that would be fair, since Moby Dick only ate one of his legs."

Bonus Sports Conundrum

Can a coach receive a taunting penalty?

10/11/2009

Does everyone cut their cornbread into tiny little cubes so there's more surface area to coat with butter, or is it just me?

10/10/2009

In the office the other day, all the English teachers were lamenting the fact that progress reports were already due, and it felt like school had just started and no progress had been made-- and while it may be true that progress report time did come a bit early this year, it also might be true that we are all getting older, and as we get older our metabolism slows and time appears to rush by, instead of crawl along (like it did when we were children) but when I suggested this, none of the other teachers wanted to contemplate this bleak reality so we blamed it on Labor Day being so late this year.

Adventureland: A Review and Other Thematically Related Stuff

Days after visiting the funky, vintage Knoebels Amusement Park in central Pennsylvania, I watched a movie that looked as if it had been filmed there: Adventureland, starring Jesse Eisenberg (who hails from East Brunswick, his sister-- who is a senior now at the high school--- was the little girl in the Pepsi commercials who spoke like the Godfather when she was served a Coca Cola) and it wasn't as gross and funny as Superbad or as witty as Juno, but in a laid back way it was just as good a film, and the 80's music, cars, clothes, houses, amusement park, and people are as much fun to look at as the sets on Madmen . . . and so I give it twelve partially thawed boxes of corn-dogs out of a possible fourteen, but I'm still putting up a clip of the Pepsi sister because I think she's still more famous than Jesse (although he's also in Zombieland with Woody Harrelson, so I guess he's an A list star now . . . and I hear the sister gets very uncomfortable when teachers or students bring up her past as the Pepsi girl . . . and are either of them as famous as Heather O'Reilly, who is possibly the most famous East Brunswick resident?)

Girl Stuff

There has been discussion in the office of what appears manly and macho and what doesn't, perhaps we dwell on this because we're English teachers and we teach poetry so we're already a little defensive . . . and I claimed that I cannot type because typing is for girls (it's easier to say this than to admit the truth-- I'm spastic on the keyboard) and some folks took offense at this, but then we decided that Ernest Hemingway couldn't type either . . . because he was too drunk (although F. Scott Fitzgerald could put it away, yet I'm sure he could touch-type with the best of them) and now there's a juggling craze in the office because Stacey learned to juggle, and while I was accomplishing an astounding juggling feat (juggling three tennis balls off the wall while standing a good five feet away from aforementioned wall) someone remarked that I didn't look very macho doing this astounding feat-- touche-- and this reminds me (this sentence is so long, why stop now?) last week I saw a guy pull out of his driveway on a unicycle, and it made me want to get a unicycle . . . is a unicycle macho?

Hammurabi's Law Doesn't Apply to Water

My son Alex's kindergarten teacher sent a note home informing us of some inappropriate behavior: apparently, Alex filled his mouth with water from the fountain, and then he spit it on another boy . . . but it's not like you can make the punishment fit the crime-- you can't ban a kid from drinking water, or at least not for long-- so hopefully he'll just stop doing this because it's gross and annoying.

10/6/2009

While I was running in the school orchard last week, I nearly ran into a red fox on the trail-- I was close enough to see the white splotch on the end of his tail before he loped away-- but fans of this blog will remember that last fall I saw TWO foxes in the span of two days, so one fox doesn't really rate a sentence, so I'm going to revise this one: while running in the school orchard I saw THREE foxes . . . and a llama . . . and . . . and Barak Obama and Rush Limbaugh making out behind a shrub.

10/5/2009

I would offer a review of Len Fisher's new book Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, an engaging overview of game theory that doesn't cover much new ground if you've done some reading on this, but does provide lots of excellent anecdotal real world examples, especially in experiment,s the author himself concocted, which often involve pub life in Australia, but why should I offer a review when I don't know if you'll reciprocate and offer me anything in return . . . perhaps I'll do it just this once and test the waters, but if it's not worth it, then I'm not going to continue: I give it seven tits out of a possible nine tats.

Is a Sloth Spooky?

My favorite ride at Knoebels Amusement Park is the Haunted House, as I'm not much for roller coasters (even the kiddie coaster made me green) and my young sons love the haunted house as well . . . Ian was holding on to me for dear life, as it is very dark and spooky in there, with lots of skulls, witches, floating eyes, banging doors, creepy music, talking paintings, etcetera-- the only time the ride loses its spookiness is in the last room, which inexplicably has a tropical theme and reminds me of The Jungle Room at Graceland . . . but the ride is certainly vintage and maybe before Diego kids were scared of the jungle, as they should be . . . we're talking about a place that has fire ants, anacondas, yellow fever, and cholera (and I'm sure kids are scared of Elvis).

10/3/2009

I'm embarrassed to say that my wrist still hurts from an incident this summer-- and if there is such a thing as divine retribution for despicable behavior than it should still hurt . . . after an evening where everyone imbibed a fair bit, and my friend Rob imbibed a bit more than a fair bit, I lost patience waiting for him to get out of the beach house, as we were on our way to see the greatest cover band in the universe, and -- having just read Born to Run and being high on the merits of barefoot running, I said to Dom and Michelle, "I'll get him!" and took off at full speed in my crocs, which was fine for a hundred yards, until I hit a muddy patch of grass in between the sidewalk and our driveway (there was a flood that morning) and my legs flew into the air ahead of my body and I flipped back onto my wrist and it really hurt, despite the beer, and I also got soaked and coated in mud, and so when I ran into the house to tell Rob to get a move-on . . . and also to change my soiled clothes . . . he happened to be coming down the steps and so, in a fit of immature rage, I punched him in the stomach (with my bad wrist) and caught him in the diaphragm, knocking the wind out of him . . . and though I apologized profusely, I still probably deserve the wrist pain for my impatience.

10/2/2009

Petting a baby alligator at Clyde Peeling's Reptiland made me think: "That's surprisingly smooth . . . maybe I would like a pair of alligator skin pants."