Dave = Greatest American (Modern) Hero
My wife called me "her hero" because I figured out that our wireless featureless Apple Magic Mouse (which looks like a space alien's slipper) can be configured to "right click" even though there's no "right click" button-- it just knows when you click on it over to the right (just as it knows to move the cursor when you twitch your finger, it's pretty amazing) but even though the mouse is quite cool, the deflation that feats of heroism have suffered in these modern times is pretty sad . . . imagine her reaction if I slew a fire-breathing dragon that was trying to incinerate our new kitchen (I'm thinking she would still call me "her hero" but there would also be sexual favors and back rubs awarded for the deed).
12/5/2009
For the past six years I have saved every piece of photo-copied paper possible in my classroom; the students give me back every article, poem, story, and question sheet that they haven't destroyed and then I file them so I can use them the next year, and I use a LOT of outside sources (because I teach several electives that really don't have a text plus I bring in anything new that I've read) so I've got several file drawers full of stuff that I recycle year to year, and I have done this without praise or thanks, and I have saved the high school money on paper and ink and saved the taxpayers of East Brunswick money and I do this without being asked and without telling anyone (except my readers) because I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees.
Hey Now . . . The Dream Is Over
During my Sunday morning soccer game, tempers ran a little high and two players started bickering over a foul, but a cooler head prevailed: a local youth coach told the two men who were arguing, who were both pushing forty, "Hey guys, the dream is over," and since then, these words have proved inspirational to me: whenever I get frustrated because Greasetruck isn't producing any music, or my kids are acting extra-annoying, or I've taught a lousy lesson, or I've written a cruddy sentence, or I've gone for a particularly slow run, or I'm angry because I haven't invented anything remotely cool or useful . . . I just remember, "the dream is over," and that I'm not going to be rich and famous or a rock star or a four minute miler or father brilliant prodigal geniuses or invent anything like Stretch Armstrong or illustrate my own long running syndicated cartoon strip, because those dreams are over BUT I do own a house (sort of, or I own a mortgage!) and I have fathered two kids (and their dreams-- which seem to be centered around professional wrestling and RC car racing-- are still alive) and I have held a job and paid taxes for many years, so I have helped innumerable poor and unemployed people, contributed to the maintenance of National and State Parks, and even helped build loads of weapons for military misadventures in the Middle East . . . which I never, in my wildest imagination, dreamed of doing at all.
12/3/2009
One of my students said her Jewish grandmother's advice about boys was this: "Goyim are for practice," and though Goyim is pejorative, it still sounds like fun to be practiced upon in this manner.
12/2/2009
Almost lost my five year old son Alex in a Darwin Award-esque accident: he said, "Look Dad!" and with a lollipop in his mouth, tried to stand on two soccer balls, one foot on each ball, and did a face plant, nearly impaling himself with the pop . . . and so, like any rational parent, I have banned all lollipops from my house until the children are old enough to drive to the store and by them on their own.
12/1/2009
Apparently people think I am causing my wife hypothermia because I keep our heat on 65 degrees; yesterday was her birthday and TWO people gave her a "Snuggie," which is pretty much a blanket with sleeves (but luckily one is leopard skin, so now she has one for upstairs . . . we don't even turn the heat on in the bedroom, it's on a different zone . . . and one for downstairs.)
Ian And Frank Sinatra Will Survive Manchuria
My four year old son Ian is very stubborn, and although this is trying, it will come in handy if anyone ever tries to brainwash him; last weekend, while we were waiting for our Mexican food at Aby's in Matawan (I mention this only because I created such a good Mexican joke about the locale: what's a Matawan? Nothing . . . but somebody stole my taco) and I played some word games with the boys to kill time-- I made them say "post" and "boast" and "host" and then I asked, "What do you put in a toaster?" . . . Alex fell for it and said, "toast" but Ian calmly said, "bread," and then I pointed to several white objects and asked them to name the color and they said "white" several times and then I asked, "What do cows drink?" and Alex fell for this one too and said, "milk" but again Ian refused to be tricked by my silliness and he looked at me and staidly said, "water."
Market Panic! Buy! Buy! Buy! Sell! Sell! Sell!
Michael Lewis's new book Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity is fun to read from the sidelines (especially if all your money is in your new kitchen addition, so while there may be some abstract money lost in the housing market, you don't feel it because you're eating at a big table surrounded by windows) but the lesson is that though hind-sight is 20/20, no one really understood exactly why Black Monday or the Foreign Credit Crunch or the Dot.com Bust or The SubPrime Mortgage Crisis happened in real time (except maybe John Paulson) and even if you did understand it, and you wanted to hedge your bets and weather the storm, other people in the herd that mirrored your position could cause a market run anyway-- and if you don't feel like reading the book, which is edited by Michael Lewis and contains articles written by a wide variety of analysts (including himself and Dave Barry) then you could probably reach the same understanding by watching the episode of Thirty Rock where Tracy Jordan, who is being interviewed by Larry King, causes a financial crisis all by his lonesome self.
11/28/2009
Nothing makes me happier than the canned pumpkin shortage-- I hope this is the first of many retaliatory measures Mother Nature levies against our materialistic culture, and I commend her for her timing, as it is especially effective when these apocalyptic omens occur around the crassly consumptive holiday season . . . I would suggest to her that she also bring a cankerous blight that decimates mistletoe and nog.
Klosterman and I Agree About Madmen
It took me a day and a half to ingest Chuck Klosterman's new book Eating the Dinosaur, and though there were some new ideas for me to devour-- on Kurt Kobain vs. David Koresh and ABBA and Ralph Sampson and Garth Brooks and laugh tracks and the inability of Ralph Nader to lie and why this is a problem in politics and the paradoxical identity of football (which appears to be the most conservative sport-- think Brett Favre and Vince Lombardi-- but is actually the most dynamic and liberal in nature . . . as it has evolved from the forward pass to radios in quarterbacks helmets, from rugby-esque to the read option and the spread offense, etc.) but the scary and entrancing and ultimately annoying bulk of the book is about things that I already love, such as the time travel movie Primer and Werner Herzog and Erroll Morris and the Unabomber Manifesto and Stephen King and Arrested Development and David Foster Wallace and Weezer and Madmen and this is ultimately annoying because he feels the same way as me about these things (and many more) but his ideas about them are more clever than mine and they are better articulated, because he's a professional pop-culture critic, so while on the one hand I am fascinated by what he is saying, on the other, I'm annoyed that I didn't think of it myself-- it's about Weezer, for Christ's sake, not the human genome!-- and for me this was most acute in his essay entitled "It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened" where he dissects a press release from Pepsi and then makes some comparisons to Don Draper and Madmen and he transcribes and analyzes Don's monologue about the Kodak carousel and nostalgia-- and this is my favorite moment in TV history . . . it's the end of season one of the show, and no one else appreciated it at my workplace, but at least Klosterman did-- but then it made me wonder about this whole other idea, which is: is Klosterman just predicting what the faux cool nerdy hipster types who also like athletics like to read and watch and listen to, and are we that easy to predict and thus he writes about those things because he knows this is what will sell?-- it crossed my mind for an instant, but if that's so then the joke is on him, because he has embraced these things so fully and thought about them so deeply that whether he's joking or not, he is sincere.
How Fat Is Funny?
Saw another great Patrice O'Neal show the other night, and although there was no brawl like last year, he did kick out a table full of cops for heckling-- we thought it was a joke, until then they filed out the exit, but O'Neal's girth raises another point, and this also came up during my Shakespeare class while we were discussing the humor of Falstaff: how fat is funny these days?-- I've noticed a slimming of the fat funny guy-- remember the grossly obese funny men of the past? John Candy and Fat Albert and Chris Farley and Sam Kinison and Natalie from The Facts of Life, of course, Falstaff were all obscenely fat, but Jack Black is really just plump compared to these guys, and though Patrice O'Neal can hold his own with the old school mesomorphs, you don't see as many really, really fat comics and--check out the pictures and judge for yourself-- I think Santa Claus has slimmed down over the years as well.
Let's Build a Time Machine and Listen to Past Dave Swear a Lot
I shudder to think what Past-Dave would say about Cell Phone, iMac, and Facebook Dave.
11/24/2009 TWO YEARS OF SENTENCE OF DAVE!
Today is the two year anniversary of Sentence of Dave, and I would like to thank my fans for their support over the past 730 days, as it is your words of encouragement that have kept me plugging away . . . comments like "this dopey-- even for you" and "typical" and "I find it odd that you own three towels" and "Dave, you're getting sloppy, Earth Day is actually tomorrow" and "So you snookered a couple of teenage girls-- you should be proud of yourself" and "this is the worst sentence I've ever read" and "this sentence is canned" and (from my lovely and always supportive wife) "NO ONE wants to hear about your dream!!!"
Wiffle Fun
I try to run my kids through the usual educational, artistic, and athletic paces-- chess playing, drawing, music appreciation, storytime, soccer and bike riding-- but while I was cleaning up the yard I saw what they'd rather be doing if I left them to their own devices: each of them wielded a thick plastic wiffleball bat, and, without any prior discussion, they began pounding out an atavistic rhythm on the lawn furniture while chanting "Ooga looga, booga looga, omooga looga, ooga looga" and they kept this up for five minutes without fighting, which is the longest time they've ever done anything cooperatively without adult supervision.
Does the Lorax Use TP?
I hate December because I constantly think about all the trees that have been cut down to be used as wrapping paper, which is hardly an honorable way to be used-- to be the thing that obscures the other thing-- and then I think about all the trees I've murdered by assigning essays and it makes me not want to assign any . . . but at least that can sometimes be an honorable way for a tree to die, you might shuffle off this mortal coil as an "A"-- and then, of course, there is the least honorable way of all to exit, unrolled from your tube, desecrated, and then flushed.
Suspicion Haunts the Guilty Mind
Last Friday the English teachers had some fun at my expense: Stacey made an educated guess and decided that I probably hadn't read the email from the principal "reminding" us in a rather stern tone that we needed to check IDs, attend all necessary meetings, give students hall passes before they left the classroom, and not "kill the messenger" when we received phone calls during class from the nurse or guidance or attendance . . . and she was right, I hadn't read this e-mail, and so when Soder remarked that he had received less than usual in his pay-check and I went down to my mail-box to check on mine (greed is partly to blame for my downfall) and I found a letter addressed to me from the principal and it was this exact email . . . addressed personally to me, I fell for their ploy hook, line, and sinker-- and I would like to think that I did not disappoint my audience (who captured my reaction on camera) as I read the letter and line by line refuted each accusation-- "Okay, so I missed a few meetings, but I had soccer!" and "I'm always nice to the ladies from Guidance when they call! In fact, Mrs. Balogh just told me how nice I always am on the phone!"-- until, finally, I decided to write a nasty note to the principal demanding that he high-light which infractions I had committed because it was ridiculous that someone didn't just tell me to my face what I had done wrong and instead gave me a long-winded letter with a host of crimes that I had not committed (or been caught at) and good thing I was too consumed by my the eating of my sandwich to actually go down and deliver said letter because no one was going to stop me from doing so and finally someone walked in who wasn't in on the joke and when I showed her the letter she said, "Wasn't that an email? I got that email," and the gig was up.
11/20/2009
Exciting time at Donaldson Park last night: I walked down there with the boys for a game of game of hide-and-go-seek and we heard the sounds of donuts, peel outs, and power slides coming from the far parking lot-- when we went to investigate the cute blond park jogger said, "he's been doing that for forty five minutes" and so when he sped out of the lot, I jogged down the bike path and intersected him on the road, and he was kind enough to stop and wave me across the street but I STOPPED in the middle of the road (HA HA HA!) and memorized his license plate ( NN 81 9L -- I made mnemonic) and then when the park policeman drove into the park to lock the bathrooms, the kids and I walked over to report the plates, but as we approached his SUV, it started moving . . . but he was inside the bathroom, and so I figured there was someone in the passenger seat inching the vehicle forward, but actually his car had slipped out of gear and was heading on a driver-less collision course with the brick wall of the bathroom-- but first it hit and crushed the metal garbage can, which absorbed the blow, and by this time the ranger had gotten out of the bathroom and was able to jump into the car and put it into park, and it was after this bit of reckless non-driving that we were able to report the reckless driver (and it turns out Catherine also grabbed this guy's plates when he was speeding up and down Valentine Street so he is a menace, but perhaps he will get his comeuppance and hopefully it won't be as bad as the kid in the purple Camaro who sped up and down the streets of North Brunswick when I was a youngster, until that fateful night when neighbors of ours that lived near Route 130 heard intermittent beeping all night long and couldn't figure out why, and it was because the local hot-rodder had flipped his Camaro into a drainage ditch and was trapped inside, slowly bleeding to death while he beeped his horn to no avail).
Stacy Inadvertently Prevents Me From Making a Really Stupid Decision
My friend Stacy is kicking herself, because during a discussion on back-hair maintenance, I told her that it might be time to resurrect my idea for a giant tattoo (the great undersea battle between the squid and the whale) because then I would no longer have to maintain my back hair, as hair does not grow through tattoos, but she said, "Hair does too grow through tattoos!" and I checked and she was right, so getting ink all over my back isn't the solution-- but now Stacey is angry because if she didn't open her mouth, then I would have learned the hard way.
I Am a Libertarian Paternalist
Sorry for all the book reviews, but I read a lot when I was in Florida: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness is a good one for people who are disillusioned with the axioms of liberalism and/or conservatism, and the authors offer a third way of doing things, which they (Thaler and Sunstein) call "libertarian paternalism," which sounds like an oxymoron, until you accept their thesis that there is no way to set up a neutral choice situation, and that all choices are somewhat influenced by the context in which they are made (the book begins with an apt example from a school cafeteria-- students most often choose food items that are placed first and eye-level, so how do you arrange the food? do you put the healthiest items there? or the most profitable? or is it fairer to do it at random? no matter what you do, you have an influence . . .) and they explain that for many choices -- in the realm of health care, preserving the environment, increasing retirement savings, etc.-- there are ways to increase people's liberty and freedom of choice while also using defaults to nudge people towards decisions that will lead to better lives and a cleaner planet . . . but honestly, their ideas make so much logical sense that I can't imagine America ever implementing them, we'd rather be mired in an eschatological red state/blue state battle until the end of time, when God's rapture will finally sort out the sinners from the saved . . . that's just how we roll in America.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)