3/11/10

Thank God the good playground is a block away from our house, as this spares me the humiliation of having to organize "play dates" for my children.

Super Freaky

Superfreakonomics is just as entertaining as Levitt and Dubner's first book, but it's a bit more controversial-- amidst its "economic" analysis, it touches on the WHO's assessment of penis size in India, the dangers of drunk walking (better to drive), the declining price of oral sex, why you don't have to worry about global warming, why you don't have to worry about buckling your toddlers in car seats, and the first recorded case of monkey prostitution . . . and like Freakonomics, it is too short, but I think that is intended; hopefully, they will write another: nine big ass volcanoes out of ten.

Hyperion

There's nothing more fun (for an English teacher) than reading the same book at the same time as someone else, especially if it's obscure-- and so it was with some regret that I finished Hyperion, Dan Simmon's 1989 Hugo Award winning science-fiction novel, which in Canterbury Tales fashion (each character tells a story) recounts the pilgrimage of a soldier, a detective, a priest, a scholar, a poet, and a diplomat to the remote planet Hyperion, home of the Lord of Pain, otherwise known as the Shrike, a three meter tale robotic many bladed creature which lives outside of time and may have been created in the future by humans or AI computers, and comes back into the past where it has spawned religious cults, inter-galactic mythology and speculation, and, of course, fear . . . and I'm sure there was nothing worse than being trapped in the English office listening to me and Mike talk about the intricacies of the plot . . . it reminds me of the old days when Celine and I would discuss Battle Star Galactica until people started screaming bloody murder.

3/8/10

The French movie Cache (Hidden) is riveting and infuriating, you have to see but it will drive you crazy-- it will make you paranoid, it will make you confused, it will make you think harder than you usually have to think while watching a movie (but Michael Haneke's direction-- he won the award for it at Cannes in 2005-- and Juliette Binoche's acting make it well worth the wild ride) . . . and watch the last scene carefully, it reveals something . . . what? I don't really know, but I still loved it: nine bloody roosters our of ten.

Pregnant Pause

Sometimes, when I've been away from my kids for a few hours, and I see someone's cute little baby, I think to myself: I should get Catherine pregnant tonight . . . but once I get home and spend a few hours with my children, that thought slowly fades away.

I Cleverly Trick Myself

While trying to use some reverse psychology on my kids, I outsmarted myself; Alex and Ian are close enough in size that they wear the same size pajamas, which is convenient because we only need one drawer with a bunch of pajamas in it, but inconvenient because of Garrett Hardin's "the tragedy of the commons," and so the other night when Ian claimed he wanted to wear the "Hulk" pajamas which Alex had already worn the night before and therefore claimed, I attempted to solve the conflict with a nifty turn of logic-- I told Ian that it was better if Alex wore the pajamas because then he could see the Hulk image on them, while Alex would be wearing the pajamas and thus would be unable to get a really good look at them-- and-- absurdly -- Ian bought this line of bullshit and stopped crying, but my logic was so clever that I actually convinced Alex (who is six now!) as well, and so Alex insisted that Ian wear the Hulk pajamas so that he could get a better look at them and after a bunch of bickering over this absurdity, I was finally able to pull Alex aside and communicate to him that this was a trick to solve the problem, but I'm not sure if I was able to convince him that I was originally using reverse psychology on Ian, and I have learned my lesson and next time I will simply confiscate the pajamas and no one will wear them.

3/5/10

So the other day Catherine was already home when I got home from school, which is a rare event once soccer season is over (she had a half day because of parent conferences) and so she witnessed my "secret meal," which I call pandedunchium . . . it happens at 2:45 and I pretty much eat anything in the house that isn't in the freezer section; Catherine was worried that I might have trouble eating dinner when she saw me dump out a Tupperware of leftover sausage into a pan, heat it, put it on a roll, and wolf it down before moving on to apple slices coated with peanut butter but, for once, she was sooooooo wrong.

Books Are Better With Pictures

If you're looking for a novel that tackles big themes-- art and design, love and alienation, fate and meaning-- but you need some pictures to help you, then I highly recommend Asterios Polyp, a graphic novel by Davud Mazzucchelli; five Platonic solids out of five.

3/3/10

The Hurt Locker takes place in Baghdad-- but I was able to recognize where they filmed it, Amman . . . when we lived in Damascus, we would travel there for a taste of the modern world-- and the film is an intense, apolitical character study about a real man, Staff Sergeant William James, who understands what he is cut out to do in this life and then just does it, and makes the rest of us (the soldiers in the movie included) feel like pussies; I don't even like the shock when you lick a battery to see if there's still juice in it . . . 365 days (before rotation) out of 365 days (before rotation).

Birthday Slant Rhyme

Today is our day:
me, Seuss, and Bon Jovi,
and I am the youngest,
Though I just turned forty.

2/28/10

Alex and Ian found a lady-bug in the kitchen (possibly the same one that crawled on my wife's face in the night?) and Ian convinced Alex that he could translate what the lady-bug was saying into English.

2/27/10

I love paradoxes and here is a great one from The Strong Horse, Lee Smith's new book on Middle East politics: "after 9/11, the schizophrenic nature of Saudi policy at the same time became plain: while members of the Saudi royal family relied on U.S. military might to protect them from foreign enemies, their domestic security depended on their ability to redirect the political furies of domestic rivals onto those same Americans who protected them," and so the end result is 9/11, because the Saudis, though beholden to America (for security of resources, diplomacy with Israel, protection from the Shi'ites, safety on the Suez Canal and in the Persian Gulf) still needs to direct the profoundly Sunni Al Qaeda's rage away from the region . . . and this time America was the victim . . . and the same sort of thing is going on in Iraq, where the Iraqi people, especially the minorities, need American support, but to preserve their honor and to attract a following and possibly garner power in the region, they need to fight against America-- Smith's thesis is that the region is still far too tribal to be ready for democracy, and that it is hard for Americans to even understand the mentality at play there, which I witnessed first hand when we invaded Iraq and one of my nicest, smartest, most diligent students in Damascus said her mother told her, "If I didn't have two daughters, I would go to Iraq and kill Americans, " and this is a woman who sent her two daughters to the "American" school to learn liberal values-- but still, when it comes to honor, though Saddam was a bad man, he was still a Sunni strong man and no one wanted to see him fall (and the Syrians I talked to pretty much hated the Kuwaitis because they were rich sell-outs, so they didn't really mind when Saddam invaded Kuwait, I could go on and on about this, especially the Druze, the Maronites, the Sunnis, and the Shi'ites in Lebanon, but, mainly, you should definitely read this book!)

2/26/10

WARNING: we watched Gremlins the other night with the kids, and though it's a little violent, they loved it . . . in this age of digital animation, those green puppets aren't very scary, BUT, and I totally forgot about this, Kate (Phoebe Cates) does recount a terrible little story, about how her father, dressed as Santa Claus, broke his neck coming down their chimney on Christmas, and she ends the story by saying, "and that's how I learned there's no such thing as Santa Claus," and I'm wondering how closely my kids were listening, because they didn't say a thing about it after she said it (and it happened too fast to grab the remote and fast forward through it-- which probably would have drawn more attention to it, anyway-- but maybe my kids are already smart enough to know that Christmas is all about playing the game, and pretending to believe in Santa so you get a bunch of gifts).

2/25/10

I just started Lee Smith's new book on Middle East politics called The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations; he is refuting the thesis that anti-Americanism in the Arab world is a product of government propaganda and an opinion of a few terrorists and dictators, and that it is more endemic in the culture, which is still very tribal at the core-- and this reminds me of a time, probably in 2002, when we were in the Western Desert between Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, on our way to Amman in a service taxi, and we stopped for gas at a godforsaken station and while we were browsing candy bars, a guy asked my wife, "You like bin Laden?" and then showed her his cell phone screen: on it there was a simple cartoon of a plane hitting the World Trade Center followed by a laughing Osama face.

2/24/10

Alex coined a word the other night; he said I should "buffle" someone with my newly shaven head, because it was "spiky and dangerous," and I corrected him and said, "You mean butt someone?" but then I realized he was taking the word "buffalo" and making it into a verb; I like it and I'm going to use it.

2/23/10

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a bit long for a thriller, but every time it slowed down, it was for a good reason-- and it's moody Swedish setting and byzantine layers make it more than a genre book . . .it's far better than The Da Vinci Code, though it shares some of it's themes: I give it nine dead and mangled cats out of ten (also, there's something compelling about reading an author's last works-- Stieg Larsson, Swedish magazine editor and expert on right wing and Nazi organizations, wrote this trilogy of novels and then dropped dead of a heart attack at age fifty, before he could enjoy his international fame . . . why does that make the book better?)

Sweet Sweet Cup Holder

I'm proud of the fact that I've been driving the same car since 1994 (a Jeep Cherokee Sport-- solid V6 engine and no power windows or locks or anything to break) but sometimes I dream of when the chassis will finally rust out and die because then I'll get a car with doors that always open, a car with an iPod dock . . . a car with a cup holder (that's right, I don't have a cup-holder-- there is a designated sneaker for holding hot coffee if there's no passenger-- otherwise the passenger is the cup-holder . . . but I am wondering: why is this? had the cup been yet invented in 1994? or was there once a cup-holder and I can't remember?)

2/21/10

Our Hamilton Beach food processor has these settings: Pulse, Grate, Quick Clean, Grind, Stir, Beat, Aerate, Shred, Puree, Blend, Crumb, Liquefy, Chop, Frappe, Mix, Hi, and Lo; but no matter which button I pressed, it just made a loud noise and didn't really chop my Poblano peppers and cilantro (I was making Rick Bayless green chorizo) so I stuck the knife in to nudge some chunks into the whizzing blade and peered into the blender to see what the problem was and then, just as the blade whacked the knife, it dawned on me how stupid I was being-- so I closed it up and shook it for a while and then it finally chopped the stuff up (real time update! my wife just walked in and told me that it's not a "food processor," it's a "blender," and that's why I was having so much trouble . . . you learn something new every day).

2/20/10

If you don't check the text messages on your cell phone for a long time, then when you finally do-- they tell a little story, and you are both the protagonist and the villain.

2/19/10

Note to self: penicillin gives me a rash.