Swedish Mysteries

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo inspired me to read another Swedish detective story-- this one, called Sidetracked, by the world famous Henning Mankell, pits melancholy sleuth Kurt Wallander against a serial killer that murders his carefully chosen victims with an axe-- this sounds over the top, but the tone is more like The Wire, slow and careful . . . it took three hundred pages until someone fired a gun; my favorite mundane detail about Wallander is that he doesn't really like soccer, but he tries his best to find interest in the World Cup just to get along with his colleagues, but really he can't understand how people could be worried about such frivolity when there is evil lurking in his once provincial town: fourteen mopeds out of fifteen.

Mini-Wolfe

Adam Haslett's debut novel, Union Atlantic, is a mini Tom Wolfe novel-- like Bonfire of the Vanities or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or A Man in Full or Charlotte Simmons, it opens the door to a world with which most people are unfamiliar and lets us all the way in, and though there were paragraphs on short selling and margins and future contracts and the Fed that took every brain cell for me to understand (I had to remember everything I learned from reading House of Cards and The Big Short) the book was also a page turner with excellent scenes and characters, ranging from the Persian Gulf to a batty old history teacher and her two dogs (who she imagined spoke to her in the voices of Cotton Mather and Malcolm X) to the lives of the rich slacker high school kids in Finden, the town Haslett chooses for a most current conflict to occur.

4/8/10

Our kids are champion car travelers, they did the eight hours back from the beach without a complaint-- yet they are often terrible when inside the house (or in any contained area except the car), which is why I'm thinking of getting a couple of car seats for indoors, so when they're getting wild, I'll just strap them in.

4/7/10

There is nothing like a Circus Peanut: the color, the texture, the taste . . . and if you want to read more, head over to G:TB for the First Annual Circus Peanut Diorama Contest (a response to the Washington Post's Peeps Diorama Contest . . . my entry, which I call "P-Day," is above, and right now, since I am the only entry, I am winning . . . the complete rules are at G:TB).

4/6/10

Rice Krispies wouldn't snap, crackle and pop . . . if corn weren't a subsidized crop.

4/5/10

Hot Tub Time Machine is very funny and also very very vulgar . . . and what made it even funnier for Catherine and I is that once the credits were rolling, we noticed that the couple behind us had decided to bring their three year old daughter and eleven year old son to see it (they passed up Clash of the Titans and Diary of a Wimpy Kid and How to Train a Dragon) and though we didn't agree with their parental permissiveness, we had to admire their perseverance, as they stuck it out despite the film's constant use of the f- word, abundant and gratuitous nudity, frequent rape and fellatio jokes, and obtuse 80's allusions; although, I don't recommend it for the kids, we both laughed a lot . . . I give the film four out of a possible five Walkmen (Walkmans? Sony claims the plural is Walkman Personal Stereos).

Pomp and Circumcision

I have been elected by the student body to give the graduation speech this year, and I am a bit nervous as I'll be speaking to a very large crowd (800 students, their families, many teachers and administrators, etc.) and so I'm working on a strong opening to my speech . . . and here is idea number one: "Greetings, I would like to thank all the parents in attendance today-- I am so glad that eighteen years and nine months ago you had unprotected sex."

4/3/10

Does Surfer Blood sound too much like Weezer for its own good?

Hypothetical Legos, Real Fisticuffs

It must be in the genes: Alex and Ian sit down together on the couch to look at the new Lego catalog, which sounds pretty innocuous, but within minutes they are embroiled in a fierce debate which ended in a fist fight . . . they were arguing about the hypothetical purchase of a Lego set and the hypothetical division of the hypothetically purchased Lego figures in the hypothetical set and the hypothetical superpowers of the hypothetical figures in the hypothetical set; they almost sounded like squabbling nations (and, by the way, yesterday's two sentence post was an April Fool's Joke-- anyone who writes more than one sentence a day is a complete idiot).

4/1/10

I'm feeling constrained by this format, I think it's time for me to spread my wings and fly. I think I need to try something new.

3/31/10

Does anyone actually get Andy Capp?-- and I'm not talking about his Hot Fries, which are delicious, I'm talking about the comic strip, which, to me, has always been as indecipherable as a Kandinsky painting.

3/30/10

While I can only commend Sean Penn for going to Haiti and lending a hand, I also think he may have lost himself in his "role" as a humanitarian; I heard him on NPR and he said, "This isn't a good place for children and there aren't nearly enough tents and we're really in trouble once the rainy season comes" and by his use of the pronoun "we" instead of "they," I'm wondering if he's so identified with the Haitians that he has forgotten that he can summon a fleet of helicopters to take him back to Hollywood whenever he desires.

Date Night With . . .

Once in a while it's fun to have a date night: an intimate dinner at a rustic spot (Sandy's diner) and then something special in the theater (the school play) and finally drinks out in a bay-side town (South Amboy) and then . . . well, you know what happens next . . . Terry gets in his car to head back to Helmetta and I get in mine and go home to see my wife (who was hanging out with her lady friends-- it's not like I deserted her to go on a date with Terry, and though the school play was actually quite entertaining-- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum-- they had the heat on and it was that warm day and so it was 120 degrees inside, my socks were soaked with sweat, so we bailed slightly before the first act ended, and met up with a bar crawl in South Amboy, the land of a million bars and ate a world renowned Munck-ee Bar chicken quesadilla).

Probably Better Not to Know

Alex tossed a shield bug in the toilet, but Ian (who STILL refuses to let us use live worms as fishing bait) rescued the drowning bug, not thinking twice about fishing him from the toilet water with his bare hands, and the only reason I found out about this daring and bacteria-laden rescue is because Alex offhandedly mentioned that he had tossed said bug in the toilet-- they were both pretty nonchalant about the incident-- and their nonchalance made me wonder how many other bugs Ian had saved from being flushed-- as he's always walking around with a bug in his hands . . . and so I did a little investigative reporting; I interrogated Alex and Ian about this matter, and they immediately-- without shame or disgust-- admitted that Ian often rescues bugs from the toilet.

Take a Deep Breath . . .

We started watching the second season of Breaking Bad, and it is just as excellent and intense as the first-- if you like to sit tensely wiithout breathing or moving for forty five minutes, this is the show for you.

3/26/10

Here is a great picture of last week's flood and what it did to the park a block from our house-- if the ocean levels do rise as predicted, we will have bay front property.

3/25/10

There is nothing more serene to me than running barefoot on the beach with my iPod, or that's how it used to be, but I think I will be more anxious in the future: last week a South Carolina man was jogging with headphones on a Hilton Head beach, and he was struck in the back by a small airplane that was making an emergency landing, and, of course, the plane killed him instantly-- and-- this is the awful part-- he was probably just trying to burn some calories before eating cake, because it was his daughter's third birthday . . . so look both ways, and then look out behind you as well..

3/24/10

I rarely post videos, but I'm sure that this is the most important film since Citizen Kane, and it inspired the kids and me to build a Rube Goldberg contraption, though ours pales in comparison to this; we had a battery powered Thomas the Train ride out of Alex's room and then nudge a Matchbox car on orange track so that the car raced down the stairs and jumped into a Folgers can strung to a balloon wedged between the banister, which pulled a string that raised another piece of track heading into the living room, so that a little car zipped down that track, and hit a Lego lever on a hinge, which pulled a string attached to a train switch, so that the train engine that was going round and round the whole time, veered onto another track and made its way towards a card house, which it knocked down . . . and we got it to work (and here is the video to prove it!)

3/23/10

On St. Patrick's Day, my son Alex had some questions about Ireland, and so I showed him a map and put on some Irish music (Horslips) and the next thing I knew, I was plunged into my personal nightmare-- Alex heard the music and decided he wanted to learn to play the flute, and asked if he could take flute lessons . . . and fans of my blogging know how I feel about the flute in general and Jethro Tull in particular . . . but what could I say except "sure," and as long as no one reminds him, I'm sure he'll forget about it.

We've Got Computers . . . Let's Use Them!

Because of all the flooding, I forgot to mention just how much I hate daylight savings time-- it's not just the darkness in the morning, and the fact that it's difficult enough to teach high school students at 7:26 in the morning without throwing a monkey wrench into the schedule-- those things are bad enough-- but the thing that really gets me is that we allow the government to control time, and-- for once-- I'm not just complaining, I actually have a solution: since it's the digital age and we've built all these tiny computers and placed them in everything from toasters to clock radios, why not have Daylight Saving Month-- if we subtracted two minutes a day for a month, we wouldn't miss them a bit, and we'd accomplish the same goal without inconveniencing the working population (because if you're retired, then who gives a shit?)