European Crime

I'm still on a foreign crime kick: if you want a Scottish crime novel that's reminiscent of Fargo, try Denise Mina's Still Midnight; and we just watched the Kenneth Branagh version of Henning Mankell's novel Sidetracked-- Branagh plays tortured Swedish detective Kurt Wallander and the start of the show is stunning-- you'd never believe something called "rapeseed" could be so beautiful.

6/6/10

There are always three ants in our upstairs bathroom sink, but they aren't the same ants because I kill them every time I use the bathroom, so either they regenerate or else there are an infinite supply of ants somewhere in that bathroom.

I Think Dane Cook Is Funny

The other day in the office, the very funny but slightly obsessive guy who always calls into radio stations and wins tickets every week and then sell them and uses the money to buy authentic Battlestar Galactica paraphernalia on eBay (you have a guy like this in your work place right?) said he had a pair of Dane Cook tickets to sell, and when I expressed interest because my wife and I both think he's funny, I took some flak for liking Dane Cook-- apparently people who think they are hip don't like Dane Cook, they think he is "obvious" and "just in it for the attention" and "not very clever" and since I wasn't all that familiar with him, I had just heard some of his famous bits (car alarm, Kool-Aid guy, public restrooms, etc.) I did some research and listened to his new album (Isolated Incident) and his takes on race, suicide, masturbation, porn, and Obama all made me laugh, so maybe I am obvious, not very clever, and just in it for the attention as well.

A Case of Premeditated Plumbing

I'm not Mother Theresa, but I am proud to say that last night I did not beat, strangle, or kill my youngest child, and you might say, "That's nothing to be proud of!" but let me tell you the whole story: yesterday morning, our kitchen ceiling started dripping and I discovered that the "S" pipe in our upstairs bathroom was leaking, so we mopped up the water (and Ian helped!) and considered ourselves lucky that the leak was in plain view and then we instructed the kids not to use that sink-- and it's not even the main upstairs bathroom, it's the bedroom bathroom, so they don't use that sink anyway, and Catherine wisely put a towel over it to remind us not to use it-- now flash to yesterday evening, we're getting ready to go to the school carnival and Alex is drawing on the computer quietly and Ian is roaming around and suddenly the ceiling starts dripping lots of water, way more water than in the morning and I get very upset-- where could it be from?-- but I go upstairs and our bedroom door is open and the bathroom door is open-- and it is a difficult door to open-- and the towel is pulled aside and THE TAP IS RUNNING! . . . because Ian, bored and annoyed because Alex was playing quietly on his own, went upstairs, went into our room, removed the towel, and turned the water on and then came downstairs, didn't say a thing, and just waited to see what would happen . . . and by this time Catherine had left for the carnival (she was a volunteer) and so I had to deal with this alone and I was having serious rage issues and Ian admitted that it was premeditated, that he knew what the result would be and that he was in serious trouble, and-- after I told him that he had "betrayed the family," he was sent to his room and missed the carnival and lost all of his reward marbles and got a stern talking to and I may have kicked a chair, but like I said, there was no beating or strangling of the child, and I'm pretty proud of that, considering he nearly ruined our kitchen ceiling ON PURPOSE . . . just to see what would happen, and I'm getting angry all over again as I write this sentence . . . deep breaths, deep breaths.

6/3/10 (That's Right, Dave Has Been Married for TEN Years!)

Secret Lives of Your Children, Part II: I ran into Ian's pre-K teacher, Mrs. Z, at the grocery store-- she is the sweetest, greatest teacher, and so patient with my stubborn grouch of a son, and she has the kids doing all kinds of hands on projects having to do with science and gardening and cooking, and this is what she said to me about Ian, you can insert the subtext: "You know, Ian is so smart . . . not book smart, and he's compassionate too."

6/2/10

The Secret Life of Your Children, Part I: Alex received a multiple paragraph note from his teacher last week, not only was he fooling around with glue sticks during work time, but he also has a tendency to "forget" his lunchbox in the cafeteria, so then he has to go retrieve it, and Mrs. Y. told us to remind him that he's supposed to use the bathroom in the classroom after lunch, and that he shouldn't be in the hall bathrooms or playing in the hallway . . . essentially what I got from the note is that Alex is driving her crazy, that she's often searching for him, and that he's having his own adventures around the building . . . and so I told him to stop driving his teacher crazy, but it's weird-- I can barely control my kids when they are within ten feet of me, so how am I supposed to get them to behave remotely?

The Form of This Sentence Reflects Its Function

A Wired article called "Chaos Theory" summarizes Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows, which argues that the riot of hyper-linked information on the Internet actually rewires our brain so that we comprehend less, and read in a cursory manner.

My Kids Refuse To Be Cute On Demand

In order to generate some material for the blog, I decided to ask my children difficult questions and jot down the results, which I figured would be cute and incoherent . . . so I asked my six year old how a car engine works and he said, "I think it burns up the gas and that makes things go around," which is actually pretty close and neither cute nor funny, and then I asked my four year old where animal babies come from and he said, "I don't know," so obviously this feature is not going to work out as a regular offering.

Two Completely Impossible Trivia Questions

Two trivia questions that have entertained people recently: 1) name the top three international best selling music albums of all time (according to Wikipedia)  2) what is the primary ingredient of Worcestershire Sauce?

Copulation > Assassination

A great moment on Madmen: ad-man Duck Phillips is meeting an ad-woman Peggy Olsen in a hotel for a "nooner," and Duck is watching TV while he waits for Peggy at their trysting place and he sees a news flash that President Kennedy has been shot and injured, but he knows his Peggy is just about to show up, and there's no way he's going to let a little thing like this ruin the romantic moment, and so he unplugs the television, and when she walks in moments later she is none the wiser, and then once they are post-coital, smoking cigarettes in bed, he says, "Do you mind if I turn on the TV . . . there's this news story that's bothering me," and then they learn that J.F.K has been killed . . . and I certainly can't blame Duck-- you can't let a national tragedy get in the way of copulation.

BONUS Post at Gheorghe:The Blog

Terry and I made a pilgrimage to the new Red Bulls Arena in Harrison . . . read all about it at Gheorghe: The Blog.

We Were at (the educational Trenton version of) Woodstock!

Last Saturday, Terry, Stacey, Mike and I attended the educational version of Woodstock-- the NJEA rally in Trenton-- and we are assuming that in the future, everyone and their brother will claim that they were there, but we were there and Stacey has the pictures to prove it; we took the train because we didn't want to be beholden to the NJEA bus schedule (and so we could drink-- we were hungry but elected to purchase beers instead of food for the train ride-- we assumed all the teachers on the train would be partying, but we were wrong, in fact, to our knowledge, we were the only teachers at the event to smuggle in alcohol-- beer for the train, and wine and Sprite in water bottles-- we were in Trenton, after all) and the event was packed with teachers, cops, and firemen . . . attendance estimates ranged from 30,000 to 35,000-- despite the crowds, the event was very well organized and there were plenty of Port-a-Johns and tons of great food . . . gyros and sausage-and-pepper sandwiches and crab cakes and grilled burgers and dogs, which made my rash culinary decision even more ridiculous, I was waiting in line to get a chicken gyro, which looked delicious, and I saw a lonely stand that was advertising "Pork Roll Sandwiches" and-- after feeling a sudden burst of Jersey pride-- I said, "This is New Jersey-- I'm getting pork roll" and then I regretted my choice for the rest of the day, but maybe not as much as Terry regretted his conversation with some cab drivers: "Hey, are you guys African? No? Oh, Haitian . . . well you're better off here than there," and when he was asked to explain that comment,  he claimed he just wanted to "talk some World Cup" with them, but then he got thrown off when they said they were from Haiti . . . and Terry wondered: what do you say to someone when they say thay are from Haiti?

Young at Heart/ Old at Heart

Once again I got mixed up in assessing people's mental age (a concept my friend Whitney invented, where you assign someone an abstract age, which they usually remain for the bulk of their life . . . he says he will always be 19, partying and trying to drink under-age, like it's getting away with something, and I will always be 90, seen it all, crotchety, going to bed early, don't really care how I dress or what people think of me) and first I was doing it in class, because it is great to do for characters in fiction, but of course the students wanted me to assess them, so I would assign them arbitrary ages (two silly girls: I say: "You're three," and "You're four," one asks, "Can I be five?" and I say "Sure," and the other says, "Then I want to be five too, if she gets to be five!" and I say, "No, you really are three") and some of them get upset ("Do I have to be twelve?" "Yes you do," "I want to be twenty one!" "That's just what a twelve year old would say") and I got borderline insulting, calling Liz a bit "snotty" and Laura "passive aggressive" and then assigning them random ages, such as 24, 114, 55, 62, 13, but the funny thing is, everyone listens to you very intently when you do this, because you are talking exclusively about them, and we love it when someone talks about us exclusively, even if the opinions are unfounded and stupid.

5/26/10

You may have tried some of the awareness tests that are available on-line, and hopefully, like me, you failed them miserably-- that's what FUN about them-- but I had my wife do a few of them (and I have read more books than my wife, so you'd think I would be smarter than her) but she kept passing the tests, which is no fun at all . . . she'd start watching and then she'd yell out the fun thing they reveal at the end of the test that normal people have to replay the video to see . . . and she guesses the end of movies too.

5/25/10

I'm working my way through Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, by conservative British historian Paul Johnson (who lost his footing on the moral high ground when Gloria Stewart, the writer with whom he had an eleven year affair, revealed that he enjoyed erotic spankings) and despite the fact that I don't agree with some of his political stances, he is a vivid and entertaining writer . . . if only my history textbooks from high school had prose like this: "The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary phase in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German body politic; the German state was huge creature with a small and limited brain."

5/24/10

So my boss asked me if I knew what "febrile" meant and I said, "feverish" and he said,"no, it means weak" and then a colleague agreed-- she said, "yeah, like feeble" and I took their word for it, although my one skill in life is that I can define nearly any word-- if I say a definition it's usually correct, and if I don't know the word then I know I don't know the word, but this was a clear example of Solomon Asch's experiments in social pressure-- all it took was two people agreeing to make me question my brain, but luckily, I had to look up the word "exiguous"-- which means diminutive-- and I remembered about "febrile" and so I looked it up and then I got to say the best three words in the English language: I WAS RIGHT!

5/23/10

Alex lost his sticker again at school, and he said it was "just for giving Leukey a high-five," and I said, "Just for that?" and he said, "Yeah, it was nonsense."

Five Circus Facts

We took the kids to Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus last week, and here are some things to remember: 1) the music is really LOUD, and in the genre of New Age Yanni, and so you should bring ear-plugs 2) you can fit seven racing motorcycles in a steel ball 3) they have updated the clowns so that they are not sad, weird, and spooky 4) go to the pre-show where you get to walk out on the floor and get close to the jugglers, men on stilts, elephants, and hat throwers 5) circus chicks are really hot and when you get bored during the trampoline act you can fantasize about running away with the circus and fornicating with all the super fit and sexy circus chicks, because the guys in the circus are kind of goofy, so you can convince yourself without too much work, that you actually might have a shot with these incredibly flexible, athletic, and lovely women from far flung portions of the globe, even though they would laugh at you because you can't even do two flips on the trapeze.

5/21/10

I bought a kid's electric guitar for Ian at a garage sale, and put two coated strings on it-- my theory being, when you teach kids chess you just use a couple pieces at a time, and when you teach kids soccer, you start small sided-- so I would start slow with the guitar, and I put a strap on it and gave him a guitar stand so that it is his guitar, up in his room, and I showed him how to alternate pick and told him if he practiced for a month, I would get him a little amplifier (which is a terrible idea, considering he's going to be five in a month and still doesn't know how to tell time, so he'll be waking us up at 5:15 with it) and he put it on and practiced several times, which was impressive, and then we put them to bed and watched an episode of Madmen and when we went upstairs, Catherine called me into his room-- he was sleeping with his guitar.

One Way to Earn a Buck

Last Saturday after my work-out at the gym I went to pick up my kids from the Kids Klub supervised play area, and the girl-- a new girl-- said that my kids "earned a dollar" and she really wanted me to take this dollar and split it between Alex and Ian but I refused, of course . . . but she insisted that they deserved it for some game they were playing and I just wanted to get out of there so I said fine, I'd make change in the car, but as we were walking across the parking lot Alex told me the whole story: he was drawing on the computer and Ian was pestering him so much that he punched Ian in the eye and they got into some kind of hysterical fight and she essentially paid them to be good, so I made them march back in and tell the lady that they didn't deserve the dollar and then give the dollar back, which they did (while crying hysterically) and this truly makes me wonder just what the fuck is going on with my kids when I'm not watching.