6/20/10

I simultaneously read Steve Martin's Born Standing Up and Hampton Sides' Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin and though they both focus on America in the late sixties, you wouldn't know it was the same country; Steve Martin lived an odd life you couldn't invent, getting his start at Disneyland doing patter in the magic shops and slowly evolving his act towards the avant-garde while he drifted through the Flower Power era . . . meanwhile, Dr. King was organizing a general revolution among the poor, hoping to bring them all to Washington to camp out and make the rest of the country understand their plight, and he was being stalked by both J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, as well as a shifty man that went by various names, including Eric Galt and James Earl Ray, who-- after assassinating King, led the FBI on a wild hunt that required detective work across the South, in Mexico, Canada, and, finally, London, where he was captured by Scotland Yard's finest (which annoyed J. Edgar Hoover).

6/19/10 The Thousandth Post! $$^%&^ You!

That's right, all you nay-saying *&;(%&*^*&&$#;ers who said I would never &^%^&; keep this up, who said I was too lazy and too stupid and too unfocused to remember to write a sentence every day . . . now I have something to say to you: %*&;^% ^*^ ^;^*&;$$%^# (*&;(*&;)(%&;$# #$%^%$!!!! . . . and if I keep it up for ninety more years, then I'll have written my own personal War and Peace (which by my back of the envelope approximation has 31,000 sentences) so ^&a&^p;%^ you!

6/18/10

So I finally executed this stupid gag at school-- it's rather Andy Kaufmanesque: we started reading an essay on Modernism and then I asked the kids if it would help if they could see a video clip about this topic before they wrote their essay and they said yes (of course) and I agreed with them that sometimes it helps to see what we're reading about, especially if it is about art, and so then I played a video of me reading the exact essay on Modernism that we just read and then I asked them if that helped . . . being able to see it, and they laughed, but next year I want to do this gag once a month, so that just when they think I'd never do it again, I do it again (and I show enough actual video clips that they would forget) so I've got a lot of filming to do . . . I feel like it will work especially well for Hamlet . . . would you like to see this scene? It's a great one to actually see . . . and then I'll play a film of me reading it in a horrible British accent . . . and then I'll use the same accent for A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, because, oddly, my British and Irish accents are identical and they are also very high-pitched, I think the students enjoy my bad accents more than if I could actually do a convincing accent . . . and if you're wondering about the relevance of this tangent, I think it fits into the category of comedy that is also Kaufmanesque.

6/17/10

If you've ever thought about leaving your wife and kids, hitting the road, and crafting a brilliant, ground breaking, and hysterically funny stand-up act, don't bother . . . just read Born Standing Up by Steve Martin; first of all, it takes a LONG time to hone an act . . . Martin divides his eighteen years of stand-up like this: ten years spent learning, four years spent refining, and four years of "wild success," but, ironically, he didn't enjoy the wild success so much because once you achieve this, you're simply robotically repeating your best material to enormous audiences, where you're unable to hear the reactions or connect in any way with the crowd, and you're not working in collaboration with anyone, you're simply going from city to city, day after day to give the people exactly what they want . . . so why do all this lonely, hard work to begin with, when the end result won't be so satisfying? . . . instead just go straight to acting, which is more social and where you have potential for much hotter chicks; as for the book, I give it nine gag arrows out of a possible ten.

6/16/10 It's Number Day!

A sentence with some numbers: when my wife and I went to the Greek place last week for our tenth anniversary, we drank a bottle of wine I bought five years ago in order to save for this occasion (but it was actually seven years old, barbera del monferrato 2003) and it tasted quite good, and then when we got the bill, Catherine told me if I guessed it within a dollar she would give me a back-rub and so I added up what I thought were the prices for the grilled calamari, the chicken gyro plate, and the caper salad, calculated some tax, added a dollar surcharge (which I thought existed but actually didn't exist) and hit the total to the penny: $40.50.

Somebody Better Write This Quickly (Before We Forget About The Gulf Oil Spill and Start Worrying About Some Other Disaster))

I hereby donate this bad science-fiction plot to whomever would like to develop it into a full length novel or movie: the US Government develops a petroleum eating bacteria in order to clean up an oil spill, but the bacteria mutates into an airborne strain and slowly expands around the globe, eating the fuel at filling stations and in individual gas tanks, essentially paralyzing world transportation-- and the bacteria creates propane as a waste product, which is highly flammable, so there are LOTS of explosions and lots of chaos, but one man-- in his home made electric car, with his battery powered fan, and his electric razor, and his electric chair-- will save the earth from complete pandemonium . . . admittedly, it sounds pretty dumb, but it's a better plot than The Human Centipede.

We Don't Know How to Relax

To celebrate our tenth anniversary, Catherine and I spent the weekend in Philadelphia . . . without the kids . . . but we really don't know how to relax, we turned the two days away into an epic, we walked from Penn's Landing to the Art Museum to Fairmont Park to Eastern State Penitentiary to the Italian Market in the South to the Reading Market in the Center to Jim's on South Street for a cheese-steak and then back to the center to McGillin's Pub to watch the soccer game-- you can read my expert analysis here--and  I estimate we walked twelve miles Saturday morning-- before we snagged the last two bar stools in the pub, where we planned to watch the game and then head back to the historical area to nap and have dinner, but the bar visit turned epic as well, because, coincidentally, a student of mine from a decade ago turned out to be the bartender, so we were fronted many drinks and five hours later we were stumbling to our dinner reservation, at an Italian place called La Locanda del Ghiottone . . . the place of the gluttons . . . and when we woke up Sunday morning, it was mildly epic to get home, I do NOT recommend taking the SEPTA to Trenton-- it stops everywhere-- so it took us two and a half hours to get back to New Brunswick, and then we had to clean the house and cook for Ian's fifth birthday-- so we were quickly plunged back into reality.

6/13/10

It's fun to look at Jeff Bridges in Crazyheart, he's a perfect portrait of every grizzled country singer on the planet, but it's not so much fun to hear him sing (like I should talk!) and the plot is predictable and-- aside from one moment of conflict that Catherine called out well before it happened-- rather lacking in impetus . . . it's certainly not a bad movie, but I'm not sure it warrants all the four star reviews it garnered.

6/11/10

I once contemplated legally adding an exclamation point to the end of my name, but at the beach on Saturday I saw a simpler alternative: a rather large girl had a tattoo of a giant "!" on her shoulder-- perhaps I will get a tattoo of a giant semi-colon on mine.

6/11/10 It's Phallus Rubicundus Day Again!

This is a photo I took of what is known as phallus rubicundus, which is a type of stinkhorn fungus, and this obscenity sprouted during the night in our garden, thrusting itself through the moist dark mulch so that anyone who passed by our house could gawk at it-- and it appears to made of the same material as a circus peanut, and, just like a real phallus, after a period of time it deflates into a limp, pink unmotivated mass and doesn't appear threatening at all.

Like a Splinter in Your Eye

Yesterday, Ian redeemed himself for last week's malicious plumbing mishap . . . it was one of those days you can't even imagine until you have kids, and then when you're in the thick of it, you stay surprisingly calm --unlike when your child purposefully floods your ceiling-- so here is the briefest summary I can muster: I took Ian to the doctor in town yesterday because we noticed a black spot on his eye and though he wasn't complaining or rubbing it, we thought we should get it checked out, and I knew it was trouble when the pediatrician flooded it with a chemical, looked at it under black light, and then instructed us to immediately head to the opthamologist, but, unfortunately, all the doctors were gone from the nearby East Brunswick office, so we had to head to Bridgewater through the snarl of rush hour traffic, and once we got there, I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork, and I don't even know where my insurance card is or what my wife's social security number is or whether we have a PPO or a POS or the name of Ian's primary doctor or what Ian's birth weight was or what my cell phone number is or when I was born or my address, so that didn't go so well, and then Ian stoically withstood a battery of eye tests and eye drops and anesthetic rubbed into his eye, and the kind and wonderful doctor was able to swab the chunk of stuff out of his eye with a q-tip because Ian was able to hold very still-- which I'm not sure I would have been able to do-- and she said he must have had a very high tolerance for pain, because most people are extremely agitated if they have anything in their eye, but he had a hunk of wood in it and never complained and if it would have been my older and more dramatic son Alex in the same situation I'm not so sure it would have went so smoothly.

6/9/10

In Creative Writing class we have Show and Tell, usually students read something or tell a story, but occasionally someone will sing or play the guitar, and last week a girl hula hooped in sync to a Lady Gaga song while she transliterated the lyrics into sign language: she is definitely a member of the multi-tasking generation.

Ouch

Right now I'm suffering from a case of plantar fasciitis, and (based on some half-assed Googling) this might be caused by bare-foot running (which I've been doing for a while now) or it might be cured by barefoot running-- this reminds me of Homer Simpson's maxim about alcohol: "the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

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.