A Psychological Tactic

This tactic is from Dan Ariely's new book The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home and it is based upon the psychological fact that people will enjoy something pleasurably more if there is an interruption-- whether it is getting a massage or watching television, a break inserted in there when you are no longer receiving the pleasurable stimulus makes you appreciate it again once the break is over . . . and so TiVo actually makes television watching less pleasurable, because resuming your favorite show after some annoying commercials makes you treasure the show even more-- and so the next time you and your wife/lover/mistress are doing something fun, sitting in a hot-tub drinking beer or relaxing on the beach watching the waves or simply watching TV, offer to get up and get your wife/lover/mistress something they want; this is the beauty of the tactic, you will appear to be unselfish because you've interrupted your pleasant activity to get them another drink or a snack or something, but actually you will be increasing your perception of pleasure because when you get back to the pleasurable activity, you will enjoy it more . . . mwooohahahahah (that is how you phonetically spell an evil laugh . . . I also recommend Ariely's other book, Predictably Irrational).

7/22/10 Ask the Oil Spill

Head over to Gheorghe: The Blog to hear what the BP oil spill has to say for itself . . . you won't regret it.

Coffee Poll

My wife wants me to poll ten people and see if they know that Taster's Choice is instant coffee . . . I did NOT know this and the other morning I thought we were out of coffee (we weren't, I just couldn't see it in the fridge) an so I rummaged around and found a canister of Taster's Choice and so I put it into the coffee maker, though the consistency was a little weird, and it made some very very strong coffee and it also formed a thick sludge in the filter and machine . . . a sludge that I imagine is similar to what the shrimp are eating right now in the Gulf . . . and Catherine thinks I should have known that Taster's Choice is instant coffee, which is coffee that disintegrates right into your cup, but I don't watch TV and I've never made instant coffee before and I'm not so sure that everyone in America knows what this stuff is, as my wife claims . . . so any information on the public knowledge of this product is greatly appreciated.

7/20/10 The David Blaine

In their hit "Crank Dat," Soulja Boy introduced me to the "superman," a sexual technique you might like to try with your ho, and now a new hip-hip album has furthered my sexual education and taught me another fun thing you can do to your ho . . . I learned this one from Big Boi's awesome solo effort, "Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty" and the technique is called "The David Blaine" and this is how it works: you are making love to your ho from behind and you get someone from your posse that is similar to you in both physique and looks to somehow swap places with you while you are in the act, without your ho noticing the switch (it probably works better if she is high on the rock) and then you go outside while your body double keeps up the love-making and you bang on the window until your ho notices you and marvels at your magical David Blaine-like powers.

What The $%#$ Is The Matter With Kansas?

In his book What's the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Thomas Frank explains the nifty trick conservative Republicans have pulled off in the reddest of red states . . . and many other places in the mid-West: the poorest people, those most hurt by laissez faire capitalism, those most in need of social services and good public schools and a higher minimum wage and unionization, those that would most benefit from environmental reforms and public parks and regulation of big-business . . . those people happily vote against this time after time because the Republicans have made the elections about authenticity and brand loyalty and morality-- these people are voting for a higher cause, whether it is the anti-abortion crusade or gun rights or small government or home-schooling or the encroachment of "liberal intellectual values" into their square way of life . . . and the beauty of this is that these battles will never be won, and the Republicans have somehow inserted Adam Smith's "invisible hand" into this pantheon revered issues and the great paradox of this is that the very laissez-faire free-wheeling capitalism that the conservatives vote for produces the insipid entertainment culture that they rail against and the more they place themselves in the hands of privatized America, the more they will be offended, insulted, and outraged and the more they will fall into the hands of the very party that does them no good . . . or no good financially, but the point of the book is that sometimes people want to do better morally and emotionally, it might be more valuable to be indignant and poor than content and middle class; there's much more in here but it's a well argued take from an ex-conservative that lives in Kansas, I highly recommend it although it will probably piss you off (if you're a Northeastern liberal . . . if you're a economically disadvantaged red state conservative and you're reading this blog then the universe is a strange place and this book might explain why you have voted against your best interests for the last thirty years).

Malleable Friends

 Adam Elliott's charming but dark (both in color and theme) claymation masterpiece Mary and Max will definitely make you laugh and maybe even make you cry-- though not as much as this movie; it's the story of the oddest of friends, an awkward Australian girl and her accidental pen-pal: an obese New Yorker with Asperger's (voiced by Philip Seymour-Hoffman) and the film has a novelistic sense of time . . . you journey through love, death, betrayal, suicide, alcoholism, neglect, and obsession and though it's all made of clay, you forget that soon enough: five cans of condensed milk out of five.

7/17/10 The New (and Improved) Sherlock Holmes?

Guy Ritchie's new Sherlock Holmes is entertaining as an action movie, and it also works as a super-hero buddy flick (complete with homosexual overtones between Holmes and Watson that rival Batman and Robin's weird relationship) but it fails as a mystery-- the clues are so obscure, obtuse, and fleeting that only Holmes can make sense of them, in rapid fire montages that illustrate his brilliant consciousness . . . so I will give it four pig carcasses out of a possible four, but only one pipe out of ten.

7/16/10 Mapplethorpe meets Reagonomics

Sometimes Adam Smith's "invisible" hand forms a fist and shoves itself where the sun of capitalism never shines.

Wrong Book For The Setting

You probably don't want to be reading Jon Jeter's book Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced the Working People while you are vacationing in Cape Cod, as it isn't exactly beach reading-- the book is about how globalization and the World Bank has created a transnational underclass, and Jeter, the Washington Post bureau chief for South Africa and South America, tells specific tales of Argentinian garbage-pickers, Uruguayan prostitutes, Zambian capitalists (who earn pennies a day), a South African woman fighting to afford newly privatized clean water and electricity, and a Brazilian cab driver working round the clock to feed his family that will make you feel guilty about living in America (even during a recession) and you certainly don't want these stories, facts, and figures in your head when you eat over your aunt's house (a stunning place on the Oyster River in Chatham) and the discussion turns political . . . it's better to stay out of it when more conservative relatives talk about "redistribution of wealth" as if that is an awful, evil thing, because you don't want to sound like an autistic socialist, which is exactly what you'll sound like if you start citing distribution of wealth ratios in various countries . . . in other words, the income for the wealthiest ten percent of the population as compared to the poorest ten percent of the population-- so I wisely kept my mouth shut, but here are the statistics Jeter cites:  in Brazil the wealthiest ten percent make 51 times more than the poorest ten percent, in South Africa the ratio is 33:1, in the United States-- which has the biggest disparity of any developed nation-- it is 15:1, and in socialized Sweden it is 6 to1.

7/14/10 A Warning

It is scary to think you might end up like your parents, but it is even scarier to think that you already are like your parents-- you just don't realize it.

7/13/10 A Literary Analogy

I Read Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night while I was on vacation and I liked it much better than The Great Gatsby, and the best way to explain this is an analogy:  The Great Gatsby is like Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men: it is artistic and archetypal and thematic and and lean and memorable and literary . . . Tender is the Night is like Cannery Row: it is ragged and specific and autobiographical in spots and rambling and not as focused-- chronologically or thematically-- and looser and more fun . . . Fitzgerald has time to write lines like "she crossed and recrossed her knees frequently in the manner of tall restless virgins" and though The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men will forever be taught in school because they are symbolic and unforgettable, Tender is the Night and Cannery Row are better books, denser and more engaging and easier to get lost in.

I'm Back! And Dumber Than Ever!

I inadvertently made my wife quit caffeine cold turkey on our vacation last week, although she did not know she was quitting . . . here is how it happened: I always get up early and so on vacation I'm in charge of figuring out the foreign coffee maker and making the coffee-- and aside from one small flood-- I was successful, but I didn't realize the green bag of coffee was decaf (for my father, at home we don't have any decaf coffee so I can't make this mistake) and it took Catherine three days of migraine head-aches to figure out my error . . . but in the end I think she'll thank me, because now she knows if she needs to quit, she can do it . . . aside from the head-aches (and if you want a full analysis of our vacation, I've written my first installment of The Battle of the Beaches: The Jersey Shore vs. Cape Cod over on Gheorghe: The Blog).

7/11/10

My brother found it extremely amusing that my father, slightly overwhelmed by the expansive menu at Aroma (a delicious Thai restaurant) asked the waiter this question about the Grilled Duck: "The Grilled Duck?  Is that duck . . . grilled?"

7/10/10

Fooled you again . . . I'm sure I didn't step foot inside the Chatham Library all vacation . . . I'm probably collecting shells with my kids right now on an idyllic beach, drunk, surrounded by bikini clad Swedish volleyball players; I wrote all the sentences ahead of time . . . sorry for my behavior, but tomorrow fresh sentences will begin again.

7/9/10

Just kidding about yesterday's sentence . . . I wrote it at the Chatham Library, a lovely red brick pile set back from main street and framed by huge old oak trees; it is such a charming old building that the internet terminals seem incongruous inside, anachronistic, as if the future invaded the past . . . and the dusty shelves of old books and the ancient maps of the Nantucket Sound on the walls make me yearn for a past time, when information had a physical component, when you had to riffle the pages of a dusty book to learn what you needed, or unroll a map, or pull a newspaper from a wooden spool, or search among cards in a monolithic wooden cabinet . . . but those days are gone, of course, and how long will libraries like this one be necessary?

7/8/10

I am on vacation in Cape Cod right now, and I have no access to a computer . . . so I am writing this sentence with my mind-- I am letting my thoughts flow in binary code and telepathically transmitting them to the internet (along with my Google password . . . trivia question: why is George Costanza's ATM password Bosco?) and the words are appearing right in front of your eyes, or maybe, if things are going according to my plan, you aren't even looking at a screen right now . . . maybe my thoughts are transmitting straight into your brain, and you just think you are looking at a computer monitor or your Blackberry or iPad or iPhone or other tiny device, but you're really not looking at anything at all, and if this is the case, then very very soon, I will be taking over the world, and, luckily, you will be in my monkey-sphere of power and influence, because you are a fan of Sentence of Dave, and so, for you, everything is going to be just fine.

A Sentence Where The Title of the Sentence is Longer than the Sentence Itself (But Not as Long a Title as a "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening")

Last night, I dreamed I came face to face with a mountain lion.

7/6/10

It's sad when you try to take your children to your childhood bait and tackle shop, and in its place you find a new business called NJ Bail Bonds . . . but it does remind me of when I learned what a bail bond is, which is the exact same time everyone my age learned what a bail bond is: right after watching The Bad News Bears when you asked your parents-- what is Chico's Bail Bonds?

7/5/10 The World Cup Causes Me Trouble: A One Sentence Memoir

Though I had an extremely long day of World Cup Imbibing (10 AM to Midnight) the day before Ian's kiddie birthday party, I thought I recovered nicely-- I got up early from Stacey and Ed's place in South Amboy and drove Stacey's stick shift car (not my forte) to Helmetta so I could get my car, and I was still home before 7 AM, and I immediately starting doing whatever my wife asked me to do-- I picked up the cake and balloons and juice boxes and other ingredients, I cleaned the kiddie pool, I straightened the back yard, and I attempted to fill water balloons-- but by the time the party rolled around I was dragging a bit, and I guess I wasn't as involved as I should have been, and mainly I talked to my friend Dom about a new book he was reading that sounded interesting (Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced the Working People) but any time Catherine asked for help I helped her and then later in the day when we were at the pool I jokingly mentioned to a friend that I had "failed" at Ian's kiddie party and she said, "Let me guess what happened . . . one of the parents there was a friend of yours that you hadn't talked to in a while and instead of helping your wife, who was running around like a madwoman, you sat and talked to your friend and had to be reminded by your wife to help out," and I said, "That's remarkably accurate, how did you know?" and she said, "Because my husband did the same thing and I said to him, 'Look asshole, if you want to talk to your fucking friend, then you call him up like an adult and you go meet him in a god-damned bar like a grown-up but right now you're going to help me with this party'" and I should mention that this is a friend who rarely uses profanity.

7/4/10

So we put our digital camera on a tripod the other day and made a stop motion Lego movie . . . the plot was very simple:  two cars drove at each other and then crashed, resulting in a pile of Legos, but we were able to screw up every aspect of the film;  there are fingers in several shots, it's choppy, the crash looks awful, the lighting switches because we used the flash on some pictures and not on others, and we were too far away for it to look very good . . . so when you go on  YouTube and watch a decent Lego movie, understand that it took A LOT of skill.