Feeling Happy? Watch This.

Robert Greenwald's documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is depressing in such a globally mind-blowing way that it almost evokes detachment . . . the low wages that Wal-Mart pays its "associates," the government subsidies for Wal-Mart stores and infrastructure, the slave wages paid in Honduras and China, the reliance of Wal-Mart employees on government programs for food and medical care, the union busting, the misogyny, the crime in the parking lots because of lack of security, the coercion techniques Wal-Mart managers use to get the "associates" to work unpaid overtime, and the sad demise of family businesses that inevitably cave to the competition . . . and though there is a "happy ending" tacked on, which details how certain communities rallied and saved their down-towns and local business and blocked Wal-Mart from their towns, you know in the back of your mind that there's always another down-town down the road that will be destroyed instead and though I will never shop at Wal-Mart again (not that we go there for much, just for worms for fishing because the local bait-shop is gone, but I guess we'll dig out own now, because Costco doesn't sell live bait) but even if Costco and Target are marginally better, it still seems that we are headed down a strange path where giant corporations will choose what we buy, how much we are paid, and how we organize as laborers . . . but we'll have loads and loads of cheap and fluffy toilet paper.

Late Start

I wish Sentence of Dave covered my entire life because it's gotten to the point where if I can't search and find an incident on the blog, then I'm not sure if it really happened to me.

Beach Reading?

I ambitiously packed two weighty tomes for our week long trip to the beach:  The Recognitions by William Gaddis, which-- though I've read five hundred pages-- I barely understand, and Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, a collection of 110 biographical essays ranging from Terry Gilliam to Tacitus, and though I recommend the latter book, neither of these works are beach reading . . . what was I thinking? . . . and so I eventually borrowed something from Dom that was more fun to read: Crash Course: The American Auto Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster and while I need to finish it before I can offer a comprehensive one sentence review and rating, I will say this:  it makes me want to watch the movie Gung Ho again, because I definitely didn't understand it when I was sixteen.

First Things First

The last night of our beach vacation, we took the kids on a ghost crab hunt, and before we went I told them a spooky tale to set the mood . . . once long ago there was a particular ghost crab that was killed by a shark, and he still haunted the beach to this day . . . he was the ghost of a ghost crab . . . and the kids, who had been watching Scooby Doo, assigned themselves characters (but no one wanted to be Velma) and decided to get to the bottom of this "ghost of a ghost crab" mystery, and while they were formulating the plan-- which involved an "invisible trap"-- my son Alex, whose personality frequently wavers between earnest and zany, stood and said, in his sternest voice "Okay, first things first! To make an invisible trap, we need a force field . . . who has a force field?"

Just When I Thought It Was Safe . . .

Just when I thought it was safe to go to the beach . . . safe to sit down and read my book or chat with other adults or skim-board a bit or maybe even take a quick nap . . . while my kids played in the light surf on their boogie-boards or dug in the sand or collected shells, with their new-found ability to make their way back to our towels and umbrellas unaided . . . this was going to be the year . . . the year my kids were self-sufficient, able to grab a snack on their own, able to amuse themselves without supervision . . . except, like all best laid plans, that's not how it turned out . . . instead of conforming to my idyllic vision, my boys transformed themselves into aggressive ocean swimmers, which is ridiculous, considering Ian barely weighs forty pounds and Alex is two pounds heavier, but, oblivious to these considerations, they now both now stride into the water without looking back to see if anyone is following or watching, and then kick out well over their heads into large surf, where they try to body surf and are often pummeled and sucked under (although Ian did body surf a wave three times his height, which was both scary and hysterical to watch, and when I chastised him for being in water that was too rough, he said, "Why?  I didn't flip," which was true, and while I'm on this subject I should also point out that Alex wandered along a tidal river and got completely lost and we didn't even know he was lost because we had assumed that he knew where our stuff was, but apparently he did not) and so we are now back where we were a few years ago, trailing our kids down the beach and into the ocean, because they aren't smart enough to look out for themselves.

A Hard Habit to Break

One of the purposes of this blog is to foster and promote human rights across the globe, and so I must implore any of my readers that are witch-doctors, or truck with witch-doctors, to please stop killing albinos and selling their body parts for use in magical potions . . . I know it's hard to abort a well-planned kidnapping and I know albino body-parts fetch a good price on the open market, but if you could substitute black rhinoceros horn or Bengal tiger kidney in your recipe, instead of albino body parts, you would be doing people of no color a great favor.

I Do Not Heed My Own Advice

Recently, I advised my readers that it is easier to invite everyone, but then, while on vacation at the beach, I neglected to follow this advice, and did not invite a particular guy to Guy's Night Out (and I asked my wife if she mentioned Guy's Night Out to this guy's girl-friend when she was out with her, and my wife said she did NOT mention Guy's Night Out so I thought this was a safe play) but then, in the fashion of Curb Your Enthusiasm, we ran into the uninvited guy and his girl-friend and all their kids while we were waiting in line at Mike's Dock and it was apparent, both by our state of inebriation and the fact that we were without wife and kids, that we were having a Guy's Night Out, and the guy made it clear that he knew we were having a Guy's Night Out and that we should have told him about it, which was pretty awkward, and all I could think of as a reply was, "It was kind of slow to develop," and so in the future I will follow my own advice.

Am I Liable? Or Just Unreliable?

I've just walked out of the ocean with my son Ian, and I'm looking up the beach to where my other son Alex is sitting, wrapped in a towel eating a snack . . . and it's low tide, so Alex is a good hundred feet away from me . . . and then, without warning, sand fills the air over my son Alex's head and a micro-burst of wind, some rogue convection cell, crashes through our beach set-up and rips two umbrellas from the ground and whips MY umbrella high up into the air . . . and when I say high up, I mean really high-up . . . it flies over the life guard stand and it continues to go straight up until it's fifty feet in the air and for a moment it hovers and it's like Mary Poppins should be attached, but then it starts to plummet and people are holding their heads and ducking and screaming (Connell said it was like when a dragon swoops down and scares all the townsfolk) and it finally crashes into the ocean-- along with one of our beach towels which also got swept up in this miniature tornado, and they are both less than ten feet from where Ian and I are standing, and so we go retrieve them (but if the umbrella would have impaled someone, I think I would have walked the other way, because I don't want to get jailed for involuntary manslaughter because of shoddy umbrella installation . . . you don't garner much respect with the inmates for that crime) and our beach area was devastated, our belongings were scattered everywhere and Nicky was crying, unhurt but scared, but here is the strange part . . . the burst of wind did absolutely no damage to any of the surrounding beach equipment, just to our little area: weird.

Modern Life: An Aphorism

There is magnificent irony in searching for the best parking spot at the gym.

That Was Easy

I locked myself out last week because I reminded my mother-in-law to be more vigilant about locking the side door that leads to her apartment in the basement . . . there's been a few break-ins in our neighborhood . . . but this was fortuitous and I recommend that you lock yourself out on purpose and then see how long it takes to break into your own home;  it took me three minutes to figure out that if I lifted the screen on the side window, I could then slide up the unlocked window and reach over and flip the dead-bolt on the side door, and thus get in without climbing anything, breaking any windows, or using any fancy equipment (skeleton keys, lasers, glass cutters, plastic explosives, genetically modified super-termites, etc.) so now I have a good idea of how secure my house is . . . and if you're thinking of robbing me now because you want to steal my new skim-board, you'll have to figure out a different way in, because now that window is locked.

You're Telling ME to Wear Sneakers?

So I walk into LA Fitness and the mousy girl working the desk-- if she had handles I could have dead-lifted her-- tells me I can't work out while wearing sandals . . . though I've been working out at LA Fitness for five years now while wearing sandals, as they are convenient foot-wear if you also want to swim or shower after you lift (plus I have a problem getting socks on my feet when it's humid, probably due to their hairiness) but she's insisting that I can't wear an "open toed shoe" while I lift weights, so I ask her about Crocs-- which are not technically open-toed-- and she considers this back-talk and says, "You want support when you work-out, so wear sneakers . . . okay?" and I'm about to get into the whole barefoot running thing and how I DON'T want support when I work out and how I often shoot baskets on their court barefoot, but I decide it's not worth it . . . and, finally, she did allow me on the floor with my sandals . . . but I had to promise that next time I would wear sneakers . . . and now I'm seriously considering getting some of those Vibram Five Fingers minimalist running shoes just to fuck with her.

A Short Review for a Long Movie

Avatar is a Disney movie for adults: thematically simple, visually stunning, full of melodramatic cheesy music which nearly ruins the entire film, and an absurdly happy ending . . . three hammerhead rhinoceros thingies out of a possible four.

Live From Sea Isle City . . . Another Embarrassing Moment in a Long Line of Them

Sunday night we went to see LeCompt, the best bar band in the universe, at the Springfield Inn, the best dive bar in the universe (cash only) and during "Born to Run," Mike LeCompt got on the bar and pointed the microphone at the girls in front of me, ostensibly to get one of them to sing the ONE TWO THREE FOUR, but then I realized he wasn't pointing the microphone at them, he was pointing the microphone at me, and so I took the natural course of action and started backing away, but he was relentless with his pointing, and then Ed gave me a firm push from behind and I stepped up and yelled, "ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!" in my best Bruce voice (which was pretty good because of the amount of drinking we had been doing) and then the girls in front of me high-fived me and twenty minutes later another guy congratulated me on my ability to count to four, and they were all sincere in their accolades, which I found ridiculous and I wanted to tell them that I was half-way through The Recognitions by William Gaddis, one of the densest works of literature known to Western culture and that counting to four wasn't much of an accomplishment, but The Springfield Inn didn't seem like the place to bring this up (and then on the way out, to add further insult, when we complimented LeCompt on another great show . . . they did a fantastic cover of David Bowie's "Starman" . . . LeCompt told me it was okay that I couldn't figure out what to do with the microphone for a while . . . he said, "It's alright man, I have ADD too").

Alex: 1 Dad: 0

While I was in the midst of one of my typical anti-Halloween diatribes, my wife sided with the boys and reminded me that I liked trick-or-treating for candy when I was a kid, and then Alex chimed in-- rather sagaciously for a six year old-- and told me something that I often forget:  "You weren't born a grown-up, Dad."

A Prison Film More Thought Provoking Than The Longest Yard

Jacques Audiard's movie A Prophet makes you work as hard as the Malik-- the Arab the protagonist-- who is thrown in jail at the start of the film and has to commit a brutal murder in order to curry favor with Luciani . . . the Corsican godfather . . . and this killing is as hard for him to execute as it is for the viewer to watch, but, like Michael Corleone of The Godfather and Tom Reagan of Miller's Crossing, Malik "sees all the angles," and though you may not see what he's planning (my wife and I didn't) and Malik certainly isn't going to reveal it-- he's as taciturn as they come-- that is what makes the film great, you are forced to contemplate how you would play all the angles, or at least speculate what tactics Malik has on his mind as he navigates the Corsican nationalists, the Italian mafia, the brotherhood of Muslims, and the various gypsies, lowlifes and drug dealers . . . a must see flick if you don't mind a little violence:  ten cups of instant coffee out of a possible ten.

Feeling Happy? Here's The Cure.

If you're feeling really happy . . . too happy for your own good, then you might want to read the graphic novel Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story: it's a depiction of when the Christian Phalangist massacred Palestinians while they were under the aegis of the Israeli Army . . . Ariel Sharon allegedly knew what was happening but did nothing to stop the slaughter, and the next time I'm feeling a bit too happy I'm going to watch the animated film that Ari Folman and David Polonsky made of this event, but I don't think it will be in the near future.

Summer Can't Last Forever . . . Or Not In My House

I must remember to wake up early . . . I must remember to wake up early . . . because if I don't . . . if I get up when everyone else gets up and I have to immediately start socializing with my family, then I can be a stubborn grouch-- and this also might be a result of a long, hot summer and a lot of "quality time" with my wife and kids-- and so last week while we were packing for a trip to the Philly Zoo, I got in a full blown argument with my wife about which water bottle to bring . . . but now I'm getting up again at 5:30 AM so I can get some alone time every morning before I have to deal with the other people that live in my house, and I'm behaving in a much more civil fashion.

Communication: Második rész

Now that there are so many myriad ways to communicate with fellow humans, you need to know which method each person prefers-- some people only respond to texts, some people will get right back to you on e-mail, there are Facebook people and Skype people and blog folks and chatters and old fashioned phone call people and communication whores who somehow manage everything at once . . . and if you don't know a person's preferred method, you may never communicate with them-- so I guess my question is this:  are texters only communicating with other texters while the old fashioned phone call people are sticking to their own and the Facebook people are partying down over there (unbeknowst to us bloggers) and the technorati are Skyping or doing something even cooler than that, is this causing some sort of communications clique effect . . . are we herding together because of technological choices and only communicating with people of the same type?

Communications Shakedown

Several members of my family have a long history of calling and leaving messages on our answering machine that contain no specific information other than "call me back," and I think this is a strategy to entice my wife and I to call back to find out what the actual message is . . . but we're not falling for it.

I Review a New Apple Product: The iGod Touched

My metamorphosis is complete, I am an Apple convert . . . read my product review of the new iGod Touched over at Gheorghe: The Blog . . . I promise you riches beyond the temporal.