Treading Water in the Shallows

Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brain is well argued and frightening, and the opposition from some corners is simply because there's not much we can do about the ubiquity of the internet-- and near the start of the book he uses the Wallace Stevens poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" to remind us of the value of deep reading, but if you read the poem here, then I feel like his point is proven . . . that reading on the internet is nothing like reading a book (look at the size and color of the font of the poem vs. everything else on that page) and Carr uses plenty of established research to prove his thesis that reading an actual book is an excellent way to take ideas and information from short term memory and enter them into long-term memory . . . that the only way to do this is laborious and information enters our brain "thimbleful by thimbleful," and if things happen too fast, because of hyper-links, F shaped skimming, Twitter and e-mail interruptions, etc. then there will be "cognitive overload" and we can't translate new knowledge into memories or schemas . . . and he also refutes the idea that storing knowledge on the internet means we can free out brains for other uses; in fact, paradoxically, the opposite is true, the more you have in your brain, the easier it is to remember other things and the easier it is to read and think (our brains are not computers and the ROM analogy does not work) . . . but the internet is difficult to escape, so all I can recommend is that you shut it down once in a while, kick your kids out of the house-- armed with knives and matches so they don't return for a long while, and then crack open a book (made of paper-- as the Kindle is aiming towards the same interruption-laden style of reading, with hyper-links, discussions on passages, Facebook style commenting, etc.)

Tacos Trump Enchiladas

My wife suggested enchiladas for my birthday meal and I agreed heartily, but then she asked, "Do enchiladas count as tacos?" and I told her that if I was going to do things honestly, then they did not, so instead she made fish tacos (which I also love) and I ate five, which really ups my 2011 Taco Count, but now I'm in a weird world where I am eating more tacos just because I am counting how many tacos I am eating . . . and I know this applies to something statistical in the real world, but I'm too full to make the connection.

34 Years To Go! (For An Average American Male)

Today is my birthday,
me and the Seuss--
I'm now forty-one,
and still feeling loose,
but if life is a train,
I'm near the caboose.

Who Is The Biggest Loser?

At work, a number of my colleagues are participating in a Biggest Loser Diet Contest-- they all put money into a pot and the person that loses the most weight (determined by a percentage of the original starting weight) wins all the money-- and I'm not sure how I feel about this because some of my co-workers are starting to look really good . . . which is nice-- it's nice to be surrounded by slender, sexy, and attractive co-workers-- but there's part of me that hopes everyone comes out of this contest so ravenous that they eat until they are grossly overweight, because it's also nice to be surrounded by people fatter than you are . . . it's good for your self-esteem (in fact, women don't need to be anorexically skinny to be happy with their body, they just have to have a lower BMI than their mate) so I guess whichever way the scale tips, I'm a winner . . . or a loser, depending on how you look at it.

I'd Better Pace Myself

Governor Christie promises he will pay into the state pension fund if a number of his demands are met (that's how collective bargaining works now in New Jersey) and one of his prerequisites is to raise the retirement age for teachers to sixty-five . . . and while I realize that 65 might be a typical retirement age in the private sector, it is not what was promised if you dedicated your life to education-- when I started teaching, the retirement age for teachers was fifty-five: it was one of the alluring things about the career-- and although the age has been raised periodically for new hires, it hasn't changed if you were "grand-fathered in," but the new proposal states that anyone with less than 25 years teaching experience must work until they are 65 before they can receive their pension, and I understand that the Governor is trying to balance the budget, but I am not sure that he's thought about the ramifications of this proposal:

1) Though it won't be so bad for this generation of kids, the next generation of children will rarely have the joy of a new, young teacher, idealistic and fresh out of college . . . instead they will be taught by old, bitter and wilted hags and crones, eking out those last few years before retirement and the big sleep . . .

2) It will be extremely difficult for new teachers to get jobs, because the old teachers won't be able to retire . . . and teaching is a young person's job-- it requires an incredible amount of energy and endurance-- so health care and logistical costs will sky-rocket because old teachers will be taking loads of sick days and using far more health care than young teachers . . .

3) The only time students will get a new, fresh, young idealistic teacher is when their old teacher dies, and this will inevitably happen in front of students, and the psychic toll this exacts on our population-- the collective trauma our youth will share, that they all have seen a teacher fall over in the middle of class, croak out a last bit of wisdom, and then die in front of them-- will off-set any budgetary benefits from the proposal;

4) On the plus side, this makes the rest of my life very easy to figure out . . . I don't have to worry about thinking about early retirement . . . what I might do with myself, where I might want to live . . . I will be in the same spot for the next twenty-five years, doing the same job, watching my colleagues grow old and wrinkled, living in the same house in the same town . . . and enjoying a higher quality of living that the vast majority of the humans on the planet . . . and there's something comforting in that, as long as I pace myself.

Costco on a Weekday! This Is How It Feels!

I went to Costco after school last week, and it was surprisingly satisfying . . . it wasn't crowded so I didn't have my usual panic attack (if I go with my wife on the weekend, I normally have to leave and go sit in the car) and instead I got this wonderfully primal feeling, a manly feeling, as I wandered through the cavernous space of goods, grabbing thing for my family, providing for my family . . . I felt like an ancient hunter/gatherer . . . hunting and gathering and occasionally stopping to eat a sample (the samples were crucial to this good feeling as they kept my blood sugar at a reasonable level) and when I got home with large packages of salmon and sausage and fruit and granola, I felt as if I had had wandered the earth and brought back a cornucopia for my family to eat and we would live to see another day, and possibly even another generation, as long as I could continue to forage with such a high rate of efficiency and variety.

Ian's Forecast

It's gonna rain babies.

Banksy and Alan Moore Should Hang Out

Banksy, the acclaimed and aggressively anonymous street artist, was invited to the Oscars for his debut film Exit Through The Gift Shop but the Academy Awards denied his request to show up in disguise, and so Banksy says he will not be attending, which is more in character for him since he "does not agree with the concept of award ceremonies," though he is "prepared to make an exception" for awards which he is nominated . . . and my suggestion is that instead of trying to crash the ceremony in some covertly overt way, instead Banksy should hang out with Alan Moore on Oscar night and not watch the Oscars and not watch Watchmen and not watch anything at all, but instead have a serious discussion on the gullibility and naivete of the sort of people who like to look at things, like art and movies and award ceremonies, and how instead of looking at things, these people should make things that other people like to look at, like stencils and comic books, unless these people are Thierry Guerra, who maybe shouldn't be making art at all-- because Guerra makes terribly, derivative and kitschy crap-- unless Guerra is a creation of Bansky, and then his art is doubly ironic, and therefore significant.

Fins Are For Fish

When I am swimming laps in the pool at the gym, I pace myself against the swimmer in the adjacent lane, and I am a decent swimmer so unless the person is excellent, I can usually  keep up with them, but nothing is more annoying than struggling to catch up with a swimmer that appears to be swimming at a leisurely pace, only to find that that they are wearing fins . . . I feel like these people need to wear little flags on their goggles that protrude above the water and read "I Cheat," so that you know they are swimming faster than they normally can.

No One Understands My Brilliance

It is very frustrating when you have a sudden and fantastic synaptic burst that results in a brilliant idea, and it goes unappreciated; for example, my son Alex was given an assignment for "Hundred Day"-- a day that simultaneously celebrates the number one hundred and the one-hundredth day of school--  he was instructed to attach one hundred objects to a large sheet of oak-tag in some creative manner, and we were brainstorming ideas and I came up with this one: he could use green marker to make the oak tag into a dollar bill and then glue one hundred pennies around the border or in some other pattern on the bill . . . so the project would not only fulfill the "Hundred Day" requirements, but it would also be a model of how many pennies are in a dollar: it would be creative, aesthetic, and educational on several levels, but Alex spurned my idea and instead glued a bunch of colored beans into a stupid and ugly spiral pattern, and I will never forgive him for this.

The Bar is Raised at the 2011 Plunge

The bar was raised in numerous ways at this year's Sea Isle City Polar Plunge: 1) Due to more people on Friday night and more members of LeCompt present for the pre-plunge gig, Friday night partying was more intense and lasted far later into the night than last year-- we closed the Springfield Inn (and for the second time, I "sang" the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! count out of the bridge of "Born to Run," and I thought this was a very odd coincidence, since this happened in the summer as well, but Connell said he locked eyes with LeCompt and sent him a telepathic message to shove the microphone in my face again and, unbeknowst to me, Dom was behind me pointing at my head to help Connel's telepathy . . . and I was glad that on Saturday this was not repeated for the third time, because I do not want my claim to fame to be that I am the 1-2-3-4 guy) 2) due to warmish (though very windy) weather and an ocean temperature near forty degrees, one plunge into the sea was not enough to prove your manhood . . . I was lured back in by Ed, who went in once but didn't dive under and get his hair wet, and decided he had to do the full dunk (and I didn't realize he was very drunk and I didn't want to seem less macho than him) and I was glad I did a second plunge and was feeling quite tough, but then Mose outdid everyone with a third full submersion 3) pre-plunge inebriation was at a record level perhaps because we are veterans now so we weren't nervous about the effects of very cold water on the body but mainly due to the twenty-something crew and the twenty-something at heart couple (Mel and Ed) 4) the bar was raised on plunge style . . . Catherine and Lynn plunged with polar bear hats and one of the youngsters plunged in a bat girl costume and  another dressed as The Joker 5) LeCompt's guest guitarist raised the bar on insanely great guitar shredding and the Springfield raised the bar on how crowded it could get . . . the town itself was packed because of the unseasonable weather, so lots of money for Autism 6) I raised the bar on humor so high that the hung-over people Saturday morning couldn't even process the brilliance of my joke and I had to repeat it when some fresh people showed up later in the day . . . I told everyone that I went to the registration tent and that we had the wrong weekend . . . this wasn't Polar Plunge Weekend, it was Bi-Polar Plunge Weekend, and that it was really crazy out there . . . and instead of laughing and complimenting my A-list material, everyone just stared at me blankly, but the second time around a few people chuckled . . . it's hard to explain, I guess it's one of those jokes where you had to be there, and even if you were there it wasn't very funny . . . so I guess you had to be me to appreciate it.

Clay Shirky, You Are My Nemesis!

I am reading War and Peace for the second time right now-- and that's not counting the time I read six hundred pages and and then quit, so really it's my third time reading the first half-- and it is even more absorbing and epic than ever (partly because of the new and excellent translation and partly because now I recognize all the insanely long Russian names) but according to internet theorist and "digital media scholar" Clay Shirky, this is not possible . . . because he infamously wrote in 2008: "No one reads War and Peace . . . it's too long, and not so interesting," and people have "increasingly decided that Tolstoy's sacred work isn't actually worth the time it takes to read it," and although I know that Shirky was probably grandstanding when he wrote that and isn't actually that stupid, I'm going to treat him literally and challenge him to a Tolstoy era duel . . . our weapons will be appropriate-- I will fight with a copy of War and Peace, which at 1200 pages is hefty enough to cave in the soft skull of an academic, and he can defend himself with his lap-top . . . so Clay Shirky, I will be waiting by the "smoker's gate" after school today and every day until you arrive, with my weapon in hand-- which I can also read while I wait (one of the benefits of a large book) . . . this library isn't big enough for the both of us.

I Can Neither Read Nor Cook

I learned something about couscous the other day: I was trying to time dinner so that everything was ready exactly when my wife and kids got back from swim lessons, and so I followed the instructions on the couscous box and prepped the mixture ahead of time so that it would be ready to cook at a moment's notice . . . I mixed the flavor packet and the couscous and 1 1/4 cups of water and left that on the stove while I chopped up stuff for salad and then when I went to boil the water, I found that the couscous had absorbed soaked it all up, though the stove wasn't on, and when Catherine got home I told her what I had discovered: that you need to cook couscous right away or it absorbs all the cold water, and she said, "It says to add the couscous to boiling water," and I disagreed, but we checked the box and she was right . . . I must have read the instructions wrong, which is weird because I'm an English teacher.

The Damned United is Damned Good

The movie The Damned United, which portrays Brian Clough-- England's most celebrated, enigmatic, abrasive and outspoken soccer coach-- is probably much more fun to watch as a clueless American . . . I have heard Clough's name mentioned by my British friends, but I didn't know his story: his great and bitter rivalry with Don Revie; his ups and downs with the brains of the operation, Peter Taylor; and the saga of his coaching career . . . the film also contains excellent archival soccer footage and lots of kitsch from the late sixties and seventies: cars, uniforms, wall-paper and style: ten footballers out of a perfect eleven.

I Use Probability to Solve A Marital Mystery

Once again, I discovered my gym bag in the closet upside-down, and I was not the one who did this-- because I never put my gym-bag away, nor do I ever zip it shut-- but my wife often throws it into the closet and if it lands upside-down, then my gym equipment falls out of the bag:  my goggles and socks and deodorant, etc.-- and though I noted this with frustration for years, it finally dawned on me . . . perhaps my wife was throwing the gym bag into the closet upside-down because she hated the fact that I always left it out, unzipped, with it's bowels exposed . . . because if she was just tossing it into the closet without any passive-aggressive anger, then 50% of the time it would land right-side up and 50% of the time it would land upside-down, but the gym bag ALWAYS seemed to land upside-down and, as I said, this had been happening for years so I had a decent sample size to evaluate, so I approached my wife about this and after a moment of denial she admitted that perhaps it did end up upside-down more than probability might dictate and that perhaps she was angry about my habit of leaving it out all the time, and so I told her I would try to put it away, and she promised not to throw it into the closet upside-down and the moral is: the key to a good marriage is clear communication and a grasp of basic probability.

I Am A Winner (And I Didn't Even Know It)

Each year San Jose State University sponsors the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where entrants are challenged to write the worst beginning sentence to a novel . . . and I usually get my Creative Writing students to enter and I send a sentence of two myself, and I last week Googled myself (you've got to Google yourself every once in a while, right?) and, although I was never informed of this great honor, I found one of my entries in the Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions but if you don't want to read through them all-- though I recommend this because they are funny-- I have copied it here for your convenience: As always, that morning he awoke to the melodious sound of a stream of water cascading into a still pool, punctuated by several ominous silences-- and he could judge, by the length of the silences and the volume of the cascade, just how much of his three-year-old son's urine he would have to wade through to get to the sink.

Louie

Though the Seinfeld gang led pathetic and shallow lives, they could always turn to each other for camaraderie-- even at the end in their jail cell-- and Larry David's misadventures in Curb Your Enthusiasm are even more awkward and painful, but at the end of the day, Larry still has Cheryl and Jeff by his side (until Cheryl leaves him) but in Louis C.K.'s hysterically funny and sincerely sad and depressing FX comedy Louie, Louie has no one except his young daughters-- and they tend to add to his anxiety rather than assuage it-- and aside from them, there are no other recurring characters that appear in every episode . . . Louie faces his depression alone, whether it be during the opening theme when he joylessly inhales a slice of pizza; or on stage doing his stand-up, which seems to be the only happy time in his life; or on his various adventures in New York . . . and he is doing the show on the cheap, so FX has given him carte blanche to do what he wants, so the show goes from clever to bawdy to surreal, often in one twenty minute episode: ten gallons of ice cream out of ten.

My Son Wisely Keeps His Mouth Shut

My six year old son Alex expressed his skepticism over the clairvoyance of Punxsutawny Phil, and he also expressed his disdain for his first grade classmates who believed in Phil's meteorological predictions, but he told me that he didn't say anything derogatory to those classmates about their irrational beliefs . . . and I told him that was a wise decision.

My Lips Save the Day . . . Now Who Will Be My Valentine?

Sunday morning, while playing indoor soccer, I hit a slick patch on the gym floor and my feet slid backwards and into the air, and it happened so quickly that I didn't have time to brace my fall, and so I fell on my lips, which really hurt . . . but good thing I have such juicy and luscious lips or I might have suffered a broken tooth.

My Use of Mathematics Makes A Young Lady Weep

In my composition class, one of the options for the classification and division essay is an assignment I stole from Bess Ward, a science professor at Princeton (I found this in a book by Natalie Angier called The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Basics of Science) and her idea is to take something you worry about and do a risk-assessment on it . . . for example, you eat two cans of tuna a week and you want to figure out if this is actually dangerous so you do the math-- you figure out how much mercury is in each can and you multiply this by what you eat and check the EPA web-site and see if you are consuming a dangerous amount of mercury . . . so first I ask the students to list specific things they worry about . . . and they list things such as: shark attack, tanning too much, not getting into college, dying alone, being eaten by spiders, smoking etc.-- and then I have them classify them into three categories-- Innocuous, Worth Consternation, and Red Alert!-- and then I have them switch so someone can constructively criticize their logic . . . and here I offer some statistics and mathematical strategies they can use when assessing the risk of their various worries . . . for instance, the odds of an American being killed by a shark is 1 in 264 million . . . so maybe you don't need to worry about that as much as drowning or being hit by lightning; so after the class has done this and I'm walking around inspecting lists, I notice a pair of worries that would be instructive for the class, so I ask the student if I can use her list (and this is a student who mentioned when we started this that it might bring up some serious emotions and anxieties) and she says sure (I've had this student in several classes) and so I proceed to explain to the class that the girl's fear of dying in a plane crash isn't statistically likely (over 10 million flights and no fatalities last year) but that her fear of "her college boyfriend leaving her" might be something worth worrying over because there was probably a far greater chance of a high school relationship disintegrating than the hull of a Boeing . . . and I guess my logic was so convincing that it upset her and she broke into tears and needed to take a walk to compose herself . . . but she was laughing about it by the end of class, and because of my previous track record of invented scenarios, the other students thought it was some kind of pre-arranged set-up . . . but I told them it was NOT and I will be more careful with my razor sharp logic in the future.