Another Free Idea . . . And I Did The Hard Part
So our on-line digital experience is becoming more and more concise; web-pages are difficult to wade through, blogs have consolidated some of this information into manageable nuggets, Facebook pared things down more, and Twitter seemed to be the end result: with its 140 character limit, brevity truly is the soul of wit . . . but I think there's room for one more application, one more level down on the communication ladder, and I call it GRUNT! and this platform will allow you to send a three second sound with a short title to your followers: perhaps you would GRUNT! the sound "yee-ha!" with the title "Bin Laden is Dead!" or "blah" with the title "Monday Morning" or "yum" attached to a local restaurant, and, of course, there's no way text can do these sounds justice-- as the expressive of a sound is infinite and unlimited-- and a GRUNT! conveys an amazing amount of information in a short space (and also don't require much literacy) and so I think this is the future of communication . . . now I've done the hard part in this process and thought of the idea . . . all you need to do is raise the capital, write the code, design the web-pages, market the application, and run the company.
The Black Swan: Happy Mother's Day
My review of The Black Swan is appropriately schizophrenic-- I watched the movie in two parts and I found the first hour grueling and painful-- the plot is typical sports melodrama (the meek but hardworking underdog gets her chance to shine) and typical sports melodrama is the only melodrama that gets to me emotionally (Hoosiers, Rudy, King of Kong, Rocky, etc.), and so I was really rooting for Natalie Portman's character, hoping that her hard work and dedication to her sport would pay off (the images and sounds of her battered feet really got to me, maybe because I've been playing soccer with a broken toe the past couple of weeks and can empathize) and so Nina's complete lack of joy for her art-- her obsessiveness and isolation and her mental disintegration-- was really depressing (unlike Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which is also a depressing sports movie, but Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei are disintegrating physically, and that's never as bad as disintegrating mentally, and in the end The Wrestler feels oddly triumphant as each character learns to cope with their physical decay) but I got over the hump in the second half of The Black Swan . . . I learned to "stop worrying and love the bomb" . . . and enjoy how the film turns the corner and becomes a full fledged horror film (and Portman turns into a full-fledged black swan) so if you're watching the movie and you want to quit, stick with it until it gets really macabre . . . and maybe you can explain to me exactly what happens to Winona Ryder's character in the hospital (enjoy the cheesy irony of Winona Ryder chastising Portman for filching her stuff) and though it almost needs two separate ratings for the two halves, I'll average it out to 8 tutus out of a possible 10.
The Last of the Dialers?
I can still recall the home phone number of a few of my childhood friends (several days ago, my wife needed to call the father of one of my old friends and I was instantly able to produce the phone number from memory) and this leads to my two questions of the day . . . and these questions may only apply to people of my generation and older:
1) Can you remember any phone numbers from your youth?
2) Will ours be the last generation that can do this?
More Difficult Than Fermat's Last Theorem
How do you get all of the tomato paste out of the little can?
Quora!
So I'm thinking of writing an epic science-fiction novel that is set in a number of giant self-sustaining bio-dome type structures dotted about the ruins of earth-- the people inside are waiting for the earth's ecosystem to regenerate from some cataclysm--and during the wait (which will be thousands of years) the various self-sustaining pods evolve different economic systems and this leads to a variety of debates, conflicts, and decisions about how to use the resources in each pod, and also how trade works between the pods-- it would be science-fiction of economics and conservation and so-- for preliminary research for this book that I will certainly never even attempt to write-- I posed this question to Quora: Is it more cost effective to eat the chicken or is it better to keep the chicken alive and eat its eggs? and people have already given me some logical answers . . . for free!-- so I suggest you create an account and ask questions for research you will never use but are mildly curious about.
Am I An Umbrellist?
Watch Your Language
Last week, during the annual Poetry Festival at my high school, acclaimed poet BJ Ward spoke to my creative writing class about being sensitive to language-- he deconstructed the Pledge of Allegiance and wondered why the students were required to repeat it every morning if it was actually a pledge . . . a serious promise that is eternal . . . e.g. I have pledged to eat more tacos in 2011-- and since his presentation, I have been more alert to the words around me; for example, I noticed a Watch Children sign in Ward's hometown of Edison, and I wondered why they couldn't add the preposition "for" into the statement . . . Watch For Children isn't as ominous and ambiguous Watch Children, which could be advice from one pedophile to another, or a paranoid warning from a wary old person.
Breaking News! Bin Laden Will Cause Baby Boom!
Mark my words, the death of Osama Bin Laden will cause a mini-baby boom in the United States . . . hearing the story of the triumphant Black Ops mission and the resultant execution of the world's most wanted terrorist will make American males feel potent, virile, and masculine . . . and there is no better patriotic expression of potency, virility, and masculinity than impregnating your wife (except perhaps shooting a hand-gun while riding a jet-ski) and though Americans surely realize this event is only a symbolic end to an abstractly defined, on-going war, they will still view the world as a safer place for children now that Bin Laden is dead; the combined aphrodisiac of military success and optimism for our country's future will lead to some groovy, unprotected love-making . . . so can someone remind me to check the average birth rates next February (which is generally a month with comparatively less births than other months) to see if this half-baked thesis pans out?
A Useful Analogy (Hindsight is 20/20)
Ha-Joon Chang, in his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, makes a case for increased government regulation of the financial sector, despite the logic that "the government does not know better than those whose actions are regulated by it . . . the government cannot know someone's situation as well as the individual or firm concerned" and so "government officials cannot improve upon the decisions made by the economic agents," but he explains that regulations often work not because the government "knows better," but because the regulations limit complexity, and of course this applies to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, where the financial instruments and derivatives were more complex than the experts and investors could predict, and Chang makes this useful comparison: when a company invents a new drug it cannot be sold immediately . . . first the drug needs to be rigorously tested on carefully monitored patients because the interactions of a new drug in the human body are complex and unpredictable, and it will take a while to tell if the new drug has more positive benefits than its side effects . . . and, of course, this was not done before we sold unregulated sub-prime mortgages, packaged them into mortgage backed securities, packaged those into collateralized debt obligations, and insured those with credit default swaps . . . and it turns out the side-effects of this financial treatment are nausea, irritability, unemployment, mental confusion, erectile dysfunction, depression, problems sleeping, constipation, diarrhea, kidney failure, hostility, hallucinations, canker sores, foreclosures, and panic attacks.
Survival in the Busch
Despite a perfect storm of things that annoy me: crowds, lines, motion sickness, lack of food . . . I survived our first day in a real amusement park (we've been to Knoebels, but that doesn't count) and I didn't even get that grouchy . . . maybe it was because of the lousy weather, which kept the lines to a minimum, or maybe it was because my wife and kids enjoyed the park so much-- they love all the rides, no matter how scary: Alex was just tall enough to go on "The Loch Ness Monster," and he did it twice, and Catherine went on every roller-coaster in the park . . . I am a pathetic coward, but I did manage to conquer the log flume twice without puking (although I felt downright queasy on the flight simulator "Europe in the Air," which is pathetic) and I really enjoyed the "Pet Shenanigans" show-- it was like a Tom and Jerry cartoon with real cats and dogs-- and the seats stayed perfectly still.
A Vacation Highlight
After a day at Jamestown, a day at Yorktown, and several days in Colonial Williamsburg (we definitely witnessed 10-12 hours of historical reenactment) I am fairly confident that my kids know we fought the British in the Revolutionary War (although I'm not sure they know that the British are English) and I must admit that the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has done an impressive job at re-creating these places, but my favorite part of our vacation was our hike through York River State Park-- we collected numerous fossils from the river bank-- and I lifted rotting log and saw a small snake I've never seen before: after some research, my best guess is that it is either an Eastern Worm Snake or an Eastern Smooth Earth Snake and it looked like the snake in the picture above.
One of These Pictures Has Nothing To Do With Brisket
So I learned some valuable gastronomical information on our family vacation at Colonial Williamsburg; a colonial farmer on The Palace Green (or a guy pretending to be a colonial farmer on the pretend Palace Green) was grazing a large colonial cow (or perhaps it was a guy pretending to be a colonial cow) and this large, shaggy colonial cow had a giant, football shaped goiter-like sack hanging in a pouch of loose skin below its neck, and this bulbous mass was so large and disgusting that I felt compelled to ask the colonial farmer about it, and he told me "That's the brisket," so if you like brisket and eat it often, then I suggest you take a look at the picture of the actual cow below the post (and not the sanitized graphic of a cow pictured above) so you have an idea of what you are really chewing on.
Several Monumental Firsts
Catherine told me she "didn't like me very much" the night before we left for Spring Break, for an odd reason . . . because I did something I rarely do: I put something away where it belonged . . . she claimed this was "the first time I ever put anything away in my life" which is hyperbole if I ever heard it, although I did admit to her that I made a mistake-- the portable sump pump was on the floor in the study (the portable sump pump we put in the basement shower when there is torrential rain) and it was right in the middle of the room and I nearly tripped over it which is probably why I acted the way I did-- despite the fact that it was raining buckets-- I put the pump away in the storage area under the house, which is only accessible from a small door on the outside of the house, not thinking that my mother-in-law would want to set it up in the basement because of the storm-- so Catherine was pretty angry when she had to walk out into the rain to retrieve it (I was already in bed) and, also due to the storm, this was also the first time that I packed the car in the dark at 4:30 AM on Saturday morning, instead of getting things set up the night before, and so I put the kids' bikes on top of the car in one of those big latch-on sacks and I put our bikes on the back of the car on a latch-on bike rack and I remind you that I did this all in the dark and so it's no surprise that I was only 50% successful . . . a few miles down the Turnpike a woman drove up alongside of our car and made a repeated pointing motion at our roof . . . we stopped to investigate and realized that I never actually latched the sack with the bikes to the roof, I skipped that step and just tied the belts loosely around the roof rack (which I do at the end so they don't make that annoying flapping sound) so it was lucky that woman noticed the sack coming loose or in a few miles some unlucky driver would have gotten hit in the windshield with a sack of bikes.
Those Chauvinist Pixar Bastards
My creative writing students were naming kids movies and then suggesting appropriate morals for each film-- practicing their inductive reasoning-- and a student said the moral of Up is this: You can't have a real adventure until your wife dies (he admitted that he didn't create this moral himself-- he read it on-line-- but it is still an excellent use of an on-line resource in the classroom).
George R.R. Martin: Fantasy Without Whimsy
For the second time in as many months, I took on a novel with two things I despise-- a map and an appendix-- but George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones was so highly recommended by everyone who read it that I had to give it a shot, and unlike Dune, which I couldn't quite finish, I read all 676 pages of Martin's first volume of his epic Song of Fire and Ice series (and even referred to the map and the appendix several times!) and though I felt a bit childish at the start . . . I'm forty-one years old and usually reading books like this, not sword and sorcery stories . . . I very well may read the next volume (A Clash of Kings) and I will definitely check out the big-budget HBO series inspired by the first book; I will admit that I started the book trying to find reasons to hate it, but the form drew me in: short, exciting and strategic chapters, each told from a different character's point of view, following Elmore Leonard's philosophy of "leaving out all the parts that people skip," with the pacing of a J.K. Rowling book, but sophisticated and very adult content (thus the need for the appendix) and far more entertaining and action-packed than the slow paced but similar Tolkien books and with one other extremely important improvement: no elves (I hate elves and anything else that smacks of whimsy, and a A Game of Thrones is definitely the least whimsical of fantasy novels).
Tetris to Impress
For the second time in my life, I have impressed my children: I completed the most difficult level (9.5) on Gameboy Tetris so the boys could witness the victory song of the "five fiddlers" and the Congratulatory Space Shuttle Launch; Alex was so moved by my performance that he said we should "write it on my gravestone when I die."
Nuts Sparring By The Fire
The charming Hotel Vienna of Windham, New York boasts a lovely breakfast room where they serve fresh baked cheese and raspberry danishes and croissants for you to eat before you ski, and they have large family style tables and even a fireplace, and I felt serene and relaxed while eating aforementioned danishes, contemplating a day of snowboarding with the family, while the other families around us did the same, and once our children finished their breakfast they asked if they could sit in front of the fire, and I said, "Of course," happy to be able to finish my coffee and Alex sat in the Adirondack style chair right in front of the fire and Ian sat just to his right and within minutes they were in a fist-fight over the chair that was right in front of the fire and I had to break them up and I couldn't beat them both senseless because there were these other peaceful families eating yogurt and granola and drinking tea surrounding us and observing us, and so I calmly and logically talked it out with them, and we agreed that they could take turns in the seat directly in front of the fire but that didn't work so well either because once Ian got his turn the good seat, he bonked his chair over and nudged Alex further away and tried to control both armrests and they got into another fight and I had to remove them from the quaint breakfast room and drag them back to the hotel room, where we proceeded to get dressed so we could enjoy a relaxing day on Windham Mountain.
How Smooth Is Smoov?
On the walk home from a very late night out, which began at the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, where we watched JB Smoov of Larry David fame do his especially bawdy form of minimalist prop comedy (he "birthed" himself through a white t-shirt, had sexual intercourse with a chair for a LONG time, and used a microphone and the cord as phallus and ejaculate) we got into a debate on how much he would tailor his material if he was playing to A) an all white crowd or B) an all African American crowd . . . and this was precipitated by this observation: the Stress Factory employees seated all the African Americans up front, and JB Smoov worked his rapport with them more often than with the other folks in the crowd-- now we don't know if this was intentional or just a coincidence, but it was apparent . . . and if anyone has seen JB in hypothetical crowd situation A or B, please leave a description of his act in the comments.
This Could Be The Idea That Allows You To Retire in Style
This weird hair discussion at G:TB reminds me of an idea a friend and I had about making a documentary where we interviewed people about the strange and rapid growth of unsightly body hair-- that crazy white hair that sprouts in the middle of your forehead or the curly gray hair that grows in your ear in the span of a nap-- and the "money shot" would be a time lapse segment of one of these hairs actually sprouting during the night, it would take thousands of hour of film to capture this, and it would be analogous to getting footage of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot . . . so does anyone have some venture capital they want to invest?
Small Pleasures
There's a certain joy in kicking a ball-- it's a similar pleasure to throwing something and hitting the thing you wanted-- but there's the added satisfaction that you did it with your foot . . . and my five year old son Ian understands this: the other day he spent a great deal of time and concentration trying to punt a soccer ball over the tennis court fence, which is an impressive feat for a forty pound child, and then once he accomplished it, he tried to do it again and again . . . and this reminds me of one of my favorite kicks of all time; it took place in our fraternity "pit," a carpeted area with benches and a television-- I was putzing around with a soccer ball-- and Kenny Bloom borrowed Brian Fogg's motorcycle helmet, sat on the bench, put on the helmet, and said to me, "Kick it at my head!" and I complied and I hit it hard and clean and perfect and it hit the helmet and snapped Kenny's head back and knocked the helmet clean off his head, and he looked at me, stunned, and said, "Remind me never to do that again."
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