Christmas Serenity . . . for Now
Though I loved this particular piece of anti-Xmas art, I am proud to say that I had no annual Christmas melt-down this year-- I may have ranted a bit to my students about wrapping paper, but that was just to bait them into discussing consumerism and American culture-- but I delivered no full out angry anti-Christmas monologue to family members or colleagues, so either I am mellowing out or things are building to a head behind my calm exterior and we are going to have a "serenity now" scenario soon (on the other hand, I do readily admit that I despise Valentine's Day, especially the whole kids being forced to give every single classmate a Valentine thing-- the card industry is "training" them to be guilt-ridden materialists and we're all encouraging it).
Six of One, 3.85 Fixed Rate APR of the Other . . .
Though the result is essentially the same, I think I'd rather rob my bank rather than go through the hassle of refinancing my mortgage.
Does A.D. Mean Alcohol Dependent?
And without the discovery of fermentation, would we have already conquered the stars?
Does B.C. Mean Before Caffeine?
Without the benefits of coffee, would mankind still be in the dark ages?
Alan Moore: Predictable and Amusing (Just Like Me)
DC Comics is planning to release a seven comic book mini-series prequel to the unparalleled comic masterpiece Watchmen, and (according to The New York Times) creator Alan Moore is-- you guessed it!-- outraged and calls the new venture "completely shameless" and the article reports on Moore's typical pompous grouchiness, and explains that he has "completely disassociated himself from DC comics and the industry at large," and this sounds like a lot of fun-- to completely disassociate oneself from something, so here are a few things that I am now involved in that I plan to completely and indignantly disassociate myself from in the future:
1) doing the dishes
2) picking up dog poop
3) tying my children's shoes
4) wearing underwear
5) flossing
6) blogging
7) canker sores
8) Boardwalk Empire
9) driving
10) Canada.
1) doing the dishes
2) picking up dog poop
3) tying my children's shoes
4) wearing underwear
5) flossing
6) blogging
7) canker sores
8) Boardwalk Empire
9) driving
10) Canada.
Sometimes You Need To Take Yourself For A Walk
I am browsing through Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems, which is written by Cesar Milan-- the "dog whisperer" himself (no relation to the slightly lesser known "dog hollerer") and Cesar believes that walking your dog is the "single most powerful tool" to connect with your dog's mind, as "fish need to swim, birds need to fly . . . and dogs need to walk," and I think this might be true for humans as well, but the difference is that humans don't need to walk in a pack-- obediently following the pack leader-- humans need to walk themselves . . . we occasionally need to be alone and moving with complete autonomy-- I think this taps into our hunter-gatherer roots . . . perhaps it's why women like to go shopping; I certainly walk to relieve stress and my friend Whitney recently reminded me of a perfect example of how well this works: several years ago Whitney and I drove from Virginia to Colorado for a wedding, and we were supposed to get a good night's sleep and start the drive bright and early, but instead we stayed up until three in the morning drinking beer and playing darts, and then we spent twenty-two hung-over hours in the car together, and when we arrived at our destination in Boulder and parked the car, we had a brief argument about the best way to walk downtown-- where we were meeting a friend-- but the argument was more about being in the car too long with each other, and so, without any formal good-bye, we simply parted ways, and I took the high road and Whitney took the low road, and twenty minutes later, we met at the bar (I think Whitney got there first, but we actually didn't speak of our separation or the argument until hours later) and after each of us had our "walk," we were able to tolerate each other again . . . and even cooperate with each other: we bought a wiffle-ball and bat and when we crossed the continental divide, we took turn pitching to each other in a very civilized fashion until Whitney hit one over the edge of the continent: the ball plummeted over a cliff and onto a snowbank and we were quite pleased with ourselves-- but then, to our surprise, some high school kids clambered down the cliff and formed a human chain and "rescued" the ball and returned it to us, so we had to hit it off the divide again.
Dave's Favorite Story About Dave
Other readers have shared their Favorite Stories about Dave, and most have these have been in the Awkward Moments of Dave genre, but I would like to tell my favorite story about Dave, and it's not awkward at all, in fact-- believe it or not-- I am the clever hero of the story, in the tradition of cunning tricksters like Odysseus, Loki, and Br'er Rabbit, but don't worry, this theme won't be a recurring feature because it never happened again, so enjoy the one time I came through in the clutch: several years ago, when my two boys were quite young-- just able to walk and talk-- and we took a trip to the Newark Museum, which has a mini-zoo, art galleries, a fire museum, and a natural history section . . . and we were walking from the mini-zoo to the elevators, and the only way was through the art galleries, and so I was making the best of it, pointing out things my kids could recognize in the paintings, boats and cars and colors; the museum was empty-- a ghost town-- and so the guards, who were probably bored out of their minds, started chasing Alex and Ian around a bit, which my kids loved . . . Ian went one way and Alex ran the other, and I chased Ian because he was younger and then I heard BEEP BEEP BEEP from the room next door and when I got in there, I saw Alex touching a large painting, and this had triggered the alarm system-- so I told him you couldn't touch the paintings and apologized to the guards, but they weren't upset at him, of course, since they had instigated the running around, and when we finally got to the elevators, there was a post-modern sculpture next to the doors-- it was an intimidating pile of seven or eight televisions, and the top and bottom screens showed a silver Buddha head floating on the ocean, being buffeted by the waves, and all the screens in the middle showed the same rotating Buddha head, but each screen was tinted a different color-- red, green, blue, yellow, purple-- and right next to the tower of TV's was a video camera and a rotating Buddha head-- the same Buddha head that was on all the TV screens-- and so I wondered if the camera was actually filming the head and sending a live-feed to the televisions, or if they were just playing a loop of film, so-- naturally-- I stuck my hand in front of the camera (I also wanted to see if my hand would appear in a different color on each screen) and I was rewarded with both the image of my hand on every screen and the BEEP BEEP BEEP of the alarm-- like a child, I had set off the system, but when the guard jogged in to check out why the alarm was going off, I pointed to my son Alex and said, "Alex, I told you, you can't touch anything here-- it's a museum!" and then we got into the elevator and made a clean getaway; this is the only time in my life I was able to think on my feet and say the right thing at the right time, and-- even though I threw my eldest child under the bus-- it felt wonderful.
Dog Thought #2
They say you have to bond with a new dog, so that it feels like part of your family, and-- as everyone knows-- the best way to bond is to have something in common . . . luckily, Sirius and I do have a common thread: parasitic worms (and you'd think since I once had some of these critters living in my intestines, I would have been less grossed-out when I "discovered" them in his stool, but they were still wriggling, nearly causing me to faint in the park).
Even Hamlet Can't Compete With a Giant Wasp
Like most teachers, I get very wound up and excited when I start Hamlet -- it's the ultimate piece of literature, totally engaging and entertaining, and full of comedy, tragedy, controversy, ambiguity, and supernatural fun -- but no matter how exciting the opening scene is, from the initial "Who's there?" to the ghost's entrance, it can't compete with a giant wasp, but that's been the recurring situation for the past few days, I start a lesson and then a wasp appears . . . I think there might be a nest somewhere in my ceiling . . . and once a wasp is hovering around, there's only one thing for students to look at , and it's not their Shakespeare text, and so the wasp must be killed, and one period that got pretty ugly-- I was smashing a stool into the ceiling tiles at one point-- but later in the day, when another giant wasp appeared in a different class, instead of killing the wasp-- which was time-consuming and distracting-- I incorporated it into the scene: I was playing the role of the Hamlet's scholarly friend, Horatio, who is enlisted to speak to the ghost, and so I made the wasp play the ghost and I yelled my lines at it "Stay, illusion! If thou hast any sound, or use of voice, speak to me!" and this seemed to appease it, so maybe it's not a living wasp at all, but the ghost of a giant wasp that I killed in the past.
Dog Thought #1
One of the ways I blow off steam is by walking around-- but I always feel a bit like a lunatic if I'm walking around completely aimlessly, without any ostensible purpose, so I usually "create" a perfunctory errand: I go buy cold cuts or a cup of coffee or some beer . . . but, of course, it's more about listening to my iPod and getting out of the house, alone and unfettered; one of the benefits of owning a dog is that now I don't have to invent a task for myself, I can just walk around aimlessly with the dog, and people look at me and think: he's not an itinerant wandering lunatic, he's just out walking his dog . . . but the only down side to this arrangement is that you have to talk to the Dog People you meet and I'm horrible at Dog Talk . . .
Dave: That's a beautiful dog . . . what is he, a Basset Hound? A Pekinese?
Dog Person: She's a Great Dane . . .
Dave: Oh, right . . . how about that one? A Shar-pei?
Dog Person: That's a cat.
Dave: That's a beautiful dog . . . what is he, a Basset Hound? A Pekinese?
Dog Person: She's a Great Dane . . .
Dave: Oh, right . . . how about that one? A Shar-pei?
Dog Person: That's a cat.
Who Cares? Not Tom Ripley. Not Banksy. You.
The talented Tom Ripley is at it again in Ripley Under Ground, the second book in Patricia Highsmith's "Ripliad" series-- this time his victim is an unlucky art patron named Thomas Murchison, who rightly suspects that the painting he has bought is a forgery-- unfortunately he has stumbled into one of Tom Ripley's sophisticated con games-- and because he can't adopt Ripley's amorality, he ends up a corpse, but Highsmith has bigger fish to fry than just murder: Ripley asks Murchison, "Why disturb a forger who's doing such good work?" and this raises one of my favorite artistic/philosophical debates, which is portrayed in both the documentary My Kid Could Paint That and Banksy's perplexing film Exit Through The Gift Shop . . if there is any way to objectively judge art, then it shouldn't matter who painted the picture-- if it's good, then it's good-- but, of course, our brains don't work like that; art buyers want to be sure that it is prodigy Marla Olmstead that painted the canvases they spent so much money on, not her dad, and when Oprah revealed that James Frey's "memoir" A Million Little Pieces is actually part fictional, people were outraged-- including me!-- and so I suppose I should come clean here and reveal that Sentence of Dave is actually written by a trained donkey, not a computer program . . . but I'm sure you all suspected that from the start.
How Did This Happen?
I am an introverted person who enjoys being alone for long stretches of time-- I like to read and play the guitar and write sentences and listen to music-- and I have trouble thinking about more than one thing at a time, but somehow I've gotten myself into the absurd position where I have to: 1) be the boss of over a hundred kids during the school day . . . I constantly compel them do things that they would never do on their own: read Shakespeare, write essays, perform skits, and draw horses (I especially love compelling kids to draw horses, because if you can't draw-- and the bulk of the population in America can't draw-- then drawing a horse is especially comical) and then 2) after school I have to lord over my own children, and compel them to do homework and clean-up their shit and eat their dinner and brush their teeth and stop fighting, and now 3) we've added a dog to the equation, and I've never had a dog, but everything I've read explains that you have to establish yourself as the alpha and show the dog who's boss and my friend John gave me this advice: "Dog training is easy, you just need to establish that you are the master," and that makes sense, of course, but I often wonder: How did this happen? because I would be perfectly content being The Boss of No One and The Master of Nothing.
Specific Demographic
My friend Ann believes there is a very specific advertising demographic profile which consists of: 1) men in their late thirties and early forties 2) who use the digital music service Spotify 3) and run while wearing Vibram Five Fingers (those goofy looking "shoes" that have individual slots for each toe, and simulate the experience of running barefoot . . . sans glass shards, tetanus, and trichinosis) and she may be right . . . and I may be a member of this demographic, but all I can say in my defense-- which is exactly what the advertising folks want me to say-- is, "I love Spotify!" and "I love my Vibram Five Fingers!" and "I can't wait to see what they sell me next!"
Neal Stephenson Cares About Canada . . . and by the transitive property, so do I
The first seven hundred pages of Neal Stephenson's new novel Reamde take place in exotic locales such as Xiamen, Taiwan, the Philippines, and the MMORPG T'Rain, but the last three hundred pages follow international terrorist Abdullah Jones as he makes his way through the mountains of British Columbia towards the U.S. border-- and though the Canadian portion of the novel is a bit slower paced than the rest, it is well worth the wait until the entire international cast of characters descend on the inaccessible and mountainous border of Idaho and Canada-- Stephenson has a miniature war play out there, and his detailed, steady description of multiple plot threads is so arresting (not to mention that after 1000 pages you're rather attached to the characters) that your heart will race, your palms will sweat, the outside world will vanish, and when you finish the final page, you won't believe that the experience was NOT virtual, not generated by any sort of technology, and simply the result of well-placed squiggles on the white pages of a very thick book.
Hey Michael Lewis! In A Book Titled Boomerang, Shouldn't You Visit Australia?
In his new book Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, Michael Lewis is more cavalier with is opinions than he was in his last book, the longer and denser The Big Short . . . Boomerang is more of a travelogue with some finance thrown in, and at times you get the feel that he's winging it, relying on his good name in each country, but he's an engaging writer and the book is a lot of fun-- considering it's about a depressing topic-- because for each country he visits, he tries to link their national character to the type of financial disaster they are experiencing: corrupt and tribal Greeks refuse to band together for the sake of their country; feral Icelanders treat high-risk banking the same way they treat fishing in the cold and dangerous waters of the North Atlantic; stoic Irishmen shoulder their country's debt with tight-lipped penitence, though they should have acted shamefully and defaulted; rule abiding Germans don't notice the filth under the sheen of the bonds they have bought (and here he takes a scatological side-trip into "the German's longstanding special interest" in "Scheisse (shit)" and tries to extend the analogy to the financial crisis, claiming that the Germans "longed to be near the shit but not in it," and although this is entertaining, I think his logic is stretched thin and that you could find loads of "Scheisse" jokes in every culture-- Mr. Lahey from Trailer Park Boys comes to mind-- so even Canadians stoop to this sort of humor); finally Lewis ends up in America, searching for the state that is the biggest financial disaster . . . and banking analyst Meredith Whitney determines this by invoking the logic of "the tragedy of the commons," she explains: "companies are more likely to flourish in stronger states; the individuals will go where the jobs are . . . ultimately, the people will follow the companies . . . Indiana is going to be like, NFW I'm bailing out New Jersey . . . those who have money and can move do so, and those without money and cannot move do not, and ultimately rely more on state and local assistance," and Lewis asks her, "What's the scariest state?" and I hoped her answer wouldn't be New Jersey, but she "only had to think for about two seconds" and then she said, "California."
Sodom and Gomorrah and Explosions
Everyone knows that "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions"-- including my favorite "cool guys," the silent and scary Mexican cartel assassins from Breaking Bad-- but I have a hypothesis as to why this trope is so common: it is actually a subtle Biblical allusion to the the story of Sodom and Gomorrah; Lot and his wife are commanded by the angels NOT to look back at Yahweh's explosive destruction of the depraved cities but Lot's wife disobeys the angel's instructions and looks back and she is turned into a pillar of salt . . . and so not looking back isn't just about being cool, it's also about obeying God's will and showing humility when something is justly and purposefully destroyed-- and I had this epiphany while showing my children the story of Sodom and Gomorrah on a site called The Brick Testament, which is an illustrated Bible depicted with Legos . . . it is comprehensive and incredible; on the other hand, if something is being randomly destroyed in a movie, then people watch it in fascination (such as the colossal train derailment in Super 8).
North Brunswick Alumnus Scores 102 Yard Goal
Tim Howard, Premier League and U.S. National Team goalie, is arguably the most famous North Brunswick High School Alumnus (he's competing with Glen Burtnik of Styx and two comedians: Jim Norton and Aries Spears) and this goal certainly helps his case.
Movie Trivia (Answer in the Comments)
What film contains cameos by Dom Deluise, Charles Durning, James Coburn, Milton Berle, Elliott Gould, Madeline Kahn, Bob Hope, Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Telly Savalas, and Orson Welles?
Basketball vs. Soccer: Microcosmically
1) for soccer, you need to bring a white and a dark shirt-- so that you can wear the same color as your team-- but for basketball, you have to memorize who is on your team-- this is fairly typical and I suppose it is because in soccer you are looking down more and have to make longer passes and might not be able to recognize someone's face from that far away, but my eyes aren't great and I wouldn't mind if the basketball game adopted the soccer policy;
2) in the soccer game, if you have to sit out a game because there are too many players, you are guaranteed to play in the next game-- even if someone from the winning team needs to be relieved-- but in the basketball game, if there are more than five players, and you miss your foul shot, you will NOT play in the next game . . . as the winning five always get to stay on;
3) because of this rule, more fouls are called in the basketball game and the score is more important;
4) the soccer crew has an email group but the basketball group does not;
5) if the weather is decent, the soccer group will play outside, while this has never happened with the basketball group . . . even when it was 95 degrees in the gym in the summer;
6) more advice and strategy is dispensed by the experienced basketball players, and it is more often accepted, or at least entertained and discussed . . . while during soccer if anyone mistakenly attempts to give someone else advice, it usually results in a vehement argument (which may happen in a language other than English)
7) sometimes at soccer, while we are warming up, we talk world politics . . . this never happens at basketball;
8) there are a couple of women that occasionally play in the soccer game-- and they can hold their own-- but I have never seen any women at the basketball game;
9) you can bring your kid to the soccer game, and if you get there early then he might get to play some-- my seven-year-old son once played for a while before everyone got there . . . but I've never seen any kids at the basketball game;
10) the soccer game has people with names such as Mario, Gio, Jose, Guillermo, Felipe, Mohammed, Javier, Yorim, Ahmed, Yusuf, Ari, Josi, Bruce and Mike . . . the basketball game has people with names such as Al, Keith, Ben, Tom, Chris, Anthony, Richard (Cob), Eugene, Bruce, Isaac and-- of course-- Mike.
The Greek Economy is Ik (Michael Lewis Thomas)
One of the economically devastated countries Michael Lewis describes in his new book Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World is Greece, and his tale is a sordid one of corruption, tax evasion, and systematic cheating and abuse that is so endemic to the culture that it is difficult to fully quantify-- he finally concludes that Greece "does not behave like a collective . . . it behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good," and this reminds me of a Lewis Thomas essay about anthropologist Colin Turnbull's infamous portrayal of The Ik, a displaced Ugandan tribe; Turnbull's observations-- in his book The Mountain People-- give a firsthand account of the Ik's selfish and highly individualist practices-- which include defecating on each others doorsteps, leaving the old and sick to fend for themselves, and having no collective spirit whatsoever-- and this makes Turnbull question the goodness of human nature . . . but Lewis Thomas dismisses this pessismism and the Ik behavior-- insisting that The Ik society has essentially gone crazy-- and as a solution to the insanity, each individual Ik has formed a "group, a one man tribe on its own, a constituency," and Thomas says this is not all that unusual, as it is how nations behave, and "for total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is no match for a nation."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)