April is the month to celebrate poets and poetry, and so I will share one of my poems here (and please don't be intimidated by how good it is, as I teach creative writing, and so I have unbelievable creative powers) and I should warn you that this poem contains an "allusion" and that if you don't know how Sylvia Plath offed herself, then you might not understand all the "layers" of this masterpiece, which not only did I write myself (without the use of the internet) but I have also memorized in toto so that I can recite it to my classes after we read "Mirror":
Some Advice for Sylvia Plath
Get your head out of that oven
and cook us up another poem.
The Potato Apostrophe Catastrophe
So last week, I thought to myself, if I were able to speak to a corporation, this is what I would say: "Hey Herr's . . . how about making the outside of your personal sized potato chip bag less slick and flashy, and instead do something useful with it, like make it more porous and corrugated-- more like the consistency of a napkin-- so that when I'm done eating your chips, I can wipe the greasy jalapeno dust off my fingers and onto the bag" but when I mentioned this genius idea to my students, they quickly saw the flaw in my plan: the bags would get incredibly dirty before they were sold . . . from the factory and the shipping and wherever they're stored, and I had to agree, as I could see someone working up a sweat, loading chips, and using one of the new "napkin bags" to wipe his brow, or blow his nose or worse . . . so this is not going to go down as one of Dave's Great Ideas, and I'd like to revise what I would say to the Herr's corporation: "Hey Herr's . . . keep up the good work on those delicious jalapeno chips!"
Ergonomic Canine Generated Plectrum
My dog chewed on one of my guitar picks, and now it fits perfectly between my finger and thumb (which makes me wonder if I can train him to do this while I am at work-- I could run a cottage industry creating ergonomic plectrums-- and I know my dog has plenty of free time while I'm at work, as I closely observed him over Spring Break, and he's very unproductive during the workday . . . he basically lies in the sun and naps . . . and his Buffalo Blue dog food doesn't come cheap).
How to Cultivate a Green Thumb
Watering my wife's garden would be monotonous, if it weren't for the magical powers of beer.
Some Good Movies and TV You May Not Have Seen #5
David Cronenberg's eXistenZ came out at the same time as The Matrix, but it wasn't as popular-- possibly because it's easier to spell "matrix" then it is to spell "eXistenZ"-- but Cronenberg's film is weird and fun and the acting is certainly more entertaining than what Keanu Reeves had to offer as Neo . . . Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh wade through multiple levels of a video game which may or may not be reality, and they run into Ian Holm, Willem Dafoe and lots of really gross props along the way.
Life Isn't Fair (But You Don't Have to Rub It In)
My son Alex got in trouble for punching his younger brother in the head yesterday, and I am partly to blame-- Ian was telling us about his day at school, and he mentioned that his class had some sort of party and he got to eat M&M's and this really pissed his older brother off-- Alex immediately wanted some M&M's . . . because it wasn't fair that Ian got M&M's and he didn't get any-- but we didn't have any M&M's (and even if we did have some, I wouldn't have given him any because his logic was ridiculous, which I tried to explain-- the fact that occasionally his class had parties and got treats and that Ian's class did not get . . . but he wasn't buying it) and so, since he wouldn't listen to reason, I decided to taunt Alex a bit, and so I said to Ian, "I love M&M's! I'll bet those M&M's were really good, and it's nice to get some M&M's at school," and Ian agreed with me . . . but all this M&M talk was more than Alex could handle, so he popped Ian right in the forehead and then got sent upstairs-- but I should have been sent upstairs as well, as I exacerbated the situation.
Nostradavus (If You Are A Member of My Wife's Book Club, Do Not Read This!)
Using my magnificent powers of clairvoyance and divination, I am going to make a stunningly useless prediction: in the near future, my wife's book club will select Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail as their book of the month . . . Karen Long called it a "tougher, more feral" version of Eat, Pray Love and it's already got a long request queue at the library . . . I am planning on reading this book-- if I ever finish Cryptonomicon-- but I will in no way recommend it to any members of her book club (and hopefully they won't read this sentence) so that we can see if my prophetic acumen is accurate.
Meme Song (Dave Coins an Essential New Phrase!)
From the same mind that brought you the eternally delightful and eminently practical word Tupperawareness, comes another hand-crafted, home-made, and absolutely essential addition to the lexicon . . . once you hear it, you won't be able to live without it; so imagine the scenario: you've just heard a memorable melody, a snatch of a song, just a wee bit of music . . . and you can't forget it-- it's ideal, archetypal, and exemplary, like the Da Duh Da Duh from Jaws or the Dah De Neh Na, Neh Na Nuh from Indiana Jones or the Da Na Nuh Na Nuh Nuh Na Nuh Nuh from Star Wars (Darth Vader's entrance) or the Dah Nah Nah Noo Nah from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and you need a name for this bit of music, and, thanks to Sentence of Dave, here it is: a meme song (and I can't believe this term doesn't already exist, it makes me wonder if the internet is dumber than I thought).
Hiking + Amphibians = Happy Children
Happiness is flipping over a rock and finding a salamander . . . but you've got to flip a lot of rocks before you hit the jackpot; we tried our best at the Mohonk Preserve, but it proved salamander-less, but the next day, while we were hiking to Awosting Falls in Minnewaska State Park, I tried my luck in a drainage gully that ran alongside the trail, as it was damp and full of rocks . . . and there was a salamander under every stone . . . sometimes even two or three salamanders, but only the red-backed and Jefferson varieties, not the elusive yellow-spotted salamander (although we did find a yellow striped mimic millipede).
No Escape From the Theme
So Wednesday night my wife spent eight hours in the emergency room with her mother, who needed an emergency nephrostomy, and then she spent the entire following day in the hospital, conferring with doctors and and keeping her mom company . . . and by Thursday afternoon things finally started looking up (her mom's creatinine levels went down) and so my wife and I took a break the hospital (and our kids, who were at my parent's house) and went to Coco-- our favorite Thai/Malaysian place-- for some much needed food and beer; we were hoping to take a deep breath and relax, but this was not to be, we had barely dug into our papaya salad, when an older guy sitting at the table next to us slumped forward in his seat . . . we saw his eyes roll back into his skull and drool run down his chin, and the woman with him explained that he had a heart problem, so they laid him out on the floor and put a jacket under his head and some lady who seemed to know what she was doing checked his pulse and cleared his mouth (she turned out to be a nurse) and he was still out cold, so I figured I should use my CPR training, though I had never executed it on a real human, and so I knelt down next to him-- he definitely wasn't responding-- and so I put my hand on his chest and measured the proper distance from the sternum and just as I was about to start doing the compressions (to the beat of Stayin' Alive, of course) the guy came to . . . I think he may have had a small stroke or maybe he fainted-- who knows-- but in a moment he was fairly coherent, groggy, but able to talk-- so we went back to our "relaxing" meal-- and this guy was especially lucky that it wasn't a life-threatening emergency, as the waiter who called 911 must not have been very clear on the phone . . . the police took an inordinate amount of time to show up, and the ambulance took even longer-- because the police didn't realize it was a medical emergency and instead thought it was a customer dispute . . . so though we tried to take a break from the stress of the hospital, the medical crisis came to us, and remained there on the floor the entire length of our dinner, and the moral of the story is this: if you're at an authentic Asian restaurant and you're having a medical emergency, make sure someone who can speak fluent English makes the 911 call.
Some Good Movies and TV You May Not Have Seen #4
If you haven't seen The Shield start to finish, then you are really missing out; from the fantastic pilot that sets the plot arc for the remainder of the series to the arguably the most perfectly appropriate closing episode in the history of television, The Shield delivers . . . especially during the Forest Whitaker and Glenn Close seasons . . . and now Walton Goggins-- the actor who played Shane Vendrell-- is on another show call Justified, which I also highly recommend.
Life Can Be Funny (Not "Ha Ha" Funny)
One moment you may find yourself in aptly named High Falls, New York-- standing beneath a waterfall with your wife, watching your boys skip stones into a pool of clear water-- but a cell phone call and a couple hours later you're back in New Jersey, cleaning your carsick son's vomit off a comforter while your wife spends eight hours in the emergency room with her mom, who is waiting for a nephrostomy because her one remaining kidney is not functioning properly (and apparently if you spend eight hours in an emergency room you witness some wild things: a sixteen year old who nearly OD'ed on oxycontin; a ninety-four year old woman who felt fine and wanted to leave and so pulled out all her tubes and made a break for it; an angry drunk who needed to be subdued by eight security officers, etcetera . . . ask my wife for details).
Some Good Movies and TV You May Not Have Seen #3
I love pretty much everything documentarian Errol Morris has done, but if you're going to get into his work, you might as well start at the beginning, with Gates of Heaven-- which Roger Ebert claims to have seen over thirty times and makes his short list of the ten best movies ever-- it's ostensibly about pet cemeteries, but I'm sure the meaning of life is buried somewhere in this film: "There's your dog, your dog's dead . . . but where's the thing that made it move? It had to be something, didn't it?"
Some Good Movies and TV You May Not Have Seen #2
This clip of David Cross selling Thunder Muscle energy drink is NOT SAFE FOR WORK . . . and if you find this sort of thing funny (my wife does not) then you will love The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret . . . Todd Margaret is utterly despicable, with no endearing qualities-- we are talking beyond Kenny Powers despicable-- but he is funny.
Special Vacation Update!
Shockingly, they have Wi-Fi in the Catskills . . . so I am on vacation and I am on-line; I even managed to write a complete post over at Gheorghe: The Blog . . . Dave's Definitive List of Seven Movies That Are Better Than the Book.
Some Good Movies and TV You May Not Have Seen
My family is heading to the Catskills for Spring Break, but I don't want to leave all my dedicated fans in the lurch . . . so each day I'll give you a clip from a movie or TV show that I highly recommend-- and though I'm certainly no film buff, which is probably a good thing, as I won't be recommending anything really artsy or obscure-- I will try to suggest things that you haven't seen, and all of these movies and shows have the DAVE GUARANTEE . . . my personal stamp of approval . . . so if you watch one of these recommendations and don't enjoy it, I will refund your time in full; my first recommendation is The Third Man . . . it's a classic movie with a modern pace-- I usually don't have the patience for black and white movies-- but I like it better than Casablanca . . . awesome zither music, excellent footage of war torn Vienna, and a fantastic cameo by Orson Welles . . . check it out, you won't be disappointed.
Melancholia Makes My Wife Angry (Except For One Brief Moment)
Melancholia, a pretentiously artsy film about depression and the end of the world, did not have the intended effect on my wife . . . instead of making her melancholic, it made her very angry-- the slow pace, the random unexplained images, the self-absorbed and despicable characters-- these finally grated on her nerves so much that-- after an epithet laced hour-- she quit watching, but she got the point: it's a film about the earth's demise, but because you have no emotional attachment to the people in this movie, you don't feel much anxiety as the end approaches; though the characters are awful people, living pathetic, anxiety-ridden lives, I wanted to see their final disintegration, and so I pressed on until the end, but really the most fascinating images are at the beginning of the film, and so while I certainly can't recommend this slog through Lars van Trier's imagination, you might try the watching the montage at the start and the horribly awkward wedding scene . . . Kiefer Sutherland is great, though Kirsten Dunst is rather annoying as a melancholic . . . but I think she got a boob job, so there's that to look at . . . and the one thing that my wife and I both liked about the movie was more of a happy accident than something intentional-- during the generally disastrous wedding, there is one romantic moment: the guests make Chinese sky lanterns and launch them into the night, and this was a helpful scene for my wife and me . . . after we saw The Hunger Games, when we walked out into the dark parking lot, we saw some odd, spooky lights in the night-sky, rising rapidly in formation and then burning out, and after much speculation and discussion, we determined that they must have been Chinese sky lanterns and now, after seeing them up close in the film, we are certain that is what we saw . . . and so for that, and for that alone, Lars van Trier, my wife thanks you.
I Seek Wisdom From the Crowd
Several years ago, my friend Whitney and I laid an interesting wager on a game of darts-- this was very late at night and after many beers-- and the bet was this: the winner could make the loser wear any t-shirt he chose for one day of the OBFT (as long as this t-shirt was not horribly profane, as we spend a long portion of each day at the wrap around bar in a family seafood joint) and I won the game of darts, but I have yet to "collect" on this bet, as I've never determined what t-shirt I want Whitney to wear . . . and I kind of like holding the possibility that I might show up with a ridiculous t-shirt over his head each year, but I feel it's time for Whitney to pay up and so I am going to take a page out of James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations and see what you have to offer . . . so Internet, I call on your wisdom, give me an idea of how I can humiliate my friend in the form of a t-shirt.
Breaking News in the World of Cheap Mexican Food!
For as long as I can remember, Burrito Royale was a sketchy but constant staple on Route 1 in South Brunswick; I often got food there when I was waiting tables at Rumbleseats . . . and though the food was mediocre, I always appreciated the aesthetic charms of the joint-- amidst a corridor of chain restaurants, strip malls, and big box stores, this shack withstood the test of time (35 years!) but it has finally closed, to be replaced by . . . drum roll please . . . Burrito King . . . long live the King, hopefully as long as the Royale, which certainly had its share of cheese (and if you are the rare soul who needs more on this story, then click here).
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