Glad That's Over With

I finished the fourth George R.R. Martin book in his epic A Song of Ice and Fire series, and all I can say about A Feast For Crows is that I survived it (unlike most of the characters) and I hope the next one is an easier read.

I'm Actually Black And I'm Proud

Hustle and Flow is the ghetto version of The Commitments.

Cow or Cat?

As we were walking home from The Dish Cafe, my son Ian spied a strange creature posing on a stoop-- and so he asked, "Is that a cow or a cat?"-- though the thing was most certainly a cat, but his question was reasonable because it was a hairless cat-- and spotted like a cow-- and not only was it hairless but it was also very saggy (much saggier than this hairless Sphinx cat in the picture) and apparently (this is news to me!) there are a number of hairless house cats, each one uglier than the next.

OBFT XIX

The 19th Annual Outer Banks Fishing Trip went off without a hitch, and a big thanks to Whitney for putting us up and putting up with us for this many years . . . here are a few things that I vaguely remember from OBFT XIX: 1) driving with a hangover while Whitney participated in a 90 minute conference call for work . . . very boring and oppressive, especially when Whitney had a bout of flatulence, and would not allow me to roll down the windows because he needed to hear 2) an innovative and scary ride home from Tortuga's for Jerry and me, thanks to Cliff 3) Whitney and I reigning for five hours in a row at corn-hole 4) waiting too long at Tortuga's and never getting to order lunch 5) cornbread and beef brisket at Taylor's Barbeque , which is just outside fo Salisbury Maryland 6) back to back pork bbq sandwiches at Southland and Pigman's, within a two hour window 7) napping on the ferry to Cape May 8) getting "shushed" at the bar 9) the best water in a long time (but no waves, I had to wait until I got up to Sea Isle City for that) 10) Bruce's fantastic joke, which cannot be repeated, even on the internet.

A Man With A Beard Is More Of A Man Than Me (But That's Not Saying Much)

I don't know how men with beards got over the IT ITCHES! hump.

Alfred Hitchcock Was Right!

A presumptuous seagull swooped down and yanked a Blueberry Belvita Breakfast Biscuit right out of Lynn's hand while she was chatting with Dom on the beach, and this is a frightening development in avian intelligence, because once all the other birds learn that humans wandering around with food in their hands are fair game, we are going to starve to death (or I guess we could just eat indoors, but you can't make a horror movie about being forced to bring your kids off the beach and eat lunch inside . . . even though that is a horrible process).

LeCompt Plays Best Set Ever!

Every trip to Sea Isle City includes a night listening to LeCompt-- the hardest working bar band in the world-- and they outdid themselves last Sunday evening: they played an entire set of Who songs, from the obscure to the epic . . . these are the ones I remember: The Real Me, Cut My Hair, 5:15, Love Reign O'er Me, Doctor Jimmy, Baba O'Riley, Getting in Tune, However Much I Booze . . . but I am sure there were others . . . the band has inspired me to go back and listen to The Who By Numbers.

We Don't Need No Stinking Bags

As I was walking off the beach, my wife yelled to me to bring back her "bag from the house" and the only bag I could find back at the house was a cute little pink and purple striped hand bag-- rectangular in shape, with a thin handle that stretched across the top of the bag-- so I grabbed that and then made my way to the 7-11 to get some coffee, and a guy spotted my Spotswood soccer shirt and asked if I went there and I so I gave him a brief history of my coaching career-- forgetting that I was flinging this little bag around every time I made a hand motion-- and then when I brought the bag up to the counter at the 7-11, the young dude at the counter said, "Cute purse" and I laughed and then he said, "You've got to be confident in your manhood to carry around a bag like that," and I said, "That's me, all man" and then when I left the place, I said to my friend Connell: "What  if that really was my bag? That guy was making a pretty big assumption?" but I guess I didn't look fabulous enough to be carrying that thing around . . . and then we went back to the crew at the beach and I told my funny story and my wife said, "I didn't say 'bag,' I said 'badge' . . . my beach badge."

Some Decisions Make Themselves

So when the dim sum cart comes to your table at the new China Bowl, and your choices are fried chicken feet, tripe buns, or shrimp dumplings, which do you choose?

An Evil Mountain by Any Other Name

One of the excellent things about having children is that you have an excuse to revisit great movies . . . our family has just started the Lord of the Rings saga, and one of the things that makes me chuckle is that amid all the high fantasy diction-- the Elvish and Old English and Germanic derivatives-- Aragorn and Mordor and Bara-dur and Balrog and The Council of Elrond-- amidst all this gibberish is the much more pragmatic sounding "Mount Doom" . . . it's possibly the only place name in the series that doesn't require a doctorate in language studies to decipher (of course, Tolkien did give it several other names, including Amar Amarth and Orodruin, which makes me believe he was not very successful with the fairer sex).

Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country, Ask When You Can Take A Nap

I guess it's okay for a President to be a tee-totaller-- although I know I would need a beer or seven after a long day of diplomacy at the G8 Summit-- but the fact that Mitt Romney doesn't drink coffee precludes him from the top spot in The White House, in my book, because how do you make it through something like the Cuban Missile Crisis without a little caffeine?

Pros and Cons of My New Minivan

The pro: you can carpool with another family that has a minivan and all the kids can travel in one vehicle; the con: you can carpool with another family that has a minivan and all the kids can travel in one vehicle . . . a vehicle that you might possibly be driving.

Does It Suck For Louie If He Doesn't Know It Sucks?

The end of season two of Louis CK's brilliant and eponymous show Louie is the most painful illustration of dramatic irony (Wave to me! . . . I'll wait for you!) since Oedipus Rex.

You'll Sleep When You're Dead (Or After You Put Your Dog Down)

On the mornings that our children sleep until eight, our dog wakes us up at six.

Can Anyone Recommend Some Light Reading?

I finished Ioan Grillo's book El Narco, which is a portrait of the Mexican drug cartels and the damage they have wrought in both their home country and our own; it works like this: the United States provides many of the guns for the drug warfare . . . and of course we provide the insatiable need for illegal drugs (especially New York City) and the Mexicans-- who used to be middlemen smugglers for Columbian cocaine, until the Miami Vice squad made it too tough to come through Florida-- have taken over as the main producers, shippers, smugglers, and distributors . . . and moved into many other organized crime rackets such as shakedowns, protection money, and kidnapping . . . and because the stakes are so high and there is so much money involved and there are so many poor folk willing to risk it all, things have gotten incredibly brutal, both as the drug gangs fight each other, and as they fight the often corrupt police for a slice of the pie . . . the violence is heinous and terroristic and the trade is global and difficult to trace-- as the drug lords rely on lots of freelance help for assassinations and transport and smuggling and raw materials-- and while good intelligence can help to bring down big players, there is always someone else ready to step in and make the big money, if only for a limited time (the days of Pablo Escobar are over) and Grillo makes the typical case for legalization of drugs-- at least marijuana, but also perhaps cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, and whatever else is coming across the border-- because that is the only way to limit the power of these very organized paramilitary economic insurrectionists who are essentially psychotic . . . there was a time in the '70's when it looked like legalization would happen, but then we "just said no," but perhaps it's time to review drug possession policy again-- considering the mounting death toll and the fact that some of the cartel drug violence violence is creeping across the border (but not much because the Mexicans know what is good for business) may lead to a viable debate about drug legalization . . . anyway, the book is a good read if you want to know the ins and outs of this atrocious situation just South of us: nine Zetas out of ten.

There Was A Kangaroo In My Living Room

Much of what we think about global warming is anecdotal-- it's been hotter than ever this summer . . . it never snows anymore . . . we never had this many jellyfish when I was a kid-- and I have another story for this file: my son Ian found a baby lizard in our living room . . . a Northern Fence lizard, to be precise, and technically this lizard's range does extend up to Central New Jersey, but I've only seen these down in South Jersey, in the Pine Barrens-- until last week, of course, and so now I am waiting for the armadillos to arrive.

The American Dream Is Just That

It turns out that Arthur Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald were right, there is no "American Dream" . . . if you want your children to have a better chance at climbing the ladder of success, the best thing you can do for them is to pack up and move to Norway . . . the Organization for Economic C-Operation and Development found that the U.S. is well below "Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, and Spain in terms of how freely citizens move up and down the social ladder" and, the developed world, only in Italy and Great Britain is the correlation between what your parents earn and what you earn greater . . . this could be true in America because of the differences in education or because the rungs on our economic ladder are so far apart (and getting farther apart) but the real point is that Elizabeth Warren and Obama's sentiment "that you didn't build that," is true . . . but it's not true because our country's infrastructure helped you to get where you are, it's because your mommy and daddy did.

Dog Days Of Dopiness

I'm into the stage of summer where I probably need to go back to work again; I've lost focus and become a bit lazy . . . I had trouble peeling myself off a lounge chair at the pool the other day, though I was really hot, and barely found the strength to slip into the pool . . . and my reading habits are reflecting this-- I keep switching between three books, one called Lego: A Love Story, a totally frivolous account of how Jonathan Bender gets back into building Lego creations as an adult; another called El Narco, which details the drug war in Mexico and seems like something I should be informed about (but also seems very distant from my life) and a third called It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How The American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, which also seems like something I should be informed about, and should be able to relate to my students as the election season heats up, but it's really complicated . . . and my students still seem pretty abstract at this point, so I'll probably end up ditching all these books and completing The Ripliad.

Porkocrite

For a guy that claims he doesn't eat pork, I eat a lot of pork (in fact, I may eat a fair amount of pork as compared to a person who actually eats pork).

Barely A Splurge

One of the many horrible things I've learned from Ioan Grillo's book El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency is that the going rate for an assassination in Juarez is 1000 pesos; Grillo was so flabbergasted by this figure that he checked it with several sources . . . and that's the deal, all it costs to hire a teenage sicario is eighty-five US dollars; this makes sense when you look at the statistics: "120,000 of Juarez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four-- or forty five percent of the total-- were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment," and so snuffing out someone who crossed you doesn't even warrant a second thought, when life is so cheap that you can hire a hitman and still get change back from a C note.