The Platinum Age of Bewilderment

Wired Magazine explains why television is better than it ever has been . . . and the Netflix original series House of Cards is certainly an example of "platinum quality" TV: the show is so good, I don't understand it (and neither does professional Entertainment Weekly summarizer Hillary Busis, who -- in her episode four recap -- doesn't mention a word of Frank Underwood's complex political stratagem hinging on the collective bargaining chip in the education reform bill, and instead concentrates on the easy, romantic stuff . . . I had to search around until I found this post, and I still don't think that Nathan Matisse understands the plot any better than I do).

Spooky Serendipity

I finished Henry James' ambiguously supernatural novel Turn of the Screw Sunday morning and not an hour later, while walking back from our secret salamander spot, my son Ian -- unprompted -- told me that "the boy's bathroom at school is haunted" and then he explained that while he was going to the bathroom, the door inexplicably locked of its own volition and that this "happened to another boy," and so I asked him my favorite question (Do you believe in ghosts?) and he said, "not really" and I said that I felt the same, and suggested that maybe it was the wind that locked the bathroom door, and he countered, "How could wind get inside a building?"

Do It! Do It!

In class right now, we are studying the ethical implications of some classic psychological experiments . . . Milgram, Asch, and Stanford prison --  and the main lesson from these is that humans can be quite obedient -- whether to a group or an authority figure or social pressure-- once we are put into a "state of agency" . . . and so it was hard to totally blame my son (though he suffered some consequences) for what happened on the bus ride home from his class trip on Friday: he had picked up a bottle cap, as boys are wont to do, and brought it in the bus, and some girl had the bright idea that he should throw it out the window and the other students started chanting "Do it! Do it!" and so he did it.

Our Dog Is Male

Wednesday night, my seven year old son Ian made an observation and then reacted to his observation, all in the same sentence: "We have four boys in the house and only one girl . . . it's awesome."

A Riddle My Nine Year Old Son Created (I Didn't Get the Answer)

What bites but has no mouth . . . and has wings but cannot fly?

I Give Up!

Diligent readers of Sentence of Dave know that I believe that Neal Stephenson is one of the greatest writers of our time -- he combines the best qualities of Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson -- and so it is with much regret that I report that I am quitting his gigantic philosophical novel Anathem . . . perhaps this is a case of what Thoreau said: "It is not all books that are as dull as their readers," as I have certainly become more dull of wit in the past year, because my life has become extraordinarily busy, but whatever the reason, I have been stuck in the forty percent zone on my Kindle for weeks (and I even took out the analog version from the library to see if that was the problem) but it looks like I'm never going to finish this incredibly speculative and meta-physical novel, and so I started something more concrete-- The Looming Tower-- and I was able to read forty pages before I fell asleep (a great contrast to Anathem . . . I couldn't get through two pages before nodding off) and Lawrence Wright's book on the origins of Al-Qaeda and 9/11 is well written and full of great research, including this quotation from essayist E.B. White, who was trying to get a grip on the dawn of the nuclear age . . . before we learned to stop worrying and love the bomb: "In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm."

Technology is Cool/Scary

Cool technology: lidar (it's like radar . . . with lasers!) and it is being used to discover load of archaeological sites in the dense, impenetrable jungles of Mosquitia . . . scary technology: algorithmic high-frequency trading . . . it's like investing . . . with lasers!

Warning. This is Gross.

If you aimlessly scratch at a pimple behind your earlobe, it can bleed a lot.

One For the Actuaries

I am assuming, from an insurance compensation stand-point, it is better to wait for a windy day and let your tree get knocked down by nature, rather than pay a certified arborist out-of-pocket to do it ahead of time.

Very Fine Gradients of Class Warfare

I know this isn't the best trait -- as a coach or an athlete -- and it has probably been handed down to me from my father . . . but whenever my team has away game in a town that appears to be much richer than my hometown, I ineluctably feel extra-motivated to give them a beatdown, and so as we entered lovely Basking Ridge, and drove past the rolling hills of Basking Ridge Country Club, I said to my son Ian, "We've got to kick these rich kids' butts today" and then -- as punishment for my classism -- when we got out of the car and Ian took a look at the opposing team, he said, loudly, in front of several Basking Ridge parents: "they don't look like rich kids" and I had to explain to him that we shouldn't say things like that (even though I did) but still, I am happy to report that we did indeed kick their butts, a great victory of a lower-upper middle class town over an upper-upper middle class town.

Boogers Part II (in 2-D)

While not nearly as epic as this booger story, this is a cautionary tale for students and teachers alike: I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that every educator has lost a student's assignment at some point . . . whether it was misplaced or tossed aside by another student during peer-editing or fell under the desk or got picked up by another teacher . . . so I always give kids the benefit of the doubt when they tell me that they handed something in; this scenario was playing out last Wednesday, and so I did the first thing I always do, which is check the pile of papers -- because sometimes I forget to grade one, or a student mistakenly staples another kid's paper to his own . . . and we found the girl's paper in the pile, but it was connected to another student's (graded) paper not by a staple, but by a booger -- or I'm 75% sure it was a booger, I didn't any testing to determine exactly what it was, but it sure looked like a booger, and we don't use rubber cement in high school.

Killing Is Worth It!

The first two seasons of AMC's The Killing focus on two Seattle homicide detectives trying to solve the murder of a high school student -- Rosie Larsen -- and the writers kept me guessing until the  last moments of the last episode of the second season . . . I think the ending of the case rivals that of the best final TV episode ever made (The Shield) . . . the solution is both surprising and perfectly logical; Mireille Enos plays Sarah Linden perfectly . . . she's a homely, unmedicated and possibly more neurotic (but in a realistic way) Seattle version of Clare Danes in Homeland . . . and though the show is dark, rainy, and bleak, unlike Danes, Linden has someone she can rely on, her partner -- Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) -- and they bring the buddy genre to new levels of weird awkwardness (and since I'm making absurd analogies, I will also say that at times Holder and Linden look and act like the bizarro world Moulder and Scully).

My Son Successfully Sails the Seas of Cheese

We commanded our children to make my grandmother a hand-made card for her 91st birthday, and in less than a minute my nine year old son Alex came up with this corny Hallmark-style stanza:

No matter how old,
no matter how young,
I will always be
your great grandson.

Dave's Weather Report (Including the Sinuses)

Unusual weather for central New Jersey today: sunny and dry, with clear skies and low humidity . . . and a 70% chance of boogers.

What Did Birders Do Before the Internet?

There is a bird in my yard that says "cheeseburger! cheeseburger! cheeseburger!" and it only took me three minutes to learn that it is a Carolina Wren (and not a black-capped Chickadee) though both these birds say "cheeseburger," but the Carolina Wren says it much faster and clearer . . . but why I am I wasting my time using langauge to explain this . . . watch the Youtube video!

That Point Doesn't Count . . . The Ball Was Dead and I Wasn't Ready and the Sun Was in My Eyes

My seven year old son Ian is the king of the "redo," which is short for "do-over," which is short for "I love to cheat."

More Fun Things About Owning a Dog

That's a strange ball in the middle of the living room . . . I don't remember the kids playing with that . . .  it's kind of oblong and fleshy-looking . . . and it smells really good in here . . . I think I'll take a closer look . . . hmm, that's not a ball . . . it's a chicken carcass, stripped to the bones . . . I suppose the lesson here is that if you own a dog, you can't leave the house for more than ten minutes if you've left a rotisserie chicken on the counter (and I won't go into detailed consequences of this feast, but I will say this: the next day, when I arrived home from work, I had to carry the rug outside and hose it down).

Graveyard for Resolutions

Every so often I notice that I still have two failed New Year's Resolutions prominently displayed on the top of the sidebar (to the right of this sentence) and while I was going to remove them, I have decided to keep them for the time being because I like the reminder that most of our "deep plots do pall, and that should teach us"; I may not have become an expert in Canadian culture, or committed a 100 songs to memory, or become a virtuoso at the banjo . .  and I may not continue to fast on Mondays and Wednesdays for the rest of my life, but the important thing is that I gave it "the college try" and not only that, I learned a few things about Canada (and also learned that I have oceans of ignorance about our neighbor to the north) and I memorized the chords and lyrics to a few songs, and I discovered that even though I don't play my banjo any longer, my wife won't let me sell it, because she likes the way it looks on the wall . . . and so I will attempt to eat nearly nothing on Mondays and Wednesdays, though I know that most days, I am doomed to fail, as are most people are when they make resolutions, but that's okay . . . we would be a sad species if we never made them at all.

Dave Cannot Assess the Situation (Even Though He Refers to Himself in the Third Person)

I have gotten so busy living my life, that I don't consume the same amount of literature, television, film and pop-culture as I used to . . . and I'm not sure if this is making me wiser and more experienced, or simply tired and dull.

Weird Hair Day

There are days when I always feel like I have a spider in my hair.