Hidden Talents

My eight year old son Ian is a hula hoop wizard - he can do two at a time, spin it around his knees, and walk while hula-hooping -- and this got me very jealous and angry because I couldn't do it at all, but I went on YouTube and watched a few tutorials and now I can get it going for a while (although I can't do any tricks . . . it's hard enough for me to keep the thing rotating around my sturdy mid-section).

This Too Shall Pass

My son Ian is a member of "the piggy club," but his brother Alex is not -- despite the fact that many of his friends profess to being members of the aforementioned club . . . Alex says he finds it annoying to talk at length about piggies.

Huge Cement Shoes to Fill

Although celebrity deaths don't usually occupy my consciousness, James Gandolfini's demise is slightly different . . . because not only is he the celebrity representative of my home state (along with Frank and Bruce) but he is also one of the few celebrities that I have met in my life: seven years ago, after a Rutgers football game, Gandolfini went to McCormick's Irish Pub (with the possible intent to score some controlled substances, as he said my friend and colleague Kevin: "I hear this is the most drug infested bar in New Brunswick," but Kevin disappointed him by replying: "I guess not tonight") and then Gandolfini signed up to play pool (after he left, the bartender took the sheet down in order to preserve his autograph) and I was on the table and taking all challengers, so I got to play some pool with Tony Soprano; he was very friendly, but also very wasted . . . so wasted that his handlers had to take him home, and the main point of this rambling tribute is that I was very impressed by Gandolfini's size . . . he wasn't Hollywood fat (like Jack Black or Seth Rogen) he was actually fat . . . big and looming and corpulent, and I appreciate that kind of honesty in art.

It's Not All Books That Are As Dull as Their Readers (But Some Are!)

I started my summer reading with two rather boring tomes, or I find them boring -- which may be a shortcoming of my own brain, but at least I recognize that they are boring for contrary reasons: Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy is Wrong is by Edward Conard, a former managing director of Bain Capital -- and while it paints a rather different picture of the 2008 Financial Collapse than the documentary Inside Job or The Big Short by Michael Lewis (according to Conard, the collapse was a run on the bank, caused by a lack of faith in short term credit, not the fault of CDO's and credit default swaps -- and the government was largely to blame for this by subsidizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which allowed the creation of more and more sub-prime loans . . . his philosophy is: why would banks want to hold mortgages they thought would default, unless forced by the government to issue such loans, and he also blames "irrational exuberance" in the real-estate market . . . some people -- such as this Anonymous Banker --think Conard makes some good points, while other folks hate his guts and think the book is a "serious abuse of facts") and while I think he makes some logical points about how America is competing against 75 cents-an-hour labor overseas and needs to counter this with investment and innovation -- I mainly want to say this is one of the driest, most boring books I have ever read, and any attempt Conard makes to insert humor into the flow is forced and pathetic, and he offers no anecdotes from his time at Bain Capital, nor does he ever address the human cost of the crisis -- he's very cold and cavalier about the lost jobs, lost equity, the evictions, the short sales, and the general decay of the middle class -- so I can hardly recommend reading this thing unless you're really dying to learn more about the economic theory behind the Financial Crisis . . . on the other hand, I am six hundred pages through George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons and this book is SO full of anecdote and detail and description that the plot barely moves . . . and I can't recommend this book unless you're dying to find out more things about the pantheon of Game of Thrones characters -- as it is NOT a thrilling read.

Serenity Now?

My wife and I noticed that everyone in our house was losing their temper more than usual (aside from the dog, who retreats upstairs when people argue) and after an especially ugly weekend when we both resorted to whacking our son on the ass (on separate occasions) we decided to institute a new system, with two jars and a bunch of "animal counters," and since everyone in our house thrives on competition, we made it a contest . . . Alex and Ian versus my wife and me: if you lose your shit, then a counter goes into the jar, and I am proud to say that I haven't flipped out on my kids for over a week (nine days, to be exact) but I have noticed an inverse relationship between not-flipping-out and alcohol consumption . . . serenity now!

It's All the Same Thing (No New Tails to Tell)

It was 4:14 on Friday afternoon, and I was cutting up old deck boards so I could put them in contractor bags and toss them, when I saw a rustling in the ivy by our fence; upon closer inspection, I found that the rustling was being caused by a cub raccoon -- which was very cute and about the size of a fuzzy chipmunk -- so I called the boys and retreated to the deck, and soon enough -- as I predicted -- a mama raccoon came scurrying down the tree with the big hole in it, and then she did something I didn't expect, she whacked and bit the hell out of the baby raccoon, then walked away for a moment, and waited, but the baby didn't follow, and then she walked back over and used her mouth to pick up the cub by the scruff of his neck, and carried him back up the tree to the big hole, which is obviously their home, so that the recalcitrant cub could learn the definition of nocturnal and write it a thousand times on the inside of their hole . . . and at first my kids thought the mommy raccoon was mean, but when I pointed out that we chastise them for similar dangerous activities -- such as crossing the street without looking or wrestling at the top of the stairs -- they understood what was going on, but I don't think that just because they understand the analogy means they are going to behave with any more common sense.

I Have Achieved a New Level of Manliness

Last week, in order to expedite the demolition of my deck, I bought a "wrecking bar," and never in my life have I felt so macho about a purchase (although I didn't buy the mega-42 inch bar, I went with the medium-sized 36 inch bar . . . I didn't want to get too carried away with myself).

Meta-Anachronism (Another Question of Dave)

How does Tank -- a self-professed child of Zion -- who claims to have been born outside of the Matrix, in reality, make the comment "Hey Mikey, I think he likes it" when Neo is down-loading ju-jitsu and various other forms  of karate . . . how could someone born outside of the computer fabricated reality make an allusion to a 1970's Life Cereal commercial which may or may not have even happened inside the complex computer program enslaving all humans in the film?

Question of Dave #2 (e.g. Jack Nicholson)

How does one avoid becoming a caricature of oneself?

Question of Dave (i.e. Donald Trump)

To be truly considered a man, do you need to go bankrupt at least once in your life?

No Way You're Beating This Statistic (nor would you want to)

It's been very humid lately here in central New Jersey, and so when I try to yank my socks onto my sweaty feet, I'm ripping one sock for every four sock-putting-on attempts.

If I Were a Double Amputee . . .

If I were a double amputee, I would definitely behave exactly like the man described in Erik Larson's fantastic non-fiction account of The Chicago World's Fair of 1894 -- The Devil in the White City; the aforementioned amputee made his way around the fair on false limbs and crutches, and a visitor constantly "peppered" him with questions, and finally said: "There's one more thing I'd like to know, and I'll not trouble ye anymore . . . I'd like to know how you lost your legs," and the double amputee said he would only answer on "the strict condition that this indeed was the last question" and then he told the inquisitive man "they were bit off" and crutched away, while the annoying and curious man yelled, "Bit off? How . . .?"

You've Got to Have Dreams

Erik Larson's non-fiction book The Devil in the White City deals with two dreamers: Daniel Hudson Burnham, the architect and director of the magnificent and monolithic Chicago World's Fair of 1894, and Henry H. Holmes, the serial killer who built a "death hotel" on land in Englewood, near the World's Fair, so he could gas young women, children, and other unsuspecting folks that he pulled into his magnetic field of trust . . . and while one of these men was working for civic duty in order to better a city he loved and the other for evil and perverse motivations that perhaps even he didn't understand fully, they both had the need to build an architectural impossibility to achieve their dreams . . . and they both succeed! . . . Larson does an amazing job of smoothly presenting all the details for both events, details both glorious and heinous -- he did all the reading for you (as evidenced by the bibliography and pages and pages of copious notes) and I highly recommend this book, especially for folks who love architecture, civic politics, urban planning, and serial homicide.

Million to one shot, doc, million to one . . .

If you're the kind of person that enjoys seeing a grown man rolling on the floor in agony, crying profusely while mucous shoots from his nose, then you are probably a bad person who has no soul . . . but you might enjoy this post: yesterday morning, I was making my signature dish (roasted tomatillo salsa) and while chopping a roasted jalapeno, fresh out of the broiler, a seed shot out of the hot pepper and straight into my eye -- under the lower eye-lid, and I couldn't get it out, though I pulled out my eyelid, and dumped water from a two gallon jug all over my face -- but my hands were covered in jalapeno juice, so grabbing my eye-lid just exacerbated things, and the pain got so bad and my vision so blurry that at one point I was on the floor on all fours, moaning in pain and unable to see, but finally I was able to stumble up the stairs to the shower -- but we only have one bathroom with a shower in our house and the door was closed -- and as I tried to open it, my son Alex yelled, "I'm doing number two!" but I didn't care and barged in, stripped off my clothes, and let the water wash over my swollen eye, and I'm not sure if it was the pressure of the shower water or my lacrimal system which removed the seed, but eventually I could tell that it was out of my eye -- and then I remembered that the broiler was still on, and that the tomatillos might get cooked beyond the recommended chestnut brown color, so I started yelling to the boys (Catherine was out getting a pedicure while I endured this suffering) to shut off the broiler, but they couldn't figure it out and so I drunkenly careened down the stairs, shut off the broiler, peeled the blackened parts off the tomatillos and then heroically finished the salsa, which ended up being delicious (though slightly spicier than normal because of the extra-special ingredient . . . middle-aged human tears).

It Was Surprisingly Funny

We saw Joe DeRosa do stand-up the other night at The Stress Factory, and his main theme was: embrace your vices, because the world is so screwed up that if you can face it without drinking and drugs and porn, then there's something wrong with you (and he had wonderful sub-themes about filling the lonely spaces in his life with fast food and the fact that in all eight stages of life, you are never free).

That's How to Perorate

At my mother's retirement dinner on Thursday, Catherine, myself and the boys read a list of The Top Ten Benefits of Grammy's Retirement -- it contained items such as "Now Grammy will have time to take us to the movies that mom and dad don't want to see"and it was a light and breezy counterpoint to most of the speeches, which were generally sappy and emotional . . . which was to be expected in a room full middle-aged female elementary school teachers . . . but Ian got a case of stage-fright when it was his turn to read, and so Alex stepped up and read it for him, and then Ian kept trying to hide behind Alex, and as I finished the tenth item on the list, they got into their typical horseplay and knocked over the heavy wooden podium, which fell backwards and hit the floor with a resounding THUD . . . and though it wasn't planned, it certainly put an exclamation point on our performance.

This Gets the Dave Stamp of Approval

While I normally eschew passing along YouTube videos . . . because I'm far too significant, dynamic and brilliant a thinker to simply be a parasitic purveyor of internet memes-- Sentence of Dave is so much more than that . . . but I think the theme of this particular parody is "meta" enough for me to suspend my elitism about base forms of internet use and pass along, so shed your hipness and enjoy some music that is "pure and honest, bordering on weird and Amish."

Is It So Weird to Do a Little Research?

My students found it odd that I was reading Over-Dressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion and when I told them that I was reading it because I was about to go on my first solo clothes shopping trip ever (not that I've never bought clothing before -- but usually just an individual item, and most of my clothes are either gifts or hand-me-downs from my brother, father, and even a colleague's boyfriend, who lost weight and gave me all his fat pants) because all of my clothes, shoes, and belts wore out at once a few weeks ago and so I was in serious need of everything . . . and one of those 30% off Kohls coupons came in the mail, so I went for it -- and it was a disaster, of course; I pulled over a rack of women's nightgowns, nearly walked into the women's dressing room, bought pants that were too long, lost my cart innumerable times, and had trouble finding the items I needed -- and then they wouldn't let me use my wife's charge card (they probably figured: there's no way this idiot is married) and so I had to get my own card in order to use the coupon, and I somehow lost my driver's license in this transaction (though it turned up a week later) and while I learned a lot about the big picture of globalized fashion from Elizabeth Cline's book, it didn't help me at all with actual shopping, and my students thought the only thing weirder than me reading a book about fashion was me reading a book to prepare to go shopping at Kohls . . . but what's wrong with doing a little research?

Dave Writes a Fashion Post!

The moral of Elizabeth Cline's elegantly written expose Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion is grim: "We own more clothes than we can wear, the quality and craftsmanship of our wardrobes is at an all-time low, and the U.S. manufacturing base can't compete on wages with the developing world, costing countless domestic jobs," but Cline does find hope in two places: the first is when she learns the joy of sewing . . . she finds a subculture of folks who won't stand for cheap "fast-fashion" clothes and won't pay inordinate designer prices, so they either make their own clothes or modify the ones they have, and while I don't think I'm going to go out and buy a sewing machine, this book has made me look at where my clothes were made and examine the stitching and material a little more closely . . . and the second place she sees hope is in fair trade companies that are making quality clothes in America with organic materials for a reasonable price (although a hell of a lot more expensieve than H & M or Forever 21) and I highly recommend this book if you are like me and know next to nothing about clothes and fashion, and it might even be interesting to someone who is a fashionista because of Freakonomics-style global take on the topic.

What is the Opposite of Fasting? Gluttony, Of Course . . .

I have put back on nearly every pound that I lost on my brief two-day-a-week-fasting-diet -- not only was I completely wrong about my ability to eat 600 calories every Monday and Wednesday for the rest of my life, but I also think the fasting triggered some reversal in my metabolism and I've been eating like crazy ever since -- I had an especially gluttonous twelve hours last Thursday night all the way into Friday; I ate a late night cheeseburger from The System at midnight on Thursday night (Pete wouldn't even let me in the bar with it because of the smell -- I had to eat it outside) and then the next day at work, bloated and gassy from beer and the burger, I was reminded that I was judging the Foods Workshop Celebrity Cook Off . . . nine courses, in the style of celebrity chefs such as Bobby Flay and Rachel Ray and Masahara Morimoto and Julia Child; the kids finished their dishes in an impressive chaotic rush, food they had ben preparing for weeks and we judged on presentation, taste, and creativity -- and I am proud to say that I was the only teacher on the panel to eat every bite of all nine courses (plus seconds on a couple) we had chicken parm, lasagna with home made noodles, quesadillas, enchilidas, tie-dye cake, butter cake, chcolate eclair, hamburger in an egg roll with dipping sauce (drunk food!) and super spicy chicken and rice . . . and I had to teach the next period and it was 90 degrees in my room and I seriously thought I was going to upchuck on some unlucky student in the front row, but then I took the kids to the library -- which has AC -- to work on their presentations, and I was able to stave off a public vomiting (though I was so full that I couldn't sit down) and I am hoping that I get an invite next year so I can repeat the endeavor.