Lies, damned lies, statistics, and statistics that might actually be accurate and useful.
I learned from a Freakonomics Radio Podcast (Women are Not Men) that while women are catching up and even surpassing men educationally and economically, there are some things at which men still significantly outperform women . . . things such as drowning and getting struck by lightning (men overestimate their ability to swim and they are outside more than women and don't come in during storms) and barely twenty-four hours after I listened to these sobering statistics, I found myself swimming -- alone -- off the shore of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina as a storm rolled in . . . but I didn't come out of the water until it started raining so hard that it hurt my face, and once I got back into the Marth Wood Cottage, where I was spending the weekend with twenty other brilliant W&M men, we discussed what my cause of death would be if I was struck by lightning and drowned, and if we could pad the stats and attribute my death to both causes, but the important thing is that either way, it would have been a victory for Team Male.
Every Man Has His Limits
I'll let my eight year old son win at chess, but not at RISK (there's a limit to my munificence).
I am the Victim of Ironic Netflix Adultery
In Orange is the New Black (Jenji Kohan's new Netflix show) educated white girl Piper Chapman goes to federal prison for a year, and she makes her fiance promise not to watch Madmen while she is doing her time, so that they can watch it together when she is released, but he can't resist . . . and, ironically, the show is so good that my wife couldn't resist watching two episodes without me (but I wasn't in jail, I was at a Red Bulls game, so I guess it's not exactly the same thing).
The Exception That Proves the Rule
The Red Bulls stoppage time 4-3 victory over Real Salt Lake was even more stunning than the Portuguese bartenders at the Madrid y Lisbon . . . four goals in the last fifteen minutes, two of them spectacular; if soccer games were always this exciting, Americans might start to watch.
I May Be Running Out of Thoughts
I'm always in fear that I will run out of sentences to write, and that day may be looming close -- I was driving on Route 18 on Monday and I saw a truck with giant spike lug nuts and thought: are those really necessary? and then my next thought was: I should write a sentence about how trucks are already intimidating enough and don't need any extra-intimidating accessories, but you can see where this is going . . . I already wrote that sentence, two years ago, and while I'm proud of the fact that I had the perspicacity to check and see if I wrote that sentence previously, I'm worried that the day will come when I won't think to do this (and what's even worse, is that most likely, no one will notice).
Working Out vs. Work
I could get the same amount of exercise digging the arbor vitae out of the ground along my back property line, but I'd rather go to the gym . . . which is sort of sad, that I'd rather exercise for no purpose, instead of getting something done (but I suppose there's no chance of seeing any good-looking women in spandex along my back property line).
It's All Relative
Watching my son Alex do "surf camp" in Sea Isle City last week was scary enough, so I can't even imagine how Garrett McNamara's parents felt when they watched their son careen down the face of a 100 foot wave in Portugal.
Some Balls (Metaphorically)
Last week in Sea Isle City, while I was walking home with some take out food from McGowan's, a twenty-something blonde woman dressed in a black waitress uniform shot across Landis Avenue at a fairly busy intersection on her pink beach cruiser bike, and she was texting as she rode across the main drag, and this wasn't at a light . . . I guess she had just gotten off her shift and really wanted to know what was going on (and she wasn't wearing a helmet, either).
Slavery!
Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained may be a lot of things -- including gratuitously violent, profanely offensive, and way too long -- but it's certainly not boring, in fact, it's one of the most entertaining movies I've seen since Pulp Fiction . . . everything you want to happen, happens . . . plus a whole bunch of other stuff: nine phrenologists out of ten.
Some Titles Are Literal and Some Titles Are Ironic
They should tell you this at the start, but instead I learned far too late that the title of Edith Wharton's fin de siècle novel of manners House of Mirth is an allusion to a Biblical quotation from Ecclesiastes (the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth) and so if you're expecting a happy, mirthful ending from this book then you are going to be very disappointed . . . it's a turn-of-the-century version of Mean Girls, without the jokes and the tacked-on happy ending; Lily Bart -- like Cady Heron -- has to navigate the world of the rich and popular, and though it's something of an anachronism to describe them in this way, they turn out to be just like "the Plastics."
True (but boring) Confessions #6
I don't ever floss, until it's three days before the dentist appointment (and I don't fool anyone).
True (but boring) Confessions #5
Before I go coach my son's soccer team, I religiously put two pint glasses into the freezer.
True (but boring) Confessions #4
Sometimes I watch 30 Rock on Netflix without telling my wife, and then the next time we watch 30 Rock, I don't tell her that she's missed an episode -- so unless she's doing the same thing to me, I've seen all the episodes and she hasn't.
True (but boring) Confessions #3
Sometimes when I open my car door, I make contact with the car next to mine (and sometimes I even scratch their door . . . but I never tell a soul).
One Hundred Years Ago, It Was Still Humid
Although I can't relate to the parties that Gatsby threw in West Egg, or the way the Gormers eschewed social conventions in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth and -- in a precursor to Gatsby --"started a sort of continuous performance of their own, a kind of social Coney Island, where everybody is welcome who can make noise enough and doesn't put on airs," but what I can understand is that going to one of these parties will be a good deal better than suffering "a broiling Sunday in town," as both The Great Gatsby and House of Mirth contain the palpable heat and humidity of the East Coast -- and this was long before the idea of global warming-- and both novels put forward the very advanced idea that no civilized person should stand this sort of weather.
Two Moving Rocks Are Better Than One
Two new songs from The World's Second Greatest Rock Band . . . one about community college and the other about not getting to have a midlife crisis; lyrics and more over at Gheorghe: The Blog, of course.
Psychiatric Tales Are More Fun If There Are Pictures
Darryl Cunnigham's eleven graphic stories about mental illness -- simply titled Psychiatric Tales -- is a terse and powerful reminder that we are not in control of our own brains, and that mental illness is just that . . . an illness that is often beyond the control of our willpower and consciousness; the late great Mitch Hedberg said: "Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only one that you can get yelled at for having," and you can substitute any of the disorders from the book in that sentence and get the same result . . . a quick read and worth checking out.
Obviously
It's more fun to brush up on Richard Pryor, then it is to brush up on Espanol (and I'm understanding a lot more of the content).
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