Old School . . . Blech

The last TV show I watched in real time was Seinfeld . . . I remember frenetic discussions of the previous night's episode at cafeteria duty . . . and I also remember when Catherine and I taped "The Betrayal," otherwise know as "the backwards episode" because of the reverse chronology (you could mark the passage of time by looking at Kramer's giant lollipop) but when we tried to play the episode back, we started in the middle, and got confused by the reverse chronology (and the lame nature of VHS technology) and ended up skipping around on the tape and watching the episode forwards in tiny fragments . . . but we just got cable TV this summer -- it was cheaper to get it bundled with our FIOS than to not have it at all -- and I watched the season premier of Breaking Bad on Sunday night . . .  and because it's been so many years, I forgot how annoying it is to watch something in real time: you have to endure commercials and previews, you can't put on subtitles, there's no pausing so you can ask your wife pertinent questions or look up tangentially related details on the internet, and, worst of all, you have to wait until 9 PM to get started . . . I will try to make it through the final season because I love the show so much, and also so I can actually talk to people at work about the current plot twists, instead of running out of the room screaming, "DON'T SAY ANYTHING!" when anyone mentions Walter White, but after this one exception, then I am going back to my Netflix rabbit hole.

Coaching! What is it Good For?

You'll have to head on over to Gheorghe: The Blog today to get your daily fix of Dave; I brandish my vast and sagacious sporting knowledge in a piece titled "Put Me in Coach, I'm Ready to . . . Coach? Coach? Coach?"

Great Show, But . . .

I love the FX show Justified --  U.S. Marshall Raylin Givens has returned to his old stomping grounds, Harlan County (where they know the difference between dynamite and road flares) and his predilection to shoot first and ask questions later makes for some excellent TV . . . but as I watch, there is always an undercurrent running through my mind, and it is this: are there really that many good-looking people in Kentucky?

This One Wasn't as Popular

I am attending a "scotch tasting" event next week, and I'm a little nervous because I'm not a big liquor drinker . . . in fact, all I know about scotch is that it invariably makes me think of the George Thorogood cover of the old drinking song "One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer" . . . though Thorogood's lesser known sequel is more appropriate for my unrefined palate: "One Mojito, One Bay Breeze, and One Zima."

This Time I Am Determined to Finish!

I am moonlighting (or daylighting, as David Foster Wallace calls it) a bit on Infinite Jest . . . and I know the last time I did this I ended up quitting the novel -- but it's four years later and I have learned my lesson, this time I am committed, but I just need a little break to read Brett Martin's new book with this double-coloned mouthful of a title: Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad . . . his thesis is that TV has entered a "third Golden Age" and that these new high quality cable shows are like nothing before -- they are neither episodic nor mini-series -- instead they resemble Victorian serialized fiction, like Dickens, and because of this format, they are much more beholden to the writers and creators -- rather than the actors and producers -- than any TV before, and these writer/creator folks happen to be moody, flawed, ambitious and brilliant men, and this personality type reflected in the "heroes" of these shows . . . characters such as Vic Mackey and Walter White and Don Draper and Tony Soprano and Jimmy McNulty.

Did You Know?

If you lie on the floor with your head scrunched against a little seat (in order to be in the room with the most A/C) and read for an extended period of time, then the back of your head and your neck can lose circulation and "fall asleep" -- I've had my arms, legs, and butt fall asleep, of course, but I never had this region fall asleep until yesterday, and it felt mildly psychedelic when the rear portion of my skull suffered the dreaded "pins and needles."

Some Things SOUND Fun (But They Are Not)

In an attempt to shed some of the pounds I have put on during summer vacation, I have started doing a CrossFit work-out my wife found on-line . . . and I have learned that Russian Twists, though they sound fun and sexy, are neither.

Outer Banks Fishing Trip Irony

My parents find nothing funnier than my annual Outer Banks Fishing Trip -- because I travel all the way to North Carolina and some of the best fishing grounds on the East Coast . . . but my fraternity brothers and I never fish -- instead we eat fish and drink beer and gamble and generally laze around on the beach, and I suppose actually fishing would otherwise interrupt this excellent break from all routine (aside from going to Tortuga's at 11:15 AM sharp every morning to get in line to storm the bar) . . . and before I left I promised my kids that I would do something fun with them when I got home, and -- of course -- they requested to go fishing.

Not Quite a Sniglet

I'm trying to coin a new word for when you do someone a favor, ostensibly for altruistic reasons, but actually because you need to vacate the vicinity so you can pass gas . . . a "fartvor"?

Outer Banks Fishing Trip XX

Another successful OBFT -- this was number twenty . . . and I am twenty for twenty (as are Whitney and Rob) although I was a bit nervous about making it down there -- train tickets doubled in price and airline tickets are through the roof -- so I drove . . . which turned out to be a good move, because quite a few flights were cancelled, leading to some travel adventures for Johnny, Marls, and Zman and a record number of cars in the Martha Wood Driveway . . . some things I remember: 1) some scatological humor at Whitney's place Wednesday night 2) a new frisbee beach game named KanJam, which caused me a minor injury (bruised thumb) and Chris a major injury (deep cut on the bridge of his nose) 3) several marathon corn-hole streaks 4) a major corn-hole partner defection 5) Whitney sabotaged my blog 6) Rob's new anti-strategic poker move -- named "the betfold" -- you simultaneously bet and throw in your hand 6) good food and drink at The Old Nag's head Cafe . . . and when one member of the group (who will go unnamed) forgot to pay his bar tab, we found out what a small town Kill Devil Hills really is . . . and not to mess with the locals, who might know Bruce 7) Johnny played Cliffy in a fabulous one on one football game 8) the old guys beat the "young" guys two to one in a very short touch football game . . . and we employed the zone 9) a typical game of Pig . . . Whitney hit the trifecta -- three sets of snake-eyes, doubles 3x in a row, and landed on one hundred points exactly - and so got to reante five times in two games 10) Marls and Whitney brought back fifteen rubber sharks from Tortuga's 11) Bruce told another joke too tasteless for the internet . . . and probably a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting because I'm still tired from the trip: thanks again Whitney, and it was great to see everyone.

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."