Hot Hot Hot

Lauren Collins recent New Yorker article "Fire-Eaters: The Search for the Hottest Chili" reminds me of the fabulous documentary King of Kong for several reasons:

1) breeding the hottest chilis and trying to set video game records are both exclusively male pastimes . . . and there's a strange machismo attached to both projects;

2) Scoville units and professional Donkey Kong scores are mathematically similar (in the millions) and seem to be set at a similar pace;

3) it is difficult to measure who or what is the best, as there is sometimes a discrepancy between high scores and averages (this is obvious with gamers -- some guys do well all the time, but it's always possible for someone to have the game of his life . . . but it's also true with chili peppers, the heat index of the same variety of pepper can vary by hundreds of thousands of Scoville units);

4) both the universe of the chilihead and the universe of the Donkey King professional contain lots of conflict, infighting, trash talking, good guys and bad guys, and the documentary and the article certainly aren't comprehensive -- they only capture a tiny sliver of an obscure and rich world;

5) Billy Mitchell -- the Darth Vader-esque villain of King of Kong -- has his own line of hot sauces, called "Rickey's World Famous Sauces";

6) neither the documentary nor the article mention me, though I was damn good at the Intellivision game Night Stalker, and -- on the pepper front--  late one night back in 1993 (before any of these ultra-hot peppers were bred) when we were dropping off my friend Mose -- whose father owned a nursery -- he handed me a pepper which he claimed was one of the hottest in the world . . . I think he said it was a Thai hot pepper (which actually isn't that high on the scale pictured above) and this was after a night of drinking and he dared me to eat it, and so I did, but I didn't give him the satisfaction of seeing me "burned," instead I jumped back in the car (which my friend Rob was driving) and spent the ride home crying, salivating, and spitting golf ball sized hunks of phlegm out the window.

A Suggestion So Rational It's Spooky

While I can't figure out exactly where America's stands in the World Obesity Rankings, it's certainly near the top, and so I have simple suggestion that will change the cultural zeitgeist and propel us down the path of national leanness and meanness: on Halloween, kids should have to earn their candy, instead of saying "trick or treat," they should be required to do ten push-ups or a few squat thrusts, or perhaps something more athletic -- like a baby freeze; I'm not sure how to initiate this new Halloween requirement, but I think an added benefit will be that Mischief Night will return with a vengeance (as lately, I haven't seen much mischief at all on Mischief Night . . . I'm going to try to get my boys to bring it back).

The Whole Truth And Nothing But . . .

A few days ago there was some skepticism about the veracity of one of my sentences, which one of my readers claimed was an ersatz version of"The Pina Colada Song," and while I will swear on my left testicle (it's genitalia week) that the story is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, according to cognitive scientist Dan Ariely in his new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, my readers are certainly in the right to question my accuracy -- as numerous experiments have shown that the more creative a person is, the more likely they are to stretch the truth, and even to outright cheat, but no correlation has been found between intelligence and cheating -- and I'm the first to admit that I am more creative than I am intelligent; I see this hypothesis in effect with my two children: Ian, the more creative guy (who Zman called "a young Crash Davis") is an inveterate and incorrigible cheater at all things, while Alex -- who scored perfect on the math section of the NJ ASK and is plowing through Lord of the Rings-- is a rule follower (or at least attempts to be a rule follower) and he is driven insane by Ian's loose moral compass . . . you can't let Ian near the bank in Monopoly, he's never hit a shot in tennis that was "out," and I have told him repeatedly that if he cheated at cards in the Old West, they would have shot him).

E.B.White, Nostalgia, the Looming Specter of Death, and Shrinkage (It's Genitalia Week)

At the end of the narrative essay "Once More to the Lake," E. B White recognizes that the nostalgic feelings he has for his old vacation spot are an illusion, and that he is no longer a young boy, but instead has become his father . . . and so when the youngsters go swimming in the cold lake, while rain pours down, and he watches his son "wince" as he pulls the cold, wet bathing suit around his "vitals," E.B. White explains that his groin "felt the chill of death" . . . and a chilled groin is a ticklish subject to explain to a high school class -- so I let Larry David do the heavy lifting and showed the Seinfeld "shrinkage" scene to explain to the females in the class exactly what was going on (and I also advised them to watch how a man enters a body of very cold water, how he pauses just before a certain part of his anatomy gets wet) and then we discussed the difference between "vitals" and a "groin," and how it's much more fun to be young and have vitals, and much less fun to be old and have a chilled groin.

The Origin of the World (It's Genitalia Week)

My son Ian was perusing the book 1001 Paintings You must See Before You Die and he stumbled upon Courbet's infamous work innocuously entitled "The Origin of the World" . . . which is a rather graphic close-up portrait of a woman's genitalia, a rather hirsute woman's genitalia . . . but luckily I wasn't home, and so he asked my wife about the picture and she explained to him what it was and he replied: "Oh, I thought it was a black hole."

Check HER Out

Last week, while I was working out at the North Brunswick LA Fitness, I caught a glimpse of an attractive and curvy blonde girl walking through the main entrance -- and, of course, I ogled her . . . because that's the main motivation for going to the gym, rather than doing push-ups and sit-ups in your living room: you can check out members of the opposite sex (or the same sex, if that's what floats your boat) and they might be wearing spandex and a sports bra . . . but the North Brunswick LA Fitness has a dearth of good looking ladies (especially at the times I go to the gym . . . early Sunday morning and three in the afternoon . . . I am mainly scoping out retirees) so you really have to be vigilant to catch a glance at anything worthwhile . . . anyway, when I took a second glance at the attractive woman, who was weaving her way through the various weight machines, right towards me, I realized that I had been ogling my own wife (and when I told her this, she took it as a compliment).

Where Do You Draw the (Fe) Line?

A friend and colleague of mine explained that she was stressed out because her cat had undergone a $1300 operation to clear mineral deposits in her stomach and intestines, and now the cat was going to need the same surgery again -- and there was no guarantee that the cat wouldn't need it again after this-- and so I made the pragmatic suggestion that it might be time to put the cat in a sack and toss it in the river, as cats seem pretty disposable to me, but I was chastised by the rest of the folks in the English office for "not having human emotions," which led me to tell the story of how I had to euthanize my pet iguana (a story I will tell in another sentence) but this conversation brings up a serious ethical dilemma -- how much money should you spend on your pet to save its life . . . and I am thinking that if this discussion happened in the math or science office, if it would have gone down very differently.

Lumpers and Splitters, Grolars and Pizzlies . . .

Jon Mooallem's book Wild Ones tells the story of the nearly extinct Lange's Metalmark butterfly, and it also tells the meta-story of how people react to the story of the nearly extinct Lange's metalmark butterfly; you'd think lepidopterists would stick together, simply to fend off bullies, but apparently they have divided into two camps: "lumpers" and "splitters" . . . lumpers are "comfortable gathering up large groups of different looking butterflies under the same species or sub-species" while splitters prefer "more painstaking divisions," and while this sound like a ridiculous feud, it can have consequences when the federal government is deciding which animals and/or environments to protect under the Endangered Species Act . . . but it mainly makes me think of Monty Python's Life of Brian . . . Mooallem also brings up my favorite sub-species nomenclature dilemma: because of global warming, grizzly bears have been encroaching on polar bear territory, and mating with them, and scientists can't decided  whether to call these hybrid creatures "grolars" or "pizzlies," and while Mooallem wisely avoids chiming in on this debate, I'd like to say that I strongly prefer "grolar bears" over "pizzly bears," and I honestly don't even see how this is debatable-- when I hear the phrase "pizzly bear," I get a psychedelic vision of a pink and yellow dancing gummi-bear, and that's not going to help combat global warming at all.

Creepy Cutoff

A discussion in my Creative Writing class -- which consists of sophomores, juniors, and seniors-- revealed that the current crop of high school seniors will be the last that remember 9/11 firsthand . . . in my Composition class, we always read Jonathan Lethem's essay "9 Failures of the Imagination" and, in the past, the discussion inevitably turned to where they were when they heard about the attack, and how they processed the information (that is the theme of Lethem's essay: the stages of processing new and tragic information) but next year I will have to ask the kids how they think other people-- older people-- dealt with the tragedy; the event will start to take on the pale, abstract cast of history.

Where the Wild Things Are?

I have been accused of having no discernment in my ratings of books -- everything I tend to review has completely captivated me, and thus I praise the thing to death -- but this is because I work really hard to find books that I like; recently I tried to read Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq . . . and though I can't speak poorly about either book, as I certainly learned something from each, they didn't fully engage me, and so I dumped Jesus in the library book slot, half read, and barely made it through the first chapter of Overthrow, because I had to keep reading the name Queen Liliuokalani . . . and I must say that I do this quite often: take books out of the library because I want to have read them, not because I want to read them (I actually have a book in my house called The History of the Vikings . . . I've never opened it) but I am now fully in the grip of a wonderful book that I will certainly finish in a day or two, it's called Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About People Looking at People Looking at Animals in America and it's got everything I love in it: mega-fauna, meta-media, and monomania; I am currently reading a section about photographing polar bears, and the trickery necessary for a photographer to shoot "an image of nature that's already lodged in our heads" . . . the footnote in this section points out that lemmings don't actually run off cliffs -- the folks at Disney propagated this in the film White Wilderness, where they paid a bunch of Inuit kids to round up lemmings, then forced the lemmings to run on a treadmill covered in snow, and then threw the lemmings into the water, and created the sequence that created the stereotype . . . but Chris Palmer, famous wildlife photographer explains that these folks aren't "evil or malicious . . . you're just trying to get the damn shot so you can go home and have dinner with your family . . . so you put the monkey and the boa constrictor in the same enclosure."

This Is The Same Kid Who Won the "Caring Award"?

Though I was pleased (and also rather shocked) that my son Ian brought home a certificate from the principal inducting him to the "Character Honor Roll" for being "Caring," I'd like to report that things have returned to normal; on Sunday, after Ian's soccer game, we walked home so I could make a couple sandwiches for us to eat while we watched Alex's soccer game -- and I made Ian a delicious ham and cheese sandwich with mustard, and as we walked back down to the park, Ian chomped on his sandwich, complimented my sandwich making ability and waxed eloquently on the very concept of mustard -- how it made everything better, including pretzels and fried pickles and sandwiches and even apples (I questioned this one) and then he told me that mustard was also great because there were so many varieties: yellow mustard and honey mustard and spicy mustard and brown mustard, and somewhere in this conversation I said to Ian that if he finished his sandwich, that it would be his lucky day, because he could have another snack with Alex's team (Ian had already had some cookies after his game . . . both teams do post-game snacks, which I'm not entirely in favor of, I'd rather that treats are contingent upon strong and strategic soccer play) and then we got to the game and Ian disappeared into the trees behind the field for a moment and when I looked over, his sandwich was gone, and when I approached him and asked about it, he said that he "finished it" but there was no way in hell that he finished it that fast, and so I told him I needed to know where it was immediately, because it was a "major crime" to litter with food that might attract dangerous animals, and I was able to strong-arm him into showing what he had done (plus I had the dog with me, who was making a beeline for the spot) and he had thrown the sandwich into a hole under the base of a tree stump, because he was full and wanted to get another treat once Alex's game was finished, and so for his disdain for my time spent making his sandwich, and for his cavalier disregard for the value of food, and for littering in a public place, he had to go until dinner without any snacks and wasn't allowed to invite any friends over for the rest of the afternoon, and I'm wondering if I should contact the principal and tell her this story and see if she'll rescind his certificate and give it to me..

Nerding It Up, Tolkien Style

My son Alex, who is in 4th grade, recently finished reading The Hobbit, and he's now deep into the first book of Lord of the Rings trilogy -- and while I must admit this is some impressive and precocious reading, the fact that he's also going to be Legolas for Halloween gives me some cause for concern . . . thank God he's athletic.

I Quietly Make Spelling Suggestion

Though I'm not particularly in tune with the world of the hearing impaired, I would like to make a humble suggestion which I think would vastly improve not only the English language, but American Sign Language as well . . . I think if someone can't hear very well, then you should refer to it as a hearing deaficit (I'm not really sure if this horrible pun will make a difference in how you sign the word, but I'm hoping it does) .

Opposite Day!

For those of you who haven't been taking notes, here are summaries of my two children: Ian is vengeful, competitive, and artistic; Alex is kind, loquacious, and melodramatic . . . and so on Friday, when my wife handed me two certificates, and one was the "Art Achievement Certificate" and the other was the "Character Honor Roll Certificate for Caring," I made the obvious assumption . . . and it's not like I had nothing to go on: Ian won the Art Student of the Year Award in 2nd Grade and Alex is the kid who asks an injured player -- even if he's on the opposing team -- if he's OK, and so I thought my inference was solid but -- miracle beyond all possible miracles -- Alex won the Art Certificate and Ian won the Caring Award . . . and so this makes me wonder if my characterization of my children is all wrong, or too simplistic, but it's too late to restructure things now, so I think I'll forge ahead with what I've got and call this incident an anomaly.

Scary Cetacean

My son Ian's wash pencil drawing of a humpback whale is surreal and almost beautiful, if it wasn't for the glowing red eye.

When You Win, Rub It In

The closest thing to hitting the lottery during a day of teaching high school is when your prep period gets extended for some unforeseen reason (such as the PSAT taking much longer to administer than planned) and the thing to do when this happens is to drop by your friends' classrooms, while eating a snack, and complain about how you don't know what to do with all your free time.

The Rule Gets Bigger and Better

One of the wonderful things about teaching is that you get to expand and develop ideas that you barely fleshed out the year before . . . unlike real life, you get as many chances as you need to get it right; several years ago I extemporaneously introduced this important life rule to my class, but then I forgot about it until last Tuesday, when a number of students who were absent before the holiday weekend came into class and did the typical -- just before class, one at a time, they approached my desk, and asked me "What did I miss?" and once I explained to one student, then another materialized and asked the same question, and this reminded me of my rule, and so I delivered a monologue that I will approximate here:

"I'm going to introduce you to a rule that does not just apply to my class, or education in general; this is a rule that you need to learn if you want to participate in our American educational system, and it is also a rule that you need to learn if you want to participate in our American economy . . . if you wish to move to the woods and live like Thoreau then you don't need to listen this, but everyone else, please pay attention . . . if you are ever absent -- from school, from work, from a team meeting, from a committee -- from any event, and you need to find out what happened at this event from your superior, then when you ask, you must provide some piece of information about what you missed, you need to ascertain some piece of information about what you missed, and include this when you ask your superior what to do about your absence -- and this is to show you care  about what you missed, and so you will approach me and say, "I was absent on Friday but I know we had to read an essay and write a page about the theme, and I was wondering if there's anything else I need to make-up?" and if you don't approach me like this, with some piece of information about what happened in class when you were away, then your failure will be epic and monumental, because there has been no generation in the history of mankind that has been more connected technologically then your generation, no generation where information has been more accessible, whether through Facebook or texting or e-mail, and so your neglect in having any idea of what went on in class is both insulting and irresponsible . . . I realize that in past times, when you needed to beat a drum or send smoke signals, in order to communicate that the plague is coming, or some other horror, that it was much more difficult to share information -- but now you have the wherewithal to at least pretend that you care, it's easy to fake it, and I fake it all the time -- I'm a coach, so I get to miss all kinds of meetings, which is one of the things I love about coaching: I get paid to miss meetings and be outside and run soccer drills, but when I meet with my superiors, I pretend that I am interested in what I missed . . . I say, "I know I missed the diabetes presentation, and what can I do to make this up?" even though I don't care about diabetes, because that's what you do in order to pretend to show that you care," and I know my monologue hit home, because the next day, when a girl who was absent for the monologue asked me what she missed in class, the students erupted in a chorus of "Don't say that!" and then they quickly filled her in on the life-lesson from the day before.

I Would Be a Narcoleptic FBI Agent

I am watching the first season of 24 on Netflix -- but in order to fit this into my busy fall schedule, I've been staying up a little later than normal, and this has taken it's toll . . . I can barely get up in the morning, though I've gotten eight hours more sleep than anyone on the show . . . in fact, if I were Jack Bauer, I think all I could muster would be 14 and then I would need a nap (or perhaps there is a surprise episode, where everyone crashes . . . if you've seen the show, please don't reveal any napping spoilers).

This Market Sentence is More Fun Than Yesterday's Market Sentence

If you watched Trading Places when you were a kid, you probably didn't understand what happens on the trading floor at the end of the movie -- I certainly didn't . . . you might remember that it has to do with commodity trading and orange juice futures-- but now you can revisit the scene and the other financial aspects of the plot in this 99% Invisible podcast, entitled Episode 84b: Trading Places with Planet Money; Roman Mars interviews some actual commodity traders, reviews the legality of all that happens in the film, and plays plenty of clips . . . and now I have a much better idea of how to "sell high, and then turn around and buy low" and I also understand why they had to insert an "Eddie Murphy Rule" into the Dodd-Frank Bill.

If You Are Invested in the Stock Market, Do Not Read This Sentence

Yikes . . . Justin Fox's book The Myth of the Rational Market, which bills itself as a "history of risk, reward, and delusion on Wall Street" is enlightening, but not fun to read -- it has plenty of history . . . chronicling a century's worth of market economic theories, and a huge cast of characters (from Roger Babson to Milton Friedman to Daniel Kahneman to Benoit Mandelbrot) and plenty of delusion . . . with market theories that attributed to swings in value to "spots on the sun" or "animal spirits" or "irrational exuberance" or -- the most popular -- an omniscient and very efficient market . . . but in the end, though the theories of dead economists resurface, and one school of thought quickly succumbs to the next (very much like the field of education) there is still no way to tell the difference between "speculative excess" and an "entirely sustainable boom" . . . in other words, no one knows how to value a stock accurately . . . but though you may lose your shirt in the market, there's still a positive moral in the last paragraph of the book: "the countries that have better-developed financial markets really do better."