Maybe The Soviets Were on to Something (Sort of)

I went to dinner with several couples on Saturday night and I was bombarded with TV recommendations -- because we are living in the Platinum Age of Television -- and so apparently I need to watch Key and Peele and Vikings and Ray Donovan and Banshee and Spartacus and Downton Abbey and new episodes of Eastbound & Down and some other shows that I have forgotten (and this doesn't even include the shows that I'm trying to keep up with: Madmen and The Walking Dead and Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Homeland and Portlandia and American Horror Story and Justified and the first season of 24) and it's all too overwhelming for me, and so I think I'm going to have to take a sabbatical from television, but really what I think I want is a simpler time, when everybody watched the same thing; I recently listened to a 99% Invisible podcast called "Unsung Icons of Soviet Design" and while the Russians didn't have much choice -- everyone played the same arcade games, used the same cassette player, programmed the same awful personal computer and knew the same bedtime song . . . and they all knew this song because they all watched the same program every night at 8:00 PM, and saw the same puppets sing the same lullaby . . . and while I don't think it's necessary that we have a Soviet-style oppressive government that designs all culture and technology, it certainly was nice when you could rely on the fact that everyone you knew watched Seinfeld on Thursday night (and discussed it Friday at work).

I Learn Two Things in One Day!

I have been on a podcast binge, and if you listen to enough podcasts, it's hard not to learn something . . . and so while I was listening to an episode of 99% Invisible about augmented reality called "Reality (Only)" I noticed that Roman Mars was talking much faster than usual, in an almost robotic voice -- but this fit the theme of the show, which was about "reactive music": a unique soundtrack that comes from your headphones, an auditory overlay created by and from the sounds around you, mixed and mastered in your smartphone -- but then a young woman explained something about "reactive music," and her voice was too fast and so I took a look at my Ipod and apparently there is a "variable speed" function for people who don't have the patience to listen to a podcast at normal speed . . . and so I fixed this and Roman Mars returned to normal, his voice deep, calm, and collected and then I actually learned something from a podcast, not about the podcast playing device; and I am going to hyperbolically call this podcast my favorite of all time, it is an episode called "The Modern Moloch," which details how automobiles went from hated, lethal contraptions . . . technological demons to which we sacrificed our children (a political cartoon from the 1920's) to a piece of Americana that we always had a "love affair" with; the podcast explains how an auto lobbying group called "Motordom," realized that it was in the automobile industry's best interest for cars to be allowed unlimited access to the city, and so came up with some NRA style logic -- cars didn't kill people, reckless drivers killed people (this brings to mind Neil Postman's rule of thumb, that no piece of technology is neutral) and along with reckless drivers, you can also have reckless pedestrians . . . this was a paradigm shift, as before this the street was a place for kids to play, adults to socialize, work to be done, and carts to move at somewhere around 5 miles an hour . . . and then Motordom brilliantly co-opted a term for redneck -- a "jay" -- and came up with the novel idea of "jaywalking," which was more a term of ridicule than something legal -- and from this time forward, the streets belonged to the auto (the podcast also has excerpts from Dupont's program where they explain that Americans have a "love affair" with the automobile . . . and since it's "love," then we don't have to behave rationally) and while I try to drive as little as possible, because I hate cars, I know that I'm a hypocrite, because I still use my car to get to work, to go on vacation, and often to get around town, when I could walk, and I often wax eloquently about my Jeep Cherokee and fully understand how many of us fondly remember our first shitty car . . . but it still makes me happy to learn that we didn't always have a "love affair" with automobiles, the affair was shoved down our throat by industry and propaganda, and if we try hard enough, perhaps some day we can take back the streets for our children (I think this bucolic vision involves flying cars).

The Time Is Now (For Michael Jackson Covers and Ghetto Goals)

There comes a time in every man's life when he must take all the scrap lumber from under the deck and nail it together in the form of a primitive soccer goal (which might be referred to as a "ghetto goal") but despite the flimsiness, a man must be proud of his handiwork . . . until it disintegrates into a heap; there also comes a time in every man's life when he must cover a Michael Jackson song, and include literal interpretations of the lyrics (in monologue form) between the verses . . . and while I understand that both of these pieces of "art" might be shoddy work, there is no time like the present (lyrics and more over at Gheorghe: The Blog).

Straight-Edge Psychedelia

My son Ian's latest work of art, made without the use of LSD or any other hallucinogenic (at least that's what he told me).

See You In Heck?

While I loved Enough Said -- Julia Louise Dreyfuss and James Gandolfini are funny and surprisingly understated -- it's kind of weird that this touching and charming little film will be my last memory of the guy that portrayed the giant neurotic Jersey badass Tony Soprano . . . I think I'm going to have to go back and watch the first season of The Sopranos in order to erase the image of "fat" Albert and Eva sitting on the porch together, doing absolutely nothing illegal or violent or depraved, because I want to remember Gandolfini as a looming, anxious and menacing mob boss . . . not a recently divorced semi-slob trying to make a new relationship work despite an odd coincidence (and if I didn't believe in that kind of stuff, I would say it was fated that this this is Gandolfini's last film -- a cinematic eulogy so we remember him as a good guy . . . but, of course, this gets into the weird meta-discussion of the relationship between the roles actors play and their actual personalities, which may have nothing to do with each other . . . but if they do correlate, then Julia Stiles is definitely a major bitch).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Some Restaurants You Should Frequent, Dammit

I'm not going to offer a full review of trader and quantitative analyst turned philosopher and power-lifter Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, other than to say that it is evocative, provocative, bold, brash, learned, and contemptuous -- and if you are at all involved in finance, then you have probably read -- or at least know about -- his previous book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable . . . which explains not so much how financial collapses happen, but how to prepare and even profit from them (as Taleb did with his hedge funds) but I'm using his ideas for more selfish reasons; he often uses the restaurant business to flesh out his "anti-fragile" metaphor, as "restaurants are fragile; they compete with each other, but the collective of local restaurants is anti-fragile, for that reason . . . had restaurants been individually robust, hence immortal, then overall business would be either stagnant or weak," and you can see where this is going -- subsidies and intervention will actually destroy the health of a working system . . . and while logical folks know that opening a restaurant is risky business (though not as risky as urban legend has it) we love the fact that people keep trying, and Taleb explains this in his typical hyperbolic fashion: "in order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic" because this person has taken heroic risk that is beneficial to others . . . but BEFORE this happens, please patronize the following restaurants, because they are inexpensive, awesome, and BYOB . . . I don't want them to become fallen soldiers . . .

1) El Gallo Giro 2 . . . a Mexican joint on Route 1 in Edison, just past Open Road Honda . . . they have awesome mole sauce and you can get enchiladas with pork or chicken or chorizo smothered in the stuff, their burritos are ridiculously huge and their tacos and guacamole are fantastic as well, this is our replacement for Taqueria la Juquilita, which changed hands and isn't as good as it once was;

2) Cafe La Terrassa, in New Brunswick, which has a new menu and a new take-out menu . . . this place is amazing, but slightly off the beaten path and never as crowded as it should be, and I will be really pissed off if it doesn't make it, so I am relying on you to eat there (and these reviews are totally unsolicited, as I have received no food, drink, coupons, sexual favors, or preferential seating for my favorable opinions).

Nets: The Reason Why America Doesn't Dominate in Soccer

Statistically speaking, America should be better at soccer; we have a large population and massive participation in the sport, but we can't seem to produce a lot of players who compete at the highest levels of the game, and I have figured out why: we have too many nice goals with nets in them . . . when American kids are milling around before soccer practice, they invariably start shelling someone in goal with dead ball shots from twenty yards out, which is a horrible waste of time -- it's barely soccer-like, rarely happens in a game, and often ends in a head injury -- and so I've banned the practice, my players have to juggle with each other before we begin, but it's really hard because a goal with a net is an attractive nuisance, and so kids can't help doing something totally inefficient which is akin to place-kicking, when they should be dribbling around each other and playing little games in small space  -- street ball -- and so my proposal is radical: remove the goals from the soccer fields and only bring them out on game day, if we do this for a generation, soon enough, we'll be playing like Brazilians (and, as I learned at a SAGE meeting, nets are not even required by the laws of the game).

The Truth About the Truth About Lying

Dan Ariely's new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone -- Especially Ourselves explains that people are more honest than we should rationally be . . . according to the Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC) we should compute the cost/ benefit of cheating and act accordingly -- but we don't do this, in fact, people cheat and rob blind people less, despite the fact that it's much less likely that you will be caught; it's not all good news, however . . . pretty much everyone cheats, but most of us only cheat a little bit -- unless you are truly pathological, you cheat just enough so that you can still confabulate stories about what a wonderful person you are . . . so we cheat more if others around us are cheating or if we are indignant and seeking revenge; we cheat more if we are creative and we cheat more if we think no one is looking, and we cheat for altruistic purposes, but we cheat less if we are reminded that it is our choice or if we are sign our name or take an oath or review morality before we commit an act . . . and while we will never eliminate cheating and lying completely, we can become morally less corrupt by using the convenient "reset" options in our world: confession and Yom Kippur and Ramadan, New Year's Resolutions, taking a new job, turning over a new leaf, and even self-flagellating (the method used by the members of Opus Dei) and while the book isn't going to scare you straight about cheating and lying, the experiments that Ariely conducted are worth the admission price; I promise you'll enjoy the book . . .  but, of course, I could be lying, and not even aware of it, as I wouldn't want to admit that I wasted my precious time reading this, and so if I can convince you to read it as well, then I'll feel like a fabulous person, despite the lie.

Barney Would Have a Hard Time Loading a Musket

One of the joys of coaching travel soccer is driving a van-load of kids to some obscure location (such as Berkeley  Heights) and eavesdropping on their conversations -- this weekend there was much talk of warfare (for example: the Revolutionary War must have been "really boring" because it took so long to load the muskets) and Barney: according to my son, Barney was fired because he "cursed at little kids" and had "cigarettes hidden in his tail," but I checked Snopes and neither of these rumors is true (I'm referring to the Barney rumors, of course . . . the rumor that The Revolutionary War was boring is hard to substantiate one way or another, but I tend to doubt that gangrene, frostbite and septicemia made 18th century soldiers yawn and nod off).

We Are the Wild Ones

The thesis of Jon Mooallem's book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in North America is that preserving the "wildness" of many endangered species may well be impossible, now that human influence is  "bleeding into virtually all the available space," and he uses stories of the Lange's metalmark butterfly, the polar bear, and the whooping crane to show that there is a "fluidity to nature that's not easy to recognize or accept" and how climate change and human expansion is certain to eventually put these particular animals out of business -- but even though there is a certain futility in trying to save them, people do . . . and their actions, though ludicrous (tedious butterfly breeding and counting, airlifting starving polar bears, and dressing in whooping crane costumes and going on a year long epic journey in a caravan of trailers and ultra-light planes, in order to teach the cranes to migrate without having them become accustomed to humans) show an essential human goodness, but in the end, these very wild species may die out, and be replaced by synanthropes -- wild species that coexist with man with relative ease: rats, jellyfish, kudzu, roaches, starlings, raccoons, pigeons, etc, and while these species are likened to "ecological Applebee's and Walmart . . . spreading through nature and homogenizing it, while putting the more fragile mom-and-pops out of business," at least we will have some wildness near us (and judging by how some whooping cranes are adjusting to humanity -- eating seed from bird feeders and corn scraps from an ethanol plant -- they may end up like my least favorite bird, which was once endangered, and now defecates on every golf course in our country, the Canadian goose).

If Men Ruled the World

It's well documented that Team Dude is not doing so well in the standings, but I'm starting to wonder if we ever actually had control of things to begin with; as we roll into the holiday season, I'm trying to imagine how things would be if women didn't control the world . . . there would be no special food, no gift-giving, no costumes, and though the holidays would lack pageantry, there would also be a lot less stress . . . so perhaps we should try to do an official switch, and give the women full sovereignty over politics and business, and give the men dominion over all the holidays, and see if the demand for blood pressure medication plummets.

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.