Who Knew?

Friday night, my ten year old son surprised and impressed the family with a passable British accent (apparently, he's been working on it for a while and he claims that it's hard to say American words-- such as "barbecue"-- properly . . . after he tried to say "barbecue", then his younger brother gave it a shot, and so I tried as well . . . and my accent was so heinous that it ended the episode).

Reminder

My family is driving cross country this summer and I've got to remember to play Bruce Springsteen's song "Badlands" when we enter the Badlands . . . I wonder what the odds are that I actually do this?

Not Sure If This Would Be Good or Bad . . .

I have two typically scatterbrained kids -- they forget clothing, water bottles, musical instruments, homework projects, and whatever task they have been asked to do-- but when they play Minecraft, they have laser-like focus, and so if menial work could be done through an interface like Minecraft-- with robots or drones or automation or something -- then little kids would line up to work these jobs, for free . . . I'm not sure what this would do to the economy, but if you could flip a burger on a computer screen, and then achieve some kind of digital reward for cooking it perfectly, and you could eventually level up, then that whole stigma would vanish (and teachers and parents would have to come up with some other cliche to inspire kids to go to college).

Losing Your Noodle

Aristotle, an all around smart guy, believed that the heart was the seat of our thoughts; now, of course, we know that our thoughts originate in our brain-- and if you need further proof, check out the story of Phineas Gage (or better yet, The Kids in the Hall "Academy Awards" skit) but this makes me wonder, if we did not have Aristotle or modern neuroscience to guide us, could we make a person believe that his thoughts originate in his foot, or elbow, or buttocks . . . and so I urge science people to get on this topic immediately (my guess is that it's perfectly possible, because it's not like you feel your thoughts in your brain, you just believe that your consciousness is swimming around in the general vicinity of your head).

It's Fun To Pass Judgement (from the Confines of a Motor Vehicle)

When you're cruising along without a care but the other side of the road has traffic piled up for miles, I know what you're thinking: I'm a good person and deserve my fate, while those sinners over there will have to repent by sitting in that jam.

Goblins, Corduroy, and Synth Pop

I wasn't much of a film buff in high school (my movie watching was limited to Monty Python flicks, Surf II, and anything that might contain a naked boob) and so I missed quite a few classic '80's films but I plugged a couple gaps this weekend: I watched both Labyrinth and The Sure Thing, and despite the obvious differences (puppets vs. no puppets) they contain some common ground: cheesy '80's music, young stars who eventually become fairly iconic (Jennifer Connelly and John Cusack), weird and harsh lighting, several endearing scenes amidst some predictable rubbish, and David Bowie's crotch (actually, only Labyrinth contains David Bowie's crotch, but The Sure Thing has the PG-13 rating . . . odd).

Robotrons, Methy Mikes, and Big Mitches

Colson Whitehead's new book The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death should be more fun than it is; Grantland paid the $10,000 stake for Whitehead-- a professional novelist and amateur poker player-- to take part in The World Series of Poker; Whitehead trains for the main event by playing in smaller tournaments in Atlantic City and he acquires a classy female novelist and professional poker coach who has actually played in the big event, and so the book has the potential to take on a Rocky tone, but playing poker at this level isn't much fun, nor is the training, and Colson Whitehead is not a fun guy, in fact, the funniest thing about the book may be the picture on the back cover, where he sports his poker uniform, a custom made "Republic of Anhedonia" track jacket . . . and while Whitehead is a bit of a grouch, the writing is hip, the allusions come fast and furious, and there's quite a bit of poker knowledge wedged in between his existential griping.

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger? We'll See . . .

I like to paddleboard on the Raritan River, mainly as a matter of convenience, as I live only a few hundred yards from a boat launch, and though I know the water isn't pristine, I prefer not to think about what's in the sauce, and instead I enjoy the views of the New Brunswick skyline, the Rutgers crew complex, and the rugged and forested cliffs directly across from the park (not to mention the large swath of open water as the river approaches the Donald and Morris Goodkind Bridges) but now that my children are also paddleboarding on the river . . . and falling into the river, as kids are wont to do, this report scares me a bit . . . apparently, the river is full of more than savage monsters, it also contains an unhealthy amount of mercury, benzene, arsenic, oil and gas drips, toxic fertilizer, and goose feces . . . a toxic brew, which-- best case scenario-- will turn my children into radioactive superheroes, or -- more likely -- it will do some weird and awful stuff to their innards, and because we don't have a control, a Family of Dave living next to a perfectly clean unpolluted river, we'll never know the exact effect recreating on the Raritan has on my kin.

Lesson Learned (I Instigate an Awkward Moment at the Pub)

If you are at your local pub, and an inebriated stranger approaches you and asks whether he should play Molly Hatchet or The Allman Brothers on the jukebox, the correct response is, "Whatever, man, they're both awesome!" but that's not what I said; instead I took a moment and sincerely thought about the question and told him, quite sincerely, that I couldn't recall any songs by Molly Hatchet so I wasn't qualified to decide, and this really astounded him-- that I wasn't familiar with Molly Hatchet-- so much so that he sang an a capella version of "Flirtin' With Disaster" to me and several of my friends, really belted it out, holding a fake microphone and everything, for an awkwardly long time, but I couldn't bring myself to walk away because he really wanted me to appreciate Molly Hatchet (but, of course, this had the opposite effect, as now any time I hear the name Molly Hatchet, I will associate the band with this horribly awkward moment).

Low Pressure Hello

Fellow New Jerseyans (New Jerseyites?) let us take a moment to give a warm welcome to an old friend we haven't seen (or felt) in a long while . . . he winters in the mangrove swamps of Mexico's Pacific coast with his cousin El Nino . . . but now he's back and making up for lost time . . . so welcome home Signor Unbearable Humidity . . . and you'll notice his good buddy Jock Itch sidling alongside him (and his arch-nemesis Tinactin in hot pursuit).

Silver Bullet For a Fourth Grader

Before

After

The bane of the elementary school boy is The School Project (and consequently, The School Project is also the bane of the elementary school boy's mom because she is the one that will provide succor when the elementary school boy announces-- at 9 PM-- that he forgot about his School Project; at this point, the elementary school boy's father, otherwise known as Dad, who has had a long afternoon coaching soccer, advises his son to hand in a piece of crap, take the bad grade like a man, then-- after dispensing this wisdom-- the elementary school dad goes to bed . . . but as evidenced by the "Before" and "After" pics that my wife e-mailed me the next day, this is NOT the proper course and when there is a project, you should take a careful look at "the scoring rubric" so you can advise your son or daughter on what to prioritize and how to make a plan of action and a rough-draft or sketch (or you take the easy way out and just do it for them-- but my wife is too principled for that).

Dirty White Boys

I've taught high school for nearly twenty years, and I'm still surprised by what will galvanize a class discussion; the other day in Creative Writing, an African American kid told a humorous story about how his grandmother-- who watched him every day after school-- insisted on bathing before returning him home to his parents, and I remarked that my own children bathe every other day, but only if we force them to, and this provoked a serious and spirited discussion about cleanliness, hygiene, and bathing frequency, and during the course of this discussion, two African American kids both admitted, sincerely and with true candor, that they had heard rumors from their parents and grandparents that "white people don't bathe every day," and when I confirmed this to be true, they thought it was hysterical and egregious -- and the Hispanic and South American kids in the class agreed, and told me about "inside clothes" and "outside clothes," and how you could never let "outside clothes" touch your bed, and this made me want to stir the pot some, so I told them that my kids often go to bed "with sticks and leaves in their hair," which may have been a slight exaggeration but the reaction it produced was worth the hyperbole (one girl actually turned to me and said, "Are you sure you're raising those kids right?").

Small Talk With Big Payoff

It's always a struggle for me to make small talk with the people at work that are not members of the English department, but Friday I had a great success: there is a janitor that passes by most days while I am on hall duty, and it was especially hot and humid that morning and so when I saw him, instead of offering my usual lame greeting (What's happening?) I stopped him and asked him, very kindly, if he could turn on the air-conditioning, because the weather was so hot and sticky . . . but, of course, as we both well knew, the high school doesn't have air-conditioning in the hallways and classrooms, and so he got a real kick out of that and pretended to "clap on" the A/C, a dated but perfect joke for the situation, and this made us both so happy that I am going to work hard to think of other one-liners to offer people around the building, so if anyone has a good idea, send it my way.

Seventeen Second Tour of Human Consciousness

Human cognition is still essentially a black box-- stimuli, filtered through our senses, enters our consciousness, this stuff is invisibly and unexplainably processed in our brain, and thoughts are produced . . . with varying degrees of success, recall, and logic . . . and we can rarely explain the causality of the stream: we can remember and explain some things at the drop of a hat, we have difficulty recalling other things, and sometimes we remember things too late (the French call this l'esprit d'escalier . . . the wit of the staircase) and this video clip of my son Alex captures all the mysteries and emotions of the mind in a mere seventeen seconds-- you'll probably have to watch it twice; I learned more from this clip than I did from all my college psychology courses (which isn't saying much) and it was pure luck that my kids stumbled upon it (they were rummaging through iPhoto, as they have reached the ripe old ages of eight and ten, and now look back upon their youth nostalgically).

And Now For Something Completely Different

Fans of Sentence of Dave know my son eight year old son Ian as a foul-mouthed candy-hoarder who once "betrayed the family" with a premeditated second floor flood, but apparently there's more going on in his head than profanity and malevolence . . . Tuesday morning, Ian was searching for something, and he looked distraught, so my wife asked him what he was looking for and offered to help him, but at first he wouldn't tell her what he was looking for and refused her aid, but my wife persisted and he finally said, "I can't find a letter . . . it's on a white piece of paper" and my wife remembered seeing this protruding from his desk drawer, and she had pushed it into the desk -- so she found it for him, and he seemed relieved . . . and rather secretive about it, so later that day, when Ian wasn't around, she went upstairs and looked at the letter and then showed it to me; it was a Mother's Day card to my mother-in-law-- who lived with us in an apartment in our basement for many years and looked after our kids until she passed away from cancer in the summer of 2012; Ian was very close with her and misses her very much, and this card expressed that sentiment in a rather unusual way . . . it was a Mother's Day card addressed to "Nanny" and thanked her for playing games with him and giving him treats but the writing was childish and sloppy and the paper was crumpled and at the bottom something was crossed out and the year "2009" was written in the lower right corner . . . and I looked carefully and was able to decipher the phrase that was crossed out and it said "4 years ago" and I realized what he had done -- he created an artifact; though he had written this note recently, he wanted it to be from when he was four years old and Nanny was still alive, and so he aged it and wrote with childish handwriting, and then he wrote the four years ago phrase and then realized that people didn't write that to date a letter, they put the actual year, so he crossed it out and wrote "2009" . . . and after we looked at the letter (and were appropriately choked up over it) we put it back in his desk and didn't say anything about it, but on Friday afternoon, he brought it downstairs and claimed he "found it" in the storage closet and that he must have written it when he was four, but when I reminded him that he couldn't write when he was four, he admitted that he had just written it and so when he is silent and contemplative, I will not assume that he is planning something malicious because I now have empirical evidence that belies this.

Empirical Evidence Trumps the Label

While walking the dog in the rain on Friday afternoon, I learned something valuable: my waterproof Columbia jacket is only a windbreaker.

If You Were to Actually Get Three Wishes, You Should Go Nuts With Them

My son Ian decided that if you make it to "your thirties," then you should be rewarded with three wishes, but when I asked him what he would wish for, hoping for some crazy-ass imaginative kid stuff . . . zombie armies, world domination, interplanetary battle ships, and such, but his wishes turned out to be fairly lame: first he said he would wish for a time machine, which had promise, but then he said he would use the time machine to "make a plane ride to Florida seem like three minutes" which resulted in me lecturing him in the style of Louie C.K. and then he wished that "he could visit all fifty states" with his family and his buddy Ben-- which was sweet, but entirely within the realm of possibility without squandering a magical wish-- and then he finished up with the completely mundane and cliche desire to "live a long and healthy life."

There's No Crying in Silicon Valley!

While we all know that "there's no crying in baseball," apparently the same isn't true about founding the most successful computer company in history, as Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography is chock full of incidents where the charismatic, sensitive, and quite possibly delusional Jobs breaks down in tears, often in front of co-workers, rivals, or friends (and usually when his "reality distortion field" ceases to operate).

iPod, I Name Thee Lazarus

One of the perks of writing a trivial blog filled with drivel is that I can fact-check extremely mundane details from my life; for example, I know for certain that I bought my iPod Nano in April of 2008 and I made a habit of swimming with this iPod in November of 2008 (which didn't last long, as my supposedly waterproof Otterbox case leaked, resulting in a waterlogged and broken iPod . . . but one of my well-connected students set me up with an "appointment" with her ex-boyfriend at the Apple Store and he gave me a new one, despite the fact that water damage is NOT covered by the limited warranty) and then I used the new iPod-- an exact clone of the old iPod-- without incident for many years, until I lost it for several months in the winter of 2013, and now I am realizing that this particular iPod (which I have conflated with the original water-damaged iPod in a philosophical leap reminiscent of the Ship of Theseus dilemma) is imbued with miraculous qualities, because my wife's iPod -- a newer, sleeker model-- doesn't hold a charge and gives her loads of problems, but this model (like my Jeep) is built to last, possibly to infinity and beyond; to make a long story short, Tuesday morning, when I got in my car to go to work, I saw my iPod lying prostrate in the road . . . it must have fallen out of my gym bag, and so it spent the night on the pavement, getting soaked by several rainstorms and quite possibly run over by cars, and so I assumed this was finally the end -- R.I.P iPod-- but when I pressed the "play" symbol, the screen popped right up, and so I put it in a bowl of dry rice and it is now in good working order-- and this tempts me to to try other more extreme experiments on the device: fire, acid, ice, my digestive system . . . but perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate, as I'm sure I will place it in peril some time soon, without forcing the issue.

A Belated Happy Mother's Day to Hannah Duston?

To determine if you are going to purchase a  Hannah Duston bobble-head doll (pictured above) and to decide whether Hannah Duston is the greatest mom in American history or a cold-blooded racist child killer, you are going to have to learn the story of Hannah Duston . . . and the best way to do this is to listen to the most recent episode of 99 Percent Invisible: Monumental Dilemma.