A lot has happened in the fifteen years since my wife and I visited the Galapagos Islands-- the last Pinta turtle, Lonesome George mated with another species of tortoise (but the eggs were not viable) and he died soon after, there has been political unrest-- fishermen, angry about a ban on catching sea cucumbers, protested against environmental regulations (tortoises were taken captive and some were killed, and the fishermen occupied the Charles Darwin Research Center) and-- on a positive note-- the vast majority of goats have been eradicated from Isabela and several other islands . . . the goats-- who came with the first sailors to visit the islands, five hundred years ago, were slowly razing the forests and threatening much of the native wildlife, including the tortoises, and so they had to be killed; this story is detailed (among other recent developments in the Galapagos) in a fantastic Radiolab podcast . . . and so the question is, of course: how do you kill 150,000 goats? and the answer is awesome . . . you shoot them from a helicopter, and this has to be the greatest job on earth . . . you get to fly around in a helicopter over one of the most scenic places on earth, chasing goats over volcanic terrain, and shooting them video game style and leaving them to rot (so as not to rob the island of nutrients) and so though I can't shoot a rifle, and though I am prone to motion sickness (I can't even read in the car) I am preparing my resume for submission . . . watch the video and you'll want to sign up too.
Accepted Premise - Logic = Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell makes good use of his tried-and-true formula in his new book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants . . . he presents an idea, presents the assumptions and logic behind the idea-- the reasons why people believe it is true-- and then explains why the assumptions and logic are misguided; while you know what to expect, it still works-- in fact, it works better because there's a sense of anticipation of exactly when in the chapter the tide will turn and the initial, incontrovertible idea will disintegrate into a cloud of smoke; this book has a motley collection of underdogs -- characters, concepts, and collectives that are thought to be at a disadvantage, but it turns out that the very thing that is disadvantageous about each of them is actually the key to victory; Gladwell begins by debunking the Biblical story of David and Goliath, and then he connects a wide variety of topics to his theme: class size, insurrection, dyslexics, the Irish Troubles, civil rights activists, the Impressionists, youth basketball, innovative cancer treatments, crime, etcetera . . . the book is an inspirational and fun read, and you will certainly come away with a practical understanding how the "inverted U" applies to your life.
Words, words, words . . .
Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel's book Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture sounds like a weighty tome, but it's actually a skinny little book that explains how the authors developed and utilized a really excellent internet application . . . the Google Ngram Viewer, a tool which allows you to see the frequency of words and phrases as they occur over time in Google's massive library of digitized books; Uncharted explains some of the ways to use this data, which gives insight into things like the birth and death of words, the gradual waning of many irregular verbs, the effects of Nazi censorship of certain artists, how fame works, and the typical course of an invention-- but it's also quite fun to type in your own searches and see what happens . . . Godzilla vs. King Kong, martini vs. beer, rights vs. justice, funeral vs. wedding . . . and there's other powerful features as well, so if you've never tried it, click on the link and give it a whirl.
It's Fun To Punt a Football in the Stratosphere
Chronicle is an updated (and much much better) version of the Scott Baio classic Zapped! . . . minus all the gratuitous nudity; the movie is about three teens that have a weird supernatural experience together, and though they are unlikely friends, they are bound together by their newfound telekinetic powers-- the heart of the film is the kids developing their powers and their friendship . . . I really liked this movie, more than my wife, and while I admit that it's full of cliche movie tropes: a kid bullied at school, absent parents, entering a place that would only be entered in a movie, the death the characters you expect to die, etc . . . but the genius is in the details -- it's a short movie and it's worth watching to see the scenes where the kids develop and use their powers . . . what they do with them is perfect and awesome to watch . . . oddly, the best bits of the film are before things go horribly wrong, before all the conflict-- the conflict works and makes sense and the drama is real and explosive and exciting, but it also feels inevitable and typical, but -- especially if you're a dude-- you've got to see the middle of this movie, the portion where things are going well and three teenage boys are doing the exact telekinetic things that three teenage boys would do.
Revisiting Beuller
When I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off in 1986, I thought the movie was all about Ferris outwitting his blowhard principal, Ed Rooney-- after all, Ferris is adored by sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, and even dickheads . . . they all think he's a righteous dude, and so he was fighting oppressive authority for all of us teenagers-- but I just watched the movie again, with my kids-- who were rooting for Ferris, of course-- but now I realize that the movie is actually about Cameron and his anxieties about the future, a future Ferris will have no problem with-- Ferris can jump up on a float in a parade and start singing and dancing, he's going to have no problem navigating the world, and though we're glad he makes it home on time, we know that, like James Bond, he's going to be fine . . . but for Cameron and Sloane, the future is much more ambiguous, and the real climax of the movie is the scene you don't see, the scene where Cameron confronts his father and takes the heat for wrecking his dad's beloved Ferrari . . . the film is a comedy, so we assume that everything turns out okay, but we'll never know for sure, that portion is oddly unresolved.
Hint: Brown M&M's
If you listen to Freakonomics, then Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's new book Think Like a Freak a bit anti-climactic-- it's mainly a rehash of their radio show-- but there are some new anecdotes and it might be worth reading just so you know the answer to this question: what do King Solomon and David Lee Roth have in common?
A Sentence in Which An Old Guy Runs and Thinks Faster Than Me
I was at the pool the other day, waiting patiently for a lap lane to open up; someone finally got out and I made my way over so I could hop in and start swimming, but an old dude beat me too it-- he scampered over and jumped into the open lane at the other end of the pool-- the deep end-- which is fairly unorthodox, people usually get into the lap lanes on the shallow end, but I had to admire his brass and so I shrugged and went back to reading my book, waiting for someone else to get tired of swimming . . . and the interesting thing is, this guy is a ponderously slow swimmer-- painfully slow-- and my children thought this anecdote was very funny, that he's such a slow swimmer, but he moved so quickly in order to get into the lane . . . fast on land but slow in the water . . . and the next time this happens, I might exhibit some brass of my own, and just dive in and start swimming towards him, in a game of aquatic chicken.
A Sagacious Aphorism from Someone More Sagacious Than Me
Stephen Pinker, the great cognitive scientist, was asked by Stephen Colbert to describe how the brain works in five words or less and Pinker immediately produced this gem of an aphorism: "Brain cells fire in patterns."
It Takes a Bad Ass to Live in the Bad Land
Jonathan Raban's book Bad Land: An American Romance tells the story of the homesteaders that attempted -- with varying degrees of success-- to farm the dry and dusty plains of eastern Montana; this is a swath of bleak and exposed land, with miles of barbed wire fences -- as it takes a lot of prairie grass to support a herd of cattle-- and while it can occasionally turn green, it relies on infrequent rain, and is often brown and desolate . . . to drive across it is endless, as it bleeds into the Dakotas, and while Badlands National Park is a weird and exotic area to visit, with strange rock formations and fields of prairie broken apart by multi-colored sandstone, the rest of this land is not as scenic, and it took especially courageous, intrepid, and industrious folks to make it out there (most of them did not, they continued west, leaving their homes, land, and farm equipment in arrears) but the ones that did survive are uniquely American . . . which includes some resolute and admirable people, but this is also the area where Ted Kaczynski holed up to write his manifesto; I highly recommend the book for people who like this kind of thing, but reading it will probably make you feel rather soft and effete (unless you know how to rope, castrate, and brand a calf . . . even a high school girl can do this sort of thing out west).
Yeah? No? Maybe?
In the past few years, the phrase "yeah . . . no" has become a bulwark of conversation-- SlateRadio concludes that the phrase creates "conversational harmony," and to that I say "yeah . . . no" as I see it as more of an insulator, an opening parenthesis that keeps a statement from being too definitive (not that this is a bad thing, life is complicated and it's often hard to give a straightforward "yes" or "no") and I also think we're adept at ending statements with some insulation, a closing parenthesis . . . such as: but that's only my opinion or it's complicated or but hey, what the fuck do I know?
Sagacious Aphorism #6
When you carry too many things, chances are you will drop one . . . but you will avoid the dreaded "making of two trips."
OBFT XXI
A light year attendance-wise for the Outer Banks Fishing Trip XXI, but no other complaints . . . the water was clear, the beer was cold, the breeze was refreshing, and the food at Tortuga's was great (even the jerk chicken and the Bajan burger) plus our friend Craig-- who couldn't make it because his children had abducted him and taken him to Storyland -- did something unprecedented . . . he took an educated guess at our whereabouts and "called in" a round of drinks to the bar; other things that happened:
1) Whitney was on a boat;
2) we listened to Lonely Island and T-Pain sing "I'm on a Boat";
3) Ian bought a keg and then passed out within the half-hour;
4) Jerry used stacks of poker chips to "write down" the phone number for the pizza place;
5) everyone had a bed, but Johnny still slept in the hammock;
6) Ian lost his expensive sunglasses in the ocean and we searched for them . . . fruitlessly;
7) Bruce told another joke;
8) it took me nearly twelve hours to get home, and during this time, I learned that Rob and Jerry do NOT dig my favorite podcast, Professor Blastoff;
9) Johnny told me I have to watch Snowpiercer and the mini-series Lonesome Dove;
10) we gambled on corn-hole;
11) Marls tried his best to make a major work/life decision but found the OBFT not the ideal venue for this sort of thinking;
12) there was much reminiscing about past OBFTs and the consensus is that they somewhat run together in our minds, and we need a spreadsheet to remember what happened and when;
13) Jerry was the first person to ever use a cane on an OBFT . . . anyway, thanks again Whit, you and the Martha Wood delivered another great time in a long string of them.
1) Whitney was on a boat;
2) we listened to Lonely Island and T-Pain sing "I'm on a Boat";
3) Ian bought a keg and then passed out within the half-hour;
4) Jerry used stacks of poker chips to "write down" the phone number for the pizza place;
5) everyone had a bed, but Johnny still slept in the hammock;
6) Ian lost his expensive sunglasses in the ocean and we searched for them . . . fruitlessly;
7) Bruce told another joke;
8) it took me nearly twelve hours to get home, and during this time, I learned that Rob and Jerry do NOT dig my favorite podcast, Professor Blastoff;
9) Johnny told me I have to watch Snowpiercer and the mini-series Lonesome Dove;
10) we gambled on corn-hole;
11) Marls tried his best to make a major work/life decision but found the OBFT not the ideal venue for this sort of thinking;
12) there was much reminiscing about past OBFTs and the consensus is that they somewhat run together in our minds, and we need a spreadsheet to remember what happened and when;
13) Jerry was the first person to ever use a cane on an OBFT . . . anyway, thanks again Whit, you and the Martha Wood delivered another great time in a long string of them.
Sagacious Aphorism #5
Just because you can't see a rattlesnake, doesn't mean it isn't there (this goes for fish, spiders, and serial killers too).
Sagacious Aphorism #2
When you pretend things are made of lead, many of your friends will desert you . . . but not your true friends (I dimly recall that my friend Whitney and I invented this game circa 1991, in Daytona, Florida, when we should have been attending wet t-shirt contests and dance parties, but instead were annoying our hotel-mates by pretending that various objects in the room were made of lead: beer bottles, food, books, and -- probably the most annoying, which made people start to desert us-- the blanket that I was pinned beneath, which I had to slowly "roll" off my body . . . it was interminable-- and illogical: how did I get under it in the first place? and while Whitney and I found this hysterical, the rest of our fraternity brothers thought there were better things to do on spring break rather than watch two poor mimes enact an endless skit without a punch line, and so they left us; the game rears its ugly and boring head every so often-- I was once pinned to the floor of The Weeping Radish Brewery by a condiment sized cup of lead horseradish, and even my children have played it on occasion).
Sagacious Aphorism #1
When you put yourself under great pressure and time constraint, it's harder than you think to write a sagacious aphorism.
It's Aphorism Week!
After completing an epic cross-country journey, I'm sure I have some sagacious wisdom to dispense, and so I'm declaring it "aphorism week" . . . get ready for some timeless adages (and this has nothing to do with the fact that I'm going to visit my buddies in North Carolina, and need to mail it in for a couple of days).
There's One Place Like Home (And It's Home)
After two mammoth driving days, we made it home . . . and the house was still standing . . . so a big thanks to all the folks who made this possible: house-sitters and dog-sitters, mail-getters and garden-watchers, my adventurous wife and kids, and-- most importantly-- the biggest thanks of all to our 2008 Toyota Sienna, for putting in over 6000 miles of fast, wild, and bumpy driving without a flat or a hiccup or a breakdown.
Road Trip Day 23: Time To Reflect (Because We Drove Twelve Hours)
Some places we visited on our trip that I'd like to live: Des Moines, Hot Springs, Minneapolis, Emigrant, Pittsburgh, Rapid City and Alta . . . but probably not Richfield, Ohio (despite the fact that the byzantine Days Inn has a strange, dungeonlike indoor fun area with a pool, mini-golf, cornhole, ball pit, arcade, hot tub, and playground in a dimly lit gigantic interior covered courtyard space . . . my kids loved it . . . until Alex got ejected for hitting a mini-golf ball so hard it ricocheted up to the second level and bounced off the window of a room overlooking the courtyard) and even though there were many places we stopped where I envisioned myself leading some alternate life, I'll be happy if we make it back to Highland Park in one piece.
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