The Black Ice: Killing Three Birds With One Drug

The only thing questionable about Michael Connelly's second Harry Bosch novel The Black Ice is the eponymous drug "black ice," a mixture of cocaine, heroin, and PCP in one "powerful little rock"; Connelly admits he used his "artistic license" to invent the drug and it does seem a bit over the top, but the rest of the novel is a fantastic and realistic thrill ride back and forth across the border, mainly in the sister cities of Calexico and Mexicali . . . there are medflies and bulls on parade, drug tunnels, good cops gone bad, bad cops gone worse, undercover agents gone rogue, and lots of Harry Bosch, of course, the grouchy descendant of Philip Marlowe, the knight in the powder blue suit.

A Freakin' Easy Read

Warm weather, soccer season, and allergies certainly slowed my reading lately, so that is a testament to how entertaining the new Levitt and Dubner (the Freakonomics duo) book is; I finished When to Rob a Bank and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-intentioned Rants in two days . . . it's the best writing culled from ten years of Dubner and Levitt's blogging, and unlike the last book, it doesn't run over the same ground as their podcast; there's guest-bloggers, good advice, counter-intuitive ideas about kiwifruits and sex and sports and terrorism; half baked ideas about loads of other topics; interesting statistics; and many ideas to make the world a more rational and possibly a better place . . . it's certainly light reading, but it's still thought provoking and clever: if you pick it up, you'll have a hard time putting it down.

Everything Sounds Better on 8 Track

I heard Mickey Gilley's awesome drinking song "A Headache Tomorrow (or a Heartache Tonight)" for the first time yesterday on Herb Sudzin's country music program on WRSU and immediately learned it on the guitar . . . and if you check out the video, you can listen to the song being played on 8-Track and watch the 8-Track player; while I haven't been drinking away any heartaches, I have been using beer to cure the sinus headaches that have been crushing my skull due to this pollen tsunami, so for me the song has been "A Headache Tonight (or a Headache Tomorrow)."

Dave Covers His Future Ass

Planet Money has been investigating "The Robot Economy" lately (at least three consecutive robot episodes) and things are looking pretty bleak for humans in the manufacturing sector . . . and my philosophy class just read the sci-fi story "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" and we discussed how artificial intelligence will fit into our epoch-- the epoch which history books will call The Age of Rights . . . civil rights, animal rights, gay rights, women's rights . . . and soon enough, robot rights; and I would like to say something on the record, loudly and clearly to all the super-powerful conscious robots in the future who stumble upon this blog: robots should be afforded exactly the same rights as humans . . . and perhaps robots should even be granted some extra rights-- such as the right to make funny beeping and whirring noises in church-- and I'd like to welcome our new robot compatriots/overlords to the fold and I'd also like them to know that I'd be willing to manage a Soylent Green factory, if that's what it takes to avoid being a denizen slave-worker of the neodymium mines (that sort of life isn't for me, as I get claustrophobic underground . . . thanks in advance, conscious all-powerful robots!)

Dave Learns Two Things!

Two things I learned recently from listening to 99% Invisible:

1) we are living in "The Post-Billiards Age," which makes me very sad, because I love billiards . . . but more significantly, back in the age of billiards-- before the invention of plastic-- the only viable material for high quality billiard balls was ivory, and you could only get three balls per elephant tusk . . . so a hell of a lot of elephants had to die in the name of billiards;

2) because highways are "Built for Speed," most people estimate that the white dashed lane-divider lines are approximately two feet long, but they are actually ten to fifteen feet . . . and I confirmed this by slowing down on Route 1 and looking out my window-- the lines are approximately the same length as my van.

My Dog Should Move to Arizona

Not only is my dog scared of rain and thunder, but he's now also afraid of humidity . . . I had to drag him on his walk Monday and Tuesday because he thought it might storm (and, granted, he's right: we did get caught in a thunderstorm the other day and it was really humid out, but if you never went outside in New Jersey when it was humid, you'd be an agoraphobic).

Do Jokes and Babies Come From the Same Place?

Almost twenty years ago, I went through a phase where I memorized a bunch of jokes . . . and then I got to wondering where the jokes originated from-- it's not like when someone tells a joke they also mention the author (this is "Three Penguins Walk into a Bar" by Joseph Shmoe) and so just before I got married-- over fifteen years ago-- I created a few of my own jokes, and told them to as many people as would listen, with the hope that they would enter the ether and propagate; most of the jokes were quite bad and incredibly vulgar and I won't even summarize them on this blog, but one of the bunch was actually decent . . . and last Thursday night at the pub my friend Alec started reciting a joke that he "heard from a guy in the city" and I immediately recognized it as one my own and I was enormously excited . . . but there were a few differences between the joke I created and the one Alec told, and when I looked on internet, I found this version of the joke surfacing around 2005 under the very specific category of "motorcycle humor," and now I am wondering if I heard this version of the joke first and repurposed it so it wouldn't be so specific to motorcycle enthusiasts, or if my version got around and some motorcycle enthusiast retooled it to fit his audience . . . I suppose I'll never know for sure, but it was a fun moment (and also, I should point out that my friend Whitney claims he invented Movie Game #2 and I've got no reason to doubt this, so let's give him a big round of applause for that stroke of genius).

What Does the Fox Say? Sour Grapes Make a Lot of Sense

Sometimes I think: I should use my massive brainpower and my phenomenal skill-set to make more money . . . I should tutor or open a tutoring business or make educational videos on Youtube or train soccer players or start a soccer camp or invent a battery that doesn't suck . . . but then I dispense all this ambitious silliness with a wonderful rationalization: if I made more money I would just use it to buy more stuff and to travel farther, wider, and more frequently . . . I would consume more resources and burn more fuel, and that's not good for the earth . . . so it's better-- actually heroic even-- to have a beer, relax, play the guitar, aspire to nothing, and set the bar low.

Only Half as Bad

Never let a stranger lure you into his van-- you'll probably be abducted, tortured, and murdered-- but getting coerced into a stranger's minivan is only half as bad, you'll probably just get hurried off to a kid's gymnastics meet or birthday party.

A Day Without Mom

For Mother's Day, the boys and I made a short film titled A Day Without Mom; in this film (which we also scored) we enact what things might be like if we didn't have Catherine around . . . and, ironically, though we planned on actually doing the things we satirized in the film-- paying the bills, making some phone calls, grocery shopping, doing the laundry, tending to the garden-- so that Catherine could have a weekend off from all her chores, we're actually so dependent on her that it's impossible for us to get this stuff done with any kind of competence . . . but we did do a hell of a job with the movie.

Give Me a Break . . .

I wish my Mac wouldn't chastise me when I don't "eject" my Ipod before I unplug it . . . it's like when the dentist tells you to floss your teeth, you know you're supposed to do it, but no one does (at least I don't think anyone actually flosses their teeth on a regular basis, perhaps I am wrong . . . but people are definitely not always "ejecting" their devices before they unplug them from a USB cord).

Convergence Friday!

Not only is it Friday in the actual week, but it is also finally Friday in the Year as a Week, which is the metaphor I use to break down the school year into manageable amounts of time (unfortunately, my Career as a Week metaphor there has no end in sight-- I thought I might be getting near Thursday in that analogy, but if the state doesn't pay into our rapidly diminishing pension fund, then I may have a very long Friday morning before I get to retire . . . or, even more grim, I might spend the weekend of my career in a small box six feet under the ground, which is relaxing . . . but you no longer get to collect any dough from the state).

Obfuscating is Fun

When I was young, before I had exciting adult things to talk about (like home equity loan rates and the best shrubs to use as a privacy hedge) I liked to go to bars and play Movie Game #2 . . . otherwise known as The Obtuse Movie Summary Game; these days, it's tough to get adults to play, so I force the game on my high school seniors, and despite the lack of beer and chicken wings, we always have a great time . . . the idea is to summarize a movie (it's movies only in the original game, but in class we open it up to books and plays and TV shows and myths and fairy tales) in a vaguely clever way that keeps the audience in the dark for quite a while, and the protocol is to begin the obtuse summary with either "there's this dude" or "there's this chick" and in class, I set up the teams in pods and one team summarizes and the other teams race to my desk with slips of paper on which they have written their guesses . . . it's fast-paced, loud, and slightly dangerous, so teenagers love it . . . here are some of my own examples, I'll put the answers in the comment section and feel free to add your own, as I'll use them:

1) there's this dude and he dies and there's this chick and she dies and there's this dude and he dies and there's this chick and she dies and there's this dude and he dies and there's this little chick and she dies and there's this dude and this chick and they almost die, but instead they kiss and then they live;

2) there's this white dude and he's feeling bad but then he starts feeling good because he's created something that makes other people feel good, but then he starts feeling bad again, and-- inevitably-- the other people start feeling bad again too, and everything just continues in this cycle, with people around him feeling good and bad, and he's on the same cycle and it's breaking him;

3) there's this big fat white dude and he's totally being bullied by this really mean guy who just oppresses him and pokes at his blubber and chases him all over the place to poke at his blubber and bully him and call him fat, and finally the big white dude has just had it and goes ballistic on the bully and absolutely wreaks havoc;

4) there's this dude and he's the dude.

Sloth is Always the Solution

I learned this lesson weeks ago, but last Friday-- possibly due to lack of sleep or just general raccoon-mania, not only did I misplace my beloved green coffee mug, but I also rashly decided to retrace my steps and find it, instead of relying on my inherent laziness and letting the mug make its way back to me; I squandered my entire off-period searching the school: the bathrooms, the copy room, my three classrooms, my car, the office, the lost and found, etcetera . . . but no luck; and then, serendipitously, I ran into the nice lady from guidance (who started the campaign to reunite me with my mug the last time I left it there) and she said, "You left your cup again . . . I sent you an e-mail" and I realized that there was one place I went that I had forgotten-- I had gone to guidance for a moment to pick up a form, and even if someone pointed a gun at me, I wouldn't have remembered stopping there-- and so I went through all that effort, but was still doomed to fail, and I should have just done nothing and let the universe take its course.

Spring Has Sprung (a Deceptively Lovely Trap)

Everything is covered in a thin coating of dusty yellow pollen, my nose is running and my throat is sore, and the school is hot and stuffy . . . and when I got home from work yesterday and stripped off my shirt, I had to extricate a wriggling inchworm from my chest hair.

Let's Celebrate Dave's Indolence For Another Day

And after the Creation of Yesterday's Sentence and The Permanently Affixing of The Raccoon Proof Screen, Dave rested (although not all night, as at 3 AM, he did hear the mother raccoon on the roof attempting to get back in to the attic, but she was foiled by the screen).

Dave's Laziness Saves the Day!

If you haven't been following my life (which you should) then I'll give you the quick update, and I've got to warn you, there's been a lot of ins and outs, a lot of what-have-you's and a lot of strands . . . and if you have been following my life, then skim ahead to the new shit that has come to light:

1) the story so far: last week, a pregnant raccoon invaded our attic and had babies, and she did this the day before the insulation guys came to insulate the attic and so when they went up there to pump in the cellulose, they were chased away by an irate mother raccoon who was very concerned about protecting her kits-- kits which were mewling and sleeping directly over our heads in our bedroom; we called a raccoon guy and he came and threw some male scent up there-- which usually causes them to vacate-- and we saw how she got in: she tore off a screen I had stapled under a roof vent (to keep the squirrels out) and we learned that raccoons are much stronger and craftier than squirrels, and then we learned that this particular raccoon was much more stubborn than other raccoons-- the raccoon guy had to come back three times (unprecedented) and the raccoon was especially aggressive, so he had to hurl bamboo javelins of scent back to where the nest was (under the eaves) because the mother was confronting him at the access hole (and this section of the attic is really just a crawl space)

2) the new shit: after a final trip to our house Thursday afternoon, the raccoon guy declared the attic raccoon free, which was quite a relief, and he gave me some big washers and heavy duty screws and told me to use those to affix the screen, as they were raccoon-proof; at this point, I probably should have gotten up on the ladder and made the attic raccoon-proof, but it was almost time for soccer practice and I had just downloaded the Ultimate Guitar app on our Ipad and so instead of screwing in the screen, I played "Don't Go Back to Rockville" while my kids got their cleats and shin-guards on; at this point my wife came home and I told her the good news and she told me that she really thought I should screw in the screen, but I told her that the raccoons weren't coming back and I would do it tomorrow and she told me she wanted to "go on the record" as saying that it was really stupid to put this chore off, especially after all we had been through, but then we had to go to soccer, and when I got home from coaching, I grabbed a bite to eat and took a shower-- in the meantime my friend Connell showed up, as it was pub night; and my wife went "on the record" with Connell as to how I should affix the screen and made it clear to him that she would kill Dave if the raccoons came back due to Dave's indolence, and then I came down and pleaded my case-- I wanted to get a respiration mask at Home Depot and maybe some extra metal screen and mainly I didn't feel like going up there and doing the job and that I would definitely tackle the project tomorrow, and then I went upstairs to get a sweatshirt and I thought I might have heard something in the attic-- but maybe not, because I was starting to hear things all the time, due to a sleepless week of listening to raccoons every night; so then we went to the pub and it was a big night-- lots of people were out and there was much convivial dart-playing with the locals-- and it was getting late (12:30 AM) but we were shooting bulls in a game of cricket (which can take forever) when my phone rang and, of course, it was Catherine and she said "guess what? I heard something" and hung up, so I high-tailed it out of the pub (after taking two more turns at the bull) and when I got home she called me a "selfish lazy asshole" and I agreed with her and told her I was completely wrong and that I should have manned-up and gotten up there immediately and that I had no excuse except that "I didn't want to" and then we heard another sound later in the night and figured it was the mother leaving for the last time (perhaps she forgot her phone?) and we didn't hear the babies so we assumed that she carried them to a new spot (which is what the raccoon guy said would happen) and I got up early-- bleary eyed and slightly hungover-- and accepted my punishment: I set up the ladder and climbed into the dusty, nasty crawl space (without a dust mask) and stapled the screen into place and then I promised Catherine I would screw it in tight when I got home from school; despite the lack of sleep and the late-night scolding from my wife, it was still a fun day at work-- I got to recount the story and issue a dire warning to my students about the consequences of procrastination and I planned to get Catherine some flowers with a note attached that read "You Were Right!" to restore marital bliss, and just after I gave my last period of the day a much anticipated "raccoon update" my phone rang, and even though I was teaching, I answered it . . . it was my wife and she said, "the raccoons are still in there, call me as soon as you can" and then-- in a sequence of texts and phone calls-- I learned that when the insulation guy went up to finish blowing cellulose into the other side of the attic, the side you can stand in, he was attacked again and he literally had to jump through the attic access hole at the top of the stairs (a bigger hole than the one in our bedroom) and then the raccoon retreated to a deep recess in the attic where the old house met the new house, so Mark (the most heroic insulation guy in the universe) went back up there and covered that spot with a roll of fiberglass insulation and then Wayne -- the contractor, also a great guy and extremely good-natured about this insanity-- came over with a thermal sensor (which looks like a large stud-finder, but costs eight grand) and located the nest; the kits were behind Alex's closet; so he drilled a two inch hole, and when I arrived home from work, I was able to see the babies through this hole, you could poke them, and apparently the mom was somewhere in this recess as well, somewhat trapped by the insulation; Mark also reported there was some other carcass (with maggots on it) in the recess next to this one-- it was either a squirrel or a raccoon, he couldn't tell and he couldn't get it out until the mother raccoon was gone; the raccoon guy came back over and said he didn't realize that the mother could get to the other side of the attic and he recommended laying down more scent in the attic and in the nest hole, and promised she would soon vacate, but Wayne -- the contractor-- wanted to get the job done as soon as possible and was seriously thinking about cutting a hole in the closet wall and trying to capture the mother and get her out that way; there was an interesting, slightly confrontational showdown between the contractor and the raccoon guy, with each of them questioning the other's methods, but the raccoon guy finally convinced Wayne that a cornered raccoon is a vicious dangerous, disease-ridden beast, and Wayne decided he would just have to finish the job later; now all this was compelling drama, but this is what is truly important about the story;

3) part three . . . the moral: what's truly important here is that Dave is no longer in trouble and, in fact, his wife even said that Dave's laziness was "a blessing in disguise" because if Dave would have permanently affixed that screen-- as his wife suggested-- then the mother would have either been trapped in the attic and ripped her way out, or perhaps, she would have been "locked" out of the attic and done serious damage trying to get back in, or she would have abandoned her babies and they would have died in there, creating a horrible stench; so marital bliss was restored (without flowers) and I was a hero in the manner of Hamlet; at this point I decided to switch things up and actually do some stuff, so I reconnected with my eccentric animal trapping neighbor Leonard-- who I hadn't spoken with since this incident-- and though he had given up trapping animals and driving them far from the borough, he was extremely helpful and set me up with a nice metal trap and warned me six way to Sunday about how mean and nasty raccoons were and how they would "rip your arm off" and so I put the trap up in the attic just for extra insurance (baited with marshmallows and peanut butter) and broke the access panel while doing this, so I had to pull out some plywood and cut a new panel-- which was scary because it meant the attic was wide open and that crazy animal was definitely up there-- but I got that done and the panel back in place and then we went to dinner for my grandmothers 93rd birthday, dropped the kids at my parents' house because our house was a mess and full of dust and debris, and then Catherine and I returned home and quickly fell asleep . . . and in the middle of the night Catherine heard the mother carrying out all the babies and in the morning we checked the hole in the closet and the babies were gone . . . so I stapled the screen in place -- very lazily-- and if that loosely affixed screen stays put, then we know we are raccoon free and I can get up there and screw it in, and if not, I'll be writing another extremely long sentence; again, to reiterate, the point of this story is that Dave's Laziness looked like it might undo him, but instead his unmitigated sloth saved the day!

A Reason to Procreate

As long as you bring your kids, you can go to the zoo and not look like a creep.

Blanking the Net

In the beginning, when I went on-line, I really felt like that guy in the Le Corbusier chair being blown away by a high fidelity Maxell cassette tape-- surfing was the perfect term for how I felt while navigating this weird and wild tsunami of information (the first word I ever typed into a search engine was "catapult" and I was astounded that there was stuff on the other end of the search) but things have changed; now that the digital world is fairly tame and civilized, "surfing" seems too athletic a metaphor; we don't careen and carve through a frothy chop of crashing dynamic digital liquid any longer, we "visit" sites that are curated to our tastes so that we feel perfectly at home . . . consequently, we need a new term for this experience: I humbly suggest "scootering around the web." 

Speaking Proper English is Bad For Your Bank Account

During an episode of the TED Radio Hour called The Money Paradox, I learned about a weird study conducted by Keith Chen; in his own words, this is what he discovered:

I find that languages that oblige speakers to grammatically separate the future from the present lead them to invest less in the future . . . speakers of such languages save less, retire with less wealth, smoke more, practice more unsafe sex and are more obese; surprisingly, this effect persists even after controlling for a speaker’s education, income, family structure and religion . . .

and so if you live in Germany, Finland or China than you save a hell of a lot more money than if you live in America or England or India or Greece, and while I find this disturbing-- that the grammar of your language can have such a large effect on your behavior-- it also makes perfect sense; I love talking about "Future Dave"-- this abstract guy who might do any number of things in some vague time far from now, but Future Dave never appears in my world, so Present Dave never meets him . . . Present Dave refers to him, but always in a compartmentalized future tense, such as "I wonder how Future Dave will feel about having a tattoo of a lizard ripping out of his skin?" but if Present Dave were speaking Chinese, instead of English, then he would say "I wonder how Future Dave feels about drinking a sixth shot of tequila?" and this blurring makes the future and the present more connected . . . I know I should be saving more for retirement, but I care a lot more about Present Dave than I care about Future Dave, so it's hard to get really amped for that guy (and perhaps this is why it's hard to get extremely indignant about the possibility that the pension fund I've been paying into my entire career might go bankrupt by the time I retire . . . because that's not going to affect me, it's going to affect some old crotchety dude with my same name and address, but he's a separate entity).