The Test Outro: We Had a Good Time (Until We Didn't)

Though my inspiration for this song was Sam Quinones' book Dreamland, which details America's opiate epidemic, the lyrics worked for the outro song of our podcast The Test . . . anyway, here it is, unmarred by vociferous debate.

The Test . . . Episode 3!

We tighten things up on Episode Three of The Test . . . the introduction is shorter, the theme song is clearer, and we cut to the chase faster; Young Cunningham creates and administers a quiz about the two things for which she feels a profound love: TV and technology . . . i.e. phones and shows, and Stacey and I flail a bit with our answers-- and on the one question I actually know, I make the mistake of letting Stacey answer first . . . and she knows too . . . very annoying . . . I  also claim that I am "crushing it" at one point, but that's patently false . . . anyway, give it a listen, pass it on to your friends, don't be afraid to play (and fail) at home, and be on the look-out for Episode 4, in which Stacey gets all anxious and sweaty.

L'esprit de la voie des genoux?

The French say l'esprit de l'escalier-- which translates as "the wit of the staircase" and refers to when you think of the perfect retort after the argument has ended, when you are on your way up the stairs-- and sometimes this is a good thing . . . that you don't think of the most pointed, cutting thing to say (e.g. George Costanza: Well, I had sex with your wife!) because the perfect retort, while satisfying, can also make some waves . . . so, when I was about to swim a few laps in the unoccupied heated outdoor pool up at the Cape, and the old coot and his octogenarian wife chastised me for unhooking the floating safety rope that divides the deep end from the shallow end because-- get this-- the pool inspector might walk in at any time and there were children around (none in the pool environs, but they did have a point, there were children in the vicinity, just not at the pool) I didn't say anything witty or even clever, I simply said, "sorry" and placed the line on the concrete and swam my laps (unimpeded) and tried to ignore the old bat's last line, delivered from her chaise lounge: "that's what they all say" and as I swam off my anger (while thinking of all kinds of perfect retorts about the sadness of their existence and how ironic it was that they were so cautious now that they had so little time left and how swimming laps might be a way to prolong their miserable lives) and by the time I surfaced for air, my dad had mollified them and we put the safety rope back in place and I left, saved from an altercation by "the wit of the lap lane."

This Is How I Roll (and Spill)

If you spill a bunch of coffee on your shirt on the way to the gym, even if you're a minute from your house, you don't turn the car around, you just carry on (or at least that's how I do it)

Welcome to Welcome to Nightvale

Reputable people kept telling me to listen to the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, but I kept thinking: do I really need to start following the news cycle of a fictional town? when I have enough trouble keeping straight what's happening on the actual Earth? why would I need more news? fictitious news? it's hard enough to find time to listen to Planet Money and Dan Carlin and Radiolab and Freakonomics . . . but I now that I've listened to the show, I realize these thoughts were idiotic; Welcome to Night Vale is fantastic and spooky and visceral and poetically hysterical, like Stephen King meets NPR meets Jack Handy, set in a haunted desert version of Winesburg, Ohio . . . with a little bit of the Parks & Rec Pawnee vs. Eagleton rivalry -- except that it's The Night Vale Scorpions vs. The Desert Bluffs Cacti . . . and my kids love the show as much as me, so fuck the real news cycle, especially when the headlines are simply to fill the space: "No Evidence of Shooting at Washington Navy Yard Despite Lockdown" . . . we're following indescribable shapes and hooded figures and the perfect hair of Carlos the scientist.

Spring Cleaning = Explosive Diarrhea

The Great Island Trail, which is just west of Wellfleet, leads to one of the most scenic spots on Cape Cod . . . high dunes divide Wellfleet Harbor from Cape Cod Bay, and once you cross over, especially if it is low tide, the barren beaches and tide pools extend for miles-- all the way to Jeremy Point-- and while we were wading south towards the point, Alex and Ian netted various sea life (and put them in a bucket and pitted them against each other . . . the hermit crabs fought each other over a shell and the shrimp acted as the audience on their "channel" of violence, as they called the bucket) and we met a lovely older couple who were digging large clams and we got to talking and the old lady said to me, "do you like sushi?" and I said "sure" and she then opened one of these fist-sized quahogs, which were much too big to slurp down raw (they were to be used for clam strips and chowder) and cleaned it out and gave me "the eye," which is the muscle that the clams uses to hold its shell together-- it was shaped like a scallop and tasted something like a scallop, delicious and salty and fresh, and then she said something about how this always gives her a "spring cleaning," but I didn't understand the euphemism, and then she offered me another one, which I ate, and then she said, "I don't eat them out here because they give you a spring cleaning and it's too far from the house if I have to go" and I realized that when she said "spring cleaning" she actually meant "explosive diarrhea" and this made me a little nervous because we were quite far from civilization and we certainly didn't pack any toilet paper, but my stomach held up just fine (and I even managed to lug four big rocks back to the car, for my rock wall).

There's No Emoticon For This One . . .

After my father sent his burrito back for the second time (because it wasn't hot enough) and asked for more sour cream, even though we already had two little bowls of it, I looked at the waitress and tried to convey this with my glance: I'm sorry you're going through this hassle and thank you for humoring my dad and even though I seem to be a part of this family, I might be adopted or something, so don't hold it against me . . . and look -- my son is eating tamales with mole sauce! so we know what's good! and I tried to explain to my dad that you can only make a burrito so hot because you've got to wrap all the fillings in a tortilla, but I don't think he heard me and he's really not familiar with Mexican food . . . and all this makes me wonder if I'm going to get like that when I get old, confused and befuddled by the unfamiliar-- because, truth be told-- I'm not adopted, and if that's where I'm headed, then please just laugh at my absurd senior citizen requests and repetitions, instead of spitting in my food . . . muchas gracias and she seemed to understand me, to completely comprehend all the nuances of my glance, which makes me wonder if she has this experience often (which would make sense, considering she works at an authentic Mexican place in a non-Spanish speaking location).

A Good Book To Read in Winter (in Norway)

Jo Nesbo's Norwegian thriller The Son starts dark and gets darker . . . you travel with an incarcerated, nearly broken, drug addicted, oddly mystical son bent on finding out the truth about his father and avenging his death, and not only does the son escape from prison, but he also escapes the clutches of heroin addiction; he travels through a maze of byzantine corruption that I gave up trying to comprehend, and I had to skim the last hundred pages, to find out what happens . . . the book definitely had me in its grip for a while, but then I lost patience, probably because of the good weather; I think if I read it in the dead of winter, in Norway, then I would have hung in until the end, but the good weather makes it tough to focus-- everyone is at the pool and there is beer to drink-- this is why I always teach Hamlet in January . . . you can only do ghost stories when it gets dark at 5 PM.

1967: Year of Contrast

A fact thanks to Dan Carlin's podcast Common Sense: the Summer of Love was also The Long Hot Summer of 1967 . . . so if you were hanging out in San Francisco at the time, you were probably doing drugs and participating in an orgy, but if you happened to be in Newark New Jersey, you were probably looting and rioting.

Droning About Drones

Don't worry, this isn't going to become a niche blog about RC quadcopters, but I would like to report that just after my son Alex's drone broke beyond repair, my younger son Ian received his drone from Amazon, the Hubsan X4-- a highly rated little gadget-- and it flew properly exactly one time before he broke a propellor . . . and once he attached the replacement propellor (included) the drone lost its balance, and now, within moments of take-off, it immediately flips and crashes (could be the trim) and my friend Alec broke it down for me this way: "you can either buy ten 50 dollar drones or one 400 dollar drone, it's your choice" and obviously we are on the fifty dollar route, but there is one other road you can take, and it's awful: you can buy a $1500 RC helicopter, learn to do incredible tricks with it, and then decapitate yourself in front of your friends . . . I thought this was an urban legend, but apparently it really happened; while headline is bordering on comical . . . Toy Helicopter Slices Off Top of Man's Head . . . the result is real and I'm not going to lie: I showed the article to my children in an attempt to discourage them from pursuing this whole RC drone/copter thing and then I ended the lesson on the frustrations and dangers of drones with one of my many brilliant aphorisms . . .  "go outside and play ball . . . a ball always works."

A Drone Miracle

My son Alex was determined to fix his broken quadcopter drone, so he ordered a tiny two dollar motor from China, waited a month for it to arrive, then unscrewed a million tiny screws to get the drone body apart, replaced the broken motor-- with some help from his father-- and finally, had a complete meltdown when he attempted to get it airborne and found out that in order for it to fly, two of the drone propellers have to spin clockwise and two of them have to spin counterclockwise-- but, because of the way he hooked up the wires, he had three motors spinning clockwise . . . which pushed one side of the drone back into the ground, but-- I'll give him credit-- he opened the thing up again and switched the wires (which I thought might work) and it reversed the direction of the propeller and the drone lifted off for a moment, and then the battery died and then the wire connected to the battery ripped out and we tried to unsuccessfully fix that and then I told him to go outside and play with a ball because I couldn't take anymore . . . but then mom found the spare battery ( a minor miracle) and Alex charged it and hooked it up and -- miraculously-- it worked . . . and he got two days of enjoyment out of it before he crashed it and broke another motor, and now he has decided to give up on drones (a miracle in itself).

Podcast of Dave! And Stacey! And Cunningham!

For a full description, head over to Gheorghe: The Blog, or-- if you're brave-- just dive in and listen; but Stacey, Young Cunningham and I have recorded a podcast: it's called The Test and the theme is epistemology . . . and we've got background music and questions and debate and a theme song and an audio montage (which is probably far too long and self-indulgent) and you can play at home, but you can't study; we are planning on having guests in the future, so if you want to be on the show, tell us.

Dave Prevents a Race Riot With an Allusion to Mean Girls

I was showing The Manchurian Candidate  to my senior Composition class and I promised them a scene where Frank Sinatra does karate, and at some point midway through the film a group of girls yelled at me: "Where is Frank Sinatra? You said Frank Sinatra was going to do karate!" and I pointed to Frank Sinatra, who happened to be on screen, and I said "he's right there and you already saw him do karate" and one of the girls said, "Frank Sinatra is white? I thought he was black," and the rest of the girls on that side of the room concurred-- Frank Sinatra was most certainly a black guy-- and when I told them that was not correct, they expressed sincere disbelief that Frank Sinatra was an Italian American-- including an African-American girl-- and then an Asian girl yelled "Just because he has a soulful voice doesn't mean he's got to be black!" and then, just before the race riot, I nipped the whole thing in the bud with the perfect line, a line that only an extremely experienced high school teacher could come up with in a situation like this . . . I said, "Oh my God, you can't just ask why Frank Sinatra is white" in my best Gretchen Wieners voice, and everyone laughed and lauded me for a job well done (nothing is more important for a high school teacher than to have comprehensive knowledge of Mean Girls).

Bonus Sentence: The Lorax Needs to Write This Article

Here is the Star Ledger article about the car chase that started on our street; apparently a local dude was caught with drugs that he was intending to distribute and took off in a hurry-- and though the chase ended when he crashed into a police car, the article explains that no one was injured . . . which I suppose is technically true, but I think the writer should mention that there was some flora that suffered injury-- my beautiful tree that I planted and tended for its entire life . . . who will speak for the trees?

Three Bands: Three Long Songs (with occasional breaks for profanity)

The Stone Pony Summer Stage is a great place to see a concert: there's a beach breeze, it's not too loud, the shows begin early (doors opened at 5:30 . . . right in my wheelhouse), the beer is fairly cheap (5 dollars for a domestic, 6 for the fancy stuff) and there's plenty of space to move around; a bunch of us saw Gogol Bordello, Flogging Molly and Mariachi El Bronx Friday night and it was a lot of fun (despite several mosh pit injuries-- Alec pulled his bicep and Rob suffered a stomped toe) although I will say it sounded like we heard a total of three very long songs: one hipster mariachi song, one extremely long Irish punk song, and one fairly long gypsy rock'n'roll song; in other words, the bands sounded great, but you couldn't tell one song from the next (also, Mariachi El Bronx are not from the Bronx, nor are there any Mexicans in the band, yet they dress like a mariachi band and do a lot of punk versions of traditional mariachi songs . . . and then curse a lot in English in between the songs).

Blood, Knife, Tooth, Sink . . .

Imagine seeing this vivid tableau soon after your son lost a tooth; you walk into the bathroom, and there's blood spattered on the white porcelain around the drain, and your son's pocket knife rests on the sink ledge . . . and you've been watching a lot of Parks and Rec with the boys and they love Ron Swanson-- who would be just the kind of guy to use a pocket knife to remove a loose tooth . . . but it turned out to be a false alarm, two unrelated incidents . . . Alex was cleaning his pocket-knife, which was covered with dirt, when his loose tooth fell out.

Can Duct Tape Really Fix Anything?

Yesterday afternoon, a bit after six PM, Ian and Catherine heard a loud bang on our front lawn-- they were in the kitchen-- and so they ran outside and saw the tail end of a wild car chase . . . a white car drove over the No Parking sign in front of our neighbor's house (causing the loud bang) and then raced across our lawn, clipping one of our trees; this caused the car's bumper and side mirror to come off (and he also knocked a huge chunk of bark off my tree . . .  more on that later) and then the car turned back onto the road and continued south on Valentine, pursued by five police cars (marked and unmarked) and though I was in the room closest to the incident, I missed the entire thing (I was in my music studio, wearing headphones, editing a podcast) and finally, from what we heard, the car plowed into a police road block on Benner, injuring the officer that was in the car . . . I can't find an article yet, but I will link to one when I do; Cat was freaked out because they were out on the front lawn five minutes before, unloading from a day at the pool, and I was freaked out because my beautiful tree, that I planted when Ian was born, suffered a severe injury, but the web tells me that if you duct-tape the bark back to the tree, the tree has a much better chance of surviving, so though it looks weird, I did it and I hope it works.

We Can't Spare a Square

The final message of Michael Tennesen's book The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man is that humans are probably going to go the way of the crocodylomorphs (crocodile-jawed creatures that existed 230 million years ago, just before the age of the dinosaurs, and "spread across the lands, evolving into different forms, from slender, long-legged, wolf-like animals to huge, fearsome animals that were the apex predators of the food web") due to various causes (overpopulation, starvation, disease, loss of native species, exhausted soil, global warming, rising oceans, ocean acidification, etcetera) and it will probably be-- in a geological sense-- sooner, rather than later . . . this is where the analogies come into play, because, despite our intelligence, humans have great difficulty realizing what a young species we are and just how ubiquitous extinction is; Tennesen uses Stephen Jay Gould's explanation: "if our planet's beginning is the end of your nose and its present is your outstretched fingertip, then a single swipe of a nail file wipes out all of human history" and I recently hear Louise Leakey describe it like this: if the history of life on earth is a 400 sheet roll of toilet paper, then the dinosaurs take up fourteen sheets and modern humans have been around only for the last millimeter of the roll . . . so we haven't existed long enough to wipe our own ass.

Don't Mention This Hypothesis to My Wife (or do it when I'm not around)

I'm not going to say this out loud, because summer vacation has just started-- which is awesome-- but the house does get disastrously messy because we are living in it a lot more, but still-- just entertain this for a moment-- isn't it possible that it might be more efficient to put dishes in the dishwasher once there is a whole pile of dirty stuff, instead of putting them in one at a time, right when you're finished using them?

There's a Fine Line Between Pedant and Douche-Bag

For the past few years, I've been correcting certain people over the grammatically correct usage of lie/lay . . . not all people, just my wife and kids (because they kept telling our dog to lay down and I couldn't stand it) and my fellow English teachers (because I think they should know better) and the occasional neighborhood kid (because if you're hanging out in my kitchen, eating my snacks, enjoying my air-conditioning, then I've got the right to correct your grammar) but I think I may need to give up the ghost because:

1) it's extremely annoying, and I'm already that guy enough . . . I don't need to add to it;

2) the battle may be lost . . . Roman Mars, the eloquent host of the phenomenal design podcast 99% Invisible, botched lie and lay twice in the first two minutes of the new episode-- "Freud's Couch"-- which, of course, features lots of lying down on furniture and laying out the structure of one's subconscious . . . but here's something even more interesting: though Mars makes the typical mistake with the verb (54 seconds into the podcast and then a few seconds later) and describes how Sigmund Freud would have his patient Fanny Moser "lay" down on his couch and then he explains that when "she was laying there" he would have her talk about what was running through her mind, but in the paragraphs summarizing and describing this particular episode, the error is corrected: "when Moser came to Freud, he would have her lie down on the couch, just like he did with his other patients," which means some neurotic copy editor heard the error and fixed it in print . . . and maybe that's how it will be from here on in, it's something to correct in writing, but something to let slide during conversation . . . on a related note, I'm not sure which is correct-- "just like he did with his other patients" or "just as he did with his other patients" . . . I don't know and I'm not going to worry about it.