Is There Something Wrong With Us?

The Pew Research Center did a survey on "U.S. View of Technology and the Future" and one of the questions asked was what futuristic technology Americans would want to own . . . and while some of the answers are typical: 6% want a flying car or bike and 3% have a yearning for a teleportation device, the chart-topper is time travel-- despite the paradoxical, monumental, and wildly unpredictable philosophical ramifications, a whopping nine percent of Americans want to travel through time whenever they see fit-- and so when we finished a unit in my Comp classes on evaluating technology, I asked my students the same question . . . and got the same result-- the survey was anonymous and these are high school seniors, so I got a few requests for robot sex-slaves, some interest in instant food machines, very little desire for improved health, and-- just like the Pew survey-- time travel was the leader of the pack . . . which led to a discussion of why we desire technology that is inherently dangerous, and will eventually destroy us . . . there's a good This American Life segment on this theme called The Leap (they discuss the survey, interview people on why they want to travel through time-- mainly to rectify embarrassing situations and kill Hitler, and why older Americans don't want to travel through time).

Benjamen Walker's Theories About Uber

I have been listening to Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything podcast . . . it's the first podcast on a list of favorites by Roman Mars (99% Invisible) and it is weird and hip and technological; my favorites so far are Instaserfs and the similarly themed Enchanting By Numbers . . . in both we get unique perspectives on the sharing economy; a caveat: if you listen to them, you might never use Uber again.

I Hope My Kids Don't Read My Blog

I broke down and bought a Wii U for my kids for Christmas (along with Super Smash Bros) and while this is ostensibly because they are doing well in school and band and all their various endeavors, it is actually because I wanted to avoid buying Ian a hoverboard and Alex another drone-- because I know exactly what happens with drones and I have no idea what happens with hoverboards.

Dave Pleads His Case About Being Overwhelmed

I finished Brigid Schulte's book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No one Has the Time in the perfect setting: at jury duty, just after I had to plead with the judge to excuse me from a ten day straight asbestos trial-- she didn't care that I was a teacher who taught three different preps (who would teach Henry IV part I?) but I finally convinced her when I explained that I was the primary child-care person after school . . . but she didn't buy this right away, and grilled me about it-- I'm wondering if I were a woman, if she would have let me go easier; I told her the trial schedule was giving me an anxiety attack and that I was responsible for not only watching my kids after school, but getting them organized and to their various activities . . . and while I constantly fight against over scheduling, my kids have somehow become very involved in a lot of stuff-- orchestra, jazz band, basketball, soccer, piano lessons, art class, alternate art school auditions, etc. etc.-- and Ian and I have been trying to play tennis every day in the balmy weather (not that the judge would care about this) and there's a very active dog in the mix (would the judge care about this?) and while I told her I was happy to do a trial in the summer-- although it's hard to catch me then-- or a short trial, like a day or two, that there was no way I could manage ten days in a row, and she kept asking me if there was someone who could watch my kids for that time and I told her I would have to hire a sitter, and that was a red flag-- they can't make you do that, and once I told her I'd have to leave my ten year old alone quite a bit, she turned snotty and said, "Well, you shouldn't have to leave a ten year old alone" and I was like: that's what I've been talking about here! but I also didn't want to tell her that my ten year old was often alone, navigating the mean streets of our town, on his way from orchestra to art class, dragging his giant trombone-- or walking home from school and getting there before his brother . . . but now I know that child-care duty trumps jury duty and I'll write that to them when I get the next notice . . . my brother works in the courthouse and he later talked to the judge, who apparently knew who I was and told my brother I was "nervous" when i said my piece and I was like no shit I was nervous! how the hell do you schedule a ten day break from your life?  and when do you need to do this in front of a judge, four lawyers, and the other fifty random people who are waiting to do the same-- staring daggers at you, especially if you get to leave the room and go back downstairs, while a white noise generator creates a sound barrier so they can't hear exactly what you said to get you excused; Schulte's book addresses this, she covers the wild and variegated history of parenting . . . from less sentimentality to more, from hired help to permissiveness to "Donna Reed" style self-sacrificing and indulgent 1950's moms to the "benign neglect of the 1960s to the denigration of marriage in the 1970s because it was an "institution of oppressive patriarchy" to the intensive mothering of today . . . and then there's the inevitable comparison to the Danes, who work less hour than us, consume less, own less material possessions, spend more family time, have better child care and family leave, have more liberated women and working moms, more dads that cook and take care of the kids, better educational systems, less of an income gap, a low unemployment rate, six weeks of paid vacation,  great public transportation, and a host of other wonderful things . . . but they are a much smaller, much more homogenous country than the United States (which doesn't excuse our lack of quality childcare and downright pathetic family leave programs) and the final lesson of the book is to embrace the now and make the most of your time, to try not to allow it to become corrupted and fragmented, and I'm a big fan of this-- which is probably how I get this blog done each day and still manage to edit the podcast and make some time for recording music and playing sports . . . there was also one piece of research that made me very happy-- not only do we sleep in 90 minute cycles, but we work that way too, so it's much better to work in short bursts, which is how I do it-- not more hours, but less hours in more frenetic bursts-- and not only that, but top workers "rested more . . . they slept longer at night and they napped more in the day" and if there's one thing I'm all about, it's more sleep and more naps.

Will the Benefits of Global Warming Last through the Winter?

Usually once fall soccer season ends, that's it for outdoor sports-- aside from snowboarding and sledding-- but this year my son Ian and I have had a chance to play tennis nearly every day . . . he's hit more tennis balls in the past few weeks than he previously hit in his entire (rather short) career, and because of all this practice, Ian is really nailing both his forehand and backhand, he's hitting crosscourt and down the line shots, he can serve a bit, and he's coming to the net . . . not only that, but I've developed a brand new top-spin two handed backhand that i can hit with power and accuracy . . . so the question is: will our well-honed strokes last through the winter snow, or will they melt away with the spring thaw?

Undefeated (and a turtle) defeat The Affair

My wife and I put the nix on the first season of The Affair-- despite the good acting, the show is SLOW-- so after seven rather repetitive episodes, we mailed it back to Netflix and instead watched the documentary Undefeated (Netflix streaming) which tells the story of the Manassas Tigers-- an inner city football team with typical inner city struggles . . . single parents, jail, gangs, violence, poverty, lack of funding, and general apathy towards school-- and the volunteer coach Bill Courtney and his volunteer assistants-- white men from the rich suburbs of Memphis-- and how they build relationships with these predominantly African-American kids and eventually cobble together an excellent team that goes to the play-offs . . . it's just as cliche and inspirational and tear-inducing as Friday Night Lights and Remember the Titans and Rudy and The Blind Side, but there's a much stronger dose of reality (as there should be, as it's a documentary) and there's also an undersized lineman named Money talking about his pet tortoise, which he pulls from a large metal bucket in the yard of his tiny house; his description of the turtle is poetic and metaphorical: "just look at the texture of him . . . on the outside everybody wants to be hard and show their strength, but on the inside it's like they're all flimsy, you know, skin and bones" and that's a lesson that he not only understands, but has to literally endure . . . you'll have to watch the film to find out how, and it's certainly a universal lesson that all football players grapple with, but despite the possibility of injury, letdown, and worse, this story makes a solid case for why we should keep playing football in America.

The Test 26: The Moral of the Story (No Napping on the Job)

You can either rest on your laurels or get off your ass and listen to this week's episode of The Test . . .  and you certainly can't study for this one: instead you have to think about the big picture-- the moral of the story-- in order to score points; so check it out, play at home, see how you fare, and enjoy our special guest (Whitney) and his comprehensive knowledge of The Princess Bride.

Let's Get Ready to Coddle!!!!!!!!!!

The Atlantic article "The Coddling of the American Mind" by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt is an excellent and comprehensive overview of how many Americans are starting to view the world-- especially college students; the article's subtitle is "in the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like . . . here's why that's disastrous for education-- and mental health" but the article covers more than college campuses-- it connects social media, politics, and society as a whole to the thesis; the article is insanely long, and while I suggest you read it in its entirety, I will offer a summary here for those of you who like to be coddled:

1) social media makes it "extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors" so we've entered a new age of polarization, where it's easy to "like" a point of view skip the dialogue, debate, discussion, and negotiation that comes with actually listening to someone else's perspective;

2) the youth of America have grown up in a completely politically polarized environment-- surveys from the 1970s show that Republican and Democrat antipathy was "surprisingly mild" but the negative feelings of each party toward the other have grown steadily, a process called "affective partisan polarization," which is a serious problem for a country that considers itself a democracy;

3) hypersensitive college students have created a new term called "microagression," which can apply to any phrase or action that might be construed offensive-- whether it was overt, subtextual, or accidental-- and this led to the whole "shrieking girl" incident on the Yale campus protesting the hypothetical possibility of unregulated Halloween costumes;

4) hypersensitive college students are now demanding "trigger warnings" from teachers if they are about to encounter something uncomfortable in a text, so that they are not traumatized by something shocking or unexpected . . . even though this goes against all psychological logic, as this system will keep students in a state of anxiety about these issues-- racism, terrorism, abuse, etc.-- instead of the time-tested use of "exposure therapy," which rewires your brain to be able to deal with the difficult topic;

5) emotional reasoning has become the dominant mode of discourse on college campuses, with a subjective definition of offense-- if it offends you then it is offensive-- and this has bled into workplace harassment policies, where the same language is cropping up: there is no objective definition of harassment, it is simply if the person being harassed takes umbrage, then it is harassment;

6) cognitive therapy is a technique that probably needs to be taught on college campuses; "the goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately" and this is done by learning the most common cognitive distortions that people fall prey to-- overgeneralizing, dichotomous thinking, blaming, emotional reasoning . . . all twelve are listed at the end of the article and I am going to use them in class during my logical fallacies unit . . . this is one of my favorite things to teach in Composition class, though I warn the students that they may get in hot water when they start pointing out these "cognitive distortions" . . . especially when a parent or teacher employs one.

Just In Case You Thought You Had Things Under Control

Just in case you haven't read Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" lately . . . or recently watched The Matrix, here is a friendly video reminder that human perception is limited, that what you see isn't what you get, and that our brains are barely hanging on to this thin thread we refer to as reality (this is also an opportune time to wish Einstein's Theory of Relativity a happy 100th birthday).

The Music is Coming From Inside the House!

It was Thanksgiving and we were about to leave the house for the afternoon when I heard music coming from the kitchen-- so I checked the computer but it wasn't coming from there, and then I checked the laptop and it wasn't coming from there, and then I thought it might be coming from my son's Ipod touch so I checked on the shelf but I couldn't find it, and so I went toward the stairs, and the music sounded like it might be coming from upstairs, so I went up the stairs, and I could still hear it, faintly, but my son's Ipod dock wasn't on, nor were any of the clock radios, and so I went back downstairs and Catherine had finished carrying the appetizers to the car and so I asked her if she heard music and she did but she couldn't figure out where it was coming from and I listened very closely and it sounded like it was coming from the dog's food bowl, so I bent down and I could really hear it, but I knew there was no way that the dog's food bowl was pulling in radio signals, though the music was oddly clearer when I bent over and that's when I had my "eureka!" moment-- though this epiphany was a far cry from Archimedes' realization-- as I remembered that my Ipod Nano was in my pocket, and it has the ability to play music through a tiny speaker-- something that always surprises me-- and that's what it was doing, at a low volume bordering on the subliminal (it's only capable of low volume)-- so I was essentially chasing my own tail while I was looking for the music, and wherever I went, there it was.

The Host: Something to Stream on Netflix

If you're looking for a streaming movie on Netflix that is a little edgy but still fairly appropriate for the whole family (there's some violence and some Korean profanity) then I recommend Ba Joon-ho's dysfunctional family/monster flick The Host . . . the movie is tragic, funny, and intense by turns, and you're never quite sure which direction the plot and the tone will go-- it's also beautiful, even the disgusting and absurd creature (Jabberwocky/leech/amphibian mash-up) is mesmerizing-- and pace isn't like Cloverfield . . . right from the start, there are plenty of gratuitous shots of the monster, flinging itself gibbon-like from bridge strut to bridge strut, or causing near-comical chaos in crowds along the Han River . . . this is a great way to introduce kids to reading subtitles, and also to prepare them for films that aren't quite so "American," as there's a little bit of happiness at the end, but it's mixed with tragedy and melodrama, and while some of the monster/horror conventions are followed, others are discarded or toyed with . . . if you haven't seen this one yet, check it out: Nam-joo only brings home the bronze medal, but she deserves the gold.

Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland and USA! USA! USA!

According to Brigid Schulte, in her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, the United States "ranks dead last on virtually every measure of family policy in the world," and it is one of only four countries without paid leave for parents-- our compatriots are Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland . . . Saudi Arabia -- where women can't drive-- has paid leave . . . Togo and Zimbabwe have 14 weeks of paid leave . . . Mongolia has paid leave . . . and Schulte traces this back to the early '70's, when women starting working and there was overwhelming political and populist support for government subsidized child care, but conservative "firebrand" Pat Buchanan implemented a campaign equating universal child care with Communist indoctrination; Buchanan-- who never had kids-- called the Comprehensive Child Development Act a "great leap into the dark" that would destroy the fabric of America, because when he was a kid he got to go outside and run around until dark and when you came home from school "you got mom's pie or cake . . . and that's the natural way to grow up" and this complete callous disregard for how people live, this utter political detachment from reality, made me very angry, and now we're stuck with an expensive, unregulated, often impossibly inconvenient child-care system (which can often be downright incompetent and dangerous) and I just really think that our country can improve in this regard-- while we're never going to have policies like Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, we can at least aim to have child-care policy as good as Haiti.

The Test 25: Phone Smarts

This week's episode of The Test is a little different . . . Stacey created descriptions of seven hypothetical smart phones-- apps and call logs and such-- and you have to identify the literary character that owns each device; Cunningam and I did quite well, but we are English teachers . . . so take a crack at it and see how you fare . . . no pressure, although I got a 6 out of 7 and I made a pretty good case for my incorrect answer . . . good luck. 

How Many Tabs is Too Many?

Today is my wife's birthday-- Happy Birthday Cat!-- and while I'll preserve her feminine mystique and not reveal her exact age, I will say this: the other day she had over thirty tabs open on our Chrome browser . . . the number of tabs she had open was nearly equivalent to the years she's been alive on this planet . . . the tabs were miniscule, there were so many of them, and I've spoken to her about this before, but she wasn't very receptive to my criticism . . . in fact, it annoyed her (I guess if opening too many tabs on our web browser is your only irresponsible behavior, then you don't want to hear about it from me) but you can't complain about the computer running slow when you've got thirty-something tabs open, and so my rule of thumb is this: an adult should never have open more than half their age in tabs at any one time . . . right now, I have seven tabs open, which is exactly the right amount, here is the list:

1) Sentence of Dave;

2) The Host (2006 film) Wikipedia page;

3) is crack a narcotic - Google search;

4) Maple Bacon Caramel Crack - Pinterest;

5) Amazon: Gold Tone Acoustic Microbass;

6) woot electronics Gold Tone Fretless Acoustic Microbass;

7) Gheorghe the Blog.

Is It Responsible to Name a Food After a Dangerously Addictive Stimulant Drug?

My wife made an appetizer for Thanksgiving called Maple Caramel Bacon Crack . . . crack as in the drug crack . . . we had to explain what this term meant to our children, and I'm not sure the fact that the "Maple Crack" was very delicious and everyone enjoyed it immensely helped reinforce the negative connotation that we intended for the term, but--luckily--  the appetizer was only mildly addictive, and I suffered no withdrawal symptoms the next day, nor did I attempt to "freebase" the foodstuff and catch on fire.

This Kid Is Ready For College (Aside From His Grades)

Friday morning, my ten year old son Ian rode his longboard to Stop & Shop, bought a package of strawberries, made it home without incident (though he forget to wear his helmet) and then-- without assistance-- he whipped up a batch of strawberry and whipped-cream filled crepes (and he was especially proud of the package of strawberries he chose, not a bad berry in the bunch).

When You Leave the Doll's House You Become . . . Overwhelmed

I finished Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House this morning-- if you haven't read it (and I hadn't until now, though many of the teachers at my school use it in class) then I recommend doing so; it's a fast read, and though it was written 1879, the plot and problems are thoroughly modern-- a woman torn between being the archetypal mother/wife figure and pursuing and resolving initiatives in the wider world (and it's not a static, philosophical feminist treatise or utopian absurdity . . .  the plot forces the issue, and while I rarely read drama, I breezed through this one) and in the end -- SPOILER ALERT! -- and, honestly, I'm not sure a spoiler alert is necessary when a work of art is over a century old, but at the end of the play, Nora walks out on Torvald, right out the door, and right into . . . the other book I am reading, which my wife checked out of the library, read a few pages, and realized that she didn't need to read on because she lives the life described inside; it is called Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has The Time by Brigid Schulte, and I find it fascinating, probably because I jealously guard my leisure time and try to make time for a host of enjoyable activities-- even it means neglecting housework, children, preparation for my job, or amicability-- but Schulte's thesis is that women have a harder time of this . . . they have left the doll's house, but they haven't left the doll's house . . . women work more than ever, but they still take care of the kids more than men do, and do more housework than men do, and experience more fragmentation of time than men do, and multitask more than men do, and live under the shadow of "the ideal worker" who has no responsibilities or time restraints and can devote himself entirely to a career . . . and I'm not sure there is a resolution to this paradoxical Catch 22 . . . neither end of the spectrum is appealing, but I will say this: it sounds really fun to be a man in Italy (25% of Italian men do no housework and the average Italian male has an hour and half more leisure time than the average Italian woman . . . per day).

Dick Gibson Puts on Quite a Show

Stanley Elkin's novel The Dick Gibson Show-- published in 1970-- is the story of an itinerant radioman on an infinite apprenticeship with the medium, and the novel-- while wild and absurd and surreal by turns-- is prescient of our own times; the many voices of Dick Gibson, and the oddballs that call into his shows, are a precursor to the internet, where you can find any voice you like, and tune in to exactly what you want to hear . . . and there's also a set-piece monologue near the end where Gibson laments the state of the world . . . politics, the environment, materialism, asymmetrical warfare, artificial sweeteners, nuclear radiation, monosodium glutamate, distracted driving, and overpopulation . ..  aside from the lack of any mention of global warming, the piece is utterly of our times, as is Dick Gibson's mutable voice; be warned, the book is heavy on style and light on plot, but it's fun and exuberant and weird, and if you like Kurt Vonnegut and Woody Allen and Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, then you might like this as well (and by the way, I'm thankful for my Kindle, which allows me to find and read oddball stuff like this with incredible ease).

Do Radical Islamic Terrorists Desire Red Mercury?

According to urban legend, "red mercury" is a incredibly rare substance which is attracted to gold and repelled by garlic, and it has incredible capabilities; The New York Times explains its purported powers: "when detonated in a combination with conventional high explosives, red mercury could create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb" and-- even more conveniently-- it is rumored that a bit of the stuff could fuel a neutron bomb that could fit in a lunch bag; I hadn't heard of the stuff until yesterday, but apparently the myth of this non-existent material has been around for decades and recently ISIS has been sucked in by the hoax . . . I guess if you're into that kind of eschatological apocalypse, then red mercury is just too damned convenient not to believe in . . . but I've also learned that Graeme Wood's Atlantic article "What ISIS Really Wants" might be exaggerating the fundamental religious element of ISIS's ideology and that the article (and current conservative idiom) might be wrong in saying that we are at war with "radical Islamic terrorists" for several reasons:

1) there are plenty of radically fundamental Muslims who abide by the Koran and aren't violent or on a jihad or in any way associated with terrorism, just as there are plenty of radically fundamental  Mormons who aren't polygamists and plenty of radically fundamental Christians who aren't part of the KKK or The Aryan Nation;

2) we never refer to the Nazis as Christian Fascists, like Indiana Jones, we just say: "Nazis, I hate these guys;

3) there's no reason to constantly associate the 1.5 billion non-terrorist Muslims with the bad apples in Syria;

4) this is probably less of a war, and more about trying to prevent criminal acts from criminally minded people with various abnormal and psychotic and sociopathic and delusional and obsessive and violent proclivities;

5) a terrorist is a terrorist, and scholars are at odds about their motivations, but in the end, if someone is willing to strap a bomb around their waist and blow themselves up in a crowd, it doesn't matter if the act is religious, or indignance over the American invasion of Iraq, or anger because of Saudi cooperation with America or simply because they consider Paris to be the world capital of "prostitution and obscenity" . . . it's still a lunatic act by a lunatic group, and there's no real reason to lump them in with the whole . . . and if ISIS thinks that about Paris, what do they say about Bangkok and Amsterdam?

The Test 24: Stacey Demands (More) Numbers

Stacey demanded another quiz about numbers and I was more than happy to comply; the result is the best episode of The Test yet . . . Cunningham puts Bud Abbott and Lou Costello shame; Stacey does math that would inspire Newton; and Dave questions the capabilities of the human mind . . . there is judgement, ridicule, condescension and derision, but in the end, a good time is had by all . . . so take a shot, see if you can outperform the ladies, and if you're not careful, you just might learn something.