They Skipped This One in Driver's Ed

Obviously drunk-driving and texting-while-driving are bad news, but neither of these is as dangerous as driving with a large hairy black spider on your leg (and the worst thing about this incident is that in my attempt to kill this spider, I endangered my own life and the well-being of everyone in the vicinity of my car, but I didn't actually squash it-- I was travelling forty-five miles an hour--,and it scurried under the floor mat, whereabouts unknown, lurking, waiting for another chance to clamber up my leg and cause more mayhem on the highway).

Reverse Allusion

The weather has warmed up, and this has inspired me to continue my project of grabbing large rocks from the river during low tide, putting them in my backpack, and then carrying them up the hill to my backyard, where I use the stones for decorative mulch and ivy barriers . . . my friend Stacey calls this maneuver The Reverse Shawshank.

'tis the Season to Be Cranky

It is once again time for my semi-annual Daylight Saving Time Rant, but this year I'm happy to report that I've found one kindred soul who empathizes with my pain and suffering-- my friend Ann; her husband takes the same stance as my wife about Daylight Saving Time: it's only and hour, stop complaining . . . but Ann is of my mind, she feels the same anger at this pointless top-down bureaucratic time shift, and suffers the same anxiety and discomfort from the lost hour, which won't be found for six months-- and by then, I'll have adjusted, and it will screw me up all over again, and I don't know why we can't move the time 30 minutes ahead and leave it forever, or do a Daylight Saving Month and move the clocks two minutes a day, so no one is inconvenienced (we have computers) and while everyone agreed it would be bad news if Ann and I were married, as the dynamic combination of our indignance, suffering, criticizing, complaining, and general disgust would create a whirling black hole of negativity that would suck up everyone within twenty miles of the nexus, I think that it is good that we provide some yin in the yang of our respective marriages . . . nothing is more boring than two positive, practical, efficient, and focused yangs . . . so this Daylight Saving Time, let's celebrate the darkness, the yin, and those people who are willing to speak and complain and criticize and whine about this antiquated, absurd, and ultimately pointless practice.

Musical Theater as Punishment

My son Ian got in some serious trouble Friday night and his consequence for his various infractions is a two week grounding; for the first night of his punishment, I forced him to attend the school play: a musical version of Little Women . . .  I didn't really want to go (because I hate musical theater) but I had several students in the show and the added incentive that I could torture my son was enough motivation for me to spend my Saturday night with a bunch of teenagers and their parents in a high school auditorium-- and though we both didn't care much for the plot-- girl stuff-- Ian and I did both concede that the actors were really talented . . . and the next time Ian screws up I'm taking him to the opera.

The Test 40: More Theme Songs

This week on The Test, Cunningham administers another TV (and a movie!) Theme Song Quiz; Stacey and I do better than the first time around (but that's not saying much) and I am chastised by the Voice of God for making stuff up; as a bonus, in order to educate young Cunningham, Stacey sings the theme song from an ancient TV sitcom (and I join in).

 

Pleasant Rhyming Surprise

I was walking the dog Friday afternoon and a middle school girl nearly ran into me-- she was looking down intently at an object in her hands-- and I assumed she was staring at her cell-phone, and my brain started on its normal path-- cursing technology and its death grip on the youth-- but then I noticed she wasn't looking into a tiny screen, she was thoughtfully perusing a perfectly formed pine cone, and this made me very happy.

Something to Teach Your Kids: Money Talks and Bullshit Walks

While my parental proclamation declaring that my children may only watch approved and highly rated documentaries on school nights has predictably fallen by the wayside, I was able to resurrect a bastardized version of the decree on Wednesday night; instead of allowing my kids to continue their obsessive viewing of Family Guy on Netflix, I forced them to watch Spinal Tap . . . and while they didn't laugh as hard as I did, they admitted that they enjoyed the film, especially when Derek Smalls gets stuck inside the pod and when Nigel Tufnel reunites the band for a reunion tour in Japan . . . the next movie I'm forcing my kids to watch: The Breakfast Club.

Pizza Ambitions

The Freakonomics episode "The Cheeseburger Diet" has inspired me to eat pizza from a wider variety of establishments, and while I'm not as ambitious as Emily O'Mara, i.e. I haven't created a rubric to judge the pizza I eat, I do have a couple of recommendations: oddly, Shanahan's Bakery (in Milltown) makes fantastic pizza-- thin and delicious crust, sweet sauce, and just the right amount of cheese . . . and they also have lots of specialty slices; Brothers Pizza (in East Brunswick) was highly recommended by the locals, and I really liked their square cut "Grandma Style"-- which reminded me of Rhode Island pizza (no cheese) but I didn't really care for the mushroom slice-- canned mushrooms, doughy crust, and too much cheese . . . and while both of these places can certainly compete with my two mainstays, Mancini's-- which is in East Brunswick-- and Attilio's in Edison, I've yet to find pizza as good as the thin crust pie at Pete and Elda's in Neptune.

Expatriates

I remember when we first went to live and teach overseas, an older international teacher told me, "Don't expect anyone back at home to care or understand what it's like to leave the United States and live in a foreign place . . . when you go home for the summer, they're just going to tell you how many rolls of toilet paper they bought at Costco," and while I found this to be a bit of an exaggeration (while my family wasn't particularly curious about our life in Syria, my friends and colleagues were generally interested in my stories, anecdotes, and analysis . ..  or maybe they just pretended) and while I thought I had forgotten much of day-to-day life overseas was like, Janice Y. K. Lee's novel The Expatriates brought it all back for me; it's the story of three expatriate women in Hong Kong, and while it's definitely chick-lit and examines the inner lives of these women in detail-- and makes some statements about the inner lives of women in general-- it is also a story of the fishbowl world of the expatriate community and how that world operates . . . there is the sentiment while you are there, far from home, that the people you are with are (and will be) the most significant people in your life-- and Lee takes a sardonic look at that struggle to fit into this new community, how difficult that is for adults, but there is also the realization that "no one back home cares . . . there's an initial shallow interest in what life is like abroad, but most Americans aren't actually interested at all," and not only did the novel detail and articulate that theme, which is near and dear to me, but there's also Mercy Cho-- the Korean-American Columbia graduate who is so ironically American that she sees the "meta" in everything, despite the tragedy that surrounds her, she remains detached; you don't have to have been an expatriate to enjoy this rather intense (but also humorous) novel, but it certainly helps.

The Arbitrary Nature of Basketball Design

99% Invisible is a fairly nerdy podcast which focuses on design, but "The Yin and Yang of Basketball" is a refreshing change from the norm; it features a short history of basketball, and how James Naismith's arbitrary decision to place the basket ten feet off the ground privileged tall folks, which inevitably led the game down a ploddingly boring path, where big men banged around near the paint in order to get as close to the rim as possible, but as interest waned (in the 1970s) the ABA introduced the three-point shot, which spread the game out and led to the current state of affairs: Stephen Curry has broken his own three-point record with twenty-percent of the season left to play, if he continues on this pace he'll outstrip his old total by an incredible amount . . . most sporting records are never broken by more than ten percent (and usually much less) but this indicates a sea change in professional basketball-- for more on this, check out "Stephen Curry is the Revolution" at FiveThirtyEight.

Happy Birthday?

On the morning of my birthday, my mother texted me this:

Hi Dave, Happy 46th birthday . . . have a good day . . . I can't believe in four years, you will be 50, I will be 75, hopefully, and Alex will be driving on his permit . . .

and I feel like the tone of this text is a breach of birthday etiquette, as not only is there a reference to my mother's mortality-- and she's perfectly healthy-- but the text also thrusts me four years closer to my own hypothetical demise, for no apparent reason-- and four years is a long time: longer than my wife and I spent in Syria, the same amount of time it takes most people to get a degree, and so I wanted to text back (but didn't) a message in this vein: "That's true, and in fifty-four years, the bulk of the East Coast will be underwater and we'll both certainly be dead."

The Test 39: Chronological Fun for the Whole Family

Once upon a time, I had a great idea for a Trivial Pursuit style family board game-- you would receive three thematically connected things, and you would have to put them in chronological order (for example: The Great Wall of China, The Taj Mahal, The Mesa Verde Anasazi Cliff Dwellings) and while I gave up on this concept as fun for the whole family, it did make for a pretty good test . . . so check out this week's episode, see if you can compete with Stacey and our two special guests (MJ and Terry) and try not to get involved in our rift with Billy Joel.

More Undercover Economics

I highly recommend Tim Harford's book The Undercover Economist-- here are a few of the many many topics he covers:

1) why storebrand supermarket products are packaged with the "purpose of conveying awful quality" though they are often indistinguishable from actual braids . . . it wouldn't cost much to improve the logos of these products, but that would defeat the purpose, the packaging is designed to put off customers who might be willing to pay more . . . IBM did this with their LaserWriter E low end printer, which was the same machine as their high end LaserWriter, only with an additional chip to slow it down-- it was cheaper to manufacture it like this than make an actual slower printer for less-- and the same goes for "professional" and mass-market versions of software programs . . . the professional is built first and then the cheaper one is handicapped;

2) the externalities of traffic jams . . . the best solution might be a per trip tax, especially during rush hour in congested areas;

3) the economic reasons U.S. health care is "hugely expensive, very bureaucratic, and extremely patchy" and the ways we can combat this, using inside information, catastrophe insurance, and cooperation between the government and markets;

4) why poor countries are poor, and why tariffs and "bringing jobs" back isn't the answer-- this section gets quite technical, but mainly what I got out of it is that poor countries try to protect industries that can't compete in the global market instead of doing what they do best, and this often leads to subsidies and corruption which drain from the economy and only help special interest groups-- in other words, the best way to make really good cars in the US is a technology called "Japan," and we should grow a shitload of corn and export it so we can turn that foreign currency into great cars, instead of trying to make our own . . . this in controversial, of course, and people get laid off and fired and have to be retrained along the way . . . but that's what wealthier countries do, time after time (and I have read that no country has become poorer after opening its borders, though I have also read that you may need the government to help you establish the infrastructure to compete on an global level, and then you can kick out the ladder . . . economists never agree on anything).

Triple Threat

I may not be a great cook, and I'm certainly not a great singer, and (compared to my friends) I'm not the world's best beer drinker . . . but combine the three of them into one event and I think I'm right up there, one of the best there is at beer-drinking and singing while I'm cooking (especially if I'm listening to Sheryl Crowe).

You Be the Judge

So "face-swapping" apps are all the rage right now at our school, and the "face-swap" above is a combination of me and my colleague and podcasting partner Stacey; it's my face on her head, with her hair of course-- and the general consensus is that my face and Stacey's hair make for a spitting image of Brad Pitt . . . of course, there are a few doubters out there-- including my wife-- but I think those in doubt are just jealous and don't want to admit that if I had some luscious brown hair and a slightly longer face, I'd be a super-famous movie-star desired by most of the women on the planet . . . anyway, I'm growing my hair out, so in three or four years, we'll see just how accurate the face-swapping is.

Dave and Theodore Geisel Both Enjoy Another Birthday (to Varying Degrees)

The doctor and I
are both a year older,
but his celebration
is darker and colder.

An Open Letter to the Lady Who Yelled "FULL STOP!" at Me

Dear Old Lady with Two Little White Dogs Who Yelled "FULL STOP!!!" at me,

while I will readily admit that I did not come to a full stop at the STOP sign before I inched my car out at the intersection to make a left turn, I'd also like to point out that in the town of Highland Park, which has narrow streets and many cars parked on the sides of these streets, coming to a full stop at a STOP sign is useless, as you can't see anything until you inch your way forward and look beyond the parked cars on either side of the intersection-- and while I was inching out, at an approximate speed of ten miles per hour, I heard someone screaming . . . it was you, waving your arms, screaming "FULL STOP!" at me and I'd like to point out to you that this distracted me from my task of getting out into the intersection, because instead of looking for oncoming cars and pedestrians and bikers and skateboarders, instead of watching for these hazards, I was looking at you, a wildly gesticulating gray-haired lady with two white dogs, shrieking "FULL STOP!" at me and this nearly made me forget my mission, which is never hit a dog or a child with my vehicle, a mission I am proud to say that I am vigilantly pursuing each and every day of my life, despite your attempts to subvert my attention, and while I realize that you mean well, I hope this sentence finds its way to you and you recognize the irony and insanity of your actions.

Inflation Subverts Sticky Prices

The Planet Money podcast recommended everything written by Tim Harford, and I love Planet Money, so I went to the library and took out The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run-- or Ruin-- an Economy and the guys at Planet Money were right; this is a highly entertaining look at macroeconomics and some of the problems and solutions to keeping an economy chugging along . . . most of ideas are a bit counterintuitive . . . the best time to trim spending, pay off debt and deregulate is during a boom-- and while most countries do these things during a recession, the best thing to do during a recession is dust off huge government projects and allow the government to employ lots of people and create value and worth . . . but again, these are the things that usually happen during a booming economy; I also learned that inflation is the only way to defeat sticky prices and sticky wages-- it's really hard to cut people's pay and to mark down the value of goods and services once a  fair price is established, but if you have a bit of inflation every year, then you can still give people raises, they are just less than the rate of inflation, so-- in effect-- they are taking a pay cut, and this works the same way with devaluing a house or something that is difficult to part with for less money than you paid for it (even if it's truly worth less money-- countries with higher home ownership also have higher unemployment, because it's harder to move where the jobs are because housing markets are slow and sticky and efficient); Harford ends the book addressing inequality of income and what that really means around the world, within countries and between them, and he believes the course of action to understanding large-scale economics is that the models need to incorporate more on human behavior, because we don't behave like perfectly rational future prediction machines, we are at the whims of our "animal spirits" and when these exacerbate an economy on a large scale, it's extremely hard to predict what is going to happen.

The Test 38: One for the Sporting Fanatics

In honor of Stephen Curry's magical performance last night,  I humbly present the newest episode of The Test, which is dedicated to the wonderful pastime which is sports; while Stacey designed this quiz to torture Cunningham-- which it did-- the questions had the opposite effect on me, and made me wax profoundly on the value and significance of all things athletic . . . so give it a shot, see if you can beat me, see if anyone is funnier than Cunningham, and try not to get choked up when Stacey does her send-up up of The Locker Room Speech.

One for the Birders

After some internet research, I realized that I misspoke: the hawk that perched in the maple in our backyard yesterday was a red-shouldered hawk, not a red-tailed hawk . . . sometimes I'm such an idiot.