Two Books with White Covers (Both Containing Allusions)

I recently finished two new books with white covers: But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman and White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer and while both of these authors are generally regarded as critics . . . of popular culture, the arts, and-- in the case of Klosterman-- sports (and both write novels as well) and they both share a precise, crisp writing style that is almost mock-epic in laying bare the logic of thought (Pulitzer Prize winner Kathryn Schulz, in this review, described Dyer as "one of our greatest living critics, not of art, but of life itself, and one of our most original writers") but the big difference-- for me at least-- is that reading Klosterman is a smooth transference of thought, because Klosterman is around my age and he refers to things that I know a lot about (The Sex Pistols, Nick Bostrom, The Cosby Show, American football, Roseanne, Dan Carlin, the intelligence of octopi, the Higgs Boson, and Star Wars are a few that come to mind from his new book) while Geoff Dyer, a fifty year old Brit, will often refer to things just outside my purview . . . I think this is purposeful: Klosterman wants to appeal to a certain category of forty-something semi-literate, semi-intelligent, semi-athletic nerdy hipster (Dave is pegged) while Dyer, though easy enough to read, designs his references and allusions to take you beyond your normal thoughts and logic . . . in this new book, you will "experience the outside world" a world of art and culture and music that you know exists, but probably never investigated; anyway, here are some references and allusions from Geoff Dyer's new book, divided into two categories, the ones I knew and the ones I had to Google:

some of the references I got . . .

1) Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty;

2) Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come;

3) the life and works of Matisse, Pissarro, and Gauguin;

4) Dick Diver in Tender is the Night;

5) Art Pepper . . . I learned about him in the Bosch mysteries;

6) full moon parties at Ko Pha Ngan

7) Don Delillo's novel Underworld;

8) David Mamet and Thomas Pynchon;

and here are some of the people, places, and things I was unfamiliar with . . .

1) the critical works of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer;

2) Walter de Maria's landwork The Lightning Field . . . this giant rectangular collection of tall metal poles is in New Mexico, if I had know about it we could have taken a detour on our cross-country trip and tried to see it . . . although it's difficult to access;

3) Chaiwat Subprasom's photo Koh Tao;

4) Taryn Simon's photo series The Innocents;

5) Simon Rodia and The Watts Towers;

6) jazz bassist Charlie Haden, who played with Ornette Coleman;

7) seminal jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders;

8) Don Cherry's funky fusion album Brown Rice, with Charlie Haden on bass . . . I really like this album and I would have never listened to it if I hadn't read the book . . .

and so thanks to Geoff Dyer for introducing me to some new things, and making me feel a bit dumb, and thanks to Chuck Klosterman for explicating things I already know about, and making me feel smart.

OBFT XXIII

Another successful Outer Banks Fishing Trip . . . thanks to Whitney and everyone else on this year's rather light team of fishermen . . . here are a few things that happened (or might have happened or almost happened) and some notes for next year:

1) I got hit in the genitals by a stray frisbee, thrown by Rob, who might be trying to take me out (as Rob, Whitney and I are the only fishermen who have perfect attendance);

2) best water ever;

3) we were chastised at Tortuga's for clapping and cheering too passionately for a little league baseball game on the TV . . . Jersey Phenom!

4) we learned that the bartender who chastised us for clapping too much while "families are eating lunch" was actually mad at the kitchen for not making him a sandwich and took it out on us;

5) Friday morning Jerry, Rob and I almost played tennis (and Whitney almost almost played tennis but he forgot his racket back in Norfolk);

6) Saturday morning, we actually played tennis, and while I like tennis and Jerry, Rob and I had a good time, the real motivation was my wife's face when I packed the tennis gear . . . the face she made said: all you old guys do is sit around and drink beer and maybe wade into the water, there's no way you're going to play tennis . . . and so while tennis is fun, proving my wife wrong is priceless;

7) Brewmanji . . . a drinking game that involved a bottle cap, the top of a cardboard pizza box, and a magic marker;

8) cornhole on the beach, cornhole tournament with randomized partners, and surprise cornhole aptitude by ringer Matt Rodell . . . but we did NOT have new cornhole bags;

9) we ordered entrees as appetizers at Tortugas and cut them up tapas style . . . Bajan burger bites and Coco Loco chunks;

10) McWhinney surfed;

11) Whitney brought a bucket of music . . . a stereo system consisting of a cell-phone in a bucket;

12) Whitney, in a hungover haze on Saturday, used his bottle of Red Stripe as a condiment . . . he thought he was grabbing a bottle of hot sauce, but it was his beer, which he poured all over his fish taco . . . he said it didn't taste too bad;

13) we did not pound any deck nails but Paci fixed the shower door;

14) Rob's poison ivy was aesthetically unpleasing and did not fit the beach theme;

15) next year, everyone needs to bring a tennis racket;

16) after twenty two years at the Martha Wood cottage, we finally figured out how to use the coffee maker;

17) when I got up at 4 AM on Thursday morning to drive to Jerry's house in Arlington, and Whitney and Gormley were just going to bed in Norfolk, and it took me eleven hours to get back to Jersey on Sunday . . . there's got to be a better mode of transport to get down there . . . a boat? . . . anyway, thanks again to all in attendance, Whitney for hosting, the Martha Wood cottage for remaining, and another year of good weather.

The Agricultural Revolution: It Was a Trap

One of the controversial, mind-bending Guns, Germs and Steel type ideas in Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is that the Agricultural Revolution, while advancing human institutions and increasing population, did more harm than good to the individual-- your typical farmer/peasant had it worse than your typical hunter/gatherer; the peasant ate a less varied diet, starved more often, worked much harder, and became bent, broken and diseased while tilling the fields . . . and Harari insists that we didn't domesticate wheat . . . wheat domesticated us (Malcolm Gladwell frames a similar argument in a more positive manner with Asian culture and rice production in Outliers) and with every toilsome step that humans took to make wheat more bountiful, we became more addicted to the high yields of the plant-- we buried the seeds deep instead of scattering them, we hunched over and cleared the fields of rocks and weeds-- though were meant to climb trees and chase antelopes-- we carried buckets of water to the fields instead of roaming the land in search of diverse nutrition, we built fences to keep out the animals and we dug canals to bring even more water, we fought diseases and blight . . . all so we could stay put and rely more and more on these few staple crops, which were flourishing, now that they had found willing slaves to take care of them . . . and in the lean years, when the crops failed, instead of moving on, people stayed and starved . . . and each step of the way towards this agricultural society was so miniscule that no one noticed what now seems obvious: cultivating wheat . . . it's a trap!

Dave Collects Forms, Finally Reaches Adulthood

Four years ago, I volunteered to coach my son's travel soccer team, and I felt mature and responsible and civic-minded . . . I'm helping the community! . . . I'm helping my family! . . . I'm a good role model for the youth! . . . but that was idealistic collegiate bullshit; coaching kids was mainly fun and easy, especially if you already know what you're doing . . .  all I had to do was show up with the equipment and a good attitude; it took an unfortunate sequence of events has show me the light on what comprises real civic and parental duty: I lost two team managers in the past two seasons, and so I elected to "take one for the team" and manage as well as coach this summer (temporarily, I hope) and now I realize who was doing the real work-- it's not setting up fun and fundamental drills and games to encourage team play, skillful soccer, and player development . . . adulthood is collecting checks and birth certificates and medical release forms, checking them over, learning what a "tape runner" is so you can affix a one inch by one inch photo onto the league approved cardstock, printing rosters onto stickers, disbursing referee money, communicating with the ref assigner, and a hundred other details that I've learned from the elders of the tribe (mainly women) and while I consider the registration system an insane bureaucratic nightmare, it's one of those byzantine realpolitik labyrinths that you have to navigate in order to participate . . . so while it's easy to change the line-up if a kid is sick, or switch practice plans to focus on a different skill, or run a new set-piece play-- which is what makes coaching so much fun-- it's really hard to change how the Mid-New Jersey Youth Soccer Association works, and so the real heroes are the people laboring under the yoke of those rules and regulations . . . I hope I can convince some civic-minded, team-spirited, gullible parent into taking this job off my hands, but I'm glad I'm learning how it works, because not only will I appreciate (and be able to advise) future team managers, but-- once I get this team registered) I will finally feel like a real adult (not the way I usually feel: like a surly teen masquerading masquerading as a real adult, with a bunch of props to lend my costume veracity: wife, kids, dog, house, two mundane cars, etc.)

Second Tier Time Machine Suggestions

If you had access to a time machine and you could visit any two events in the past (without altering them) I've always espoused that you should see a Shakespeare play (in Elizabethan times) and a dinosaur, but here are a worthy alternatives, inspired by the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harris:

1) go back 20,000 years to the island of Flores, and watch three foot tall humans (Homo floresiensis) hunt pygmy elephants . . . so cute;

2) go back 10,000 years to the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina and watch this piece of cave art being created:

3) go back 45,000 years to Eurasia, and check out warfare and interbreeding between modern humans and neanderthals . . . this moment exemplifies the seminal paradox of the human spirit: there are some strange people on the other side of the valley . . . should we court them or kill them?

Craft Beer or Crafty Beer?

If you like Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin and think you're a craft beer connoisseur, then I recommend you cleanse your palate and listen to Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything "sudculture part I."

It's Fun to Think About How Wrong We Are

The premise of Chuck Klosterman's new book But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past is stated succinctly in the subtitle . . . the way a time period is perceived in the future is never the same as the time period is perceived while people are living in it, because of future discoveries and progress in art, science, ethics, and technology and the cultural shifts that accompany these . . . and Klosterman concedes that everyone will admit this in the abstract, but once you get specific-- once you tell people that Abraham Lincoln will be perceived differently, or Led Zeppelin, or the American system of government-- then they have trouble getting on board; from my perspective in the present, this is another excellent Klosterman book, and by excellent, I mean that Klosterman discusses things-- both eminent and obscure-- of which I have working knowledge: American football, Kurt Vonnegut, Kafka, George Saunders, Citizen Kane, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, Star Wars, The Constitution, Renata Adler's novel Speedboat, string theory, Ohio, Nick Bostrom's simulation argument, etcetera-- and he writes about these disparate things so lucidly and logically, that once I read his ideas, I immediately digest them and believe they are my own . . . now this could mean he's just a middle-of-the-road thinker and a really compelling and clear stylist, so that reading his books makes me (and anyone my age who likes literature, science, pop culture and sports) feel really smart, because we get the allusions and can put everything in context, but I like to think otherwise: I like to think that Klosterman takes the time to think extensively, precisely, and comprehensively about the things that people of my generation and proclivities only half-think about, because it's not our job to think full time about hair bands and conspiracy theories and why the hell people still love Ronald Reagan, and Klosterman takes a real critical eye to these things and makes you rethink your half-baked thoughts about them . . . so thanks Chuck, I don't know how people are going to view your books in the future-- probably as mindless drivel about obscure minutia-- but I love and look forward to them here in the present.

Flower Power India Pale Ale . . . Yuck

The United States led the world in hops production in 2015, surpassing Germany for only the third time ever, and the majority of these hops were poured into Ithaca's Flower Power India Pale Ale . . . of course this beer is highly rated on BeerAdvocate, because it tastes nothing like a flower, and everything like Pine-Sol Multi-surface cleaner; I give it a big thumbs down for three reasons:

1) it doesn't taste very good;

2) when I drank three of them, it gave me a stomach-ache;

3) it cost me 14.99 for a six pack;

but, in case you want to give it a try, here are some of the positive descriptions culled from BeerAdvocate reviews:

1) piney tropical hops flavors;

2) the taste follows the nose;

3) an airy white head that lasts before heavy lacing;

4) heavy tropical flavors, including guava and coconut;

5) hazy honey hue;

6) residual astringent hop bitterness;

7) looks a bit like an orange snow globe in the light.

The Test 56: Politics, Naps, and Canine Mating Rituals

This week on The Test, Cunningam asks some pointed political questions-- both general and germane-- and Stacey, God and I do our best to answer them . . . we occasionally get sidetracked by other important issues (such as how to encourage a romantic interlude at the dog park, and the secret rules of napping) and in the end, everyone learns something or other about the upcoming election and our political process . . . so give it a whirl, keep score, and see how you fare . . . and remember: there's going to to be three more months of this shit.

The Strangest Thing About Stranger Things is That My Son Looks Like the Girl in Stranger Things

My family just binge-watched Stranger Things, a deft and super-compelling derivative mash-up that perfectly channels so many great shows and films:  E.T. and The Goonies and Freaks and Geeks and Poltergeist and eXistenZ and The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Stand by Me and Super 8 . . . and while this is a good thing, to see our family-favorites blended together in one eight episode mini-series, it also makes me think that we've come to the end of some of sort of artistic road-- and I'm having these kinds of deep thoughts about things I shouldn't think so deeply about because I just finished Chuck Klosterman's new book, But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past, which proposes exactly what the subtitle suggests: that we look at the present as if it were the past, and so from a future perspective, only a few movies and TV shows will be remembered,and--sadly-- Stranger Things probably won't be one of them (in my opinion) because it's so derivative, and the original works will take precedence . . . but I could be wrong, perhaps Stranger Things will be the perfect vehicle to remember all the tropes of the realistic/spooky/horror/teen/noir/government conspiracy/alternate universe/sci-fi/kids-band-together-and-take-on-the-supernatural-and-corrupt-world-of-adults genre . . . but I also found it interesting that I received multiple texts, from friends and colleagues and my brother, all advising me to watch this show with my kids . . . and most of these texts were from people who did not have children of their own . . . which is spooky in itself, but this also probably stems from nostalgia for the days when we had shared TV experiences, Seinfeld or Dallas or whatever . . . and people were saying that this show would be a perfect one to enjoy that shared experience, not only with the general public but also with your family, and they were right (if you can endure your kids having a few nightmares) but nostalgia for that "normal" time might not be so normal either . . . that was just a small window when people were on the same page, watching three networks, in the pre-internet, pre-DVR, pre-streaming, pre-Youtube, pre-plethora of shows age, but before that, way before that, everybody was doing their own thing-- just like now-- in pre-literate society, when everyone was around their own fire, telling their own version of the Ur-story about saber-tooth tigers and cave bears . . . I suppose there were a few classics, Homer and Beowulf and Gilgamesh, but most of the programming must have been very unstructured and primitive and unique, stick puppets, Dunt and Thok doing their schtick, song parodies very specific to a particular clan of people . . . anyway, that's how it feels now-- everyone is watching their own private pantheon of entertainment, and it rarely coincides with anyone else, but I should get off my high-horse and just recommend this show, because it will remind older folks of a by-gone era of TV and film, and it will scare the shit out of younger viewers, while also immersing them in a world before the internet, of microfiche and rotary phones, a world where there might be vast conspiracies and things beyond our understanding, unlike the world we have now, where if you've got a hunch about something like that, you just Google it, and voila, you were right: there is a vast conspiracy and there are things far beyond our understanding and aliens have come to earth and they live among us and of course our government planned 9/11 and dinosaurs live right beside us and they're chickens . . . Stranger Things delivers what it promises, that even in the suburbs, if you're brave and adventurous and loyal and have an imagination and a bike, then there is adventure right out your door . . . the series begins with D&D, and it ends with the mention of an Atari . . . perhaps Atari is the harbinger of the end of an era, the end of kids out in the world, depending on themselves, alone, unstructured, off the grid, fighting epic forces; anyway, my wife and I loved it and my kids claim it's the "best show ever" and there's one more creepy thing, just for folks who know us: Eleven is the female version of my son Ian, they look nearly identical and also make the same expressions and have the same eyes, it took someone else to point this out, and once she did, it made me look at my son in a totally different light (as in, I think he might be able to move things with his mind and squish bad people's brains).

A Book Makes Dave Feel Emotions

I thought once we left the Southwest, I would quit reading The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest but none of my other books came up on my library queue, so I decided to finish, and it was well worth it; I learned that the Anasazi (Ancestral Pueblo, if you want to be politically correct) didn't disappear because of an apocalyptic drought-- there was a drought, but they started leaving before that, and usually with environmental catastrophe, everyone doesn't leave-- there are always a few stragglers that remain and eke out a living, so this was a political or religious migration that cleared out these cliff dwellings and granaries and high mesa redoubts, because by 1300, the area was completely empty of human habitation and life, and that just doesn't happen . . . and so there are plenty of theories of what political/religious movement drove the migration, but none are rock-solid . . . this information may be lost in time, because it's abstract . . . I also learned about the Comanche transformation, which is a real Cinderella-story, an underdog achievement worthy of the scrubs in Hoosiers: at the start of the colonial era, the Comanches were "horseless hunter-gatherers living in small camps scattered around northern Colorado and Wyoming . . . by the end of the seventeenth century they had become the most skillful equestrians warriors and long-distance traders in North America," with a domain that stretched from Canada to northern Mexico . . . so though they've been portrayed as merciless barbarian raiders, that wasn't the case until they met several defeats at the hands of the U.S. Army forces in 1875 . . . but enough of this, what the book made me feel, unfortunately, was jealousy and regret; when I was young, I dreamed of becoming a paleontologist and trekking through the Gobi Desert in search of dinosaur bones, but then I learned that paleontology is not all fun and bones, but David Roberts figured out how to live a life that combined the best elements of adventure, writing, climbing, history, archaeology, and epic journeys-- and while he's stayed out of the academic world, he interviews the people in it, and compiles their theories for the layman and, by the end of the book, after reading about all his hikes, his overnight camping trips and raft voyages, his access to secret sites and petroglyphs in our country, all this made me profoundly jealous, which I'm not proud of, because I have a fantastic life-- full of family, sport, and adventure-- but I know that I'll never get to travel all the trails and paths through the American Southwest that he did, and-- in fact-- that I may not get out there for another decade, instead I'll be hacking my way through humidity and poison-ivy, and instead of petroglyphs, I'll be looking at spray painted tags, which someday, in some far apocalyptic future, might prove to be just as evocative and obscure as the ancient rock etchings scattered through the Four Corners region, but I'll be long dead by then (which makes me want to start doing some graffiti art!)

Dave is NOT in the Zone

It looks like I'm going to have to do this whole thing all over again, in the correct order-- which is highly appropriate for the content, as . . . like most of us (except for the stalkers, of course) I made my trip into the Zone unprepared, with little or no information, and came about it the wrong way, from the wrong direction, as a blithe intellectual, moving too quickly, with too much alacrity-- and I thank myself lucky that I was not ground into pulp, or that my legs weren't turned to gelatinous rubber, but what I should have done, instead of trying to read a book about a movie I had never seen, what I should have done-- because I'm no cinephile-- what I should have done was read the original book first, I should have read Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novel Roadside Picnic long before I watched Stalker and I should have read Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room  long after consuming both the original novel and the movie inspired by the novel, and while Tarkovsky's film is regarded as one of the best of the 20th century, it's also rather interminable, especially when you don't understand what's going on, and Roadside Picnic explains all that and more, in fact, if you're not a cinephile, then you can skip the movie and the Geoff Dyer book and just read the novel, and if you're not into Russian sci-fi, then you can skip the book entirely, and head to the Afterword, and simply read the notes the Strugatsky Brothers took on their very first discussion about the story, long before they sat down to write it . . . as these notes are so elegant and poetic, so ominous and enigmatic, and so pointed and precise, that they almost replace the novel itself: "a monkey and a tin can . . . thirty years after the alien visit, the remains of the junk they left behind are at the center of quests and adventures, investigations and misfortunes . . . the growth of superstition, a department attempting to assume power through owning the junk, an organization seeking to destroy it (knowledge fallen from the sky is useless and pernicious; any discovery could only lead to evil applications) . . . prospectors revered as wizards . . . a decline in the status of science . . . abandoned ecosystems (an almost dead battery), reanimated corpses from a variety of time periods."

The Avalanches Reveal the Fault in Dave's Brain

 I was very excited a few weeks ago when I got to listen to The Avalanches new album Wildflower . . . I clearly remember the day I heard "Frontier Psychiatrist" on WRSU while driving home from work in my 1993 Jeep Cherokee Sport . . . Since I Left You became a staple on my iPod, and I really like the new album as well, but I was surprised to learn that it's been sixteen years since the band released Since I Left You . . . in my mind their last album was from a few years ago, and it is categorized in my brain under "Hip New Music of which Dave is Aware" and maybe this is because of the liberal and bizarre use of samples . . . I suppose I consider Girl Talk to be new music-- but not Paul's Boutique-- or maybe it's that most new music doesn't dent my consciousness, but anyway, it was a bit frightening when I learned that Since I Left You came out in the year 2000, a fact that bears plain witness to just how faulty my memory and cognition is (though I think we all have these experiences all the time: I can't remember who was in the Super Bowl three years ago, but I vividly remember Super Bowl XXIII, the 49ers/Bengals game when Pete Johnson couldn't gain a yard on fourth down) and I guess the lesson here is that you shouldn't trust anything anyone says about things that happened in their past, because people tend to compress the past, or conflate it, we exaggerate memories from our youth, forget the rest, and generally just remember things however we want.

Back to Back Crap

When I get motivated to do crappy chores, I usually do two in a row, and the chores I juxtaposed on Monday morning were especially gross-- so if you've got a weak stomach, turn back now: first, I took a white garbage bag and put it inside a cardboard box and then opened fifteen jars of rancid home-pickled vegetables and poured them into the bag-- our extra fridge in the basement died months ago, but we never took the stuff out of it . . . so the white plastic bag was filled with old beets and pickles and peppers and onions and loads of vinegar (of which plenty spilled onto my chest and shirt) and the sound of old pickled vegetables plopping into a plastic bag full of vinegar is not particularly pleasing; so after a half hour of this, I sealed up the bag and-- keeping it inside the cardboard box for support-- carried it to the CRV, the vegetables sloshing around inches from my face, put it in the back, drove it to the park, and chucked it into an empty dumpster, where it hit the metal floor and exploded, and then I got home, took off my shirt-- which reeked of vinegar-- went into the backyard, and in the shade of our yew tree, shaved my chest hair to a reasonable length.

The Test 55: Of Robots and Noodles

I'm back and so is The Test . . . this episode mainly focuses on robots-- both televised and cinematic-- but there is also some discussion of noodles and intelligent apes; check it out, keep score, and determine how intelligent of an ape you are.

How Many Popsicle Sticks Do You Need for an Apocalyptic Project?

The people that comprise ISIS want money and sex slaves (who are forced to use birth control so they don't get pregnant) and beheadings and ransoms and territory and power and Twix and Axe body spray and expense reports and lonely American converts and employees and-- most importantly-- glory . . . glory in participating in what Rukmini Callimachi, the New York Times reporter that covers the Islamic State, calls their "apocalyptic project" . . . if you want some interesting perspective on ISIS, and why-- though ISIS will fold rather easily when confronted with organized military force-- the war with them will be prolonged (they may fold easily when confronted, but once you've defeated them on the ground, then you've got to stay on the ground for a long, long time . . . in Iraq and Syria and Mali and Nigeria . . . etcetera . . . it ain't happening) then listen to Planet Money 667: Auditing ISIS and Rukmini Callimachi Talks to David Remnick About ISIS.

Hoskinini, the Navajo Houdini

In a feature that should recur more often than it will probably will, here's a dude that should be on the high school history curriculum but is not: Hoskinini, the man who eluded Kit Carson and the Navajo Roundup of 1864 (and the ensuing Long Walk of death and misery) and then survived with a band of seventeen men, women, and children and twenty sheep in remote areas near Navajo Mountain (on the border of Utah and Arizona) until the Navajo were allowed to return from Bosque Redondo back to their homeland . . . and, in 1868, when the refugees arrived, they were met by Hoskinini, who gave "those wretched Dine corn, sheep, wool, and skins from the vast store he had accumulated during the years of hiding" and Hoskinini never revealed where he hid for all those years, but David Roberts thinks he might know . . . I'm still making my way through his book The Lost World of the Old Ones, which is full of adventure, discovery, academic debate over archaeology (observed firsthand by the author) and compelling American history and would be a fantastic book for high school kids to read (as opposed to the controversial new Mexican American Heritage textbook which was approved to be used in Texas, which-- according to this Washington Post article-- was written by people with no  who have no expertise in Mexican-American studies and calls Mexicans lazy).

Victory! And He Did It Without the Sauce

After five hours of best of three play, my son Ian and I won the first annual Sea Isle City Cornhole Classic . . . we only dropped one game (in the finals) and Ian was a good sport all the way through, and he had to be extremely patient, as there were many rounds of play and we only had one board (and three bags each, which certainly slowed play even more) and I'm quite proud of him, he carried me when I was missing the hole, stayed late on the beach with the adults even though all the kids had gone back to the house to watch TV and eat junk food, ate a slice of pizza between games to stay fueled, and played cornhole sober (I think) despite the fact that it's a mindlessly absurd game that should only be played for any length of time if you are drinking beer (which, of course, I was).

Family Vacation + Organized Competition = Recipe for Disaster

My eleven year old son Ian and I are riding an obnoxious two day undefeated cornhole streak, and last night-- after much sangria-- my father and the cousins wrote up a cornhole tourney bracket on a styrofoam plate, there are twelve teams and Ian and I are the top seed, despite the fact that he is the youngest player by a decade; Ian is very, very competitive and I think this level of organization and competition will only lead to bad and ugly things later this afternoon . . . I will keep you posted on all the sordid details as they unfold (or maybe not) and I think the problem is that he's too young to drink beer, which helps you to put things like competitive cornhole in perspective, and allows you to relax and enjoy the sounds of the ocean, instead of enjoying seeing your enemies driven before you (with beanbags).

Weird Things You Might Want to Grapple With

A couple of weird things I've been thinking about, so you can ponder them too:

1) we now live in an age of negative interest in the global bond market . . . so instead of keeping your millions and millions of dollars and/or francs in an insured vault, with a guard, and all that overhead, you invest them in a bond that you buy for a hundred dollars, and this bond promises to pay you back $99 . . . which is weird enough, but some of these bonds have gotten so popular, that you can sell your $100 bond to someone else for $101 dollars . . . the new episode of Planet Money: I Want My Money Back explains this phenomenon better than I can . . . but it still doesn't fully explain it;

2) weird thing number two is that the anti-union, free-market champion billionaire industrialist Koch Brothers dislike Donald Trump . . . and I dislike the Koch Brothers of course, as they're against public education funding and teacher's unions and me getting a pension and sucking off the government teat until I die . . . but I'm certainly not for Donald Trump, but it seems I should be happy about what he's doing to the Republican Party . . . win or lose-- and he will most certainly lose, Trump may prove to be a boon to the working man, even if he is a douche, because it's probably better to be a douche than an ultra-rich, ultra-tactical free market fundamentalist in an economic environment where you happily put ten dollars in a bond in order to get back nine.