The Lorax and The Grinch Wish You Happy Holidays

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I finally convinced my wife to send a digital card instead of contributing to the environmental-materialist-consumer-disaster-that-is-XXXmas (the XXX is for the pornographic nature of online shopping, which I succumb to as much as anyone) and she did a fantastic job . . . now I just need to convince her that we should eschew wrapping paper, and instead do the old close-your-eyes-hold-the-gift-behind-your-back-style method of giving presents.

Good News and a Lot of Bad News

Amidst all the awful information Callum Roberts imparts about the state of our oceans in his book The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea, there is some good news:

"Great tits in cities sing shorter, faster songs at a higher pitch than those in the countryside,"

and while this doesn't override the problems discussed in the latter half of the book, which I will list in a moment, I'm always pleased when I hear about singing tits in the city, especially if they are great tits, especially a mated pair . . . but a pair of great tits, singing or not, isn't enough to undo what mankind has wrought: the undersea noise pollution that interrupts aquatic communication; the invasive species making their way across the globe; the sheets of sea lettuce, fertilized by pig-farm run-off, that that piled in sheets on the surface of the water and trapped poisonous gasses created by the very run-off that fertilized the sea lettuce; the rampant destruction of wetland and mangrove forest-- the coastline's safety system-- in order to create aquaculture pens and ponds; the hundreds of thousands of tons of krill and other small fish made into fishmeal to feed the aquaculture fish, thus eliminating food for the wild stock; the threat of genetically mutated fish breeding with wild fish; the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria within the densely populated fish pens; the bays and river mouths that lack circulation because of warming currents, and so contain incredible amounts of toxins, heavy metals, and effluvium; the dredgers that destroy habitats and churn the polluted sediment back into the water; the loss of habitat and groundwater and storm protection because of the destruction of mangrove, salt marsh and wetlands; the utter devastation wrought by fishermen catching predatory fish high on the food chain-- the reported collateral damage of catching 211 mahi-mahi on a long line in Costa Rica is beyond abysmal (here is the death toll: 468 olive ridley turtles, 20 green turtles, 408 stingrays, 47 devil rays, 413 silky sharks, 24 thresher sharks, 13 smooth hammerhead sharks, 6 crocodile sharks, 4 whitetip sharks, 68 Pacific sailfish, 34 striped marlin32 yellowfin tuna, 22 blue marlin, 11 wahoo, 8 swordfish, and 4 ocean sunfish . . . and I though line-caught was something positive) and the difficulty of convincing politicians to mandate sustainable fishing practices-- despite scientifically proven paradox that if the fishermen fish a bit less, then there will soon be more fish . . . but though there are some bright spots, and a number of organizations and nations are getting wise as we approach the brink, we're going to need to change our ways sooner rather than later, or we're going to lose some of our greatest megafauna-- which would be tragic-- and destroy an incredible source of food . . . and delicious food at that, and we're going to destroy the wildest, most alien and possibly most resilient place on the planet.

Giving the Gift of Omelas

I've been pretty good this year about controlling my Xmas Ranting . . . maybe it's because my children have moved beyond The Age of Getting Loads of Plastic Toys to less overt consumption, but I've still had a couple of Grinch-like moments: in Philosophy class, we read the classic Ursula Leguin utilitarian-parable-turned-nightmare "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" . . . if you haven't read it, then you must-- and after sharing some fairly typical Dave-like opinions on the evils of wrapping paper and the vacuous environmental disaster of mindless gift giving, I told my class that I had a brilliant idea: the only gift I would give my children for Christmas would be a gift-wrapped copy of the story (on recycled paper) and they told me I was an awful person, and I told them as much as I wished I could do that, my wife wouldn't allow it, and then I even offered them a different, more hopeful view on the story . . . an inspirational and fascinating TED Talk by Leslie T. Chang about how Chinese factory workers aren't oppressed slaves of the first world, and actually choose working in cities over awful rural conditions, and how these workers-- many of them women-- have far more autonomy and choice and upward mobility than Leguin's boy-thing in the closet . . . I recommend you consume both the story and the TED Talk, and then make your own decision as to how much you should rant about the holiday season.

Hillbilly Paradoxes

J. D. Vance's bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is an excellent primer for liberal city folks who want to learn about the culture that voted Donald Trump into office: if you go by Vance's assertions, then these white mainly Scotch-Irish generally non-college educated majority-minority "hillbilly" folks are a bundle of paradoxes:

1) they are often fiercely loyal and protective of family, especially to outsiders, but within the family there is much violence, divorce, infighting, and abuse;

2) they are vocal about the value of hard work and express a desire for jobs, but often awful about actually working-- because of factors such as frequent absences, addiction, lack of motivation, self-entitlement, refusal to pursue training and education, teenage pregnancy, and general feeling of victimization;

3) they are vocal about religion, Jesus, and church, but often awful about actually attending church-- especially in Appalachia and rural Ohio; in southwestern Ohio, church attendance is the same as in "ultra-liberal San Francisco," but folks there are afraid to admit they don't go to church, so reported church attendance is high, but actual attendance is low;

4) for those that do attend church, according to MIT economist John Gruber, people are happier, make more money, liver longer, have better health in general, drop out of high school less frequently, commit fewer crimes, and all sorts of other good stuff . . . and this appears to be "causal . . . church seems to promote good habits" but while these hillbillies-- in Kentucky or transplanted elsewhere-- are "deeply religious but without any attachment to a real church community," and thus, not receiving any of the benefits of that people  who regularly attend church enjoy;

5) though liberals see them as people that could use social safety-net programs and benefits, within the community the hard-working folks see the people who take these benefits (and often game the system) as scoundrels, who are "laughin' at our society! we're gettin' laughed at for workin' everday!" and this results in the weird situation that Thomas Frank has so often written about, that the people who need the government assistance most often vote against their best interests, but it's because they often can't stomach the people in their society that need and use these programs;

6) they lionize the American military and are jingoistically patriotic, but they are disgusted with the results in Iraq and Afghanistan;

7) despite their patriotism, they don't embrace the ideas that could vault them out of their social class-- they don't trust the mainstream media, think the deck is stacked against them, and believe that if you attend a superior college and develop critical thinking skills, then you're "too big for your britches" and "uppity," and even Vance still suffers from this cognitive dissonance . . . he made it out, but still often feels regret at the culture he lost, and finds himself an alien in the oddly nice, well-adjusted, healthy, well-educated liberal elite circles that he now frequents . . . these people don't understand that the kind of folks that join the military (as he did) are far more various than the liberal stereotypes and they don't understand the kind of folks that might take a circular saw to someone's leg because of a familial insult (as his uncle once did) and they don't understand these very very tough people that need to get even tougher (and a bit more flexible) because government policy isn't going to be enough to help them . . . they're going to have to be tough enough to shed some of their old-fashioned ways and tough enough to trust the institutions and the the liberal culture they find soft and unappealing and tough enough to love their kinfolk a bit less and the future a bit more.

The Test 70: Random Drug Test!

We've made seventy episodes of The Test, and Stacey decided it was about time to administer  a random drug test . . . Cunningham and I pass with flying colors, but it's a long strange trip: keep score, see how you fare, and try to avoid having your face eaten under a bridge.

Mold Spores Make Dave Smarter!

Not only did I survive yesterday's inhalation of dangerous stinky mold spores, but I think they may have made me smarter . . . so see if you can follow me here, as I intend on explaining and connecting all the issues of the day in one sentence; in a previous post I discussed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's theory on the difference between liberals and conservatives, and why liberals have such a hard time stomaching conservative values and understanding conservative perspective; first he breaks down social/political concerns into five categories:

1) fairness/reciprocity;

2) harm/care;

3) purity/sanctity;

4) in-group/loyalty;

5) authority/respect;

and then he explains the results of his experiments: he has found that liberals care about number one and number two, while conservatives have a "five channel" moral system . . . and I find this to be true about myself-- if you take an issue like gay marriage, then I don't think it's fair to ban gay people from marrying, and why would I care anyway?-- it helps them and gay marriage doesn't harm me-- but conservatives will often have far more complex views about the sanctity and tradition of marriage-- which I could care less about-- or loyalty to their church or religion, or respect for authority figures who disdain gay marriage . . . again which is all stuff I would never even consider-- so take a typical liberal view and you'll see that conservatives have a lot more to worry about-- I just don't give a shit about things that conservatives care deeply about, and often find them silly, which makes me lack empathy for conservatives-- and it's a problem and I see no clear solution to it, even though I understand what I don't understand about conservatives-- but here is something I figured out: I think this five channel morality explains the reason conservatives fall for fake news and conspiracy theories far more than liberals-- which absolutely infuriates everyone on the left: this debate about what is real-- the fact that in America, people ask if you "believe" in global warming, like it's a religion-- and for some background, I recommend you listen to the new Planet Money: Finding the Fake-News King, because the fake-news king is actually quite smart (and a liberal) and was creating incredible fake-news stories first as a joke and then as a very lucrative profession, and he found that he couldn't make any money with liberal fake-news, it only worked on conservatives-- people on the left would quickly fact check the news and the fake-story would fizzle, but I don't think anyone has definitively explained why this is so-- until now! thanks mold spores!-- so here it is: conservatives are more likely to fall for fake-news because the stories trigger more of those five channels-- conservatives are more loyal, and thus more likely to trust something passed along to them from a friend or trusted source, conservatives are more likely to respect the authority of the internet and not go to Snopes or start fact-checking away, and conservatives find their views to be more pure and sanctioned, so they are more likely to buy more of the same . . . while liberals-- while callous and unsympathetic to many conservative views-- are also less likely to respect a source, or think of themselves as part of a big pure group that believes a certain thing . . . it's not that liberals never fall for fake news, but they often recognize that they are just "rooting for the clothes" and don't wholeheartedly believe in anything, so the fact that the right could push an email scandal into the media for the entirety of the election-- and that conservatives could focus on this issue for that long-- while a plethora of real issues like climate change and the fact that Trump is an anti-vaxxer who said NAFTA is terrible were pushed to the side . . . don't get me started-- anyway, that's why conservatives think liberals are nice people with bad ideas, and liberals think conservatives are horrible people with insane opinions, and that's why fake and silly news stories had such a profound effect on this election, and things aren't going to get better any time soon . . . because while I now understand this better, it's not helping me any, I still think it's crazy to care deeply about channels three through five, and I still think anyone who is getting their news from random Facebook feeds and passing it along is an idiot without any critical thinking skills . . . so maybe I need to sniff another batch of mold so I can figure out the next step.

It's Been Fun

I've had a good run here on earth but I'm fairly certain that my time is coming to a close: I got motivated this morning and decided to finally clean out the refrigerator in the basement that broke months ago-- many many months ago, because back in July I said that this fridge broke "several months ago" . . . that's one of the saving graces of this stupid blog, I can actually get a decent timeframe on the significant events in my life-- anyway, I opened the freezer door and was whacked in the face by a horrendous moldy stink, and I felt the mold spores burrow straight into my brain . . . I got some bleach spray and wore a shirt over my mouth and nose for the rest of the clean-up, but I'm certain that the fungus is gestating in my skull, and I'm afraid to look on the internet for the consequences of breathing in fermented refrigerator mold, but I'm sure it's fatal, and I'm sure there's going to be a period of insanity before I die so blue monkey carrot chocolate burp sound licks the claws.

New Brunswick: Taco Trucks on Every Corner!

While I realize this is The Marco Gutierrez Nightmare, the town across the Raritan River from me--New Brunswick-- now has a thriving Hispanic population, and with that scene come the tacos and burritos and enchiladas and posole and mole Oaxaqueno and empanadas and chorizo . . . I could go on and on, but I'm already salivating; anyway, here are two recommended options, one upscale and one incredibly cheap:

1) for the best tamales in town-- and they only cost a buck and a quarter-- head to Punto Y Coma; it's on French Street right in the heart of Little Mexico, and you'll have to dust off your Spanish to order, but it's worth it . . . great tacos al pastor, too, in homemade corn tortillas;

2) for something fancier, if you're looking for a real night out, then head to Esquina Latina . . . this place has more of a weirdly lit dance-club lounge feel, but the sangria is amazing and the food is really good too . . . especially the empanadas, just don't pronounce them "empanyadas," or you'll sound like a rube (as I did).

Doors Open and Doors Close

Richard Linklater's film Everybody Wants Some!! is the story of a college baseball player learning to navigate around a new campus, a new town and-- most importantly-- a new group of dudes; while there is a main character (Jake, a freshman pitcher) the story is less about him and more of an allegory, it's the early '80's, it's Texas, it's a group of college athletes, and class has not yet begun-- so they're not learning anything academic, but they are learning how to get around (as Russell Ziskey says in Stripes, "We're not homosexuals, but we're willing to learn") and all doors are open for these young men: they visit a local bar, a disco, a honky-tonk, a punk show, they host a baseball party-- which is very fratty-- and then, the climax, they really stretch themselves socially and go to a drama party . . . they change superficially for each event by literally changing their clothes-- and Linklater captures the fashion melting pot disaster that was the early '80's, and they also change mentally, and learn to understand the hierarchy of competitive dudes and thrive in it-- as they move through the layers of the campus and the town, the scenes are superfast and various, just as you might remember the first weeks of college, old school college, before honors programs and tiger moms and high school AP classes and incredible tuition costs, back when college was a time to experiment not only with learning, but with your personality . . . you could be anyone you wanted, and move through a frenzy of settings, barely connected by any through plot; the movie almost has a detached documentary feel, there is a time stamp in the corner counting down to when class begins . . . though I wasn't heavily emotionally invested in the characters or the plot, I loved the movie, and I highly recommend going on this optimistic cinematic adventure . . . but if you're in a more dour mood, and want think about doors closing, because of age, situation, and personality-- and you want to laugh like hell about all this existential misery-- then watch Season 5 of Louie . . . Louie also navigates a complex and variegated world, but it's a darker universe than the bright Texas sun in Everybody Wants Some!!-- Louie gets beat up by a trashy girl, spends some painful and enlightening times with a hack comic in Oklahoma, visits a chanting cult by accident, awkwardly attends a school potluck, tries (unsuccessfully) to NOT interact with his driver while he's on the road, bores the hell out of his psychoanalyst, has an intimate encounter with a pregnant surrogate, spends an awful evening with a childhood friend who is now an incompetent and depressed cop, takes an old time picture with some nice ladies, and travels through all the odd, weird, and often inscrutable layers of New York and beyond, and he's barely able to comprehend any of it, he can't seem to fit in or get comfortable, he can't find a bathroom, disappoints himself, his daughters, and his lover, and then takes this misery and processes it into stand-up comedy . . . now that I've sat down and written this reflection in contrast, I'm a bit sad and nostalgic: I miss the opportunity and flexibility that youth and college offers-- or once offered, those days might be gone . . . they are certainly gone for me, and they might be gone for everyone except the ultra-rich-- and I can see my future and it's not bright: the world will get more and more confusing, more and more closed off to me, as I grow older and my neurons stiffen and my ability to tolerate new situations gets worse and worse . . . I don't even know how to write myself out of this corner.

Stop the Country, I Want To Get Off!

In more news that sounds fake but isn't, Betsy DeVos-- the billionaire freelance Christian educational reformer who Trump has chosen for Secretary of Education-- has revealed that she would like to "help advance God's Kingdom" in the pedagogical realm . . . she's not content just donating money to Christian schools, instead she wants to "be in that Shephelah, and to confront the culture," which basically means she wants to fight the good fight against the Philistines-- of which I am one-- and she acknowledges that "the church-- which ought to be in our view more central to the life of the community-- has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity, the center for what goes on in the community" but she hopes with charter schools and tax credits and vouchers that the church can get more and more central and involved in the education of the youth . . . and I know she's not speaking to me, or my area of the country-- but still . . . HOLY SHIT . . . this is a wonderful, wild, weird admission of actual political/religious purpose-- in a way it's lovely because it's so clear and so crazy, an incredibly brazen violation of the separation of church and state, the admission of a deep-held desire for the government to fund religious affiliation-- Christian religious affiliation-- and a bizarre plan to unravel the most accessible democratic institution in American life-- the public school-- which is now a place where parents of any class, status, religion, and/or belief can have an immediate effect . . . a place where local people can run for school board or serve on the PTA or volunteer or coach or simply attend functions and have influence-- and so I love to see her ardent longing laid bare, her yen to turn this special place into a segregated religious institution . . . to place the secular setting where arts and music and sports and various clubs of all stripes and denominations happen under a religious purview, and more importantly, to taint the place where our critical thinking is taught with the tincture of Christian ideology-- hello Creationism!-- and I just love that she says it out loud, for everyone to hear . . . it's a great reminder of how ideologically different people are in this great country of ours; for a loosely connected reason why this is a weird and wild turn of events, listen to Sam Harris talk to Shady Hamid about his new book: Islamic Exceptionalism . . . Hamid explains that one of the major differences between the Islamic nations that often export terror and Western nations that do not, is that Islam is completely intertwined with politics, and there is no separation of church and state, nor is there even the idea that it's possible to separate religion and politics in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia . . . but there's no way that the Senate in the United States of America will approve her, right?

Te Cacharon!

Ian failed a Spanish quiz last week, so my wife has been on his case, to ensure that he's ready for the test this week-- last night Ian was sitting at the dining room table, doing an online quiz on the laptop, reciting Spanish words aloud, when my wife-- who was in the kitchen-- said to him, "What are you doing?" and Ian said, "Doing the quiz" and my wife said, "Look in the window" and Ian turned and looked and he realized that my wife could see the reflection of the laptop screen in the dining room window, and he also realized that his clever ruse of mumbling random Spanish words while he played Slither.io (an online Centipede-like video game) had failed him . . . te cacharon!

Do NOT Read This Book

I'm in too deep to stop, but it would be hard for me to recommend Callum Roberts' book The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea-- it's just too depressing-- though he tries to keep the tone as hopeful as possible, the weight of the evidence is overwhelming: our oceans, the life within them, and the complex food-chains and filters of our planet are in dire jeopardy, unless we collectively start doing things very differently; here are some awful things I've learned so far:

1) the ocean is absorbing much of the carbon dioxide emitted when we burn fossil fuels, and this is causing a usurious problem that has been overlooked until recently: ocean acidification . . . to an extent that hasn't been seen in 300 million years-- at the end of the Permian, when there was a mass extinction; many corals, marine plants, and shelled animals need "dissolved carbonate minerals" and the lower pH makes it harder for these animals to "crystallize carbonate" out of a solution;

2) a cool fact, a pint of seawater contains two billion viruses, and they are helping to slow the rate at which the ocean is acidifying, but no one knows at what level of pH those tiny organisms won't be able to function-- or if they function too well, then there is an increase in global warming, because they recycle the the nutrients in sunlit waters-- keeping carbon in the cycle, instead of letting it sink into the deep sea;

3) nutrients, fertilizer and run-offs are causing toxic algal blooms at a much greater intensity and rate, red tides and other toxic phytoplankton which, when ingested, can cause hallucinations, nightmares, nerve-damage, cancer, birth defects, and tumors (especially in sea turtles) and the increase of big storms with high-winds has exacerbated airborne instances of sickness and contact, the "storms churn the sea into a spray which can be inhaled," resulting in rashes and lung inflammation . . . but what's bad for us is good for one creature-- the "triple combination of nutrient enrichment, low oxygen, and overfishing" is wonderful for jellyfish, so if you're taking a trip to the beach, make sure you bring meat tenderizer;

4) persistent organic pollutants (POPs for short) are building up in water and ice and animal fat all over the world, chemicals like DDT and PCBs are especially deleterious-- the toxic load carried by male dolphins in Sarasota Bay makes their flesh equivalent to biohazard . . . females have lower amounts of toxins because they pass much of the bad stuff to their offspring through pregnancy and breast feeding . . . and these toxins are making their way up the food chain, into large animals like whales and humans, and there are thousands of new chemicals wending their way through the waters and polar ice and food chains and we don't even know the consequences, so get used to the acronyms, there will be more to come;

5) if the chemicals don't get you, the heavy metals will-- the most toxic is mercury, and the main culprit for mercury pollution are coal-fired power plants . . . Asian plants produce over half of the world's mercury pollution, and it seems they are "hell-bent on building more" such plants . . . and if Trump has his way with deregulation, maybe we'll see more coal burning in America as well . . . anyway, my son loves sushi, but he really shouldn't be eating it, as tuna often exceeds safe levels of mercury . . . but the FDA also recommends that children and pregnant women don't eat swordfish, king mackerel, tilefish, and shark . . .

and I'm not even halfway done with the book, so sorry, but there will be more bad news to come.

The Test 69: Livin' La Vida Cunningham

This week on The Test, Cunningham forces Stacey and I to get in touch with our inner-Latina: check it out, keep score, and see if you're a supermalo estudiante de espanol.

Trump Saves Jobs and the American Economy!

Sorry . . . everyone else is writing fake news clickbait, so I've decided to join them-- I'm also sorry that Trump did not save the American economy when he strong-armed Carrier air-conditioning into staying in Indiana with a stick and a carrot-- respectively: he threatened them with tariffs on products they import into the U.S. and provided them with a 7 million dollar state-subsidized tax break . . . this, of course, is taking America one step closer to the isolationist insanity of North Korea-- not that I think there will be too much more of this, I'm hoping Trump did it purely so he could tweet-brag something, and that this is not as an economic policy . . . anyway, for those of you who are confused at how saving 800 jobs is not such a good thing, first of all, understand this is a drop in the bucket-- we've lost five million manufacturing jobs in America since the year 2000-- and if you want to know the effects of enacting high tariffs and forcing companies to stay in the country, listen to this excellent episode of Planet Money: Tires, Taxes, and the Grizz . . . or read my summary of it, anyway, all this means is that Indiana is subsidizing these jobs, and the threats to enact tariffs on parts and labor in Mexico is going to upset the complex supply chains between the U.S. and Mexico, and so Carrier air-conditioners will get more expensive and Americans will foot that bill-- the same way we foot the bill for Chinese tire tariffs . . . it's always cheaper to just pay off or retrain the 800 workers who lost their jobs and let the globalized market work its magic, but that's not fun to tweet about . . . in future fake news (that just might get real) avocadoes: $45 each!

Spacehog: Things Get Eponymous

A notable Topic of Interlocution at the Park Pub last night-- we attempted to determine the best eponymous song . . . in other words, the best song with the same title as the band that played it; here are some of the contenders:

1) "Bad Company" by Bad Company;

2) "This is Radio Clash" by The Clash;

3) "Black Sabbath" by Black Sabbath;

4) "They Might Be Giants" by They Might Be Giants;

5) "Minor Threat" by Minor Threat;

and there was only one song that was not considered; this song was brought to the attention of the panel by Roman, but despite the fact that it was Roman's name day, "Spacehog" by Spacehog was pronounced not only downright awful, but also very silly.

Let Them Eat Squid

I am in the middle of reading a rather depressing book called The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea, and so far, the theme is that the oceans are depleted-- humans have always pulled an incredible bounty from the sea and that has declined precipitously of late . . . and because we always reset the baseline, we can't even imagine how many fish were in the sea before our own time, unless we take an empirically scientific approach, as Loren McClenachan did with the shifting baseline of fish in the Florida Keys . . . this is not a fun study to read (nor is it amusing to look at the photos . . . but that's the story) and things are only getting worse . . . because of over-fishing of sardines and other filter feeders, and the resultant unchecked algal blooms and sulfuric up-swellings, and the warming of the top layer of the ocean-- a product of global warming-- which causes greater sequestration of oceanic layers and less mixing of the oxygen-deprived middle layer of water and the much warmer nutrient-rich upper layers, the ocean is a much less hospitable for large delicious finned fish and they are becoming more and more rare . . . but while big fish (and aquatic mammals) are on the decline, one of the few big animals that can survive in this ugly environment is the seven-foot, rather-intelligent, rather-vicious Humboldt squid, and this fearsome creature is edible, and so we may not be able to enjoy tuna and mahi-mahi and Chilean sea bass and cod, but we may still have some ersatz seafood on our table, nonetheless: slabs of chewy calamari . . . unless, of course, we make some serious regulatory changes in how much carbon we pump into the atmosphere and how much we harvest from the oceans-- but certainly America, in voting for Donald Trump, has expressed a disinterest in any of this (or perhaps even a malevolent skepticism that any of this science actually exists and holds water) and so when the price of fish skyrockets and there is nothing left to haul in except ten-tentacled suction beasts, we must assume that the powers that be will simply say: "Let them eat squid."

No Such Yuck

A bird shit on my driver-side car door handle last night, but instead of wiping it off, I gingerly opened the door-- gripping the handle with two fingers, thus avoiding the poop-- and I figured that the rain would wash it away by morning, but no such luck . . . apparently bird shit is water-resistant (and I still haven't wiped it off . . . today the rain is supposed to be torrential, so I'm hoping for the best).

This Underground Railroad is Actually Underground

I was pleasantly surprised (and pleasantly horrified) by Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad . . . I assumed that because of all the critical praise the book received (and because of the content) that reading it would be like eating fiber, good for you but no fun, but I was very wrong; Whitehead starts with the childhood conceit that the underground railroad is actually an underground railroad, and in the spirit of the magical realists, he makes you buy his fantasy . . . and in between the dream-like underground journeys on the train, the main character Cora-- a runaway slave-- who suffered abominably on the plantation and witnessed things even worse than she endured, finds herself in a fragmented variegated mainly hostile country; each stop on her journey is insidiously evil in it's own unique way; there are scenes reminiscent of the Tuskegee experiment, Anne Frank's captivity, Flannery O'Connor's Gothic South, and the stereotypical Southern plantation . . . and the common thread that unites this ugly patchwork of loosely connected territories of racism and abuse, is the slave-hunter Ridgeway and his odd companion/slave Homer, an educated and erudite miniature lackey on a bizarre epic journey far from his African-American roots, making his way in the only way that he can, betraying his people in order to thrive and survive; the book certainly evokes the state of our country today: fragmented, unsympathetic and divisive, and the theme is ominous-- perhaps only a civil war and the consequent reconstruction can mend the rips and tears in the fabric of our nation . . . but despite this heaviness, the novel is a damned good read . . . horrific, hallucinatory, compelling, and epic by turns, and just when you think you can't take it any longer, when you've entered the broken mind of the slave and see no escape from the shackles and chains, then the plot takes off and you're on the train, underground, excited to poke your head above ground in some new place, with some new tone and tenor, possibly better than what came before.

This Sentence Is Not About A Bench

Early Sunday morning at the dog park, behind the bench, in the shadow of the bench, there was a white bench-shaped outline of rime-frost on the dark soil . . . the sun had melted the frost everywhere else, except within the shadow of the bench; forty-six years on this planet, and this was the most beautiful (and first) bench-shaped rime-frost outline I had ever seen.

The Test 68: The Key Piece

This is the episode of The Test we recorded the day after the election-- we decided we wanted to capture some audio as close to the incident as possible-- and you can certainly hear the depression and shock in our voices, but despite this ugly subtext, there's a good test buried amidst the maudlin political ramblings; dig in, give it a shot, and see if you can identify the key piece.