Put Your Bugs Where Your Mouth Is

Every spring, our house gets invaded by these tiny little ants, and while this really bugs my wife-- she does her best to eradicate them with traps-- I try to embrace the little fellas, and refer to them as "nature's cleanup crew" and so when I noticed that there were a bunch of these ants in the bristles of my toothbrush this morning, I decided that I had to roll with it, and so I rinsed them off and brushed my teeth . . . but perhaps I should have left them on the brush . . . if I could train a bird to live on my body and eat ticks, then perhaps I could also train a bunch of little ants to live in my mouth and eat all food decaying between my teeth.

The Test 88: Fear the Reaper

Despite the proximal whirling scythe of grim-visaged death, we prevail and present you with this podcast full of grim shit; special guest Mike gets the last word in (actually a number) and Cunningham breaks new ground in depression therapy . . . as a thematically related bonus, Stacey threatens to kill Dave.
 

The Shawshank Inspiration (for blood-sucking parasites)

I need to train a bird (like Brooks had in Shawshank) to patrol my body and eat the many ticks that end up residing on me after I run in the orchard.

Sooner = Meta-cheater

Perhaps you're a clueless on this topic as I was yesterday, but "Sooners" is a more offensive nickname than "Redskins" . . . the University of Oklahoma nickname celebrates jumping the gun in one of the most infamous land grabs in American History . . . it's bad enough that men and women were trampling, shooting, knifing, and generally denigrating their fellow man in a mad rush to be the first to one of 42,000 parcels of Indian Territory . . . this was enough of a disaster for the Cherokee, Choctaws, Cheyenne and Apache, but a "sooner" is someone who tried to sneak across the boundary line early-- so they could claim a prime parcel before anyone else-- so a "sooner" is another level of cheating, where you're trying to cheat the people who are cheating the Native Americans . . . sooners are meta-cheaters, and apparently, a few people recognize what the name signifies and are taking action, but I would have never known the meaning of the nickname "sooner" if I hadn't started reading Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, a fascinating account of Indian land rights, oil, and murder; the book is by David Graham, who also wrote The Lost City of Z, which I highly recommend.

Someone Should Have Told Me This Two Months Ago

It's so much easier to shave when you use a new razor.

Never Mind What It's Called . . . Eat This Food!

This is a bit local, but there's a great authentic Mexican restaurant right across Route 18 from East Brunswick High School, and I want it to survive . . . but it has a lot going against; it's tucked in a small strip mall that's difficult to turn into off the highway (but you can access it from the side streets) and I'm not sure what the place is called . . . it might be called La China Poblana (which probably means "the porcelain dishware from the Puebla state of Mexico," but you shouldn't have the word "china" in the title of a Mexican restaurant) or it might be called Mary's Mexican Grill or it might be called Mary's Grill Pizza . . . anyway, the food is inexpensive and delicious-- the tamales with green sauce are crumbly and light, with white meat chicken inside; the chorizo is tasty but not greasy at all; and the al pastor is loaded with spices and pineapple . . . plus they give you an excellent little black bean dip with your gratis chips and green salsa . . . so if you have a chance, pull in and try the food so that this place stays afloat until it can figure out a better name.

Dave Gets Extra About Extra!

I'm often amused by the slang words high school kids sprinkle into their lexicon; I enjoy hearing them use "swag" and "lit" and "salty" and "ratchet" in context, but I rarely use these words myself (except for comedic effect) because there's nothing sadder than an old man trying to be hip to the young folks . . . however, despite my general dictum on avoiding the vernacular of the youth, I have adopted one new term because it works so well in so many spots, and it doesn't sound particularly absurd when I say it: recently, when kids want to say something is melodramatic, they use the word "extra," as in Keanu Reeves is so extra when he fights Agent Smith in The Matrix or just because you failed the physics test doesn't mean you have to get all extra about it . . . I'm hoping this one sticks around, it's especially useful for Shakespeare, where folks like Hamlet and Iago and Don John get extra about all kinds of things.

The Singularity vs. Nightfall

Ian Morris begins his massive history of Eastern and Western social development, Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, at the very beginning --15,000 years ago, deep in prehistory-- and he runs through the typical Guns, Germs, and Steel stuff (with more details about Chinese history) but he comes at this massive scale of time from the perspective of an archaeologist, and on the "maps vs. chaps" debate, he's firmly on the side of the maps (unlike someone like Paul Johnson, who goes more for the chaps) which might be offensive to some because he takes the humanity out of history, and views the span of human achievement as something of a Civilization computer game, with an algorithm for social development based on energy capture, urbanization, information technology, and war-making capacity . . . so you're going to get a lot of numbers, as societies advance, which is sometimes disconcerting but it all eventually makes sense and if you can't figure out how to break through the hard ceiling-- perhaps this occurs at a social development index of 24-- then you don't get to stagnate at whatever glory you have achieved, instead things tend to spiral out of control and your civilization collapses . . . you can't turn away the four horsemen of the apocalypse: climate change, famine, state failure and migration (occasionally, there is a fifth horseman: disease) and you need particular resources to defeat these horsemen, and of your geographical and technological situation doesn't possess them, then you're screwed . . . no matter who is making the decisions . . . but with great collapse comes great resilience and great recovery-- so you might as well embrace the impending apocalypse, because while a few good decisions might head off or postpone a collapse, if it's going to happen, no individual human-- brilliant leader, scientist, thinker, moral crusader, or whatever-- is going to defeat the lazy, scared, concerned masses . . . you might be able to temporarily plug the dike, but you're not going to stop the flood . . . and Morris doesn't see any inherent superior value to Western culture-- there's no cultural bias here-- the East surges ahead of the West at times (541 AD to 1100 AD in particular) and then hits a hard ceiling and it takes the Industrial Revolution for the West to make the big move ahead and it really didn't matter who invented what or when (Stigler's Law of Eponymy) and then, finally, Morris gets to now and that's when the book really takes off-- he explains the economic marriage of America and China (we buy Chinese products and China buys our debt, making the America dollar more valuable and the Chinese renminbi less so and if we stopped buying Chinese products, they could dump all the US dollars they own on the market, thus totally devaluing our currency . . . so we're stuck with each other) and how we are headed towards an uncharted future as far as social development-- we might hit 5000!-- which could result in cities of 140 million people or more, but we're hitting a hard ceiling around 1000 points, and we can't go on this way-- all the citizens of earth can't live the way the richest countries live-- we're burning too much fossil fuel, contributing to what Morris calls "global weirding" and as the world becomes smaller and flatter, developed nations are becoming more concerned with immigration (a prescient prediction of Trump's victory and Brexit . . . the book was published in 2011) and because we are at such a technological high point, the stakes are infinite . . . we may see a transformation in the next fifty years that makes the Industrial Revolution look like the domestication of the goat, a singularity situation where AI and energy capture make the world so small that geography and nations are meaningless . . . or we may be staggering towards a collapse like no other, where-- as Einstein pithily predicted-- we fight World War IV with rocks . . . the scary thing is that, with the technology we now possess, it only takes one thing to go wrong and then we are shrouded in nuclear winter or enduring the desert of the real, while it will take incredible diplomacy and cooperation to make everything go right, so that we break through the next hard ceiling and propel ourselves into a phenomenal future . . . I'm rooting for humanity to do it, but I'm not sure we've got it in us, but if we don't succeed, there's always the hope that some other life form-- cockroaches? rats?-- will step up to the plate and eventually swing for the fences . . . anyway, this is a must read, but when you get bored of the ancient Chinese history, skip a bit brother, and get to the conclusion (which a good hundred pages in itself).

Is Sloth Contagious?

Senior-cut-day has infected my brains and robbed me of my initiative . . . hopefully we'll all be back in gear tomorrow.

Dave Embraces the Future

In honor of finally finishing Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, a monstrous tome of massive erudition by Ian Morris that I purchased over two years ago on my Kindle, I embraced the culture that will probably supersede our own (if there's not a nuclear apocalypse first) and after a truly epic Sunday-- I played pick-up soccer in the morning, then built a gate for our fence, then coached a soccer game, then went kayaking in a tiny kayak that I barely fit into and which spun in circles if I didn't paddle with perfect synchronicity (difficult to do while drinking a beer) then switched out of the aforementioned kayak because my legs were cramping up inside the tiny hull, and attempted to stand-up on a very small paddle board, designed for folks 150 pounds or less, toppled into Farrington Lake several times, finally got my balance and stood up and slowly paddled it back to the put in, navigating a stiff breeze with the tail end of the paddle board underwater-- so when I got home I was cold and wet and really really hungry and Cat and I decided to go to Chef Tan, the fairly new upscale authentic Chinese place right in town, so I could scarf some food down; we've been several times before and so we got some of our favorites: the Dan Dan noodles-- which come in a spicy peanut sauce with minced pork; the scallion pancakes; the dumplings-- homemade and crispy; and then we decided to try something new . . . Minced Pork with Mustard Greens, a heaping plate of chopped greens and tender lean pork chunks, but very spicy, just loaded with chopped skinny red hot peppers, and Catherine ate a reasonable amount and then waved the white flag and admitted defeat but I was really hungry-- I had an epic day!-- so I soldiered on, until my lips were numb and my nose was running and I couldn't take another bite . . . but it was so tasty and there was that weird amount left on the plate-- too little to take home but too much to leave-- so I finished it . . . and my stomach was pretty beat up this morning, along with the rest of my body because of my epic Sunday, and so I decided to go to the Chinese massage place in town, where I had once told the proprietress that "strong" was fine, and so now every time I go there, she does it a little stronger, and I'm not sure if this is authentic and I'm embracing the culture, or if the chef at Chef Tan and this lady are just giving me a taste of future Chinese domination, but either way, I'm preparing myself.

Butt Dial Plus

Thursday night at the bar, I had to confirm to a friend that I had butt-dialed him, and he sent back a text that said, "I thought I heard your ass" and while I assume he was speaking metaphorically, I had consumed a fair amount of beer, so he might not have been speaking metaphorically . . . and even if he hadn't literally heard my ass, and was only joking, I am sure there has been-- at some point in the history of cellular phoning-- a flatulent butt-dial, and that is wonderful.

Watching the Matrix Inside the Matrix

We were watching The Matrix last week in my senior composition class, and we had already covered the philosophical implications of the film: we connected early scenes to Plato and Camus (The Allegory of the Cave and "The Myth of Sisyphus") and so all we had left to discuss was the ending, when conflict and drama inside and outside the matrix build in masterful intertwined lock-step . . . Neo appears to be dead in the simulation, the sentinels have breached the hovercraft, Morpheus is about to detonate the EMP, and Trinity finally uses her oracular knowledge and some tongue to resolve things; this is when I used my brilliant analogy-- and analogy almost as brilliant as Plato's cave . . . I explained that the final structure is analogous to when they are in class-- the matrix-- pushing the rock and trying to live and succeed in the false reality of academia, and their cell-phone is buzzing, bring them information and messages from the real world, the world outside the matrix-like environment of school, the world which they desperately want to learn about and enter . . . but they're not supposed to be using their cell-phones in the school, they're supposed to ignore the outside world, stay inside the cave and focus on the shadows on the walls, but they want to graduate and see the light and fly around in the sky with cool sunglasses to awesome heavy techno music (and they're going to be sorely disappointed).

Ballsy Bootlegger

When we got home from soccer practice last night, Catherine greeted Ian with the statement: "I found something in your bookbag" and Ian immediately went with the classic contraband trope-- he threw his friend under the bus and said, "I was just holding it for X so he didn't get in trouble with his parents" and I said, "Okay, no problem, we'll just call X's parents and straighten it all out" and after a moment of reflection, he walked over to my wife and told her the two giant bags of gummy candy were his-- he had bought them at Rite-Aid-- and, after the usual web of lies, he finally admitted they were just for his own gluttonous consumption-- so we confiscated the bag, gave him the perfunctory lecture about sugar-- we had just been to the dentist the day before!-- and then I advised him that if he had just bought a little bag of candy, consumed it, and threw away the evidence, no one would have been the wiser, but three pounds of candy was rather excessive-- dealer level weight-- and then we thought we were in the clear with parenting dilemmas, as the long weekend was almost upon us, but today Ian used his green hair paint to spray a giant pair of green genitals in the boy's locker room (the frank and the beans) and he not only had to clean the school locker rooms but he also did a bunch of manual labor around the house to atone for his profane vandalism . . . I guess I shouldn't have let him watch Superbad last weekend (although he did nice job weeding and mulching . . . not that I want him to get in trouble, but it is a big help with the chores when he does).

Manchesters Fictitious and Real

Although it is well-acted, impeccably structured, and beautifully filmed, watching Manchester by the Sea is about as much fun as following the Manchester Ariana Grande bombing . . . but since Manchester by the Sea didn't actually happen, why put yourself through unnecessary tragedy?

Did I Finish This Book?

If you're a fan of big data, breezy writing, fun facts and sex and sex and sex and sex, then you'll certainly enjoy Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's new book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are . . . his theories and information are extracted from the digital confessional, the place where people are the most honest, the place where people think no one else is listening . . . he studied massive troves of Google and Pornhub searches; here are some of the things you'll learn about:

1) how racist America really is . . . and where the racists live (closer than you think)

2) the truth about Freudian slips and phallic dream imagery (neither means shit)

3) the six most popular story structures (as determined by an algorithm)

4) why 99 percent of teenagers who reported having artificial limbs on academic surveys were pulling the researchers' legs (pun provided by Dave!)

5) why parents wonder if their son is a genius and their daughter is overweight;

6) why were not as polarized as we think (Stormfront users love the NY Times)

7) how we are lying about how much we want to judge and keep up with our friends, how much we care where and how products are produced, how much we want to watch midgets having sex with porn stars, and how much we want to learn about political policy;

8) how most people are overestimating the amount of sex they are having per week (male and female estimations don't add up, and even more damning, the condom sales don't add up)

9) the ethics of using all this data . . . we don't want to end up like Minority Report, with precogs predicting crimes before they happen and then pre-crime units preemptively abrogating people's rights-- or . . . if we could avert something like the recent Manchester bombing . . . maybe we do;

10) why non-fiction conclusions don't matter (most people don't finish non-fiction books).

Decisions in Basketball Have No Bearing on Decisions in Life

Pick-up basketball night is all about making quick decisions with the ball, and my son Alex is certainly getting better at that-- he made a couple of nice outlet passes and is getting better at catching and shooting the ball in one motion-- but his decision making off the court has improved not so much . . . before we left for the gym he was hungry so he put a bunch of cereal in his pocket, so he could eat it when necessary-- and when my wife and I questioned the rationality of this strategy, he told us: "these are clean shorts!" and when he got home, he filled a cup with cereal and milk, and went into the living room while drinking his concoction-- and he's got terrible allergies right now-- so he ended up choking and spitting cereal and milk all over the place (and he's got poison ivy on his face because he fell in a bush during Nerf wars and he also nearly asphyxiated at his soccer game on Sunday because his allergies were so bad-- we had to take him at half-time and the doctor gave him a steroid shot-- not that he can control his allergies . . . but he's quite the thirteen year old trainwreck right now).

The Test 87: Brothers From Another Mother

Another brilliant and creative test idea from Stacey this week, and she thought of it all by herself . . . without the help of a man . . . astounding; first you'll have to endure our tales of curing cancer and Cunningham's perplexity about a disgusting mystery of the human body, but this is a sun-dazed episode the whole family will enjoy (and kids might perform better than adults) so give it a shot, keep score, and see how you fare.

Applying the Bard to the Beautiful Game

We had a low turnout for this morning's travel soccer game in Flemington; we were missing several key players and had only one substitute-- who was not only sick, but had a sore quad from Saturday's game-- and we were playing a team with several big, fast players and an eleven year old goalie the size of an adult (he could punt the ball nearly the length of the field and he caught everything cleanly) and we were down 1 - 0 at the half so I paraphrased Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V to inspire them: I began with the mathematical division of glory . . . the fewer the players, the greater the share of honor, and then reminded them that they had showed up and and if they did something remarkable then those players who were not in attendance "should think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap" and then my very tired crew went out for the second half and immediately gave up a goal, so we were down 2 - 0 and things looked hopeless, and then they got inspired by something-- whether it was my speech we'll never know-- but they came back and tied the game and came damned close to winning it . . . if it wasn't for that giant goalie, but it was certainly a David vs. Goliath performance . . . the other team had eighteen players and we had nine and a half, and I was very proud of their effort.

It's Saturday and It's Raining . . . Again

Last week one of my students said, "It rains every weekend" and I pedantically pointed out how irrational her logic was-- how the weather does not possess consciousness and can't possibly be aware of what day of the week it is-- although it is Saturday and it's raining again, and we have a soccer game and I need to build a new gate for our fence and my wife is getting soaked at a bike rodeo and so my evidence may be anecdotal and also suspect to confirmation bias, but I'm starting to believe her.

R.I.P Grunge

I am usually unmoved by celebrity deaths but Chris Cornell's death is more symbolic . . . grunge is now truly dead: Cornell joins Kurt Cobain, Scott Weiland, and Layne Staley-- and while I've seen the meme about protecting Eddie Vedder at all costs, as he is the last remaining frontman of grunge, I never considered Pearl Jam a real grunge band, they're more of a pop act and most of their songs annoy me-- anyway, the age of grunge was the last time I could listen to pop radio and enjoy it (my friends and I saw Soundgarden and Circus of Power in Asbury Park in the late 80s-- the Louder Than Love tour-- and it was as billed, so LOUD, we couldn't hear for days afterwards and in a few short years grunge was everywhere-- Nirvana was ubiquitous and in 1993, the fantastic, extemporaneous and acoustic Alice in Chains album "Jar of Flies" reached number one on the charts . . . signifying something awesome about that time period . . .Dave was 23 and Kim Thayil said, in some interview in a guitar magazine, "It doesn't matter if you're playing a major or a minor chord when your sound is this loud and distorted" and all that is over now, especially for me, as I can't take loudness these days and if grunge resurfaced I wouldn't be able to tolerate it).