Is it wrong to pretend to be friends with someone solely because he smokes (and distributes) his own bacon?
It's Summer! Make Your Kids Watch Movies!
My kids and I don't watch much TV during the school year, but now that it's summer, we are making up for lost time-- and I'm very lucky to have two excellent (and captive) movie watchers . . . one of the great joys of fatherhood is forcing my kids to watch films that I want to see; and the rule is, if you don't want to watch what dad has chosen, then go read a fucking book . . . here's a few of the things we've watched lately:
1) Song of the Sea . . . 2D and proud of it, a little slow, but visually stunning;
2) American Werewolf in London . . . best pub scene ever at The Slaughtered Lamb, a lot of awkward seventies nudity, and if they had just listened and stayed off the moors . . . a great movie and streams for free on Amazon Prime;
3) Caddyshack . . . still holds up and my kids loved it as both a comedy and a sports movie-- the dialogue is a lot weirder than you remember, especially Chevy Chase's seventies mystical guru bullshit . . . Bill Murray is often incomprehensible, and may have been drunk/stoned during production;
4) Goodfellas . . . this is one of my favorites and the kids really appreciated the dialogue and the lesson . . . Alex said in school they told him not to do drugs, but he though a better approach would have been to simply show the last twenty minutes of Goodfellas, the deathly pale Ray Liotta having paranoid freak-outs while being chased by helicopters, and the class would have gotten it more clearly;
5) The Shawshank Redemption . . . Ian sat silently during the entire film and then at the end turned to me, astonished, and said, "That was a great movie!"
6) Saving Private Ryan . . . this one struck a chord with Ian as well, making him want to watch another war movie, and we realized you can stream this film on Amazon . . .
7) Apocalypse Now . . . I was really impressed that my kids dug this movie, it's long and trippy and slow at times-- although punctuated with some of the greatest scenes of violence and horror ever filmed-- I hadn't watched it in a long time and forgot how astounding it is-- you couldn't make a movie like that today: slightly plotless, surreal and psychedelic, chock full of stars, and tragically abject at the end . . . the boys were riveted, even during the interminably long and weird Kurtz portion . . . warning though, animals ARE harmed during the production of this movie, especially a water buffalo . . .
8) 30 Rock . . . we all love this show and it's a great thing to watch right after you finish Apocalypse Now, in order to wind down and not have nightmares;
9) Raising Arizona . . . kids loved this one as well, especially the fight between John Goodman and Nicholas Cage in the trailer home, and Randall "Tex" Cobb as Leonard Smalls;
10) Poltergeist . . . fairly scary, especially the clown, and very important for kids to see, so they understand jokes about building houses on top of ancient Indian burial grounds.
1) Song of the Sea . . . 2D and proud of it, a little slow, but visually stunning;
2) American Werewolf in London . . . best pub scene ever at The Slaughtered Lamb, a lot of awkward seventies nudity, and if they had just listened and stayed off the moors . . . a great movie and streams for free on Amazon Prime;
3) Caddyshack . . . still holds up and my kids loved it as both a comedy and a sports movie-- the dialogue is a lot weirder than you remember, especially Chevy Chase's seventies mystical guru bullshit . . . Bill Murray is often incomprehensible, and may have been drunk/stoned during production;
4) Goodfellas . . . this is one of my favorites and the kids really appreciated the dialogue and the lesson . . . Alex said in school they told him not to do drugs, but he though a better approach would have been to simply show the last twenty minutes of Goodfellas, the deathly pale Ray Liotta having paranoid freak-outs while being chased by helicopters, and the class would have gotten it more clearly;
5) The Shawshank Redemption . . . Ian sat silently during the entire film and then at the end turned to me, astonished, and said, "That was a great movie!"
6) Saving Private Ryan . . . this one struck a chord with Ian as well, making him want to watch another war movie, and we realized you can stream this film on Amazon . . .
7) Apocalypse Now . . . I was really impressed that my kids dug this movie, it's long and trippy and slow at times-- although punctuated with some of the greatest scenes of violence and horror ever filmed-- I hadn't watched it in a long time and forgot how astounding it is-- you couldn't make a movie like that today: slightly plotless, surreal and psychedelic, chock full of stars, and tragically abject at the end . . . the boys were riveted, even during the interminably long and weird Kurtz portion . . . warning though, animals ARE harmed during the production of this movie, especially a water buffalo . . .
8) 30 Rock . . . we all love this show and it's a great thing to watch right after you finish Apocalypse Now, in order to wind down and not have nightmares;
9) Raising Arizona . . . kids loved this one as well, especially the fight between John Goodman and Nicholas Cage in the trailer home, and Randall "Tex" Cobb as Leonard Smalls;
10) Poltergeist . . . fairly scary, especially the clown, and very important for kids to see, so they understand jokes about building houses on top of ancient Indian burial grounds.
Freedom?
In the spirit of Independence Day, I cut the cord on our cable and home phone; we now only have Verizon FIOS internet-- they're sending us a prepaid shipping box so we can mail back the set-top cable receiver, so no more weird fees to "rent" that stupid thing (no taxation without representation!) and they are also sending us a new router . . . at first the lady on the phone wanted to charge me 84.99 a month for internet, but once I mentioned the opposing deal from Optimum, she "noticed" that if I signed up for two years, it would be 44.99 a month--- and that's it, no fees or anything-- I think I now need to get a digital antennae for local stations (apparently there are more than you think) and I'm a little hazy about the rest-- I'm still a Verizon customer, so I can login to ESPN3 and other channels-- and in place of the home-phone, I used Google Voice and got a Google Phone Number . . . yesterday I actually called my son and the computer in the kitchen "rang" and he answered the call . . . and he was able to reciprocate and call my cell from the computer with Google Voice . . . to celebrate the new digital revolution, we watched Apocalypse Now last night, it's streaming for free on Amazon if you have Prime.
The Test 91: Looking Through the Looking Glass (Menagerie)
Another brilliant and creative quiz from Stacey on this week's episode of The Test, but this time-- as I've always suspected-- she didn't think of the idea herself . . . you'll understand once you navigate the steep and thorny path through seven ethical dilemmas-- with an added layer of mental gymnastics-- plus, as a bonus, listen all the way until the end to hear us laugh and laugh at Cunningham's anguish.
Trump and Scott Pruitt Want to Contaminate Our Precious Bodily Fluids
If you're worried about the state of our nation, forget about the tweets and the faux-Time magazine covers and the Russia investigation and the posturing with North Korea . . . the Trump administration is dismantling the Waters of United States Rule, which extended the EPA's authority to regulate large bodies of water, such as the Chesapeake Bay and the waterways, streams, and wetlands that flow into these bodies of water . . . this is also called The Stream Protection Rule, and it fleshes out the laws that prevent mining companies from doing "material damage" to the waterways and streams, and it took many, many years to enact . . . fifteen, in fact; Scott Pruitt-- Trump's pro-coal nutjob EPA administrator-- just signed a proposal to rescind the rule, and return the power in these pollution issues back to the states, which makes no logical sense, because waterways do not observe state borders (nor can water be gerrymandered) and if you're upstream-- whether you're a farmer or a miner or work in some other industry-- then you can pollute away, and let the state downstream worry about it . . . and if we've learned anything from Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, the best way to start World War III is to taint our fresh pure water, which we need to replenish our precious bodily fluids, so that we can engage in the physical act of love without a loss of essence.
Parallel Gluttony with a Dash of Surrealism
Friday, I got home from my four hour workshop on how to teach the Rutgers Composition class, ate some lunch and crawled into bed for a nap-- I was all tuckered out from Thursday night . . . we took a tour of the Cypress Brewery-- which involved much sampling of the wares-- then went to the pub (I dropped a dart on my foot and, unfortunately, I was wearing sandals, there was some blood) and then ate a bacon cheeseburger and some fries at White Rose . . . an epic evening for middle-aged men-- meanwhile, as I slept through the afternoon, my kids and their friend Tibby were out on the town, determined to spend their allowance; they walked all the way to White Rose for lunch-- which is quite a haul, especially in the heat-- and on the way they found a wallet in the street, and they looked inside and ascertained the address of the owner from her ID . . . she lived on the North Side, by the Middle School, and she also happened to be a little person (dwarf also seems to be okay when describing someone very short, but the "midget" is politically incorrect) and they decided they should return the wallet to the little lady, but first they would follow a rule of thumb very close to my heart: Eat first, then do a good deed . . . so they ate their burgers, then walked across town and delivered the wallet back to the little lady, who Ian described as very kind and thankful, but slightly witch-like, with a boil on her nose and some green cupcake batter on the side of her face . . . and she was so pleased with the return of her wallet that she gave the boys a twenty dollar reward, and they applied another commonly used heuristic to that situation: Found Money? Spend That Cheddar! and so the three of them went straight to Baskin Robbins and spent twenty dollars on ice cream (they ordered elaborate sundaes that sounded more like bowls of candy with a dollop of ice cream tossed in for good measure) and then, to finish the adventure, they went to the comic book store . . . so a gluttonous twenty-four hour cycle for all the males in my household, but while I needed a nap to recover, Alex and Ian said they had no ill effects from throwing a shit-ton of ice cream and candy on top of a greasy burger and fries . . . the joys of youth.
Drinking and Tossing
Playing cornhole without beer feels a bit childish-- especially if you're playing with other adults-- you quickly realize that you're just tossing around beanbags in public (we learned this lesson at the Stress Factory, the local comedy club . . . they have cornhole outside and you can play while you wait to get in, and while the hostess insisted we'd be able to get beer out there while we waited, that was patently false . . . cornhole was fun at first, but then, without beer, the realization dawned on us what we were doing; at least with horseshoes, if you don't pay attention, you can get a concussion).
The Intrepid Adventures of Dave's Headphone Wire
I was about to go for a run, wearing my headphones, the cord dangling-- I hadn't attached the headphone jack to my phone yet-- when I realized needed to change my underwear from boxers to boxer-briefs, to avoid chafing, and during the underwear exchange, while I was pulling them up, the headphone cord fell into the briefs, and then-- propelled upward by the new underwear-- ended up threaded between my thigh and right testicle, the final six inches of the cord looping back upwards and wedged right between the crack in my ass . . . so my only option was to pull the cord back to daylight, flossing my nether regions, hoping the metal jack didn't lodge itself anywhere sensitive, and while everything worked out fine and the cord didn't sustain any permanent olfactory damage-- I checked-- I'll be a little more careful the next time it's hanging loose, now that I know the potential hazards.
Inside Out is a Great Movie But . . .
Lisa Feldman Barrett's new book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain is psychologically groundbreaking-- it upends intuition, debunks, assumptions, and overturns the classic way psychologists and laypeople alike view emotions-- you should read it, but if you don't feel like wading through (and I had trouble, I often had to read paragraphs over and over again) here are a few highlights:
1) your brain makes a model of the world through prediction and correction, and if things don't work then the brain tries to construct a new prediction to resolve errors;
2) therefore you don't have set emotional circuitry, that you share with all other people . . . so Inside Out isn't all that accurate;
3) your upbringing, your culture, your genetics, all your experiences and stimulus and all sorts of other things influence these models and predictions, so no emotion is the same;
4) some cultures and people lack emotions that other cultures and people possess . . . and knowledge of these emotions and granular analysis of common emotions can cause people to experience emotions differently . . . just knowing the word for a particular emotion, such as schadenfreude, can cause someone to have that emotion;
5) emotions aren't triggered, they are constructed;
6) there is no battle between the logical, conscious brain and the emotional "side" of the brain-- the brain isn't cerebral rationality wrapped around primitive emotional response circuitry;
7) we are neither blank slates nor hardwired circuitry, though this is the caricature of each position;
8) our "body budget" has a profound impact on how we view the world, so sometimes emotions are the result of lack of sleep, lack of food, or lack of exercise;
9) your memories are "highly vulnerable to reshaping by your current circumstances";
10) mental inferences about emotion are often wrong, and facial expressions are not hard-wired or indicative of much . . . behaviorism is not a great predictor of emotion;
11) at the core we feel valence and affect . . . we feel aroused or calm, and we feel pleasant or unpleasant . . . the rest can be determined by a number of factors;
12) we have more control over our emotions that previously thought-- which appeals to the conservatives: you are responsible for your actions, but-- and this appeals to the liberals-- culture and experience literally create our prediction models, so emotions are more relative than universal;
13) "the dividing line between culture and biology is porous";
14) this revision from essentialist emotions to a more interoceptive model will probably be considered equally primitive in 100 years;
anyway, if you read this book and The Nurture Assumption by Judith Harris, you'll have a whole new view of psychology, which might make you feel liberated or ignorant or empowered or pedantic or-- if you're reading this stuff on a couch in a supine position-- sleepy.
1) your brain makes a model of the world through prediction and correction, and if things don't work then the brain tries to construct a new prediction to resolve errors;
2) therefore you don't have set emotional circuitry, that you share with all other people . . . so Inside Out isn't all that accurate;
3) your upbringing, your culture, your genetics, all your experiences and stimulus and all sorts of other things influence these models and predictions, so no emotion is the same;
4) some cultures and people lack emotions that other cultures and people possess . . . and knowledge of these emotions and granular analysis of common emotions can cause people to experience emotions differently . . . just knowing the word for a particular emotion, such as schadenfreude, can cause someone to have that emotion;
5) emotions aren't triggered, they are constructed;
6) there is no battle between the logical, conscious brain and the emotional "side" of the brain-- the brain isn't cerebral rationality wrapped around primitive emotional response circuitry;
7) we are neither blank slates nor hardwired circuitry, though this is the caricature of each position;
8) our "body budget" has a profound impact on how we view the world, so sometimes emotions are the result of lack of sleep, lack of food, or lack of exercise;
9) your memories are "highly vulnerable to reshaping by your current circumstances";
10) mental inferences about emotion are often wrong, and facial expressions are not hard-wired or indicative of much . . . behaviorism is not a great predictor of emotion;
11) at the core we feel valence and affect . . . we feel aroused or calm, and we feel pleasant or unpleasant . . . the rest can be determined by a number of factors;
12) we have more control over our emotions that previously thought-- which appeals to the conservatives: you are responsible for your actions, but-- and this appeals to the liberals-- culture and experience literally create our prediction models, so emotions are more relative than universal;
13) "the dividing line between culture and biology is porous";
14) this revision from essentialist emotions to a more interoceptive model will probably be considered equally primitive in 100 years;
anyway, if you read this book and The Nurture Assumption by Judith Harris, you'll have a whole new view of psychology, which might make you feel liberated or ignorant or empowered or pedantic or-- if you're reading this stuff on a couch in a supine position-- sleepy.
It's Got to be the Water
Yesterday, I bought my first ever "growler" of beer, from a local brewery a couple miles from my house; Cypress Brewing Company is located down a bosky side street in an industrial park in Edison, New Jersey, amidst auto body shops and computer firms, near the community college, and while I didn't ask, I'm fairly sure that the brewers use the flavorful and pungent waters from the Lower Raritan Watershed . . . despite this hurdle, several prominent beer drinkers (Ashley, Connell and Alec) agreed that the beer is delicious-- the Knobbed Whelk Amber Ale specifically-- and I will definitely visit this diamond-in-the industrial-park soon to refill my growler (four dollars to buy the 64 oz growler and twelve dollars to fill it with beer).
The Test 90: Consume This
This week on The Test, I quiz the ladies (including special guest Little Allie Hogan) on all the various things we consume; the numbers are weird, wild, and wonderful, and -- if you're a modern American-- a little embarrassing . . . there's also an erotic reading and a cannibalistic interlude (and the audio quality is fantastic . . . no more sounding like this guy!)
Dave Fixes His Car! With Tape!
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| Before |
If you've been following my life lately (which you should) then you know that I tore a hole in the side panel of my Toyota Sienna; I caught the lip of a guardrail while trying to squeeze out of a tiny parking lot adjacent to the Landing Lane Bridge (and I was in this lot for good reason: I was going for a run with the dog on the towpath, and this lot has the quickest access to the path . . . if you park in the lot on the other side of the bridge, in Johnson Park, then you have to walk across the bridge and the bridge walkway is covered with glass shards, so I was worried about my dog's paws) but I got some Auto Body Repair Tape (eleven dollars on Amazon) and my van is as good as new.
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| After! |
On the Nature Front, Tough Losses, Strange Gains
Sadly, the baby dove that my two sons were trying to resuscitate back to life died yesterday-- they were hand-feeding it, Brooks-style, and kept it alive for a couple weeks before it succumbed to the anti-stork, but despite the end result, I was proud of their efforts, they cooperated in a noble fashion-- one holding the bird and gently opening the beak, the other squeezing a concoction of minced chicken baby food (feeding chicken to a dove, yuck) and baby cereal out of the corner of a plastic bag . . . and today while walking the dog, Ian found a new addition to the family-- not exactly a replacement for the bird, but another nature project . . . it seems he found a small meteorite at the park, and it has passed a few of the internet litmus tests-- it made the right color streak, it's very heavy, it looks like a meteorite, and it's attracted to magnets-- but we'll have to take it to a real geologist to be certain of the origin.
This Happened? In America? Less Than 100 Years Ago? Yikes
David Grann's book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is a tough story in more ways than one; it's a detailed account of two dozen (or possibly more) murders of Osage Indians, who relocated from the Cherokee territory in south Kansas (the ending point for many tribes after enduring the Trail of Tears) to a hardscrabble land of rocks and hills in Oklahoma because they thought the white man would never bother them in such lonely wicked country . . . but once oil was discovered under the Osage land, the white man came in droves, the Osage got filthy rich with headrights to the Osage Mineral Estate, and the atrocities followed one after another-- many of the murders masterminded by William King Hale-- who took advantage of the fact that some of the Osage married outside the family . . . it's impossible to summarize the rest, as the book has a huge cast of characters and also delves into the birth of the FBI, the methods of J. Edgar Hoover, and the storied biography of Tom White, who eventually ran Leavenworth Prison, and while the plot might be a bit byzantine for beach reading, the images of the richest Indians in America-- riding in chauffeured limousines to pow-wows, flying private planes to campfires, and sending their children to the finest European boarding schools, while still being under the corrupt auspice of government guardians and managers-- and these same Indians falling prey to a compromised criminal justice system, while being fleeced and often killed by number of greedy and conniving white men, with the lure of black gold looming in the Oklahoma hills, this all makes for an epic and embarrassing story from recent American history, and there's some new findings at the end, that Grann uncovered in his copious research-- so while this book isn't as fun as The Lost City of Z, it's much more significant, and in the end you will agree that-- as God told Cain-- "the blood cries out from the ground."
Dave is Never Too Old to Learn Stuff (but He'll Never Have a Nice Car)
I went for a run with the dog this morning on the towpath (the narrow park between the Raritan River and the Delaware and Raritan Canal) and I learned several valuable lessons:
1) if you are several miles out on the towpath, and your dog poops, and you bag the poop and then put a plastic bag filled with poop in your pocket (because the canal is a watershed, so you don't want to leave poop near it) and you then run several miles, you'll forget you have poop in your pocket (it cools down) and you'll eventually stick your hand in your pocket to see what's in there-- luckily I tied the bag shut, so I didn't end up with a hand full of poop (although I did smell the bag, in the name of science, and despite the fact that the poop is sequestered inside plastic, it still smells like poop);
2) it's not worth parking in the tiny Landing Lane lot, right next to the towpath, because it's an extremely sharp turn out of the lot and there is always traffic on the other side of the road . . . I cut it a little too sharp and caught the lip of the guard rail and tore a hole in my van . . . I'm going to attempt to fix this hole with some auto body repair tape-- ten bucks on Amazon-- which leads us to lesson number three . . .
3) I am a terrible car owner-- fans of this blog know the stories of my infamous Jeep Cherokee, and I am doling out the same kind of abuse to my Toyota Sienna . . . when it comes to cars, I just can't have nice things.
The Test 89: Music From the Past (for the Future)
Another clever thematic music quiz from Stacey this week on The Test . . . so listen to the song clips, identify the artists, contemplate the lyrics, compile the clues, and then-- in the timeless style of Archimedes-- jump out of the tub, shout "Eureka!" and run through the streets, buck-naked and dripping wet, proclaiming your answer . . . only to find it is wrong (and you are without clothing, in public).
Barrett vs Tolstoy
Lisa Feldman Barrett begs to differ with the opening premise of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," as she believes that happiness-- like every emotion-- defies categorization and is much more variegated and complex in form (and much simpler than was once thought in content, controlled by two factors: valence and affect) and she points out that "you can smile in happiness, sob in happiness, scream in happiness, raise your arms in happiness, clench your fists in happiness, jump up and down doling high fives in happiness, or even be stunned motionless in happiness . . . your eyes might be wide or narrowed, your breathing rapid or slow . . . you can have the heart-pounding exciting happiness of winning the lottery or the calm relaxed happiness of lying on a picnic blanket with your lover" and this idea connects to Barrett's central thesis, that emotions aren't set pieces waiting to be triggered, they are created on the fly, thus the title of her book: How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain . . . and if don't feel like wading through the text, you can listen to Invisibilia "Emotions Part One."
Ode to Talcum
I've just finished showering the dirt and grit and sweat and talcum powder off my body, accumulated from hiking twenty plus miles-- the exact distance is still being computed; our intrepid gang of ten dads hauled our asses through through Montclair, Glenridge, Verona, West Orange, Eagle Rock Reservation, Mills Reservation, Montclair State Campus and a bunch of places I can't remember, on an urban/suburban/dirt trail adventure, we walked from 9 AM to 6:00 PM-- and I walked over a mile to the train station at 7:00 AM; we saw a fox and Yogi Berra's mansion and the top of Eagle Rock and Thomas Edison's lab; in the middle of the day, we got soaked in the downpour, but we finally made it back to Montclair, had a delicious meal at Le Salbuen, took an Uber home, and-- because of an emergency baby powder purchase mid-hike and very liberal application of said powder, in many public locales-- including along busy roads-- I am happy to report that there was no chafing.
Old Dog = New Tricks
Not only did I eat at a pizza place that I had never tried before (Pasquales . . . delicious, thin chewy crust and they put a bit of pesto sauce on the grandma slice) but I took a shortcut that I never used before to get there (Stratford!) and I attribute my two new tricks (for an old dog) to my students, who advised me both on the pizza place and how to get there as quickly as possible (I had to monitor two exams in a row, so I was really hungry).
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