Oppressing Question

Even when I've made a clean fecal grab and knotted the neck in an airtight fashion, if I hold a full dog poop disposal bag right up to my nose, I can still smell the poop inside the bag-- the poop smell somehow penetrates the plastic . . . but this seems to defy the laws of olfactory physics: anyone out there know why this is so?

Bury This Post, Evil Algorithm . . . I Dare You

It's been nearly a year since I told you to read Cathy O'Neil's book Weapons of Math Destruction, and you ignored me . . . or perhaps you didn't ignore me, perhaps-- and this is far worse-- the algorithm that chooses what you see and don't see on social media buried this post (and wouldn't that be just what an insidiously malevolent algorithm would do? bury a post about the dangers of algorithms?) and so if this post reaches you-- and I'm not confident that it will-- then I've got something quicker and easier for you than reading an entire book: just listen to this week's 99% Invisible . . . the episode is called "The Age of the Algorithm" and Cathy O'Neil is the special guest; she reminds us that the internet is a curated propaganda machine designed to brainwash you in a most pleasant and undetectable manner, and she's not afraid to admonish all of us for allowing this to happen . . . when society is presented with a difficult question-- what makes a good teacher? what is the purpose of jail? who deserves to get a loan? what should we encounter on the internet?-- we now tend to skirt the issue and let an algorithm do the "math," because it's easier to hide behind a formula, even though the variables and values in the formula were chosen by a human, and the formula itself was designed by a human . . . and often a human who didn't have any stakes in the outcome of the equation . . . O'Neil isn't condemning all algorithms, some are incredibly useful-- in fact, New Jersey is employing an algorithm to implement bail and it has been quite successful-- but she is advocating transparency, we need to pull back the curtain and took a look at the wizard that makes these decisions, and we need to be able to see what other people are seeing on Facebook and Twitter and such, to get an idea of the fake news and political ad campaigns and other persuasive rhetoric that is happening beyond our perspective . . . and the sad thing is that the people who see this post will be the people who already know this, maybe I need to photocopy it on regular paper and drop it from an airplane.

This post is not a pipe . . . nor is it a spoon

This season, my U-13 travel soccer team made the leap from 9 v 9 on a small grass field to 11 v 11 on an enormous full-sized high school turf field-- the space is vast and incomprehensible for the pre-pubescent 11 and 12 year olds of which my squad is comprised, goals will be few and far between, and most attacks will peter out forty yards from the endline, so this year's mantra for my midfield is straight from The Matrix: there is no forward and there is no backwards, only open space and open players (our only hope is to possess the ball, bring it all the way back to the keeper, out to the sides, up the field a bit, then back again . . . until the other team collapses from exhaustion . . . then, if we've got anything left, we'll finally move forward).

Can a Goat Win Best Supporting Actor?

I can't really recommend The Witch as a horror movie, but if you're looking for an eerie period tragedy in the vein of The Crucible-- but without the boring courtroom scenes and way more blood and gore-- then you might be up for this film . . . my son Alex watched a bit, was properly disturbed, pronounced the movie weird, and reminded us that there weren't any witches in 17th century New England, and that the probable cause of the hysteria was that the settlers ate crops covered with a psychedelic fungus (it's called ergot, and this is a real academic theory as to the cause of the witchcraft pandemonium in Salem) and while this is alluded to in the film, it' ambiguous as to whether the witch and the witchcraft is real or hallucinatory, but mainly the movie is beautiful to look at and listen to, the costumes and the menacing farm animals and the creepy score and the perfect casting of every actor and muted color palette that makes the film look ancient and venerable . . . the husband and wife really look like malnourished Puritans in a Grimm's fairy tale, and the twins have that Shining quality about them and Thomasin is radiant and compelling, a with a strange slightly sexual magnetism that adds an air of Freudian attraction to the brew . . . and beware of Black Phillip.

Listen at Your Own Risk

Here are some podcasts that will twist your sense of morality back unto itself:

1) This American Life updates the noted George Saunders short story "Pastoralia" in Act Two of episode 623: We Are in the Future, the rest of the episode is trash, so head straight to "Past Imperfect" . . . it's the story of an African American woman (comedian and actor Azie Dungey) who played the role of a slave at Mt. Vernon, George Washington's estate in Virginia, and the difficulties and disparagement she suffered as a consequence of this oddly symbolic position-- a sole black woman representing all 316 slaves that Washington owned; tourists struggled with this reminder of reality (thought it was sorely lacking in numerical accuracy) and the moral of the story is that none of us are over the past, and none of us are able to get over it, white and black alike, so we're going to have to have some frank discussions about what went on back there in the mists of time and how we're going to portray these folks that we all have in common;

2) Episode 792 of Planet Money, "The Ransom Problem" presents a wicked dilemma that combines Catch 22 and Hamlet's most famous soliloquy . . . when you've been abducted by terrorists demanding ransom, and you have to decided whether "to pay or not to pay"; the U.S. and Canadian governments refuse to pay kidnappers, while many European nations will foot the bill . . . and while in a utilitarian sense, it makes sense not to pay ransom, because you don't want to incentivize abduction, this tactic doesn't seem to be working . . . anyway, this episode will run you through the wringer, you'll change your position several times, and by the end you won't know what to think or do . . . not only does the podcast deal with the economic implications of ransom, it also tells the entire wild abduction story of Amanda Lindhout . . . and it all happens in less than 20 minutes;

3) the wake of a flood is probably the worst time to discuss the cockamamie flood insurance policies in our country, because you're bound to come off a bit callous and unfeeling, but the folks at The Weeds and Slate Money do a great job of being informative, empathetic, and knowledgeable about what we need to do in the future to amend the absurdity (not that it will ever happen).

A Post Just Forer You

I've done some research and data analysis and here's what I've found: people who read this blog are smart, creative, a little skeptical, and self-sufficient . . . congratulations, readers!

Duh

Rick and Morty is the opposite of Horace and Pete (and Time Travel: A History, by James Gleick, is the text that explains why this is so, but I'm so tired from my first day of work that I can't give any further explanation . . . you're going to have to trust me on this one).

Wednesday/Thursday Morning Compare/Contrast Miracle

Yesterday morning I was angry and frustrated: I hooked up my $14.50 Amazon Warehouse deal digital antenna to our very expensive flat screen TV and got bupkis . . . I couldn't pull in any free channels, not a one, and so after some cursing and yelling, I packaged the antenna back up and printed out the return label so I could send it back to Amazon-- I wasn't sure if the antenna didn't work (it was a Warehouse Deal) or if I needed a better antenna and/or better antenna placement to pull in the digital stations, and I was getting nervous because football season is about to start and I want to be able to watch the Giants, and so last night, when I crashed lady's night at Pino's, my friend Ann said that digital broadcast TV is a total hoax and there's no way to pull in any stations and I was very sad-- I just wanted to watch the Giants, not become beholden to cable again-- we cut the cord a few months ago and are saving a lot of money and I wondered about the various cheap streaming TV services and Johanna said that Sling TV has trouble streaming major sports events and I was totally confounded and depressed, afraid I was headed back into the monopolistic maw of Verizon or Optimum, but this morning, after Googling things like "Are digital TV antennas a stupid fucking hoax?" I learned that any antenna can pull in digital signals, and the site recommended plugging your old-fashioned rooftop antenna into the TV, and so I found the old rooftop coaxial cable, screwed it into our fancy digital TV and-- miracle beyond miracles-- the tuner started pulling in all kinds of channels and now we've got all the basic channels and a bunch of really weird stuff (like an audio channel of people talking in Mandarin) and so I can watch the Giants and my wife can watch The Bachelor and we'll survive without cable for the time being (although I'm going to need to do something creative once the World Cup starts . . . Ann suggested bringing my big TV over to her cabled house).

Thanks Time! For Saving My (Naked) Ass

I was eating some delicious and weird food at Chef Tan today with my wife and kids, sitting outside on the patio, slurping down some cold clear noodles and hot sauce (these clear noodles are especially transparent, square, and gelatinous . . . like something squeezed out of a psychedelic Asian Play-Doh extruder) and the two teenage sisters from next-door walked by, enjoying a stroll down Main Street on a beautiful day and we said,"Hello" and once they passed my wife remembered something and said, "Oh my God, I forgot to tell you!" and then she told me, and I had a momentary lapse of reason, and then realized the gods of time and space had smiled upon me . . . here is why: my wife informed me that she had seen the older of the two teenage sisters totally out-of-context, when she took the boys on a trip to H2Oooohh water park in the Poconos earlier this summer; I wasn't there-- I was down in Nags Head with friends-- and so I missed this incident; they were inside the park, and Alex was riding the infinite wave rider and our neighbor appeared in front of Catherine and said, "Hi" went over and said "Hi" and my wife didn't recognize her for a moment, because it was so weird to see a neighbor in a water park in Pennsylvania, and it turns out she was working in the park as a counselor, and when my wife told me this, I thought, "Yikes! That was close" because this particular water park was the scene of one of my more egregious awkward moments, when I changed into my bathing suit in a corner of what I thought was the locker room, but it was actually an open waiting area that was masquerading as a lock room, and so I essentially stripped in public . . . it was quite embarrassing and my family still gives me shit about it, but now there's a silver lining, at least I committed this rather heinous act when our teenaged neighbor was not working at the water park . . . so thanks Time, for allowing me to escape years and years of awkward interactions with my neighbors (and to repay you, I will do a naked dance in my yard, slathered in olive oil, at the stroke of midnight on the next Leap Day . . . hopefully, no one will be peering through the bushes).

Geometric Fashion

After multiple trips to the fitting room at Kohl's-- tedious trips that nearly crushed me with boredom and exhaustion-- I finally had an epiphany: if I were two-dimensional then my shirt size would be a "large," but I'm not two-dimensional, not even a little bit, so when I'm in the middle of the store and I hold the shirt up to my body to get a quick look-see, it seems as if a "large" will suffice, but when I actually stuff my body inside the shirt, then there's no question that I'm going to need an "XL."

Horace, Pete, and an Amy Sedaris Cameo

My wife and I finished the rather bizarre Louie C.K. ten act televised play Horace and Pete last night, and while it has comic moments and plenty of fantastic topical debates and cameos among the bar-folk, it is mainly a tragedy about the inevitability of change: Horace and Pete's is a family bar that has been owned and operated in Brooklyn for a one hundred years, and there has always been a Horace and a Pete behind the bar . . . Louie C.K. is Horace the VIII and Steve Buscemi is his brother Pete, and while they try to keep things intact and preserve the traditions of the bar (they only serve Budweiser and straight liquor, and you pay based on your patronage, loyal customers pay one price-- on nothing at all-- while hipsters drinking "ironically" pay a higher price for drinks) there is no avoiding gentrification, technology, progress, and craft beer; this story really struck a chord with me, the school year and soccer season are about to start, and while I'm a veteran teacher and coach and I should know exactly how things work, that's not the case-- once again, everything is new and changed and different . . . there's a new platform to register all the soccer players and it's driving everyone a bit crazy; we're having a technology day at school on Friday, probably to introduce yet another lesson plan/grading/attendance/standards platform (and I've just figured out Evernote and Google docs!) and my classes have all "evolved," Creative writing is a quarter long instead of a half year, and my College Composition class has transformed into the Rutgers Expos class-- and while I think good writing is still good writing and I think good coaching is still good coaching, I'm not totally sure . . . maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years and none of it is any good at all, it's just the accretion of tradition . . . if you think about it too much, then you might descend into madness, like Pete does, and that's not an easy road, so I'm going to try to adapt as best I can, hang on to what i think is good, and blithely discard the rest (it will be nice to have all my travel players' birth certificates confirmed digitally, once all the parents figure out how to upload them, so sometimes progress is good in the long run).

The Test 97: Different Croaks

This week on The Test, I present the ladies with things that are similar and challenge them to find the differences, and while the accuracy of their answers run the gamut, Stacey and Cunningham certainly both "contribute a lot" to the discussion . . . so play along at home, see how much you can contribute tot he discussion, and be prepared for some inclement weather.

Busking for Ice Cream

The kids and I jammed a number of times on the porch last week in Sea Isle City: I played guitar and Ben accompanied me on drums, we all sang, and Nick played the ukulele and the keyboard . . . but it wasn't until financial gain entered the picture that my son Ian took up the bongos . . . the boys decided to do some busking out in front of Steve's Grill Cheese and Ian happily joined the band; they made enough to buy lunch (and Steve's gave them a 15% discount) and then they returned at night and busked again (I'm taking great pleasure in using the word "busk" as many times as possible) and they made enough money to buy some ice cream at Yum Yums . . . they called themselves "The Beach Bums" but I think "Busking for Ice Cream" is a much better name and they played a number of songs, the best being "House of Gold" by Twenty One Pilots.

The Last LeCompt Night Ever?

Even if LeCompt continues to play Sea Isle at another bar, it will never be quite like the Springfield: the sound is perfect, you're practically sitting in with the band, and between sets is just as fun as the music (and if you can't tell, that's me yelling "ONE!TWO!THREE!FOUR!" and that's Cat dancing around with Mike LeCompt . . . that's not going to happen at La Costa or Ocean Drive).

Thick Matted Layers of Reality

Last night after browsing through the many many cable channels on our beach house television, we arrived at The 40 Year Old Virgin, which is much funnier than I remembered (and also much more inappropriate, so the boys loved it) and I insisted that the chest waxing scene was done with fake skin and special effects, but young Nicky made good use of his cellular phone and showed me proof that Steve Carrell did it live and did it for real, even the strip across the nipple . . . so hats off to you, Mr. Carrell . . . that's dedication to your craft (and the scene is much funnier when you know it's real, as the Asian lady doing the waxing is giggling, and not acting/giggling, she's actually about to crack up).

Game of Bosch

Michael Connelly's Nine Dragons is one of the darkest Bosch novels . . . this time Hieronymus takes on the Chinese Triad syndicate . . . in Hong Kong, and he leaves a wake of dead bodies in his path as he searches for his abducted daughter; if you've never read a Harry Bosch mystery, this is a good one to start with.

Fists and the Eclipse

After a wild Sunday (on the beach we were beset by a west wind and persistent black-flies; then, that evening, just before all the adults left to see LeCompt, Alex and Ian got into it: after escalating annoyances, Ian whipped Alex across the back with a bag of polyhedral dice and then Alex clocked Ian in the face, causing Ian's cheek and jaw to immediately distend and swell . . . and while Ian was hurt pretty badly and had to hold an ice pack to his face for the remainder of the night, this incident did quell any other altercations between the boys, as Alex was banished to his room and the rest of the kids saw the perils of fisticuffs; we stayed for all three sets at the Springfield, in honor of the possibility that there won't be a Springfield next summer, and Connell made his usual request to Mike LeCompt-- which Mike made good on and so--once again-- I had to yell "ONE TWO THREE FOUR" into the microphone at the climax of "Born to Run" and then everyone slept until 10 AM . . . including me, that's the latest I've slept in twenty years) Monday was perhaps the best beach day ever . . . the winds shifted to the Southeast, blowing in warm clear water, and the eclipse was actually a lot more fun then I thought it would be . . . no one burned their retinas out-- the cheap eclipse glasses totally did the job-- and I really enjoyed the lack of sunlight on the beach, it was a bit cloudy to begin with, and the clouds combined with the breeze and the fact that the moon was obscuring three quarters of the sun made it more like a crisp fall day, and then the sun came back out and we all put in so much time playing soccer, skim boarding, riding waves, playing spike-ball, and swimming that Alex and Ian were too tired to punch each other (although Ian was annoying Alex during a spike-ball game, arguing about the score or something, and Ian pegged Alex with the ball, and I was very proud of Alex's reaction: instead of punching Ian, he took the ball, ran to the ocean-- a good hundred yards away-- and threw the ball into the waves, and then when Ian ran down to get the ball, Alex flipped him off and left the scene . . . I told him that was much more mature than resorting to violence).

Oh, What a Noble Mind is Here O'erthrown

Whatever he's writing about-- whether it's the banality of sports memoirs; the politics of prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries; the lack of concupiscence at the AVN awards; the general self-centered douche-baggery of John Updike; strategy, sincerity and skepticism during John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign; the genius of Fyodor Dostoevsky and his biographer; 9/11 as seen from the mid-West; the morality of boiling a lobster alive-- and however good his writing, research, and ideas are, the main thing about reading a David Foster Wallace essay is that you are reading David Foster Wallace, he manages to use words like "pleonasm" and "dysphemism" and "gonfalon" and "benthic" and "prolegomenous" and they fit, they pique interest instead of coming off as faux-intellectual and bombastic; I think I read most of the essays in Consider the Lobster years ago, but this time I read all of them, in a row, even the endless account of McCain's campaign and I went through the footnotes as well . . . and no matter what the subject, these essays are compelling, accessible and entertaining-- they make me want to read more Dostoevsky and also study the context of his life and times, they make me want to read Bryan A. Garner's Dictionary of Modern Usage, and--most importantly-- they make me want to re-read more David Foster Wallace . . . he's so alive, his voice so vibrant, that it seems impossible that just after this collection was published (2005) he fell apart, went off his medication, and in 2008, in a state of hopeless depression, he hanged himself from his rafters . . ."the observed of all observers, quite, quite down!"

Tender Are the Nether Regions

I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but I discovered this morning that the outdoor shower at our beach house has detachable head; at first, I didn't think I would bother to detach the head, and just stood, meditatively, letting the water sluice down my body and wash away the sand and salt, but then I realized, in a eureka moment reminiscent of Archimedes, that detaching the head after taking an early morning run and swim is essential, if you value the skin on your testicles.

The Test 96: Mount Whatmore?

Everyone agrees that Mount Rushmore is pretty lame, so this week on The Test, Stacey forces the gang to do seven different makeovers; play along at home and be sure to bring your dynamite and chisel, because whatever you decide will be set in stone.