Punt-cam

The travel soccer pre-season has been fairly exhausting because we've gone digital with all our registration, player passes, game cards and scheduling . . . it's been a lot of information to input into the cloud, but everyone realizes that digitization should make things easier seasons to come . . . despite this bold leap into the future, this rather ominous email from the coordinator of the tournament we participated in this weekend felt very apropos:

"The PSC (Piscataway Soccer Club) has hired a photographer with a Drone to take footage of the games Saturday morning between 8 am and 10 am;

Please share with your parents so no one is concerned."

Good Motivational Techniques = Therapy

We bought two 36" by 12" laminated mural sized team photos this weekend at the tournament-- one for Alex (The Eagles) and one for Ian (The Vultures)-- but while I was chatting with my friend in the bleachers, we decided that a more fitting purchase would be to buy a shot of the winning team in each respective age group (The Cranford Timbers came out on top in our flight, we came in third, with 2 wins and 2 losses . . . respectable, but perhaps not laminated mural-worthy) and make each child put up that laminated mural sized team photo in their respective bedrooms and make them stare at that team all year, to inspire them to win the tournament and then receive a laminated mural sized team photo to commemorate the victory . . . but motivational techniques like that, though they might be effective, probably aren't worth the hassle of pediatric psychological counseling co-pays and the bad press in the tell-all Agassi-like autobiography.

A Flurry Rush of Dad Humor

My boys were playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild this afternoon with their friend Tibby, and as I walked through the room, Tibby says to Alex-- with utter disdain-- "You don't have flurry rush unlocked?" and I took this opportunity to chime right in: "Seriously Alex, you don't have flurry rush unlocked? That's just . . . that's just incompetent, a real disaster, you've got to unlock that . . . it's absurd to not have flurry rush unlocked," and Alex said, "Get out of here, Dad" and Tibby and Ian didn't appreciate my dad humor either, so I'm putting it out there for the other dads to enjoy.

Absolute Adjective Maniac

The other day in the English office, Young Allie became very excited when she realized she knew something I didn't-- this kind of silliness among the new teachers happens for a few years, until they scratch through the thin veneer of my intellect and realize there's a soft brown stupid underbelly to my brain, a crappy underbelly full of gaseous holes-- anyway, she read that English speakers unconsciously follow a rule that "absolutely" stipulates the order of adjectives . . . I had never heard about this claim that Mark Forsyth makes in The Elements of Eloquence, and I was properly deferential and fascinated by Young Allie's interesting piece of grammatical information; Forsyth believes that:

"adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun . . . so you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, but if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac . . .”

but after thinking deeply about this rule, I think it might be a great big brown steaming fresh shit pile (a sequence which does begin with opinion and size, but then inserts color before shape and age . . . and 'soft brown stupid underbelly' doesn't follow this rule either . . . so you probably shouldn't use the words "absolutely" and "maniac" when you're talking about English grammar . . . I have a feeling H.L. Mencken would kick this guy's ass).

It's Gotta Be The Pants (Of Fabric and Fabrication)

This morning, in honor of the first Friday of the school year, I put on my new red plaid button down shirt (red is a major fashion statement for me, I normally only wear blue, black, brown and gray) and my new Lee X-Treme Comfort Khaki pants, which are "the perfect combination of style and athletic performance," mainly because they are 98% cotton and 2% Spandex . . . you heard me right, two percent Spandex . . . so while these pants masquerade as work pants, they are comfortable as all hell-- and not only are they comfortable as all hell, but they are also super-functional, so much so that they may have saved my life this morning . . . or I certainly thought they saved my life; it was 7 AM and I was deep into the crosswalk in front of our building, thinking my happy thoughts, enjoying the crisp morning air and the soft fabric of my beautiful spacious new red shirt-- one car already stopped for me but as I passed the street's halfway point, a parent who had just dropped off their child went into zoom-away mode and-- despite the fact that I was wearing a bright red shirt, a shirt that said, "STOP! Do not hit me! I am a human being!"-- despite this fashionably colorful alert, the distracted parent almost ran me down, but I leapt backward and avoided the impact, the car stopped, I gave the driver a disappointed look, and then I went on my way . . . the security guard said, "Good thing you were paying attention, you could have been killed!" and I said, "Yeah, and the crazy thing is I'm wearing this bright red shirt!" and then I realized that while my bright red shirt didn't matter-- I could have been wearing a rainbow Afro-wig and clown shoes and that parent-of-an-honor-roll-student would have still run me down-- but my 2% Spandex pants did matter . . . they very well may have been the reason I was able to react so quickly and athletically to the oncoming car . . . and so I made a point to tell this story to all my students and colleagues, and each time I told the tale, I gave full attribution to my new pants (and even did some lunges and kicks and squats to demonstrate their comfort and elasticity) and things got pretty wild in the office last period, I ended up stuffing myself into Liz K's little green trench coat (I needed aid to extricate my arms from the sleeves) and then when I finally got home from work, pleased as fuck with my life-saving 2 percent Spandex pants, and I whipped them off and took a whiff of the seat (to determine if they needed a wash or if they could go back into the closet) it was then that I noticed something odd on the back of the pants-- a little red white and blue rectangle-- and I realized that these weren't Lee brand khaki pants-- that was a Tommy Hilfiger logo on the waistband!-- and I remembered that I had bought these pants last year at Costco, and while they were very comfortable, they were 100 percent cotton and contained zero-point-zero percent Spandex; then it dawned on me in it's entirety: my entire day had been a weird lie, a lie I told myself and everyone else in my path . . . I truly believed that my pants were 2 percent Spandex, convinced myself of the fact, and I acted like it-- I felt them stretching when I did karate kicks and lunges in front of my composition classes, I praised their supple elasticity when I put my foot on the desk, and they were just regular old cotton pants . . . and now I'm going to have to actually wear the 2 percent spandex pants on Monday, to prove that they actually exist, and i'm going to have to confess to my Friday fabrication . . . yes, that's right, I thought of it and I wrote it down: it was all a fabrication.

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).