Humans: Impressively Stupid
Considering how important our keys are, it's impressive how reliant most of us are on very crappy keychains (mine are held together with a cheap faux mini-carabiner with no locking mechanism).
Vermont + Chick Peas = Delightful Geographical Culinary Anomaly
It's no surprise that Vermont has great local cheese and beer and wine and apples, but the victual you really want to procure is Yalla brand hummus and Yalla brand pita . . . this stuff rivals what we ate in Syria (minus the civil war and the intestinal parasites).
Ouch
While Cat and I were hiking this morning, a wasp stung me on the calf-- and after a reasonable amount of swatting and yelping, I think I handled the pain fairly stoically.
Taking a Break From the Seltzer
My wife and I are in Brattleboro for the long weekend-- sans children-- and we just did an impromptu micro-brew pub crawl . . . here are my notes:
1) Hermit Thrush is all about the sour (and the guy behind the bar will tell you how they achieve the sour, and it's more complicated than you might imagine)
2) Whetstone Station is all about the view;
3) McNeill's Brewery has fantastic home-brew style beer, games galore, a sincere and sweet waif of a bartender-- she brought us pads and pens so we could play Boggle and she asked what kind of music we'd like to hear and then put it on (I suggested Greg Allman's final album, Southern Blood) and there's also plenty of the dank, and the stickiest tables this side of the Mississippi.
1) Hermit Thrush is all about the sour (and the guy behind the bar will tell you how they achieve the sour, and it's more complicated than you might imagine)
2) Whetstone Station is all about the view;
3) McNeill's Brewery has fantastic home-brew style beer, games galore, a sincere and sweet waif of a bartender-- she brought us pads and pens so we could play Boggle and she asked what kind of music we'd like to hear and then put it on (I suggested Greg Allman's final album, Southern Blood) and there's also plenty of the dank, and the stickiest tables this side of the Mississippi.
This Sentence is Not About Salsa
I can't pinpoint exactly when this happened, it just crept up on us-- but I think my family is indicative of a larger American trend in that we drink a shitload of seltzer.
A Matter About A Mattress (Dave Turns the Corner)
My neighbors have five kids so they're are always cleaning out their house and their garage, getting rid of clutter, and tossing items their kids have aged out of, and all the cleaning and organizing and property maintenance seems to be done by the lady-of-the-house-- she certainly doesn't get much help from her husband and kids-- so while I feel bad that she has so many responsibilities, I also like to complain to my wife about whatever junk is cluttering up the sidewalk, as it's unsightly, it blocks my way to the park, and it detracts from my wife's beautifully maintained front garden; I used to be a live-and-let-live kind of guy, the kind of guy who didn't care if people neglected to bring in their garbage cans promptly from the curb after garbage collection (I once got into a passionate debate with my friends Dan and Dom on this issue-- they were homeowners at the time and disdainfully-- and accurately-- called me a "renter") but I think I turned some kind of crazy corner this morning-- the neighbors threw a twin mattress on the sidewalk in front of their driveway on Sunday (right where I start my morning walk with the dog) and bulk trash day isn't until September 27, so after gamely walking over the mattress several times yesterday, I decided that instead of complaining for a week and a half and driving my wife bananas, I would take matters into my own hands, and so before I went to work this morning (I wanted to get it done before the storm soaked the mattress) I threw the mattress on the roof of my van, drove down to the park, and tossed it in the dumpster . . . and while it's sad to wave good-bye to good-natured, easy-going Dave, I'm going to try to embrace New Crotchety Dave, the Dave who has Initiative and Interest in Property Values, the Dave who has realized sometimes it's easier to just do it yourself, instead of complaining about it, because I think this is the Dave of the future, the Dave that will eventually succumb to that wacky lunatic, Senile Crank Dave.
This is Why I Rarely Run Errands
Saturday morning, I got up and went out into the world, alone, to do some things: I drove out to Pennington to buy a craigslist bike for my son Ian; took a detour to visit the Stony Brook Millstone Watershed Preserve-- a beautiful reserve with a large environmental center and plenty of hiking trails through meadows, forests, and floodplains-- promptly got lost in the woods, ended up at a farmer's market on a road I did not recognize-- where I got conflicting directions on how to get back to the Watershed parking lot, and then used Google Maps on my phone to figure out the best way to go-- it's incredibly accurate, if I took ten steps or so in the wrong direction, I could tell-- then I stopped at Joe Canal's in Lawrenceville, but my little keychain bottle didn't work-- each store is independently owned and so I needed to sign up for another little red keychain bottle so I could get the discount, and then when I stopped at 7-11 on Route 1 for a snack, the friendly young dude behind the counter offered me a plastic bag for my potato chips and cheese-stick, and I refused-- I always try to refuse plastic bags, because they are an environmental scourge and most of the time you can just carry your shit or put it in your pockets, but the dude behind the counter was doing the hard sell-- he held up the bag and said, "It's free!" and if he wasn't such a friendly, good-natured young dude, I would have given him a lecture on the environmental cost of handing out non-recyclable plastic bags with every minor purchase, but that would have been obnoxious, so I just said, "Save it for the next guy" and he said, "Okay . . . then do you want a Squishy? It smells like food when you squeeze it" and he pointed to a display of little nerf food items in plastic, which were listed at $2.99 each and I wasn't sure if he was up-selling me one of these, or offering to give me one or what, so I just said, "No thanks but that's really funny" and I'm not sure what I was referencing: the fact that Squishy food items that smell actually exist and are sold in stores: or that he thought because I refused a plastic bag, I might want one of these; or that whenever I run errands, people say weird stuff to me (the last time I was at Kohls, the little old Asian cashier ordered me go back into the store to get more underwear to take advantage of a sale, complained about the high taxes, and said too many Indian people were moving into town).
Dave is on a Collision Course . . . with Himself
There's nothing better than the Tina Fey flick Mean Girls . . . I reference it at least once a day-- I especially like to say "You can't just ask someone why they're white"-- and there's nothing worse than musical theater, I disparage the genre no less than thrice month, and these two passionately polar opinions have got me in a real bind, because a musical version of Mean Girls is opening on Broadway and I'm not sure if I want to see it or not . . . it's a Hegelian conundrum: I'm afraid if I don't see it, I'll regret it for the rest of my life, but I'm afraid if I do shell out the cash and willingly take my wife to see some musical theater, I'll spontaneously combust.
The End of the Road
My Week Was More Epic Than Yours (Unless You Were Involved in a Flood or Hurricane)
It is the first real Friday of the school year (last week the students only attended school for three days) and while I know many of you work long hours, have tedious commutes, and are responsible for many tasks and duties on a day-to-day basis (and I also recognize that many of you are without power, living through natural disasters) but still, you've got to understand just how epic a week this was for me-- and you've got to realize I had the whole summer off, so I got used to a certain lifestyle and rhythm of existence, and second, you've got to understand that I'm a rare and delicate flower, with many hobbies and interests and peccadilloes, and working gets in the way of this groove I've cultivated, and third, it was hot and humid and there's air-conditioning neither in my classroom nor on the soccer fields . . . anyway, here are my stats, in case Governor Christie wants to peruse them:
1) in the last seven days, I coached eleven soccer events and attended two others . . . so just shy of two a day;
2) my high school scheduled back-to-school-night early this year, on Wednesday, from 7 - 9 PM . . . so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I worked fourteen hour days;
3) we've begun the narrative unit in my Expos class, so in order to prepare the students for the looming menace of their college essays, I reviewed Dan Harmon's 8 step story template, and I ended up telling the students a buttload of exemplary stories for my own life (which is exhausting) and the same thing happened in Creative Writing (for similar reasons) and Philosophy (mainly to do with perception, as we're doing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave") and so, to make a long story short, I recounted a lot of anecdotes, some multiple times in one day . . . here's an incomplete list, for those of you keeping score at home:
4) I also did some phenomenal acting on Wednesday, for three periods in a row in my Expos classes; in order to illustrate the lesson in Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant"-- the fact that authority figures will often compromise their morality and do what the crowd expects, in order to not look a fool-- I staged an incident of disobedience and secretly asked a student in each class if they would pretend they had not read the essay, refuse to take the quiz, make a bit of a scene, and then storm off to guidance-- disobeying my command to stay put and fail-- and each student that I asked did a phenomenal job, and then I had to fake-deal with the situation, which was fake-exhausting, I had to act like Orwell and let the class (the Burmese) push me around-- some classes wanted me to write up the student, other classes wanted me to give them a break, there were spurious phone calls and real-fake texting, the student couldn't be found anywhere-- not in the bathroom or in guidance, I fake-contacted the security guards and was very fake concerned because I had fake-lost a child . . . and I did all this in the real heat and humidity of my blind-less classroom (they took my blinds! I wanted them to fix my blinds, but instead they took them, so we're baking and we have a glare)
5) but I shouldn't complain because guidance came to visit my three senior Expos classes today, to inform the kids how to apply for college, and so I got to skip class and hang out in the air-conditioned office and explain my two simple rules of women's fashion-- which really annoyed Brady, who was also off all day, because I'm so unfashionably dressed, but I don't think it matters how I dress, it just matters if I can give women some good advice on how they should dress-- and my two rules of women's fashion are very simple . . . rule number one is tighter is better and rule number two is skin to win . . . and I'm pretty sure these are the rules of fashion every male is following when they comment on a woman's clothing (Stacey said when Ed makes a positive comment about an outfit, she knows that she can't wear it to work, because it's inappropriate for high school boys).
1) in the last seven days, I coached eleven soccer events and attended two others . . . so just shy of two a day;
2) my high school scheduled back-to-school-night early this year, on Wednesday, from 7 - 9 PM . . . so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I worked fourteen hour days;
3) we've begun the narrative unit in my Expos class, so in order to prepare the students for the looming menace of their college essays, I reviewed Dan Harmon's 8 step story template, and I ended up telling the students a buttload of exemplary stories for my own life (which is exhausting) and the same thing happened in Creative Writing (for similar reasons) and Philosophy (mainly to do with perception, as we're doing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave") and so, to make a long story short, I recounted a lot of anecdotes, some multiple times in one day . . . here's an incomplete list, for those of you keeping score at home:
4) I also did some phenomenal acting on Wednesday, for three periods in a row in my Expos classes; in order to illustrate the lesson in Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant"-- the fact that authority figures will often compromise their morality and do what the crowd expects, in order to not look a fool-- I staged an incident of disobedience and secretly asked a student in each class if they would pretend they had not read the essay, refuse to take the quiz, make a bit of a scene, and then storm off to guidance-- disobeying my command to stay put and fail-- and each student that I asked did a phenomenal job, and then I had to fake-deal with the situation, which was fake-exhausting, I had to act like Orwell and let the class (the Burmese) push me around-- some classes wanted me to write up the student, other classes wanted me to give them a break, there were spurious phone calls and real-fake texting, the student couldn't be found anywhere-- not in the bathroom or in guidance, I fake-contacted the security guards and was very fake concerned because I had fake-lost a child . . . and I did all this in the real heat and humidity of my blind-less classroom (they took my blinds! I wanted them to fix my blinds, but instead they took them, so we're baking and we have a glare)
5) but I shouldn't complain because guidance came to visit my three senior Expos classes today, to inform the kids how to apply for college, and so I got to skip class and hang out in the air-conditioned office and explain my two simple rules of women's fashion-- which really annoyed Brady, who was also off all day, because I'm so unfashionably dressed, but I don't think it matters how I dress, it just matters if I can give women some good advice on how they should dress-- and my two rules of women's fashion are very simple . . . rule number one is tighter is better and rule number two is skin to win . . . and I'm pretty sure these are the rules of fashion every male is following when they comment on a woman's clothing (Stacey said when Ed makes a positive comment about an outfit, she knows that she can't wear it to work, because it's inappropriate for high school boys).
The Hotness/Fashion Calculus Inversion
I can dress more casually for work than my colleagues because I'm so good looking.
Millennials are Weird (but Fun . . . and Imagistically Fungible)
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).
"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)
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).
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