The Test 115: Good Fences Make Good Podcasts

This week on our podcast The Test, Stacey quizzes us on various and significant walls and we perform admirably (aside from when Cunningham accuses me of stealing her thoughts . . . also the voice of God returns to correct some stupidity).

Two Lightbulbs in a Week

While I still can't peel a hard-boiled egg (even with this "genius" spoon method . . . check out the photos) I did stumble on two life hacks recently, and, both times, I did it the old-fashioned way-- without the internet-- so if you were viewing the animated version of my life (which you should) then you would have seen a lightbulb appear over the top of my head, twice this week:

1) I was blowing the yew branches and berries off my sidewalk after my massive trimming project and I decided to stick the leaf-blower into the gutter-spout spout and-- up at roof level!-- a bunch of leaves and sticks and junk flew out of the gutter drain and into the air, unclogging the gutter with minimal effort;

2) I always have trouble with spillage when I'm pouring the water from the coffee decanter into the coffee-maker but I realized that if I put the filter and the ground coffee into the top of the machine before I poured the water into that weird little oblong hole, then I could be sloppier and hold the decanter directly over the coffee-maker and the grounds and filter would absorb any water that doesn't go into that small and awkwardly placed hole that is the ostensible target of the pour (and a difficult bulls-eye for such an early morning activity).

Hey NFL! Dave is Taking the Proverbial Knee

This season (and perhaps for the rest of my days) I am taking the proverbial Colin Kaepernick knee in regards to the NFL: I'm not watching any games, I'm not playing fantasy football, I'm not reading about the Giants on ESPN.com, I'm not buying any merchandise, and I'm going to try my best not to consume any advertisements associated with the NFL . . . in this polarized political environment, I'm choosing Colin Kaepernick over Donald Trump, clarity over CTE, brisk fall afternoons over television, and leisure time over the monetized soulless drudgery of "managing" a fantasy football team.

Cute Cuter Cuterest

I used to think our dog Lola was cute, but not anymore: we met a nine week old black lab puppy today that was so adorable it made me want to vomit (a situation reminiscent of the classic Simpson's bit from "Lisa the Vegetarian" that some jerk absolutely ruined on YouTube).

Another Italian Economist?

I'm not sure if I'm biased because of my heritage or if Italian economists actually have got it going on, but I loved what conservative economist Luigi Zingales had to say about free markets, capitalism and corruption in America, and I just listened to the new episode of Freakonomics (Is the Government More Entrepreneurial Than You Think?) and I found Mariana Mazzucato's reimagining of the American free market venture capitalist narrative totally fascinating . . . indicative of her revision to the idea that the government is a bumbling, wasteful organization that can never  the fact that we pay double for drugs in America, as we subsidize a great deal of the research for the drugs (through the NIH) and then we pay the drug companies through the nose-- despite the fact that the high prices are to fund marketing and share buybacks and dividend payments, and not research and development (as the story goes) and to explain this, drug companies say their premium pricing indicates the value of the drugs . . . which were often funded by taxpayers; Mazzucato touches a number of examples in the podcast and it's worth a listen, but I'm going to read her books and then I'll write a much longer sentence about her.

Some (Especially Trump) Like It Hot

Schools in my area without A/C sent the kids home early today because of excessive heat, and if you think that this global warming thing is purely anecdotal, and it wasn't any cooler when you were a kid, if you're prone to agree with our fearless leader and think human-induced climate change is a Chinese hoax, and our best bet is to drop out of the Paris Agreement, burn more coal, and rollback auto emissions standards, then this tool might open your eyes . . . it doesn't take into account humidity or temperature averages or anything fancy, it just shows you how many days per year were over 90 degrees, on a year-by-year basis, for any town you like-- and, no surprise, the number has been growing-- and the chart the tool provides also gives a glimpse into the future, which you will be spending indoors, watching Netflix, in your air-conditioned filtered bubble.

I Can Get You a Toe by 3 O'Clock This Afternoon

After a long day of meetings on Tuesday, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the rest of the day went: my kids were home alone all day and they did all their chores, supervised the dog, played together without argument, and willingly did some reading; Ian had a good soccer practice-- he distributed the ball to one-and-all, hustled, and set a good example in the drills for the younger players-- and then we watched the absolutely perfect finale to Detectorists and decided it was a fantastic and fulfilling ending to a rare and brilliant series, noted that there is a metal detecting club in New Jersey (Deep Search Metal Detecting Club . . . The Deep Searchers would certainly get along with the Dirt Sharks) and we all started making our way up to bed . . . moments, while I was turning the lights off downstairs, I heard a pained screaming not in all in character of the previous events, ran up the stairs and discovered that Ian had jumped off Alex's bed and gotten his ring toe caught in the hole of the laundry basket, which resulted in his nail being ripped from the bed, a wicked cut along the rest of the toe, and a lot of crying . . . I thought I had previously enacted the rule: no one is allowed to get injured right before bed-time, but obviously I hadn't reinforced it enough (like the one about hanging your wet towel up after showering) and this infraction-- which was particularly close to bed-time on the night before the first day of school for Cat and I-- needed a lot of tending and care, including a soak in the tub, some minor surgery on the nail, and some staunching and bandaging . . . so I'm going to really reiterate the rule tonight and remind everyone that the curfew on injuries that need first-aid is 7:45 PM.

The Art of Article Humor

When my kids are playing Magic: The Gathering with their friends and I (invariably and inveterately) ask them, "Is this Magic . . . the Gathering . . . or just a gathering of people playing Magic?" they get the joke but don't find it funny.

Summer of Tomatillos

The one benefit of this unseasonably hot, humid, and wet summer is that my wife's garden produced obscene amounts of peppers and tomatillos . . . in fact, I ate so many tomatillos this summer-- every morning with my eggs and every afternoon in green salsa form-- that I googled if it was okay to eat a shitload of tomatillos . . . apparently, it's fine.

Dave Belabors Labor Day

I have concluded my Labor Day labor: I worked from 8 AM to 1 PM trimming trees in our backyard; I started the morning using my circular saw-- which was dangerous and not particularly effective-- then I borrowed my friend Alec's electric chainsaw, which-- as promised-- had an extremely dull chain-- and I finally walked over to my buddy Ashley's house and got his industrial strength Sawzall, which was the best tool for the job; I had to do a lot of sawing and trimming while standing on a ladder, I had to thoroughly clean the debris because yew berries and needles are poisonous to dogs, and I had to drive three loads of yew tree branches to the dumpster in the park, so I'm (pun intended) bushed but unfortunately, I'm not done expending energy today, and so I have begun drinking beer in the hopes that it will assuage my sore muscles and imbue me with berserker strength for our annual aquatic greased-watermelon rugby match.

Sentence of Dave: Two Paragraph Edition

Franklin Foer begins his essay collection of selections from the New Republic (Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America) with a piece from 1914-- World War I had just begun-- by Rebecca West (who wrote the massive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a travelogue and history of the Balkans) and while she's ostensibly speaking about literary criticism, there's a lot more going on and I certainly agree that "the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before" to grapple with what's happening in our country and our planet . . . I feel like I have been stumbling across bad news everywhere I turn-- I don't really follow the news day-to-day, but when I catch up, it's all bad-- I hadn't heard about Trump's stubborn refusal to lower the flag to half mast for John McCain until after it happened and it just mad me embarrassed and sad, and then I listened to "The Measure of a Tragedy" about Venezuela's economic implosion-- inflation has been so rampant that working a day at minimum wage (which is the median salary for the country) can buy you 900 calories (in the US, working a day at minimum wage can buy you over 100,000 calories) and so Venezuelans have lost, on average, 24 pounds and there is a mass migration of Syrian proportions out of the country, and then I listened to the new episode of The Weeds, about how we've lowered all our immigration numbers-- despite what's happening (and I'm still angry and sad about what happened to my cleaning lady and her husband, who are being sent back to Nicaragua despite the fact that they've had work-permits since 2006 and have kids in the school system and parents and sisters who are citizens-- they are a hard-working couple and a boon to the economy, but the government is over a decade behind on dealing with citizenship applications) and then there's all the environmental stuff-- permanent ice in Greenland is gone, Trump is pushing coal despite carbon emissions and particulate matter pollution, we could have curbed global warming back when George H.W. Bush was president-- he was a proponent and wanted the world to cooperate-- but then things got political and the lobbyists won out (listen to this episode of The Daily to learn about this lost moment in time) and --like with smoking-- we plunged into a corporate fueled era of darkness and denial . . . but like with smoking, there is hope that the science will eventually prevail, just not any time soon . . . anyway, here are the first two paragraphs of "The Duty of Harsh Criticism," her words are far more powerful than mine:

Today in England we think as little of art as though we had been caught up from earth and set in some windy side street of the universe among the stars. Disgust at the daily deathbed which is Europe has made us hunger and thirst for the kindly ways of righteousness, and we want to save our souls. And the immediate result of this desire will probably be a devastating reaction towards conservatism of thought and intellectual stagnation. Not unnaturally we shall scuttle for safety towards militarism and orthodoxy. Life will be lived as it might be in some white village among English elms; while the boys are drilling on the green we shall look up at the church spire and take it as proven that it is pointing to God with final accuracy.

And so we might go on very placidly, just as we were doing three months ago, until the undrained marshes of human thought stirred again and emitted some other monstrous beast, ugly with primal slime and belligerent with obscene greeds. Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before, and must more passionately than ever practise and rejoice in art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.

Encroachment, Both Avian and Feminine

Tuesday morning, I got to the East Brunswick Library at 9:40 AM and it wasn't open yet, though the website claimed they opened at 9 AM, but the sign on the door said 10 AM -- summer hours?-- and so I grabbed my book and walked across the parking lot to a bench by the little pond and sat down and started reading; two minutes later a heavyset woman with crazy hair pushing a stroller with a toddler in it sat down on the same bench as me . . . there were other benches available but this was the closest one to the library and, I quickly surmised that she too thought the library opened at 9 AM and I surmised this not because I possess a highly attuned sixth sense that enables me to read people's thoughts-- in fact, I was trying my best to ignore this woman (and her thoughts) but not only was she encroaching on my physical space, she was also encroaching on my auditory space: divulging all her innermost thoughts via a running monologue . . . or I suppose it was a one-sided dialogue with the non-verbal toddler, an apostrophic vomit of words: we thought the library was open, but it wasn't open was it? so we just have to wait here a few minutes . . . maybe awe can have a snack? okay but we're going to stay in the stroller, we'll stay put and eat a snack . . . not that, here you go, and look . . . there are the ducks, those are ducks, and those are the geese, no we're not going to go by the geese, we're going to stay in the stroller and have a snack while we wait for the library to open, we thought it was open but it's not open yet . . . and this prompted me to get up and move, but then I decided that not only would that look rude, but this was my bench and I was obviously trying to quietly read and I was in the right-- she should have taken a look at the context and found another bench-- so I wasn't going to move and i wasn't going to chat with her about how the website claimed the library opened at 9 AM but it actually didn't open until 10 AM, so I buried my head into my book, which was not easy reading (Authority by Jeff VanderMeer, book two in the Southern Reach trilogy) and tried my best to concentrate and then a dozen geese starting walking out of the pond, up the bank towards our bench, and she said, "We're out of here" and got up and pushed the stroller away and I celebrated (internally) because I wasn't afraid of a bunch of geese, in fact, these geese were my saviors . . . and so I settled back into my reading, certain that I would be able to focus now that the woman and the toddler were gone, but the geese kept coming, closer and closer, and eventually the geese got so close to me-- people must feed them-- that I couldn't concentrate on my book and so I had to get up and let the universe have it's way . . . because (ironically) the universe obviously didn't want me to kill the time waiting for the library to open reading a book, though that would have made perfect sense . . . and the universe told me this with three uniquely annoying and encroaching entities-- harbingers always come in sets of three: a rambling mom, a hungry toddler, and a rather aggressive flock of geese.

They Maced Me! I Cried! And You'd Cry Too!

Someday, I will tell the story of Pip and the Mace (it's set in Daytona, circa 1991 . . . a classic) but while today's post is about tears, it's not about Pip's tears in a portable cell at the tail end of a wild night in a sleazy spring break beach town, it's about my tears and how I had to stop reading a book at the dentist to avoid looking like a fool; the book is W. Bruce Cameron's A Dog's Purpose, which my son Ian chose for our family-book-club, and he finished it weeks ago . . . on the beach . . . this is the only book my son has ever read while at the beach, my wife said it was bizarre-- he actually couldn't put it down (my wife loved it as well) but when I started reading, it seemed to me like a creative writing assignment gone bad: it's the story of a unique canine consciousness searching for its purpose-- but the dog lives through multiple lives, reincarnating after each death . . . the synopsis is utterly ridiculous and childish and silly, and the book feels that way for the first five pages but then -- especially if you're a dog owner-- the story becomes riveting and also makes you contemplate the philosophy of the whole animal consciousness thing (which apparently is far more sophisticated than people once believed, read this book for the latest research) and then there's the crying . . . I cried multiple times while powering through the book yesterday, our new dog Lola napping at my feet, the ghost of my old dog Sirius roaming through my house and my memory and I only had twenty pages left when I took my son to the dentist today, and so I brought the book-- but I also brought a back-up book, something dry (Mark Kurlanky's Salt: A World History . . . pun intended) in case I started blubbering in the waiting room . . . and when I started reading, I could feel the tears coming (my son Ian, a tough kid, said, "If you don't cry at the end of this book, you have no soul") and so I switched over to Kurlansky's take on the divinity and wonder and significance of sodium chloride, and avoided clouding up my own eyes with brine and finished the book in the privacy of my home, my trusty dog nearby.

The Test 114: You Need This For That

This week on our podcast The Test, Cunningham forces Stacey and me to ponder how this leads to that . . . or how some things (or people) are instrumental to other things . . . like eggs are instrumental to baking a cake (or maybe not) and as a bonus, Stacey makes a pun.

Land Ho! Two Five Star Recommendations!

Summer is waning fast, but if you still have time left to binge some quality stuff, I have two superlative recommendations for you; both are concerned with man's relationship to the land, but one is British and the other as American-as-fuck-all so they have very, very different takes . . . one piece is an incredible piece of deep dive journalism that-- if you're a liberal-- will make you scared and angry and freaked out and contemplative, and if you're a moderate conservative, will make you wonder where the hell the fringe of your party wants to go (and if Donald Trump actually wants to lead them there) and if you are willing to follow; and if you're a right-wing-gun-nut-ultra-patriotic-endangered-species-hating-militia-member-antifederalist then you'll be pleased that your story is getting some press (even if there's a liberal media bias to the reporting)

and the other piece is a droll, charming comedy that will make you forget all the troubles I formerly mentioned . . . without further ado:

1) Bundyville . . . a journalistic tour-de-force consists of seven podcasts and four articles on Longreads that details how Cliven Bundy and his family and allies have fought the federal government about grazing rights on federal land, starting with the Bundy Ranch Standoff in 2014, which attracted anti-federalist right wing militants from around the country, and leading to the forty day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon . . . along the way, Leah Sottile touches on religious fundamentalism--God speaks to Bundy-- and the environmental movement (which the Bundy's believe should be labeled as a cult-like religion), radical interpretations of the constitution, the rights of states versus the rights of the federal government, David Koresh and Timothy McVeigh, race (if people of color tried to do the stuff the these white nationalists do, they'd be shot and killed) and government overreach, and-- in the end-- what it means to be an American and the relationship Americans should have with our land and our government . . . compelling and essential, so good I'm going to teach it this year;

2) Detectorists . . . a fantastically weird show about friendship . . . and metal detectors; Mackenzie Crook (best known for playing Gareth in The Office) and Toby Jones roam the British countryside looking for bits of ancient history (in a nation where you have the right to roam on private land . . . while you may have to ask permission to look for treasure, if you are British, there is a much more communal feeling about "private" property, and you're not going to get to keep the Saxon hoard you turned up anyway, you have to report it to the "coroner" and it is regarded as national treasure) but meanwhile, in the present, the two buddies aren't exactly killing it . . . so is the metal-detecting a healthy escape from the mundane or a barmy obsession that's going to destroy their relationships and life-goals; I thought this would be it, but the show introduces some rival detectorists (that look like Simon and Garfunkel) and an attractive female and you've got way more plot then I anticipated, plus extremely well-written dialogue, understated and pitch-perfect acting, and lots and lots of laughs . . . I convinced my wife and kids to watch and despite the utterly weird and slow start-- two dudes roaming a field with contraptions-- they fell in love with the show and we're racing through (I know some of you only take my reviews seriously if my wife is onboard) and I will also admit that as we slog through these final hot, humid, mosquito-and-tick-ridden days of central Jersey summer, I am longing for a cool place where you can hike wherever you wish, without the fear of getting gunned down by a semi-automatic-weapon-wielding-anti-federalist landowner.

The Red Bulls Game Was the LEAST Exciting Part of the Night (or Hostage Situation at the Carpark)

Last night, Catherine, Alex, Ian and I went to Red Bull Arena to watch Wayne Rooney and DC United take on the Red Bulls; Rooney put in an understated performance, playing a number of great one touch passes (and demonstrating that his vision and decision-making is miles ahead of the MLS players) but he never took on the defense in full Shrek-rugby-fashion (and he had a perfect opportunity at the six and cranked it over the crossbar) and the Red Bulls combined well, generally controlled the ball, moved forward with purpose, should have scored three or four goals, and made do with a one-zero victory . . . we thoroughly enjoyed the game, but the problem with watching the Red Bulls is the transportation situation: you can't park in Harrison, where the stadium is, because it's a traffic nightmare, so you can either take the train to Newark and then the PATH, or drive to Newark, park in a lot, and then do a rather treacherous walk along the (very polluted) Passaic River, then cross into Harrison over the Frank E Rodgers bridge . . . we elected to do the latter, because if you hustle out of the stadium and walk fast, you can beat all the traffic; we took off right as the injury time ended, and I warned the kids to take it easy and be careful because it was dark and this was not a well-marked or evenly paved stroll; despite my warning, Ian bit it hard when he tried to jog up to Catherine to ask her something-- he caught his toe on the stand of a portable traffic sign that happened to be on the sidewalk, he fell hard (and nearly into traffic on Raymond Blvd) and scraped up his knees, hands and elbows . . . he was bleeding and crying and had some glass bits in his rapidly swelling elbow, but he got up and we hobbled on towards the Edison ParkFast on Market Street . . . when we arrived, there was only one person working and a number of people waiting for their cars, and you had to pay at a machine and then give the guy the ticket, then he would get your key and drive your car around to the front of the building-- it was fairly disorganized and difficult to determine the line or what was going on, but Catherine fed our ticket into the machine, ran her credit card, was charged $20, and out popped TWO tickets . . . so she handed the guy both tickets-- and he immediately took one of the tickets and ran it over to a car that he had already pulled around and handed it to the driver and then he went back to getting cars so I told Catherine that we might have given him the wrong ticket and he wasn't getting our keys and when she explained this to him and how the machine gave us TWO tickets, he said that the machine couldn't take two tickets and that we had to pay and we explained that we HAD paid and that the machine DID spit out two tickets and he said this was not possible and then ran off to pull around another car and this is when I realized that we were going to have trouble resolving this issue-- it was an issue with the machine and the attendant had no clue how to solve it; Catherine tried to explain again-- she said that maybe we paid for the other person's ticket or something, or the tickets got jammed, but that we had paid but the attendant turned a deaf ear and continued serving people who had come after us because he didn't understand the situation-- and while all this waiting is going on, Ian is bleeding from his knees and elbows-- and the guy, who, judging by the accent, might have hailed from Trinidad, was not getting it and Catherine was getting pissed off that he kept ignoring her and he was getting pissed off that we were interrupting his work; things got more and more heated, and a random guy stepped in, took out a twenty, handed it to the attendant, and said, "Will this resolve the situation?" and the attendant said, "Yes" but Catherine was having none of that-- she took the money and handed it back to the guy and said, "We're not paying $40 for parking" and, while I admire her principles, I would have paid twenty bucks at that point to get the hell out of Newark, but Catherine tried another tactic-- she pulled up her Wells Fargo account and showed the guy that we had paid $20 at the Edison ParkFast at 9:27 PM but he wouldn't even look at the phone and ran off to pull more cars for people who had got there after us, and then Alex got vocal with him and he said, "I don't talk with children" and this pissed me off, so I told the guy the kids were people too and he was putting them out as well as Catherine and I and he said he would deal with this problem later because he was busy so Catherine laid it on the line and said, "Are you giving us our keys? Or do we have to call the police?" and the guy-- getting very defensive-- said, "Call the police" and so Catherine did-- and then another random guy made an excellent suggestion; he said, "Run the ticket again on your credit card and then call the credit card company tomorrow and say you were double charged," and that is exactly what we will do next time this happens (God forbid) but at this point Catherine was angry and determined and she saw a cop car across the lot and so she walked over to it, meanwhile, Alex got a complimentary bottle of water and we cleaned out Ian's wounds . . . right in front of the attendant's little booth, and perhaps this moved him, or the fact that the police were coming, but he gave me the ticket and said, "Write an explanation of what happened on it and your phone number" and I did so-- then Catherine got back and told me to put a fake phone number on it and the police were on their way-- but at this point, the guy had caved, he realized that we weren't going away and that he was holding a bleeding child hostage in his lot, and so he took the ticket-- with my hastily scrawled explanation on it-- and pulled out car around; that was when an officer showed up, and we told him that we had finally resolved the situation and thanked him for coming to lend a hand . . . all told we were at the lot trying to get our car for over an hour, but there is a happy ending to the story; we crated Lola before we left, she still isn't great about being left alone, and we were worried that with the delay, she might have peed in her crate, but she was fine and dry and happy to see us.

Mission Accomplished?

In the spirit of George W. Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" proclamation, I'm claiming victory in my goal to improve my under-the-porch bike shed . . . it's not perfect and will probably require some tweaking, but I'm tired and I did some stuff:  I laid down plenty of tar paper-- which should keep the cave crickets out-- and I built new slots on plywood for each of the bikes; it was much easier to build the slots on pieces of plywood outside the bike shed, and then insert the floor into the shed with the slots already built, a lesson that makes me recall George H.W. Bush and the first Iraq War: if I would have done things right the first time, I would have never needed to go back in and do all this labor a second time.

Vacation is Over (Cue the Cave Crickets)

No time for abstractions and bombast today, I'm back from vacation and battling a horde of cave crickets inside my beautifully designed but ill maintained bike shed . . . I've been flushing them out with our leaf blower and I now I've got a fan running int here so they won't return; I just got back from Home Depot with a big sheet of plywood for a new floor, tar paper to seal things up, pressure treated four by fours so there's no need for kickstands, and a waning supply of determination.

New York was an Oyster Town (and may be again)

Mark Kurlansky's book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell is the perfect beach read if you are at the Jersey Shore (which I am) and you don't want to escape and instead want to ponder just what has happened to our water-- especially the water and estuaries around New York City and New Jersey-- and the creatures that inhabit this water; Kurlansky writes a chronological and comprehensive history of New York City through the lens of the oyster, starting with the Dutch and the Lenape's interaction in New Amsterdam in the 1600's; then detailing Revolutionary Era Manhattan-- "a city of pirates, entrepreneurs, and the struggling poor,"; then Kurlansky focuses on New York in the 19th century, which was the golden age of oyster eating, oyster harvesting, oyster shipping and oyster bars; and finally, he ends with the inevitable: rapacious overharvesting, pollution, sewage, the end of edible oysters around the city and recognition that something needs to be done . . . it gets weird to read the word "oyster" so many times, but New York really was an oyster town-- the shellfish was abundant, delicious, cheap, and cooked in a variety of ways; the rich and the poor both ate oysters in vast quantities, and Kurlansky provides the recipes to prove this; the beds were everywhere: the East River, Jamaica Bay, the Gowanus, the Battery, City Island, Rockaway, way up the Hudson and the Long Island Sound and in Jersey as well, the Raritan Bay, Keyport, Newark Bay, etc . . . the processing plants and markets and barges and boats and harbors and seeding and tonging operations were all big business, fueling "oystermania" in the 1800's; it's hard to imagine, but the waters around New York City were incredibly rich in sea life: blue claw crabs and menhaden and shrimp and anchovies, mackerel, bluefish, enormous sea drum, stripers, sharks and sturgeon . . . and up the Hudson there were also freshwater species such as carp, pike, perch, bass and pickerel . . . and then it all came crashing down; first, it was the sewage and typhoid-- and by 1927 the oyster beds around New York were all considered inoperable, incredibly polluted, dangerous, and disgusting . . . and then things got even worse-- for the next fifty years or so, factories poured industrial waste-- heavy metals, dioxins, DDT, etc-- on top of the sewage sludge and silt that had already decimated the bays, rivers, and estuaries . . . and while the Clean Air and Water Act helped to change things, it will be a long long time before we can eat the oysters from around NYC again; environmental programs have started growing oysters in various locations (though not the Gowanus, it still doesn't have enough oxygen) and hopefully, despite the Trump EPA's plan to roll back standards, there is enough momentum to get oyster populations on the rise-- because even if you can't eat them, they filter the water-- and there has been a return of many fish species (but not the drum, because they eat oysters, or the sharks-- which live out past Sandy Hook and can still smell something wrong with the bay) and after doing all this reading about the state of oysters, I had to eat some, so last night at Mike's Dock, I ordered a dozen Cape May Salts, which I ate on the half-shell-- which means they were still living when I bit into them-- and they were absolutely delicious and typhoid free . . . anyway, there probably won't be edible oysters out of the East River in our lifetime, but if they do get established, they may filter the water enough to change things for our children . . . and the descriptions in the book of the golden age of oysters, when rich and poor, pirates and prostitutes, all congregated in basements to drink beer and consume massive quantities of oysters, is worth the price of admission, whether you're a fan of the bivalve or not.

They Accepted the Challenge!

Last night, the LED placard on the side of the Springfield Inn advertised three special events:

1) $3 COORS LIGHT  4 PM to Close

2) $3 TWISTED TEA 4 PM to Close

3) TODAY ON THE DECK . . . CHALLENGE ACCEPTED;

and I imagine the band meeting where the guys (had to be guys, right?) decided on that moniker went something like this:

Dude #1: Dude, we should name ourselves the stupidest thing possible and see if we can still get gigs!

Dude# 2: Challenge Accepted!