To Veal or Not to Veal?

During a recording session, Cunningham, Stacey and I all proudly virtue signaled the fact that we don't eat veal . . . but perhaps this isn't as benevolent as it seems; in fact, we might be all the more monstrous because while we don't eat baby cows, we're not vegetarians-- all three of us eat beef-- before we eat a cow, it lives for a longer period of time-- probably suffering in terrible conditions-- and also, due to the longer life and larger size, this cow has time to release many more clouds of methane-laced flatulence into the atmosphere . . . so maybe if we're going to eat cows, we should eat veal and kill them while they are young, small, and haven't farted all that much.

Dear People Who Still Read Books

Dear Readers,

I'd like to give my highest recommendation for Julie Schumacher's novel Dear Committee Members (and while I know that's not saying much, as I realize that I spit out "must see" and "must read" endorsements like a demented Pez dispenser . . . has anyone watched Detectorists yet?) and I'm not espousing this novel simply because it's written from the point-of-view of an irate Creative Writing and English professor who might have a heart of gold (or maybe silver or brass . . . but a good heart nonetheless) who resides in a building that is decrepit in a department that is undermanned and underfunded (while the sciences and economics departments are showered with praise, money, and facilities) nor am I enamored-- as a Creative Writing teacher might be-- by Schumacher's use of the epistolary form: the novel is written entirely through Professor Jay Fitger's rambling, candid, sincere and sometimes confessional letters of recommendation-- and he is called on to write many many letters, for a variety of students, colleagues, graduates, etc. and he uses them to try to have some control over a future which dismays him more and more . . . anyway, the main reason I am recommending this book is it is very very funny . . . I've been doing a lot of heavy reading and listening lately, and this book was a breath of fresh air, a gem and a prize-- it took me two days to read . . . if you remember Richard Russo's Straight Man fondly, you will love this novel even more, and Schumacher has just published a sequel, which has good reviews, so I'm sure I'll read that as well-- anyway, I'll end this LOR with some random lines from Fitger's letters so you can peruse the tone and decide if you want to take a break from partisan politics, Supreme Court hearings, immigration snafus, and heinous weather events . . .

Bombastically Yours,

Dave



The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician—a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.

Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz religion, and I would wager that the pursuit of the ineffable via aesthetics in various forms has saved

(Ms. Frame faithfully taking minutes) during which a senior colleague, out of his mind over the issue of punctuation in the department’s mission statement, threatened to “take a dump” (there was a pun on the word “colon” which I won’t belabor here)

My own writing interests me less than it used to; and while I know that to teach and to mentor is truly a calling, on a day-to-day basis I often find myself overwhelmed by the needs of my students—who seem to trust in an influence I no longer have, and in a knowledge of which, increasingly, I am uncertain—and by the university’s mindless adherence to bureaucratic demands.

you should choose from the smaller and more disadvantaged units—Indigenous Studies or Hindi/Urdu, or some similarly besieged program, one of whose members, like a teenage virgin leaping into the bubbling mouth of a volcano, will sacrifice him- or herself in exchange for a chance that the larger community be allowed to survive. 

A Poetic Celebration of Yom Kippur (and the fact that most New Jersey public schools have off today)

While the Jewish folks in Jersey atone for a year's worth of sin
the rest of us Gentiles enjoy sleeping in . . .
except for me, I just can't seem to sleep late,
I woke up this morning at 5:08.

Life is Disgusting: Dawn to Dark Edition

We were practicing showing and not telling in Creative Writing this morning, and I like to practice what I preach, so here goes: we've been mired in humidity here in central New Jersey for the past few weeks; giant fungus is sprouting in weird formations (see the above photo I took at 5:45 AM this morning) and my classroom-- which does not have air-conditioning or a cross breeze and only has windows adjacent to a stagnant courtyard-- just might be the most humid place in this swamp-ass state . . . the desks are slick with a weird viscous scum, the carpet is moist, the laptops are slimy, and soon after entry, the teenagers are coated with glistening teen spirit; at 7:30 AM this morning my knees were already stuck to my pants and my boxer briefs were soaked through . . . you can imagine the rest of the day; it's also been raining every afternoon, so soccer practice has been a muddy mess and all my equipment smells of damp and mold; in the evenings, I've been trying to fix two dodgy toilets in the upstairs of my house, and while I finally conquered the commode just off our bedroom, I couldn't fix the American Standard in the hall (despite a stream of constant profanity) and ended up having to order a different part on Amazon-- my hands were inside the tank so long, as I tried to rebuild the flush valve apparatus, that they pruned-- and were also caked with the black rubber sediment from the flapper-- and then this afternoon, the finale, I tried to cure our dog's proclivity for carsickness by taking her on a couple of short car rides, but when I ran into the beer store to get a six pack, she threw up all over the soccer corner flags . . . the smell was particularly vibrant because of the barometric pressure and the already pungent smell of all the wet fabric in my van, so I unloaded everything, tried to get all the chunks out of the car, washed off the corner flags and then loaded the equipment-- aside from the vomit stained corner flags and poles-- back into the car beofre everything got even yuckier from the impending rain.

Soccer Triathlon

I completed my first soccer-triathlon of the fall season yesterday: I played soccer, watched soccer, and coached soccer . . . I played pick-up with the usual suspects for 90 minutes in the morning, then watched my son Ian play for his club team from in the early afternoon, and finally coached the town travel team-- Ian's old team-- in the evening . . . I could have hit for the soccer-cycle if I did color commentary for a game (or filmed a game? or refereed a game?) so that's something to shoot for, and while it was fun and entertaining, my legs were sore this morning.

R.I.P. JJ McClure (and his Masterful Mustache)

Sadly, Burt Reynolds has taken his last wild ambulance ride and finally joined his buddy Dom DeLuise at the Great Cannonball Run in the Sky . . . and while the Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run movie franchises make me nostalgic for my youth and simpler times, I just learned that Reynolds turned down the role of Han Solo in Star Wars . . . I can't imagine how much better that movie would have been if it contained a shirtless Reynolds ambling around the Millenium Falcon, his chest hair rivaling that of his sidekick Chewbacca . . . anyway, in honor of the man, the mustache, and the legend, I'm revisiting OBFT XVI-- the year of our mustache contest and my award winning 'stache-- and posting a photo of me at my most Burt.

Primer for the Clueless

Charlie Sykes tweeted this image with the caption:

Kind of amazed this pr campaign wasn’t enough to save Alex Jones on Twitter

and the podcast Reply All #126: Alex Jones Dramageddon does a fantastic job explaining what it all means . . . to get the joke in all of it's glory you need to know about: Alex and Jones and Marco Rubio nearly got into a fistfight; the irony that alt-right-trollster Laura Loomer got drowned by an auctioneering Republican congressman in a hearing about letting idiots like her have freedom of speech on social media; Colin Kaepernick is the face and voice of a new Nike ad campaign; our government briefly entertained the idea of making a "gay bomb" . . . but only in the sense that the idea came up in a brainstorming session for theoretical speculative weapons; Alex Jones believes that the government is drugging us with chem-trails and hormones in the water and that the proof of this is that there are pesticides that can turn male frogs into female frogs . . . he links all this together in a wild and entraining conspiratorial rant  . . . before this podcast, I had heard of Alex Jones and knew he was some kind of alt-right figure, but had no idea of how he operated; this episode is an excellent primer into that strange and wild world of right-wing-conspiracy nuts.

Maturity is Admitting You're Stupid

This is hot off the press: so fifty-four minutes ago . . . at the end of middle school soccer practice, my son Ian and some of his friends decided to bike up to the Okie Pokii Cafe and get some bubble tea-- they took off while I was packing the soccer equipment into the minivan, but when I drove the 200 yards up the hill from the park to my house and turned onto Valentine Street (our road) I saw Ian biking the wrong direction, back to the park . . . so I rolled down the window and asked him what was going on and he said he thought he left his phone down at the field and was going to find it; then I drove up the road and crossed paths with his friends, and I told them to wait a moment at Ben's house because Ian had to retrieve his phone and I went home and pulled a cold mug out of the freezer-- Friday!-- but before I could fill it with beer, Ian came storming back in the house, looking for his phone-- he had really lost it-- and this totally pissed me off because it was finally Friday and time for a celebratory beer and now I was on this (mock) epic quest with my son, using Find My Android, calling his phone, searching the house and the soccer equipment bag in the van-- all fruitless-- and then he decided his phone was at the park so we drove back down, and he had to suffer through several tirades and some profanity on the ride but instead of his usual routine-- denial and argument-- he finally realized how to soothe the savage dad, and he acknowledged that his behavior was stupid and insane and the work of a lunatic, and then we found his phone, in the grass behind the goal, and he willingly admitted that he was disorganized and wanton and profligate and he needed to take the time to pack a bag and he couldn't rush to practice and he would accept any consequence and it made me think of how I left my car door open for 90 minutes two days previous (with my wallet on the console) and I told him that I was also insane and constantly losing things and an absolute idiot and then I grew very calm and told him we just had to think of a method to prevent this from happening again (especially on a Friday when dad wanted to kick back and have a beer) and I told him he was lucky to have good friends that would wait for him when he did something stupid like this and then he rode off on his bike to go get bubble tea and all-in-all, it was a pretty decent parent/son interaction and I'm proud of both of us for working through it.

Bunnies on the Border

In Jeff Vandermeer's second book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, Authority, it feels as if the British version of The Office has moved from Slough to the edge of a wilderness contaminated by an alien civilization, and while in the first book (Annihilation) there was no escaping the menace of Area X, in the second novel there is no escaping the byzantine bureaucratic labyrinth of the Southern Reach-- until the two settings begin to merge . . . and then there are all those border-bunnies; I'm sure I'll be just as confused when I finish the third book, but then I'll read the internet theories and watch the movie and perhaps that will clarify things.

Brain Melt

School has truly begun and my brain is taxed . . . I'm teaching four different classes this year (or preps, as we teachers like to call them: Creative Writing, Philosophy, College Writing and English 10) and our family is juggling four different soccer schedules (Alex is playing for the high school, Ian is playing for the middle school team-- which I coach-- and a higher level club team, and I am also coaching the town travel team) and this is probably why I left my driver side door open for the duration of soccer practice, despite the fact that it was raining and my wallet was in the glove compartment; though the rain soaked my seat and the door, it deterred any thievery and my wallet was where I left it.

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.