Jokes: How to Tell Them?

Thursday night, Rob the Plumber told an excellent joke and I liked that he told it as an exercise in minimalism . . . the joke got funnier on reflection:

this penguin is driving across the desert and his car breaks down in this little town and he finds the one mechanic and the mechanic says he can take a look at his car-- but it's going to take a few minutes-- so the penguin goes and gets a vanilla ice cream cone and he walks back to the mechanic's place and the mechanic says "It looks like you blew a seal" and the penguin wipes his face and says, "no, it's just some ice cream"

and while I got the punch-line of course-- gross-- I also liked thinking about the plot of the joke: the fact that the penguin was driving a car . . . in the desert-- that's funny in itself . . . and of course he's a messy eater-- he's got a beak!-- but I realized all this little by little, after the fact; at happy hour on Friday, I told the joke to the teachers and my friend Liz said, "That's my husband's favorite joke! But he tells it so much better-- he goes on and on about how messy the penguin is, how he's so hot and dying for ice cream and just pigging out and how he's getting ice cream all over his face and he's a total mess-- he build it up and builds it up-- and then does the punch line" and then we had a meta-discussion on how to tell the joke-- we are all English teachers-- and it made me think of the "Willie Nelson" joke and the many discussions we've had on how to tell it . . . in the end it's a matter of preference . . . The Aristocrats is an exercise in this.

Murder in the Snow

Ruth Ware's new mystery thriller One by One is totally entertaining, especially if you love skiing and snowboarding; it's set in the French Alps, there's lots of murder and mayhem, there's a tech element-- and while it's a bit longer then it needs to be (a lot of wrapping up) I found it far more fun than building a shed.

Dave Makes an Inspirational Poster!

This morning during my first period College Writing class, I scrawled a brilliant and inspirational epigram on an 8.5 by 11 piece of printer paper . . . these are seniors and we have one more essay to go before the year is finished-- all we want to do is get this last Rutgers essay complete and on the books, so the successful students can purchase the credits, I can teach some Hamlet, and we can end this shitshow of a year; here is my pearl of wisdom . . . designed to curtail procrastination and inspire action:

You can't stop writing until you start writing.

Note to Pollen

 When everything blooms, sleep with the windows in your bedroom closed (what a difference).

Adventure on the Clock

Terry, Mike, and I took a walk on our free period yesterday and when we got to the back of the building we saw the back "smokers" gate was open-- it's been open through the pandemic but normally it's locked-- so we headed out onto the tree-lined suburban streets to do a couple laps, but when we got back to the gate it was locked-- and this is a tall chainlink fence-- 20 feet high?-- and after some thoughts about calling the main office, we decided we could find a way back-- so we headed down the street to where the road intersected with the stadium fence; we could see the gym classes walking around the track, but no teachers within shouting distance-- and I gave climbing the tall chainlink fence a shot but when I got to the top I realized it was going to be quite difficult to get over the chain-link without tearing my pants and Terry wisely pointed out that if I fell and hurt myself we might get fired, so we double-timed it out to Summerhill Road, entered the property where the cars come in, took the hypotenuse of the soccer fields, waded through some wet grass, and made it back to the building just in time for class (but sweaty).

Shed Break

I took a break from shed building today (and wow was I sore from shed building) to host the First Day of School in April . . . it's the start of the new quarter and we've combined cohorts so that in-person kids are going five days a week; quite a few of my students opted in for the fourth quarter, so I had a dozen kids in Creative Writing-- the first time I've had an actual class since last March-- we made groups, had a dead metaphor contest, shamed the seniors for losing, etc.-- it was kind of like school, despite the masks . . . but it was hard to remember about the virtual kids on the computer, who were getting a very limited perspective of class . . . I don't know what they saw or heard; same thing second period, I had a bunch of kids in Philosophy class and we were discussing some moral choices post they wrote but when the kids talk in class, I don't know what the computer kids hear-- it's surreal; my last class was in four groups and there were kids from all four groups present so they could report on what was going on in the virtual groups-- but it was easier to have kids at home present because then you don't have to do all the muting and unmuting-- anyway, it was an odd day, I saw a bunch of my students in person for the first time-- you never know how tall kids are until you meet them in person-- but I didn't see them all that clearly because if I put my glasses on they fog up (and my throat hurts from allergies and yelling through a mask all day).

Nobody Put a Shed in the Corner (Except Dave)

I started banging nails at 8 AM this morning-- my wife thought I was pushing it and might upset the neighbors-- but I knew I had a long day ahead of me and needed to get started; eight-and-a-half-hours later, there's definitely something shed-like growing in the corner of my yard-- here are some highlights and lowlights of the shed building process:

I got lots of help painting, mainly from Catherine-- but Alex and Ian painted some parts as well;

a shed kit from Lowes contains A LOT of parts-- so use screws at the start, instead of nails, because you are going to screw up-- I attached a 91-inch beam to the top of a frame and couldn't figure out what was wrong-- until I realized it supposed to be the 92 and a half inch beam and that's why the frame wasn't square; Catherine and I also put a wall in upside down-- you'd think it wouldn't make a difference but it does sp we had to flip it;

we found some old shingles in the crawlspace-- which saved us $150 dollars-- but I should warn you: shingles are very heavy and they were quite difficult to carry out of a four-foot basement crawl space-- I definitely got my squats and deadlifts in today;

I had to borrow some wasp spray from my neighbor because I am trying to squeeze this shed into a corner-- my backyard is small enough-- and there's a family of giant bumblebees that must have lived under where I excavated and they are very territorial and want to kill me . . . and they are crafty and mobile foes and tough to battle when you're on a ladder or squeezed between a fence and a shed wall . . . the lesson here is don't build a shed in a corner if you can avoid it-- putting on the roof is going to be precarious;

a shed frame is like a miniature house frame;

we were lucky to have a lovely dry day to paint;

plastic pavers filled with pea gravel are a miracle;

I'm hoping, weather permitting, to finish this thing in the next few days-- but I've never shingled a roof, so if I roll off and break my neck, I just wanted to tell you all it's been real.

Shed Shed Shed

My life has become very orderly: I'm either building the shed or taking breaks from building the shed (otherwise known as living your life) and so this morning I started to move the shed parts from the driveway to the backyard but then my friends needed a fourth for doubles so I took a break and then I finished carrying the parts and then I took a long nap and then I took a look at the parts (with a contractor friend) and then it started to drizzle so I covered the parts with a tarp.

The Shed Saga Continues

I built the base for my shed and read the instructions to build the actual shed and I am afraid to open the shed package (although the deers beat me to it) because I do not think I am competent enough to build the shed (instead, I will go for a run with the dog . . . something I understand).

Man Tantrum

Tuesday afternoon, my wife started preparing two elaborate recipes (Crispy Sour Cream and Onion Chicken and some Ethiopian lentil dish) and then she left to go do some gardening at her elementary school-- she runs the gardening club there and she's always planting stuff on the school grounds-- and then the kids came home from tennis practice (Ian defeated Alex 6-1, 6-3 and so the younger brother is officially first singles) and they were hungry and I was getting hungry as well (and inebriated-- I've been avoiding grains and bread and sugar, for the most part-- so the two beers I had while making salad really went to my head) but my wife lost track of time while she was planting things and I don't think she had her phone on her (or she was ignoring my frantic texts) and so I made an attempt at these recipes but I was quickly overwhelmed by all the ingredients and steps and methods and such so I pretty much gave up and sulked and drank wine on an empty stomach and by the time she arived home I was a frustrated disaster and while I tried not to blame her, she definitely caught my tone and got pissed at the fact that if she's MIA for forty minutes the entire house falla apart and I told her that if it was some simple recipe-- like grill some meat and steam some broccoli, then I'm fine-- but this was advanced culinary arts and she said we should have eaten something else-- and I agreed and apologized and said it was my fault and it definitely made me think of the passage I've included below from Joseph Campbell's Myths to Love By that we are annotating in College Writing-- when Alex and I were alone on our snowboarding trip, away from "completely efficient females," we just ate beans and meat and things were easy . . . and the only thing of value I can offer is the fact that I am slowly but surely constructing a new shed . . . but even that is slow going and harder than it looks.

So much, then, for the mythic world of the primitive hunters. Dwelling mainly on great grazing lands, where the spectacle of nature is of a broadly spreading earth covered over by an azure dome touching down on distant horizons and the dominant image of life is of animal societies moving about in that spacious room, those nomadic tribes, living by killing, have been generally of a warlike character. Supported and protected by the hunting skills and battle courage of their males, they are dominated necessarily by a masculine psychology, male-oriented mythology, and appreciation of individual valor. 

In tropical jungles, on the other hand, an altogether different order of nature prevails, and, accordingly, of psychology and mythology as well. For the dominant spectacle there is of teeming vegetable life with all else more hidden than seen. Above is a leafy upper world inhabited by winged screeching birds; below, a heavy cover of leaves, beneath which serpents, scorpions, and many other mortal dangers lurk. There is no distant clean horizon, but an evercontinuing tangle of trunks and leafage in all directions wherein solitary adventure is perilous. The village compound is relatively stable, earthbound, nourished on plant food gathered or cultivated mainly by the women; and the male psyche is consequently in bad case. For even the primary psychological task for the young male of achieving separation from dependency on the mother is hardly possible in a world where all the essential work is being attended to, on every hand, by completely efficient females. It is therefore among tropical tribes that the wonderful institution originated of the men's secret society, where no women are allowed, and where curious symbolic games flattering the masculine zeal for achievement can be enjoyed in security, safe away from Mother's governing eye. In those zones, furthermore, the common sight of rotting vegetation giving rise to new green shoots seems to have inspired a mythology of death as the giver of life; whence the hideous idea followed that the way to increase life is to increase death. The result has been, for millenniums, a general rage of sacrifice through the whole tropical belt of our planet, quite in contrast to the comparatively childish ceremonies of animal-worship and -appeasement of the hunters of the great plains: brutal human as well as animal sacrifices, highly symbolic in detail; sacrifices also of fruits of the field, of the firstborn, of widows on their husbands' graves, and finally of entire courts together with their kings. The mythic theme of the Willing Victim has become associated here with the image of a primordial being that in the beginning offered itself to be slain, dismembered, and buried; and from whose buried parts then arose the food plants by which the lives of the people are sustained. 

Joseph Campbell

The Deers Hate My Shed

The shed project continues: I've leveled out the base, bordered it with bricks, put down plastic pavers, added the pea gravel, hauled the lumber for the joists and floor, and now perhaps I'll hire a professional to do the rest . . . especially since some stupid deer rubbed their paws or their hooves or their stupid fuzzy antlers on the shed package in my driveway, ripping open the plastic and damaging (slightly) the shed lumber . . . these deer have no respect for property or propriety.

Sci Fi Sunday (Profound and Absurd)

It was a rainy Sunday yesterday, so . . .

1) I read over a hundred pages of Chen Qiufan's futuristic vision Waste Tide . . . it's translated from Chinese by Ken Liu (the same guy who translated Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem) and it's excellent-- the story of an e-waste worker on Silicon Island-- where electronics from cell phones to laptops to cybernetic limbs-- come to be recycled who gets involved with labor disputes, an American company that ostensibly wants to make the island more environmentally healthy but actually has more nefarious goals, and the future of intelligence-- artificial and otherwise; the book is dark and violent and precise and surreal and touching all at once, and apparently-- according to this Wired article-- the author is regarded as a prophetic rock star in China;

2) my family went to the movies-- the first time since the pandemic started-- and we saw Godzilla vs. Kong . . . which had HIGHLY entertaining battle scenes-- you should see this film in the theater . . . it's fantastic how often these two punch and kick each other, though they have so many other ways to attack, and the undersea battle amidst the naval vessels is stupendous and literally breathtaking, BUT-- and this is a major but-- the plot of the movie seems to have been written by a bunch of drunk twelve-year-old boys . . . maybe Hollywood was able to grab them since they aren't attending school-- they take Kong to Antarctica so that he can go through a tunnel toward the center of the earth and lead a bunch of levitating ships to an incredible power source (which the levitating ships seem to already possess) and in the center of the earth there is a weird hollow jungle environment with giant creatures and clouds and Kong plays with some inverted gravitational rocks that are floating and then he grabs a giant tomohawk and sits on a throne-- it's very surreal-- and Godzilla gains access to this world by shooting his nuclear breath straight down into the earth and then the thing ends with a battle to end all battles (and a plot twist that I predicted) and I should also point out that there are a lot of movie stars in this film-- Millie Bobby Brown, Bryan Tyree Henry, Kyle Chandler, etc-- and they all seem to find each other wherever they happen to be . . . including Hong Kong, though most people get stomped (or fall off bridges . . . Godzilla loves to stand up right when he's under a bridge) but the stars all seem to be standing close to the action but not in th epath of Kong and Godzilla . . . and the great Lawrence Reddick is in the movie for like two seconds- they must have left his role on the cutting room floor . . . my favorite moment is when Kong pops his dislocated shoulder back into place on a skyscraper and then gets back to battling--epic-- anyway, quite of continuum of skilled and ridiculous sci-fi for one Sunday.

Even More Tennis Notes

Yesterday, after purchasing, loading, and unloading a dozen bags of pea gravel (for the shed base) I substituted again in the tennis league and eked out a tie-breaker victory over a big-serving, hard hitter-- some call him Ken-- and while I didn't hit the ball very well, as I was sore from tamping and digging and carrying bags of rock, I remembered to back way up when Ken was serving-- a simple tip that is easy to forget-- and while he certainly hammered some of my weaker returns, I occasionally hit drop shots and more often got it deep enough to stay in the point . . . and while his serve was brutal, he was also prone to double-faulting and being too aggressive, so I just hung in and hung in and eventually tied it up 5-5 so we played a ten-point tiebreaker to finish our time and I beat him 10-2.

We've Been at the Mercy of Evil Geniuses

It's not a fun read, but it's compelling; Kurt Andersen's new book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America is a comprehensive history of all that went wrong since America took a sharp right turn in 1980-- and while we all know Ronald Reagan was famously at the wheel when the country steered away from progress, the ramp-up to this new path was the dynamic and radical change happening in America in the late 60s and early 70s . . . Vietnam and Civil Rights and the Weathermen and acid rock and mini-skirts and women in the workplace and the oil crisis was too much change all at once and so while culture lapsed into nostalgia, the conservatives launched a concerted and organized attack on all the "progress" that was made; greed became good and the bottom line was God; Milton Friedman was a prophet; unions were attacked and dismantled; laws were written in favor of large corporations; regulations were eased (which reminds me of this repugnant Reagan deregulation . . . what a douche); dark money proliferated; conservative think tanks and advisory boards gained power; conservatives made inroads on talk radio and economic departments; the country became finacialized; Wall Street and banking went from boring to a casino; stocks became sexy; we had various economic meltdowns because of these right-wing deregulation experiments; the liberals became neo-liberals and shifted rightward; income inequality grew and grew . . . and while Scandinavian countries figured out a kinder version of capitalism, with a social safety net, but often made slight conservative alterations to their course-- we went whole hog, convinced by the right-wing pundits that this was the only way to make America great again-- that the free market was sanctity and anything that impeded it-- from pollution to income inequality to lackof social programs to a pandemic-- was an obstacle to raze over or ignore; so we erased the progress that happened after WWII and retreat into the robber baron age from before WWI . . . the conservatives had their forty-years in the wilderness from 1940 to 1980 and they've had their time in the sun, and it's been disastrous, and now-- perhaps because of Trump (who received no more votes from white people than any other Republican president) and the pandemic, progressives will have a chance to change things, and to help usher in this weird new age . . . the book is a monster and this sentence hardly does it justice, but it does end with some hope and a call to the future-- so let's go already.

Shed Shit

Shed shit is happening, slowly but surely.

God Helps Them?

Thoughts and prayers are the opposite of solutions and action.

Extremity Revelation!

 I'm not a size 12 shoe, I'm a size 11.5 wide.

Let the Taunting Begin?

I didn't want to ask for too many details, but they are doing "challenge matches" now at tennis practice to determine the positional order of the players and it seems my older son Alex and my younger son Ian were at the top of the ladder and had to play each other for the number one spot-- Alex was ahead in the set 5-1 but Ian came back and beat him 7-5 . . . so for the time being-- for a change-- the younger brother is number one and the older brother is number two . . . I haven't heard any taunting or trash-talking, so I think they are both handling the situation with aplomb, but we'll see how long that lasts (this coming from kids whose dad takes great pride in trash-talking about the NYT mini . . . so I'm certainly going to come off like a hypocrite at some point).

Some Simple Advice, Since the Marketplace is Broken

The new episode of Radiolab, "What's Up Holmes," is required listening for anyone interested in the great American experiment with freedom of speech; Oliver Wendell Holmes eventually comes to the conclusion that there is "a marketplace of ideas" and that nearly all speech should be allowed-- good ideas will rise to the top of the marketplace, win the competition, and the truth will prevail . . . and while this has become an American ideal, the metaphor may need some revision-- marketplaces need rules, regulations, and referees because while marketplaces can occasionally work, they can also produce pollution and uncontrolled externalities; they can create monopolies and arbitrage and collusion and unfair trade practices and great inequality; they can poison the water supply (or factual information) and-- when deregulated enough, they can lead to Enron or the mortgage crisis or any of the other stupid crashes created by our idiotic and evil hardline right-wing voodoo economists/politicians that have been having their way with this country, it's laws and marketplaces and its unions since 1980 or so . . . anyway, the takeaway is that if you are stupid enough to get your news on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media, you need to realize that marketplace is broken and lies, propoganda, and misinformation compound and spread much fast than logic, reason, and the truth . . . my advice would be to AVOID TWITTER AND FACEBOOK . . . because if you go there, you give those platforms power to pollute the information-sphere and the marketplace of ideas, but-- despite the fact that I crushed at tennis AND the NYT mini today-- who's going to listen to me?

Shed Stuff

Cleaning out the shed, in preparation to knock down the shed, so that we can build a new shed-- it's not for the weak of heart (but I certainly don't want to end up like Arthur "2 Sheds" Jackson . . . although since I own a shed and a mini-shed, I might already be him).