I listen to Sam Harris and find him smart and logical . . . and I also listen to (some) Joe Rogan podcasts, and he seems to have a pretty low bar when it comes to vetting his guests-- and in a recent Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris discusses why he won't invite Bret Weinstein on to talk about covid vaccines and ivermectin-- because Weinstein touted ivermectin on Rogan's podcast-- Vox has a nice article explaining the "dubious" rise of the drug as a miracle treatment . . . and apparently the drug is probably NOT a miracle treatment, but it may have some modest effects . . . and while I'm taking everything Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying say on the podcast with a grain of salt, they are against masks in school-- because kids are mainly going to be fine-- and I would love it if we all the had the choice to take off our masks in school-- though that might not be the best course of action, but I do agree with them heartily about the fact that we should NOT be married to our ideas, not equate science with political teams, and that people on the left should not describe the unvaccinated as impure or disease-ridden-- first of all because some of these people have natural immunity from already having the virus and second of all because that is a really dangerous path to go down and I don't think there's any way back.
Not My Fault (For Once)
Yesterday, we attempted to play an off day JV game (so that we could take a couple of younger varsity players-- we're low on numbers) but ten minutes into the game we got slammed by torrential rain-- so we hightailed it to the bus and drove back to Highland Park (from Middlesex of all places-- we were lucky not to get caught in the floodwaters) and the kids wanted to get dropped off in the Middle School lot because there is some shelter there from the rain-- so I directed the bus driver there, even though my car was parked on the other side of the school, on the street near the front of the building-- so I walked through the rain, carrying the ball bag and my giant coaching bag-- the thunder and lightning exploding around me, and when I got to Fifth Avenue, I couldn't find my van-- I wandered up and down the road, at first wondering if I forgot where i parked and then wondering if the car had been stolen-- but who would steal my disgusting and disgraceful van?-- and then I saw a blue Mazda and wondered if my wife had switched cars, but it wasn't our Mazda-- and by that time I was so wet that my phone wouldn't work-- so I couldn't call Alex or my wife-- and it just kept downpouring, so I got under a tree and managed to dry my phone off enough to call and I found out that Alex had taken the car home when he got caught in the rain at varsity practice-- in order to save his laptop-- and my wife had told him to do this but no one told ME that he took the car-- Alex thought Catherine communicated this to me and my wife thought that Alex had told me . . . so I was really wet and really pissed off when Alex came to get me . . . but it was only water, so I got over it-- and Alex then took the van to some sort of junior prom event, so there was more getting in and out of the car in the rain-- and I slept from 6-7 PM and then from 8 PM to 5 AM-- I was wet and tired, and then when I got in the van this morning to go to work, I soaked my pants-- the seat was sopping wet-- but I didn't feel like changing my pants-- I just threw a towel on the seat-- and first period my pants were very noticeably wet, which my class enjoyed-- but I put a small fan behind me, and that worked and now my pants are dry and my underwear is only a little moist.
Dave Debuts "Creepy White Van" to an Audience of One (Human)
If you're like me (or Linda from Bob's Burgers) you might occasionally sing original songs about whatever the hell is going on right in front of you-- and while Linda will do this right in front of people, I think I only do this when I'm alone-- or when I think I'm alone-- for example: this morning when I was walking the dog in the park in the 6:00 AM darkness and I saw a van-- a white van-- roll out of the park, it got me wondering . . . so while I let Lola loose to run around and sniff the trees in the large grassy patch near the playground, where she generally does her business, and I started singing:
Creepy white van, creepy white van
who is the driver? always a man
creepy white van
and then Lola, who was fifty yards away from me, near a park bench facing the river, starting barking-- barking at a man sitting on the bench, a man I had not noticed-- or I wouldn't have been singing an original song about a van-- this man who was either sleeping one off or resting after an early morning walk or ready clandestine tryst with a lover . . . but whatever he was doing, he probably didn't expect to get regaled with an original tune and then reprimanded by a territorial bitch.
When Canadians Like Maple Syrup
The Hidden Brain episode "Group Think" explains why Canadians like honey and maple syrup equally . . . UNLESS they are reminded they are Canadian (perhaps by watching this commercial) and it also explains why I didn't become a Bruce Springsteen fan until I left New Jersey and went to college in Virginia; it wasn't until then that I was reminded (by mayo on Italian style hoagies) that I was part of a group: central Jersey dirtbags.
Tooziest Toozday
Tuesday is obviously the worst day of the week-- it has none of the earnest go-getter initiative of Monday, none of the hump-day inspiration of Wednesday, none of the thirsty pub-night charm of Thursday, none of the happy-hour/weekend anticipation of Friday . . . and it ain't the weekend-- and this was a very Tuesday Tuesday . . . our new block schedule features 84 minute periods, which is a hell of a long time in the normal world, but even more so in a mask, and I got assigned another period of cafeteria duty-- for a sum total of 84 minutes of cafeteria-duty . . . because, as I found out after I wrote a bunch of irate, all-lowercase, unedited and unvetted emails to administration with lovely vocabulary like "shafted" and "sucks," that if you're off period 3 or period 7, then you're going to end up in the cafeteria for extended amounts of time, because with the block schedule they don't have many teachers off at the same time . . . so I made the best of it and ignored the children and graded as much Rutgers expos stuff as I could, which makes for a brutal Tuesday . . . but it can only get better from here (I'm also tired because we had an epic night game against our rival Metuchen yesterday . . . it went into overtime and ended in a 2-2 tie . . . their goalie laid out and made an incredible PK save with two minutes left, but it was still a good result and Alex played well . . . but wow, today felt like I really had a job, which I guess I do).
L'esprit d'escalier, Sixteen Years Later
Ramble On, Jack, Ramble On
If you're looking for some sensitive and thoughtful fiction, you're probably not going to like Lee Child's first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor . . . an ex-military policeman with rambling on his mind wanders into a sleepy Georgia town that turns out to be the center of the world's largest counterfeiting operation, and also the place where his brother was murdered (along with lots of other folks) and so the wandering on his mind turns quickly to vengeance-- and by the time Jack Reacher is through with everyone who has wronged him, his only choice is to ramble on and avoid the investigation . . . because he did not operate within the boundaries of the law or any normal ethics-- and I'm guessing wherever he wanders will turn up more trouble.
Rough Afternoon
My son Alex had a rough afternoon on the pitch today-- it was hot and we were playing a very tough South River team on their insane grass field-- it's part baseball field, part soccer field, with lots of bumps and ramps and hillocks-- and we're used to playing on turf and this team just cut us apart-- and our big center back (who knocked Alex out of the previous game with a head-to-head collision, knocked himself out of this game by planting his nose into the back of someone's head while going up for a header-- it was a bloody mess) and our 3-5-2 formation couldn't handle the skill and speed and wily moves of this mainly Portuguese team-- they knew how to play the proper weight passing into the space on the grass; they knew how to trap bouncing and lofted balls; they knew the simple feints that would work in order to get a defender tied up in the mud; and they knew how to run two players, one after the other, through the ball when it wildly bounced off the random patches of dirt and crabgrass-- but it's better to play a game like this and learn something than not play at all, and luckily, South River is group 2 and we are group one, so we won't run into them in the States.
Hygiene Theater Part II
Acting! In the Hygiene Theater . . .
School is absurd right now-- we wear masks in class, but then we go to the cafeteria and 500-plus kids eat together without masks (and I supervise a section and I snack and eat and drink and wander around and chat with kids, so I'm not wearing a mask) and then we go back to small classes and put a mask on-- and the kids are supposed to have assigned seats (and sign in with a QR code) so they can contact trace if there's a case-- even though the cafeteria (and the auditorium, which is where the sophomores eat) has to be FULL of COVID-- because it's airborne!-- and my wife is in the same boat, with kids eating together . . . but she's not allowed to use a fan . . . anyway, either we're all going to get covid or were going to really bolster our immune systems . . . we shall see.
Looking for the Silver Lining in Chronology
My older son Alex-- a senior in high school-- had a good day on Friday; he learned he was starting at left-back in the soccer game on Saturday-- his first start in a real varsity game (and this is great for him because the team is excellent and mainly composed of super-skilled technical club players and Alex only plays soccer during soccer season-- but he's been playing well, he wins balls in the air, has some speed, a good left foot, and he just surpassed the six-foot mark, so he's pretty big-- so he was very excited to be out there for a home game against rival Spotswood) and then he drove to the movies with his friends and saw Shang Chi and then when he got home, he saw his SAT scores and he was very happy-- he improved 150 points and did especially well in math (and he wants to be an engineer) and then Saturday out on the turf the varsity coach said he was excited at how well Alex had been playing which is always nice, because as the JV coach, it's hard to tout your own kids too much-- it's a conflict of interest-- so I just agreed and told him he had been working hard and was really fit-- and Alex was a JV superstar last season, playing every minute of every game without injury and holding the team together so we could have some fun against generally tough opponents (we are in a conference with schools twice our size because we're competent at soccer) and Alex started the game playing excellent, winning balls on the ground and in the air, stepping to balls, and making some great distribution-- we're only playing three in the back so they can't screw up-- and then he called a head ball and went up for it and the center back, his buddy Luke, who is at least 6 foot three, maybe more, came flying out of nowhere and they clonked heads and Alex had to come off-- he might have a mild concussion or he might have just taken a hard short above his eye-- but he was annoyed that he got hurt in his first varsity start but I told him that it's a long, long season and he'd be back out there and to look on the bright side-- at least he didn't have to study for the SATs with a headache-- it was a great thing that the SATs were a couple weeks BEFORE he got his bell rung.
The Myth of the Starving Artist
According to North Korean defector Yeonmi Park, there's no such thing as a starving artist-- if you're foraging for grasshoppers and wild plants for sustenance in an absurdist dystopian dictatorship, then you've got no energy or brainpower left to consume or create art-- which is just how Kim Jong-un wants it; Park tells her story on the Joe Rogan podcast, and it is by turns horrific and enlightening-- I'm not sure what we can do about the state of affairs in North Korea because they possess nuclear weapons, but Park describes the place as worse than a Nazi death camp . . . this is an amazing episode, but perhaps there are inconsistencies in Park's story . . . although I'm not sure if that matters; she is also highly critical of "Woke" culture and you can understand why-- when you've seen the terror and racism and horrors of North Korea, it must seem that Americans are quibbling about minor affairs.
Trump, Shakespeare, Assassination, Viral Media, Abe Lincoln, Wife-Beating, Etc
James Shapiro's book Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future is far more fun and compelling than the title; Shapiro, a noted Shakespeare scholar, looks at how American Shakespeare productions in eight different periods of American history reflect the politics and predilections of the times . . . so you've got:
1) Othello in 1835 and themes of miscegenation;
2) the cross-dressing genius of Charlotte Cushman, who apparently played Romeo far better than any man could;
3) class warfare, populist riots, elitism, and Macbeth in 1840s Manhattan;
4) Abe Lincoln's meditations on Hamlet . . . apparently he liked Claudius' confession soliloquy (my offense is rank, it smells to Heaven) better than "to be or not to be"
5) The Tempest and immigration in 1916;
6) feminism, the role of the woman and all that in 1948, with The Taming of the Shrew and Kiss Me Kate . . . the way Shrew was staged often indicated how the director felt about the growing amount of women in the workforce and the role of women in general;
7) adultery and same-sex love in Shakespeare in Love and 12th Night in 1998 . . . apparently major revisions were made to the theatrical version of Shakespeare in Love to make it appropriate for a general movie-going audience-- in the original script, Shakespeare took much longer to realize Viola was a woman and thought he had fallen in love with a man and was confused about his sexuality-- that was the main conflict, but that got stripped down for the 1998 audience, which was just starting to embrace homosexuality;
8) and the wild left/right culture wars of the Trump era, embodied by a version of Julius Caesar wherein a Trump-like figure is assassinated, sparking a firestorm of typical right-wing outrage and internet virality;
and at the heart of this is the fact that America loves Shakespeare even more than England-- and it often evokes our darkest sins in a way that we can handle and discuss: incest, suicide, adultery, racism, sexism, class warfare, democracy, tyranny, etc and it would be a shame if the same thing happened in America that happened in England in 1642-- the theaters were shut down because of civil war between parliament and the crown, ending in the beheading of Charles I . . . hopefully the right won't abandon Shakespeare as elitist melodrama and the left won't abandon him because he was a white male (though the term didn't exist yet) and we'll be able to use him to air our debates and grievances and politics in an artistic and public forum.
Ironic and Idiotic Advice and Action Juxtaposition
The Dress: Revisited By a Morning Person
Be Like Jenson (Not Novak)
I'm a compact guy, so no more following around-- I'm going to hit a compact two-handed backhand . . . and I might even chip it with some backspin occasionally, like that Jenson Brooksby fellow (but what I'm certainly not going to do is try to emulate Novak Djokovich . . . that guy is Gumby).
The Return of the Greased Watermelon!
Hurricane Ida Jersey Flood Pics
Here are some pics of the Hurrican Ida floodwaters in Highland Park and New Brunswick . . . pretty wild-- for two days, our house was riverside:
Route 27 bridge
Donaldson Park tennis courts, drone shot.
What Does the Fox Scream?
I thought that when our coffee maker broke, that was the perfect ending for this summer-- but it wasn't-- the perfect ending was a monster rain event that flooded our basement (and everyone else's basement in the vicinity) so I spent my last night of summer dragging furniture up the basement stairs; shop-vacuuming water from the basement floor; setting up a sump pump in the basement shower; building a tarp and whiteboard tent around a leaky basement window in a monsoon, and admiring the fact that my shed stayed bone dry because of the expert flooring and drainage system I constructed; some irony here-- earlier in the day, the kids and I did a massive deep clean of the house to surprise my wife when she arrived home from her first day of school-- we cleaned bathrooms and sorted shelves and vacuumed stairs and carpets and spun the kitchen table so the carpet wouldn't pop up . . . and the kids were cooperative and hard-working and my wife was duly impressed but it all came to naught, because the house got really dirty again because of the flood-- I'll provide pictures and more tomorrow, but now I've got to go to a birthday event-- but late last night, when the park was flooded and the eamimals had to roam the streets, I saw a couple fox strolling down our street and they started SCREAMING . . . apparently this is what they do-- and then I got up and went to work, while my wife and kids cleaned up from the flood-- my wife's school was canceled and my kids haven't started yet-- and now the park is still flooded and all the roads are closed, an epic way to start the school year.
A Perfectly Apropos Ending for This Summer (but a bit on the nose)
On my final day of summer (but my wife is reporting to work today) the coffee maker broke, which is the perfect end to this summer of lost and dying things.