600 kids were out at my school today (and it was the same percentage of kids out in Highland Park, my own children reported) due to some TikTok meme promising school shootings today . . . despite the fact that New Jersey has the lowest rate of school shootings of any state in the nation; they should call it antisocial media (but at least order has returned on the illness front, Lola is pooping solid again and I got a negative result for my Covid test).
Chinese Democracy?
A Chinese algorithm is proving to be excellent at school shooter terrorism . . . and many of us have let it happen, we opened the door with open arms, installed TikTok on our phones, and let our children do the same.
Covid Ruins Sick Days
I was really tired two days ago and went to bed at 7 PM and then I felt lousy yesterday and it turned out I had a 101.5 fever-- so I slept in the basement, in case I had covid, and I scheduled a PCR test for 9 AM this morning and then I woke up this morning and my fever is gone and I feel fine-- but I still went for the test and stayed home from school because that's what you're supposed to do now . . . but the imminent threat of covid certainly ruins what used to be a regular sick day (and the dog is sick as well, she puked all over the house two days ago and had diarrhea yesterday on the kitchen bench cushions-- so they are in the trash-- and now she's on rice and water and she got me up at 3 AM last night to go out . . . so maybe we have the same virus . . . is that possible?)
Do Animals Understand BEEP!
I was driving up South Adelaide Avenue early this morning-- it's a narrow street and it was still very dark-- and a deer darted from the shadows directly in front of my car and I reacted exactly as if someone had cut in front of me without using their blinker . . . I slammed on my brakes and beeped . . . BEEP! and then I realized how ridiculous it was to beep at a hoofed ruminant (but it did work-- the deer got out of the way and we didn't have a collision).
Weddings and Funerals . . .
Some people know how to wear a suit and a tie, but I am not one of those people (I have a thick neck or something).
Dave Revises His Expectations Mid-match
Today was my first match of the winter tennis league at the racquet club-- I'm playing in the A division, and most of those matches begin at 7:00 AM-- and I had to play an agile and skilled 29 year old this morning, but he made a few errors early on and I was serving well, so I went up 2-1 on him and I thought to myself you can do this but then he started getting to all my shots and running around any forehand that I didn't hit very deep and hitting an inside out diagonal forehand that pretty much angled off the side of the court (on my backhand side!) and I thought to myself there's no way in hell you can do this but it was still a fun match and we got a lot of exercise very early in the morning and I learned that I've got to hit the ball very deep on young players.
Rutgers! Gum!
I forgot my loose, breathable fabric mask at home today (it's drying on the handle of our exercise bike) so I had to grab a leaf-covered disposable garbage mask from the floor of my minivan and now I'm trapped inside this thing with tequila breath while I teach because we went out last night after the incredible Rutgers basketball victory over Purdue-- the first time Rutgers has beaten a number one team-- but luckily I have lot of gum (sorry Connell).
Silence!
The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides, is one of those smoothly written thrillers that hypnotizes you with the easy reading so that you don't think about the absurdity of some of the plot devices (like a diary that contains every piece of dialogue and information to uncover the killer . . . a diary written until moments before death) and I will stay silent about everything else, except that there is--of course-- a twist (which you might see coming if you're thinking deeply about the plot, but the best way to read these things is a mile-a-minute while biking at the gym, so that everything is a surprise).
The Feeling Is Mutual
While I was on my way to one of the few water fountains in operation in the school building-- most are closed down because of Covid-- I passed by a foods teacher who I rarely see . . . and we were wearing masks (of course) and she said, "I feel like we're living in an alternate universe" and though it was a transitionless non sequitur, I knew just what she meant.
It's Still Tuesday . . .
What Monday is to Garfield, Tuesday is to me . . . and despite having some good ideas at work, crushing the mini, covering a class for extra dough, and exercising at the gym for 90 minutes-- the entire time Ian was at tennis-- I'm still feeling disoriented and ready to surrender to the week . . . it doesn't matter how much I get done on a Tuesday, it's a drop in the bucket, an exercise in futility, a weak attempt at conquering an insurmountable amount of time . . . I'm going up to shower and read my book, certain that this week will never end (and when it does, I'll be attending a funeral for my Uncle Mike, a great guy who had the decency to pass away on a Sunday, not a Tuesday).
Cat and Ed Defile the Buddha
You can take the girl out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of the girl (or Ed) so despite my warnings of bad karma, there was some classless abuse of the Three Legged Buddha at Storm King . . . and if you haven't been there, it's epic-- Grounds for Sculpture on steroids . . . Jersey's version is 42 acres but Storm King is 500 acres of trails and lakes and an incredible variety of sculptures, set in a valley and on the side of a mountain-- we went for Cat's birthday, and a dozen of us stayed up in New Paltz in a big Air BnB right by the Rail Trail-- Cat looks a bit hazy in the photo below because she over-served herself tequila Friday night, but she recovered and we were able to bike around the enormous sculpture park and enjoy a good dinner Saturday night-- a great 50th Birthday weekend.
Sad Day (Hard to Recover After a Dart Like This)
It's going to be a sad Outer Banks Fishing Trip this year . . . as our main man Johnny G. passed away today-- I hope he's sleeping soundly in the big hammock in the sky (not on a picnic table in the courtyard of The Weeping Radish, unnoticed for several hours-- so that when he returned and no one batted an eye, he said, "What! Nobody even missed me?!") and this was a theme with him, as he went missing at Cat's Fortieth and OBFT XXV . . . anyway, whether it was playing poker or darts, shooting the shit about sci-fi, or our annual ride together from Norfolk to the Outer Banks, I always enjoyed spending quality time with Johnny and I know he will be sorely missed by the whole gang (he's to my right in the old photo-- I'm the one who looks like he's wearing a toupee . . . I used to have such thick luxurious hair) and I will never forget his favorite good-natured darting heckle, done in his gravelly voice: "it's hard to recover from a dart like that . . ."
Sexual Selection Defeats Survival of the Fittest
My wife turned fifty today and she received a pair of lovely diamond earrings . . . and this bowerbird mating video explains why this happened-- if you need a full explanation, listen to this Radiolab podcast.
Dave Reads Fifty Before Cat Turns Fifty
My wife is turning fifty tomorrow-- quite a milestone-- but more significantly, I just finished my fiftieth book of the year The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green. . . and judging by the number of passages I highlighted on my Kindle, it's a good one-- here are the highlights, with some fragmented commentary:
there's a lot of stuff on understanding the vastness of time . . .
Complex organisms tend to have shorter temporal ranges than simple ones . . .
When you measure time in Halleys rather than years, history starts to look different. As the comet visited us in 1986, my dad brought home a personal computer—the first in our neighborhood. One Halley earlier, the first movie adaptation of Frankenstein was released. The Halley before that, Charles Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. The Halley before that, the United States wasn’t a country.
Put another way: In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.
John Green, who is very literary, actually missed an easy allusion here-- see if you know what I'm talking about:
Eventually, in what may have been the most entitled moment of my life, I called and requested a room change because the ceaseless tinkling of the Gatsby Suite’s massive crystal chandelier was disturbing my sleep. As I made that call, I could feel the eyes of Fitzgerald staring down at me.
he should have referred to the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg on the billboard over the valley of ashes-- as they were the eyes of God, staring at the corrupt and immoral wasteland of America . . .
on imagery
We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph"
on the stupid geese in the park . . .
Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather.
on the lawns which we mow, water, fertilize and manicure:
In the daily grind of a human life, there’s a lawn to mow, soccer practices to drive to, a mortgage to pay. And so I go on living the way I feel like people always have, the way that seems like the right way, or even the only way. I mow the lawn of Poa pratensis as if lawns are natural, when in fact we didn’t invent the suburban American lawn until one hundred and sixty years ago. And I drive to soccer practice, even though that was impossible one hundred and sixty years ago—not only because there were no cars, but also because soccer hadn’t been invented. And I pay the mortgage, even though mortgages as we understand them today weren’t widely available until the 1930s. So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose.
on the past and the future
And I suspect that our choices will seem unforgivable and even unfathomable to the people reading those history books. “It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”
something that might be true (but would make me uncomfortable)
Taylor Lorenz tweeted that office air-conditioning systems are sexist, a blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd. What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.
a sports essay that made me cry
Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming. I give Jerzy Dudek’sperformance on May 25, 2005 five stars.
and another sporting essay that made me cry-- this one on the yips-- I am a sucker for sports . . .
And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St.Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game.
Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel. I give the yips one and a half stars.
more on lawns . . .
more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio,or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S.—clean, drinkable water—is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer an pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.
Green writes about my favorite literary term, the pathetic fallacy!
There’s a phrase in literary analysis for our habit of ascribing human emotions to the nonhuman: the pathetic fallacy, which is often used to reflect the inner life of characters through the outer world, as when Keats in “Ode on Melancholy” writes of a “weeping cloud,” or Shakespeare in Julius Caesar refers to “threatening clouds.”
and he writes about my favorite poem . . .
There’s an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.” It’s one of the only poems I’ve managed to commit to memory. It ends like this:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge, And
Finished knowing - then -
and he writes about America's proclivity for large balls of stuff, like the largest ball of paint, which started as a baseball:
“My intention was to paint maybe a thousand coats on it and then maybe cut it in half and see what it looked like. But then it got to the size where it looked kinda neat, and all my family said keep painting it.” Carmichael also invited friends and family over to paint the ball, and eventually strangers started showing up, and Mike would have them paint it, too. Now, over forty years later, there are more than twenty-six thousand layers of paint on that baseball. It weighs two and a half tons.
and he describes a photo I'd like to know more about and a novel based on the photo . . .
Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
I gave John Green's new book five stars!
Dave Might Survive
I am the worst at being sick-- but now that I'm feeling better it all seems kind of silly; the Thanksgiving break started off well-- we saw a great Beatles cover-band at Pino's on Wednesday night, then on Thursday Ian and I played two sets of tennis-- and I can usually only make it through one set (Ian beat me 6-4 and 6-3 and he claims I will never beat him in a set again and he put a pound of quality chocolate on the line) and then we had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner at my parents and then Friday I got a BRUTAL massage from an old Asian lady (after I went to the gym) and then I played tennis with Ian later in the day-- though it was cold-- and then we went to the Rutgers women's soccer game that night and it was freezing and the game went into overtime RU won!) and the next day I felt kind of crappy-- glassy eyes and fatigue-- and then Saturday night I hung out at my parents' place with my dad and my cousins while the ladies went to a fancy Italian restaurant in Robbinsville-- and by the time the ladies got back, I was feeling really lousy, and I spent the night freezing cold and then burning hot-- with some stomach issues-- and I felt awful all day today (and I even went for a Covid test) but now my joints are no longer sore and my stomach doesn't hurt and I just might live . . . of course, I might not live-- and I've been reading John Green's new book (The Anthropocene Reviewed) which can make you into an obsessive hypochondriac (but in a fun way) and his chapter on the plague is pretty grim . . . but this doesn't seem like the plague (but only time will tell . . . and while the plague had some terrible suppurating and devastating symptoms, nothing is worse than glassy eyes).
Something For Which We Can All be Thankful
I just finished the third book in Ben H. Winters' Last Policeman Trilogy (Word of Trouble) and while I will offer no spoilers, I will say that the books remain mystery novels until the end-- the milieu might be apocalyptic but the thrust and theme of the novels are solving crimes, seeking truth, and answering questions-- and this Thanksgiving, I am thankful that a giant-civilization-ending asteroid is not headed for the earth any time in the near future (as far as we know).
If You're Wondering Why There's a Teacher Shortage . . .
This morning during first period I got the weird silvery aura in my right eye that happens sometimes when I look at a screen too much-- and I'm always looking at a screen these days, since they took away the printers and we migrated all our texts and work to Canvas: our digital learning platform-- and now our periods are 84 minutes long, instead of 42 minutes (because someone thought that was a good idea) so I was in for the long haul with this hazy eye (and oncoming headache) so I put on my blue-blocker screen glasses-- which I never use because I have to wear a mask and when I wear a mask and glasses, I fog up (probably because I wear a modified, very breathable, fake mask that barely touches my face) and after a second 84 minute period the silvery aura faded (I did some stuff where the kids wrote on the whiteboard, so I could avoid looking at a screen) and even writing this sentence is hurting my eyes a bit so I'm going to end it here.
Tragedy of the Viscid Variety
It's the end of an era, a cataclysmically tragic truncation of the most royal jelly . . . Birnn Chocolate-- our delicious town chocolate factory, a Highland Park institution-- no longer makes raspberry jellies-- the only raspberry jellies worth eating (because the jelly is homemade, firm and not that sweet) and they are discontinued due to lack of demand, and judging by the rather unconcerned reaction of old lady Birnn to my horror and lamentation at the loss of the jellies, I don't think they are coming back any time soon.
Don't Think About This . . .
If all the money spent on lobbying and campaign finance actually went toward infrastructure and scientific progress, we'd be living in an equally distributed sci-fi future.
Required Listening (Whether You Go Online or Not)
Whether or not you care for Joe Rogan-- and I love the guy, I think he's smart and curious and funny and knows how to let people talk-- but that doesn't matter, you need to listen to episode #1736 with Tristan Harris (of The Social Dilemma) and Daniel Schmacktenberger . . . and it doesn't matter if you go on social media like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, or whether-- like me-- the extent of your social media consumption is two blogs . . . here are some of the things they discuss:
the arms war between apps and beautification filters . . . if one app implements a filter then other apps have to follow;
the fact that China and Russia don't have to wage a ground war or an air war or a nuclear war, because they are stalling our progress from within, by creating polarization and political cynicism and obstructionism and they are doing it with troll farms-- the top fifteen Christian sites are troll farms, spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation and radicalizing folks-- and you don't even have to invite them on Facebook, if they invite you, then you will see their stuff in your feed;
this could even lead to stochastic terrorism . . . and awesome term that could be a punk band name-- it's really hard to get one particular person to commit an act of terrorism-- say Lee Harvey Oswald-- but it's easy to flood a country of 330 million with incendiary misinformation and eventually produce a Kyle Rittenhouse or whoever else, just through chucking shit at the dartboard and hoping some of it hits;
there tend to be two huge gutters that the bowling bowl of the internet is heading towards-- Orwellian autocratic dystopia and chaotic Huxleyian democratic catastrophe . . . Taiwan might be some middle ground;
China regulates its internet MUCH more than we do-- social media for those under 14 shuts down from 10 PM to 6 AM, if you game too long you will receive a reminder to get up, the scroll is not infinite, the TikTok algorithm promotes engineering, etcetera;
the fact that the CCP is providing the programming for American youth is scary . . .
according to Harris and Schmacktenberger, the problem is that we have "paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology" and they think the government needs to step in because the corporations have direct access to democracy, unlike an oil company that has to at least go through lobbyists;
Rogan believes the government isn't invested enough and it will have to come from individuals educating themselves and inoculating themselves against the evils of these platforms-- but he fully admits that unhappy people seek dopamine and purpose on the internet . . .
Harris wants to measure the success of a country not through GDP-- which goes up during times of addiction and war-- but through LACK of addiction;
Harris and Schmacktenberger are trying to imagine a new internet that nudges us in other directions than social media and the hyper stimulus for unreal dating, info, debate, gaming, connection;and I have an Android phone, which apparently is just a data farm, but perhaps I should get an Apple phone because they seem to be a more good faith company . . . I don't know but this episode raises more questions than it answers and may change the minds of some folks who dismiss Joe Rogan as a meathead and an idiot.
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