The Usual Saturday Tennis Notes

I beat my buddy Cob 12-3 today in the 7 AM Tennis League for the Insane, Obsessive and Otherwise Mentally Ill and here are my notes, reflections, and takeaways:

1) I was a bit nervous because my wife and I finally ate at Tasty Moment, a crowded and authentic Chinese place featuring Szechuan, Nanjing, and Yangzhou Chinese food . . . and the spicy crawfish with noodles was SPICY and the peppercorn fish was delicious but had an odd spice to it that made your lips numb . . . so i was a bit worried this morning that I might have intestinal issues during the early morning match, but I was ok;

2) I chewed gum the entire match, even though the racquet club prohibits this;

3) it was the first time I ever played on Court 7, which is in the far corner and has no doubles lines-- that's visually a little weird but I actually think I liked it-- less distraction from green areas you CAN'T hit into;

4) I really focused on hitting shots from deep on the baseline 3-6 feet over the net with lots of topspin . . . and I focused on hitting shallower shots when I was moving forward LOW . . . hit it high when you are deep and hit it low when you are moving in is a basic strategy that really helps me;

5) Cob and I had some epically long rallies-- 30 or 40 shots?-- and i was really patient and kept hitting the ball crosscourt over the low part of the net . . . it seems the most common error at this level is trying to go down the line off cross court shots and hitting the net-- you can go down the line when the ball is up the middle, but if it's crosscourt, be defensive and hit it diagonal and deep;

6) I actually starting pointing my elbow, whipping my arm and pronating-- so I hit some solid flat serves (and even a few on the T aces . . . which I need to do more often)

7) I didn't get to the net enough . . . although Cob hit a few beautiful lobs when I did . . . I finished an overhead or two but I'm still not sure how much I should be getting to the net;

8) I was hitting my two-handed backhand fairly well-- deep and with some topspin, but I'm not sure how much my wrists should be involved in the stroke-- I need to keep experimenting;

9) the key to my forehand is the left hand, it has to come back with the racquet and I need to catch the racquet with my left hand on the follow through . . . this ensures that I get a good turn (but not too much of a turn-- it helps to keep the racquet on the same side of your body on the pull back and follow through) and that and I need to always get a wide base and drive through it.

Escobar's Cocaine Hippos?

Today I learned something new-- and serendipitously complementary to the book I finished yesterday: Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar kept (among other exotic animals) four hippos on his estate . . . and while the elephants and zebras and giraffes were relocated after his death, the hippos remained . . . and they bred; now there are more than one hundred hippos in the vicinity Escobar's property-- in the nearby lakes and rivers-- and they are big dangerous animals that also-- according to some folks-- cause some environmental destruction-- they defecate too much in the water, which can cause algal blooms; they eat too many of the aquatic plants which makes it harder to catch fish; and they are a menace to fishermen and those who swim in the lakes and river . . . but other folks like the hippos, whether because they are charismatic megafauna (and great for tourism) or because they might fill an ecological niche that has been vacant since humans came to the Americas and hunted and killed most of the large herbivorous mammals . . . listen to "The Debate About Pablo Escobar's Hippos" for more information on this ginormous issue.

Bad Gulls Bad Gulls Whatcha Gonna Do?

Mary Roach's new book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law tackles man vs. nature in a legal, humanistic sense-- what is to be done when nature encroaches upon civilization?-- and the book begins in dramatic fashion, with charismatic megafauna: hungry bears in Aspen, killer leopards in the Himalayas, rampaging elephants in India, stealthy cougars in California . . . and these stories are exciting and dramatic and involve tracking and hunting and shooting and running and hiding and a fabulous live-and-let-live attitude from a shopkeeper about a grain-pilfering elephant in India . . . 

"We just say, 'Namaste and please go away'"

and then the book takes a horticultural turn, detailing the dangers of killer trees and poisonous beans, and then there's the story of the albatrosses of the Midway and the epic (and ultimately futile) battle the U.S. Military fought against these birds because they were causing air collisions . . . and it is ultimately this futility that is pervasive in the book-- after all the hunting, trapping, scaring, and poisoning humans do to ride their homes and neighborhoods and field and airstrips of "pests," generally nothing works . . . the book ends with the mundane, stoats eating eggs and indigenous wildlife in New Zealand and the lowly mouse . . . and while the book is gross all the way through lots of defecating and vomiting and descriptions of how traps and poisons do their work-- this is certainly gallows humor, I had to put the book down several times when I made the bad choice of reading it while I ate . . . but it ends philosophically-- what do we owe these creatures? what makes a pest? can we actually preserve a habitat? can we rid an area of a certain animal? what happens if we do? do these animals actually do enough damage to warrant the campaigns against them? what is the most humane way to kill an animal?

and the book ends with some hope-- a farmer who keeps a few barn cats and barn owls to make sure the mouse population doesn't go through the roof but realizes that mice are going to eat a bit of his grain and it's not enough to start a land war . . . and Mary Roach takes the same approach with a roof rat that lives near her house-- instead of trapping and killing it, she blocks the way it was getting into her attic and calls it a day . . . a great read, detailed and dense and full of memorable characters that work in fields that don't get much press.

Dave is Killing It, Fruitwise

I'm killing it today, healthwise . . . I've already been to the gym-- where I played some basketball-- and I'm also killing it fruitwise, I've had an apple, an orange, and two kiwis.

Winter Gets Wintrier

It's frigid today-- so cold that Lola dragged me home from her walk-- after she did her business, she was like LET'S GO . . . WE COULD DIE OUT HERE! . . . so it was a good day to have remote school, and it was a good day for a drive-by COVID test for my son Alex . . . the pharmacist came out and handed him the nasal swab and he swabbed his nasal passages in the comfort of our heated car.

Winter Has Come . . .

Catherine tested negative for COVID . . . so she has the cold that I had; meanwhile, I am still on remote school, which feels oddly disembodied but I went to the Piscataway YMCA today on my long off period and it was great-- I shot baskets, watched old people play pickleball, and rowed on the upper level-- which has a great open-windowed view-- but the cold has settled in, Lola and I marched over to the dog park and the ground was frozen and icy, so while I don't like remote school, it will be nice to stay inside and bundled up tomorrow . . . perhaps remote school has its time and place, the dead of winter.

Longmire Heads South of the Border

In Craig Johnson's fifteenth Longmire novel, Depth of Winter, Sheriff Longmire's moral compass spins all out of whack when he heads south from his normal milieu of Wyoming deep into narco territory of Mexico, in order to rescue his kidnapped daughter-- this is more of an action novel, with a ragtag band of folks-- including a Tarahumara runner/sniper-- heading into very dangerous territory on an impossible mission and while Longmire uses the stock of his M-16 to knock out a fair number of bad guys, he's eventually got to do some shooting and killing, and it ain't pretty (and neither is he . . . like every Longmire book, by the end of the novel, he's a complete disaster).

Dave Beats the Guys Who Beat the Guy . . .

I beat Wayne this morning in the early morning tennis league 12 - 4 . . . he's a good player, especially at the net, but he made some unforced errors and double-faulted a couple of times . . . last week Wayne beat the champion of the league-- but apparently HE had an off day last week . . . so apparently anything can happen when you play tennis at 7 AM and I'm attributing my victory to the fact that I got to drive my wife's car, which has seat warmers (and though I had a resounding win, Wayne had the shot of the day . . . I hit a deep topspin shot which drove him to the curtain, and he basically struck his return while running into the aforementioned curtain and he somehow hit a perfect drop shot from back there, which just cleared the net and then spun back a bit, well out of my reach).

Thus Endeth the Streak . . .

Thus endeth the Wordle streak and thus begins the Wordle slump . . . and it's appropriate that the first Wordle I missed was the word "slump" . . . I put "slurp" instead . . . but there's always tomorrow.

You Can't Fight City Hall

You have to wear a mask while you work out at the East Brunswick Planet Fitness but you don't have to wear one at the Edison branch . . . and it turns out this is a town ordinance.

You Think Wordle is Hard?

My friend and I have all been enjoying Wordle-- give it a try, it's all the rage-- but the boys and I stumbled on an even more difficult game: find the good basketball . . . and though all three of us looked in the sporting equipment spot, none of us were able to find the ball-- so we took the lousy ball to the YMCA and shot around (wearing masks!) and then came home and accused my wife of hiding the ball somewhere obscure . . . whereupon she quickly solved the puzzle and found the basketball and called us all idiots-- can YOU find the basketball in this picture?

Why Online School Crushes Your Mind

Ezra Klein's interview with Annie Murphy Paul explains why I hate online school so much-- Paul's new book "The Extended Mind" dismantles the "computer model" of the human brain; computers are neat-- wherever you put them, as long as it's not too hot, they compute the same answer . . . your computer can be by a window, among lots of smart people in a coffee shop, on the floor of an industrial slaughterhouse, whatever . . . it will compute-- but our minds are extensions of what is around-- other people, a lovely landscape, white noise, an open office, gunfire, etc.-- and that totally influences our thoughts-- and being alone in a room staring at tiny muted icons of students on a screen destroys whatever creative groove I might occasionally find myself in . . . we are not designed to sit still (although school and work are often systemically based on this supposition) and we need a lot of tricks and stimulus and motivation to concentrate for any length of time . . . which is exactly what school is for: group work and making posters and switching classes and writing on the board . . . and-- for em-- pacing around, reading stuff aloud-- that's what I like to do (I did realize this finally, and put my computer on the counter and then paced a bit while I read something, and the students rejoiced but it's not the same) and while our classrooms need to reflect these ideas more, so that kids can learn better, online school doesn't reflect this at all . . . it's a mess and I hope we are back next Monday.

Here We Go Again?

The world is getting weird yet again because of the pandemic; yesterday I was tailgating at the Jets/Tampa game . . . partying with tens of thousands of (mainly unmasked) people, watching Tom Brady shatter dreams once again (he threw a game winning touchdown with 15 seconds left) but today I will be teaching on a computer, as my school has gone virtual (mainly due to lack of staffing, apparently not only do loads of students have COVID, but also loads of teachers and bus drivers and nurses, etc.)

Dave's Book List for 2021

1.  A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

2. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes To a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib

3. Mooncop by Tom Gaul

4. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

5. Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

6. Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

7. Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill (with Jake Rosen)

8. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

9. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

10. A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

11) Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey Selingo

12) Dead Land by Sara Paretsky

13) Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America by Kurt Andersen

14) Coyote America by Dan Flores

15) Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen

16) One by One by Ruth Ware

17) The Searcher by Tana French

18) No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

19) Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

20) In the Woods by Tana French

21) Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500 Year History by Kurt Andersen

22) We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker

23) Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix

24) We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix

25) My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

26) The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

27) The Guest List by Lucy Foley

28) The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova

29) The Auctioneer

30) Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix

31) Phil Gordon's Little Gold Book by Phil Gordon

32) Maynard's House by Herman Raucher

33) When Darkness Loves Us by Elizabeth Engstrom

34) CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill

35) The Humans by Matt Haig

36) Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

37) Susan Wise Bauer's The History of the Medieval World 

38) The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

39) Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About His Past and Future by James Shapiro

40)  Killing Floor by Lee Child

41) Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell

42) Soccer IQ vol 1 and 2 by Dan Blank

43) The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais

44) The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

45) The Man Who Cast Two Shadows by Carol O'Connor

46) The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

47) The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

48) Countdown City by Ben H. Winters

49) World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters

50) The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-centered Planet by John Green

51) The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

52) The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michale Lewis

53) Fall or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

54) Lazarus vol 1 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark

Almost (but not quite)  . . . War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin and The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge

Final Pub Night of 2021

The final Thursday pub night of 2021 was oddly reminiscent of a pub night a year ago-- but there were some notable changes; we started at Ashley's for some smoked cheese and liquor-- he's got some glass contraption that you stick stuff under and it gets all smoky and Ashley-- who works in healthcare and was once nervous about the consequences of COVID, has now given up worrying-- his daughter just had it but Colleen and him didn't contract it from her and then we went to Steakhouse 85 for drinks and burgers and despite the record-setting COVID numbers, the place was packed and then we headed to Dan's for a fire and the release of another paper lantern balloon . . . something we did a year ago when we were in full lockdown and the bars and restaurants were not open (indoors) and I think we're calling it a day on this pandemic in New Jersey, the Omicron variants seems pretty harmless and most of the state is testing positive for it (or have been exposed multiple times) so I am hoping we can take out masks off and move on with out lives.

Four Bridge Day . . .

Yesterday my wife and I walked to the train station to catch an 8 AM train to Newark-- so we crossed the bridge over the Raritan to the train to the PATH to the Oculus-- and we went to the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit at Pier 36-- very immersive and very psychedelic, certainly dose yourself a bit with the drug of your choice before you go in-- and then walked across the Manhattan Bridge into DUMBO-- and the Manhattan Bridge was empty save for a couple fo diehard runners and we had great views of the city and Brooklyn-- and then went to Evil Twin Brewery for some delicious beers and ate lunch at another branch of the Westville Diner-- excellent vegetarian fare-- and then we saw lots and lots of people taking some iconic photos of the Manhattan Bridge and we walked back to the Oculus across the Brooklyn Bridge-- holy shit! what a difference from the Manhattan Bridge-- packed with throngs of people-- and they let you climb up over traffic?-- and people REALLY like taking pictures on the Brooklyn Bridge . . . and then back through the Oculus, back on the PATH and it would have been a perfect public transport day except there was an old dude on the single lane escalator and we were sprinting up it for the train and he was not walking and he wouldn't let us pass him until it was too late and the train pulled away as we got up the steps . . . so we had to wait a few minutes for the next one and then we walked back across the Raritan Bridge and collapsed.

Too Much of a Good Thing = Not a Good Thing

My wife wouldn't let me have any of the salad dressing in her Trader Joe's salad dressing packet because she wanted the rest for when she used the rest of that particular salad mix so she suggested that I use the blue cheese dressing but I informed her I had already put actual crumbled blue cheese on my salad and that I couldn't put blue cheese dressing on top of crumbled blue cheese, as that would be akin to wearing a Pixies shirt to a Pixies concert, very gauche.

In The Afterlife, You Could Be Headed for Digital Strife

I just finished Neal Stephenson's newish novel Fall, or Dodge in Hell and I read a good 750 pages and then I finally had to do some skimming before I read the final couple of chapters; the book tackles the subject of eternal digital life-- folks get their entire connectome-- or synapse map-- scanned right when they die and then upload this into an increasingly complex virtual reality-- but Stephenson deals with this in both a very realistic fashion-- the quality of your digital afterlife is really going to depend on how much computing power is available-- and in an entirely fantastic fashion: the digital afterlife grows in Biblical and surreal stops and starts, as the processes learn to control and traverse the land they create-- and some digital processes have more power than others . . . it's a giant mess of a book, with lots of wild ideas and a lot of words and a lot of descriptions and a lot of sub-plots and while I'm glad I read it, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who isn't a Neal Stephenson junkie.

Socks: Are They Conscious?

After some mild trepidation and complaint, the boys and I agreed to my wife's project: we poured out all three sock drawers onto the floor and while we watched Friday Night Lights, we paired up socks; disposed of threadbare socks, and traded socks . . . and-- for now-- all the socks are in their proper places . . . for now.

A Wonderful Boxing Day

Some people love the holidays and some people love the day after the holidays-- and I fall into the latter category; I went to the dog park early this morning, then Cat and I headed to Hacklebarney Park for a hike-- but we left the dog home so we could stop for a leisurely lunch . . . and we left the kids at home as well, because they were sleeping late (Alex went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and then stayed up very late last night building his Lego Seinfeld set) and so after our hike, we stopped in Somerville at the Village Brewery for a beer-- and I had the fried chicken banh mi sandwich and it was absurdly good and then we stopped and watched the boys playing tennis-- they were at Johnson Park-- and I was very happy that they were playing together without fighting and then I turned on the Giants-- bad idea-- and then Ian called me and asked if I wanted to play tennis because they DID end up fighting-- which always happens-- but I took a nap first and then I went out and hit with Ian under the lights-- it was still fifty degrees and when we were leaving, Alex and his buddy were pulling up to the courts to play and we have leftovers from Xmas Eve for dinner so no one has to cook so it's a very successful Boxing Day.