Nothing Says "Happy Anniversary" Like a Blair Witch Incident
Conflict in the Spider-verse
Catherine and I went to see the new Spider-verse movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with Alex and his girlfriend, and we all agreed that the film is awesome in all aspects: visuals, characters, and plot-- but the crowd at the theater was NOT awesome . . . a bunch of middle school kids talking and horsing around and making a huge mess-- it was distracting enough that I spoke to them in my teacher voice: "hey some of us are here to watch the movie, not listen to you guys . . . you need to respect that" and they were quiet after that-- I didn't need to go full Costanza on them-- but then, when the lights came up, we noticed that there were parents sitting with these kids-- and the dad was giving us the stink-eye and we were giving the dad the stink-eye . . . both my wife and I were annoyed that we spent all day telling kids what to do and how to behave and then we went out in public and had to do the same damned thing again.
End of Something (Start of Something Else)
We played Metuchen today in the Group I State semi-finals and we knew it would be a tough match-- all we could hope for is that it stayed close-- and that's how it went down; Ian was playing a very tough heavy-hitting player who he has never beaten (Grayhson Kang) and he knew he had to work his ass off the beat him-- unfortunately, he ran into a pole at the back fence in the first set (down 2-3) and smashed his fingers and that was that-- he lost the first set 6-2 and really couldn't hit the ball-- his pinky nail was split and the rest of his fingers jammed and shaking . . . but we only needed to win three matches and we were doing well at second doubles and third singles and second singles was close-- but not close enough-- we ended up losing the match 3-2 . . . there was some contention in the second singles match but the other coach and I were watching the third singles match-- because of some disputed calls-- anyway, I was very proud of my guys, they played hard and we nearly pulled off an upset victory and this is the end of something very special-- I don't think there are many high school coaches who coached their own children in both high school soccer and high school tennis . . . then we rushed back to Highland Park and the seniors all got dressed for prom and headed right back out-- this is all high school in one day, from the tennis match straight to the red carpet for photos and then prom (and then they head to the beach tomorrow-- and Ian's friends acquired some lodging so they're not sleeping in the car) and Catherine and I are excited because Alex and his girlfriend invited us to go see the new Spiderverse movie tomorrow night-- it's nice when the youngsters include you (when it's not mandated).
Senior Cut Day!
I nearly forgot to put a sentence up-- it's senior cut day and the vibe is infectious.
Sports with the Boys (and more)
I had off yesterday (because we didn't use any snow days) and so my older son Alex snuck me into the Rutgers gym on Busch Campus at noon so we could play basketball-- I felt pretty sketchy, hanging out by the back doors waiting for my son to let me in-- but no one seemed to care and there was a fun five-on-five game-- a few older guys and a few college students . . . Alex and I got to play on the same team and we won every game-- he's really become a player, he can shoot a bit from outside, he's tall and long, and he knows how to drive and seal someone and get to the rim (he's also lefty, which confuses people) and I made a few three-pointers and got some rebounds-- definitely a treat to be able to play full court with a nineteen-year-old-- and then I rushed home and was off to coach the tennis match-- we were playing the two seed in the state quarterfinals but we matched up well-- we played a much tougher schedule than they did-- and Ian was crushing his forehand-- he whipped his kid in less than an hour and though some of the other kids put up a fight, we still won 5-0 in the end-- but the match took forever because there were only four courts, so second doubles had to wait-- then we rushed back to Highland Park and went straight to the senior awards night-- Ian got an award from the booster club for athletics and sportsmanship-- very nice-- and it was a great-- if tiring day-- until Ian told us that after prom-- which is on Thursday, along with the state semi-tennis match-- him and a couple of friends planned to drive to Wildwood and sleep in the car for a couple of nights-- so we had to explain that you really can't do that and that he needed to plan some lodging and that became a whole teenage debate which I won't get into-- but that's the deal with teenagers, it's an emotional rollercoaster (for all those involved).
The (Murder) Mystery of Existence
A new episode of my podcast We Defy Augury is up and streaming-- this was a tough one to make; it's called "The (Murder) Mystery of Existence" and my meandering philosophical thoughts are (loosely) based on Stuart Turton's mind-bending mystery novel The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle . . . Special Guests include: Albert Camus, Phil Connors, and Grant Goodeve.
A Very Windy (and possibly penultimate) Practice
Tennis season is annoying-- it runs through Spring Break and Memorial Day Weekend, so you're always missing kids for various reasons-- but we had a pretty good turn out at practice today-- despite it being Memorial Day-- and the second doubles team (Akhul and Theo) actually beat Michael and me in a set-- they played awesome-- and I gave the team the typical motivational speech at the end-- no other team is practicing today, no other team is preparing for these gale force winds (it was insanely windy today) and all we need to do are the things we know how to do, just with as much focus and good-decision-making as we can muster-- and so we play the two seed tomorrow, but we match up well against them . . . hopefully we'll get a win and head to the semi-finals later in the week (with the added bonus of Thursday night prom).
Weekend Review
I went out with the pub crew Thursday night to Steakhouse 85 and Alec leaned too far forward on his bar-chair, so that he was leaning on two legs, his elbow resting on the bar, and the chair legs slid backward on the polished wood floor and the long-legged chair went skittering backward-- horizontally-- and Alec's body suddenly dropped vertically, down below the bar (and luckily, he didn't hit his face on the rail) and though the chair skittered back eight feet or so, toward the host stand, no one was injured; then Saturday Catherine and I drove all the way up to Foxwoods in Connecticut for my cousin Nick's wedding-- and I remarked that you don't hear much about the state of Connecticut-- it's an under the radar state-- and now I know why-- the fucking traffic is terrible-- we stopped in Clinton at Liv's Dockside Grill for some seaside seafood-- and once you get off the highway, Connecticut is lovely-- it looks kind of like Cape Cod-- Clinton is near the end of the Long Island Sound-- you're looking across the sound at East Hampton and Montauk-- but then you have to get back on 95 and it's two lanes and white knuckle driving-- Foxwoods is a wild place, a little bit of Vegas in the middle of the Mashantucket Pequot reservation-- the wedding was lovely but we split the very expensive hotel room with my brother and his (soon-to-be) wife and my brother had a sinus infection and was snoring and making a lot of noise so we got up at 6 AM and hightailed it home-- much better drive with no traffic, but still a long fucking way-- and then I played some pickle-ball, practiced tennis with Ian, and went to a graduation party where I drank a bunch of Corona beer-- great for the day after a wedding-- and Alec and I dominated at corn-hole-- even over the recent college graduates, who were surprisingly bad . . . I asked one college student what the leisure sport of choice was at Reed college-- darts, frisbee golf, corn-hole, spike-ball, beer pong?-- and he said they don't play anything . . . I guess they just go to class and learn stuff . . . kids these days.
I Need to Even Out
I am developing quite the "farmer's tan" because of tennis season and today's Relay for Life outdoor school event-- but I don't think I'm going to remedy this any time soon, as going shirtless around school grounds is frowned upon (even if you're as jacked as I am).
We Are Through to Round Two!
Highland Park boys tennis team is the ten seed in our region of the State Tournament, so we took a ride up to Roselle Park-- the seven seed-- and I was a bit nervous because they have an excellent first singles player (Owen Miller-- he's going to play at Susquehanna) but though Ian got spanked (and he hit the ball really well-- their guy was amazing, and an all-around nice guy and captain who seemed to be a real leader on and off the court) the rest of the team really came through-- Michael Cederbaum played the match of his life, as did the rest of the crew (aside from the usual second set space-out from our first doubles team) and we won the match 4-1 . . . but it was a very slow match, as they only had four courts-- so second doubles had to wait-- and, a weird tennis peccadillo that I've never encountered-- all their players, doubles and singles, took the full 90 second rest during switchovers . . . the ref even had to call for them a couple of times-- I'm not sure why they did this but it was weird and boring and it made the match much longer than it needed to be . . . next round is closer, in Woodbridge, and hopefully we will beat them soundly (and quickly).
Nice Job Stacey!
Stacey made a good-old-fashioned worksheet for Hamlet scenes 4.5 and 4.6 and it was just what the doctor ordered.
Shakespeare Motivates Shakespeare?
This year, I'm really getting to the bottom of Hamlet, the most bottomless piece of literature in existence, but this means we might never finish-- which is perfectly appropriate . . . I probably need a ghost (played by myself) to visit and "whet my almost blunted purpose" so that I actually finish the thing before the last day of school (that's essentially what happens in Act III scene iv . . . Hamlet's dad returns in the form of a specter that only Hamlet can see and tells him to stop calling him mom a slut and get on with his revenge on King Claudius, the same way Mufasa tells Simba to quit it with Timon, Pumba, and Hakuna Matata and live up to fate and responsibility and go kill Scar . . . but of course, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet's lines-- so when the ghost (probably played by Shakespeare, tells Hamlet to get on with it-- because we're nearly three hours into the play and the plot hasn't really gotten going yet) this is very strange-- it's the director telling the writer (who are both the same person) to stop going so deep with his character because people have to eat dinner.
Weird and Ugly Tennis Match
This was a difficult situation to process and I am sure this sentence is extraordinarily biased and we'll never get to the bottom of it but we had a tune-up tennis match today against Monroe-- a giant Group IV school with a county champion first singles player-- which our team was treating as a practice for the State Tournament (we got lucky and have a decent bracket!) and it was a no-worries-let's get some practice kind of match because we knew we would get slaughtered but Monroe was missing their first singles player (he was playing in a tournament down in Virginia Beach) so my son Ian was playing their second singles player, who was still much better than him in UTR rating, and while the rest of our players went down quickly, Ian took the lead on their player-- and things were a little weird because this was the Monroe kid's first match at first singles and all his friends were on the fence cheering him on and then something strange happened-- the assistant coach (yes, this school is so big they have an assistant coach for tennis) came over to me and said that he heard our first and second singles players using profanity and he told my son to stop cursing and my son told him to "shut up" and so I stopped both matches and told Ian and Ethan to stop using profanity and then I pointed out to them that this young guy-- who looked like a student manager-- was an assistant coach-- which neither of them realized-- and Ian told me he didn't tell the assistant coach to "shut up," he told the kids who were clapping when he made on error to stop-- and then I watched and saw the deal-- the kids on the fence were really excited that their buddy was getting to play first singles and they thought he had an easy win against a player from a tiny school-- but Ian had eye of the tiger today, and was not going to let that happen-- and I did have a few words for the assistant coach: why the fuck was he talking to MY players during a game about profanity? . . . you come to me first and let me deal with it, especially when they didn't know him from Adam-- and I explained to him that we play in a county park and our kids are used to telling adults to be quiet because we often have lots of them circling like vultures to get on the court-- but the other coaches were having none of my diplomacy and explanations and chit-chat-- they were downright weird and angry, but I think they really wanted their kid to get his first win at first singles-- a singular chance for him-- because they were vociferously rooting for their kid-- which is weird in tennis-- anyway, Ian closed out the match and won 6-4, 6-4-- despite some sketchy calls from Ian's opponent and while I'm not sure exactly what happened, I'm sure Ian and Ethan cursed-- as they are wont to do-- but I don't know why some assistant coach is wandering around acting as the profanity police, especially in a match that means nothing, but I guess this is good practice for States, when shit will get real.
Construction Raises Dave's Spirits (and Property Values)
I'm not sure if it was due to my persistent and eloquent emails to the County Parks Department, but construction is underway . . . they are finally resurfacing the tennis courts right next to my house-- and they are adding much needed pickle-ball courts as well . . . there aren't many pickle-ball courts in Middlesex County so this project is going to make the courts 100 yards from my house a real commodity-- and hopefully they will attract a decent pickle-ball scene (and I'm sure these courts will further assist my choice to phase out tennis-- I'm playing tennis today but I'm enjoying the fast-paces pick-up nature of pickle ball more and more).
Wink Wink Nudge Nudge Revisited
I read the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness way back in 2009 and-- like much of rational liberal America, I decided I was a "libertarian paternalist" and bought in-- this was a kinder gentler time in politics, the years of hope and economic recovery from the subprime economic crisis-- which seemed to be a technical crisis more than anything, based on technocratic choices and rules gone wrong-- and now it seemed if we got those technocratic rules right, then solutions and progress could be made by smart little tweaks to choice architecture-- technocratic solutions instead of partisan political chaos and conflict-- but after listening to Mike Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri revisit this book and all the "nudge-like" ideas on their fantastic podcast If Books Could Kill, I realize-- like Mike Hobbes-- I bought into something very silly-- and so I have changed my mind-- especially since the main anecdote supposed to hammer home their thesis is not true-- changing organ donation box default from opting in to opting out does NOT greatly affect the organ transplant system of a nation-- Spain has best organ donation program because of the structural system they put into place-- and when Mike and peter break down, debunk, run the numbers, and point out the illogic and in the rest of the nudge-like examples-- then none of them work or seem to even fit the description of a gentle choice architecture nudge-- aside from the one very simple example-- putting the desserts below eye level in a cafeteria line and promoting fruits and vegetables to a better placement promotes slightly healthier eating-- more telling examples are things like "we know how to fix gay marriage . . . just make ALL marriages a private legal affair-- so essentially burn down the institution of marriage instead of letting gay people take part in it" and "we know the problem with healthcare-- let people opt out of litigation if care goes wrong and then it will be cheaper because all these lawsuits are what's wrong with the US healthcare system" . . . so just downright stupid stuff that I was probably too sleepy to parse back then (because I had two very young children) and in part two of the episode, they really dive deep and point out that co-author Cass Sunstein ended up riding this "nudge" wave to a government position on the creepy Reagan-created Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an office designed to sit on regulations and block regulations and essentially murder people in a slow methodical deliberate bureaucratic manner-- a real detriment to Obama's legacy and technocratic slow walking of anything against big business-- check out what happened to silica regulations under Sunstein's reign; co-author Richard Thaler kind of rescinded his ideas about the ubiquitous wonder of nudging, realizing that many nudges were scams-- and we are surrounded by scams in America-- and when it comes down to it, the nudges just never seemed to be neutral-- anyway, listen to both parts of the podcast, wonderful and funny and logical and eye-opening-- but the only scary thing is this kind of breakdown makes me not want to read these fun non-fiction books anymore because they play so fast and loose with facts and numbers, and these books have to fill pages with stuff that won't hold up to academic scrutiny-- and I'm not doing academic research in the fifteen minutes before I drift into REM sleep at night so I can succumb to these ideas quite easily (as can entire administrations of the US government . . . and many other governments, who formed "nudge units").
Artificial Intelligence Does My Job . . . and More! So Much More . . .
Yesterday in Public Speaking class, a student asked if AI could grade an essay and I said "sure it can" and then I took his speech-- which was in an incipient stage (read lousy) and I asked Bard (Google AI) to grade it (as Chat GPT is blocked at our school) and Bard said a bunch of nice things about this fairly lousy informative speech about the student's five favorite animals-- so then I asked Bard to grade it like an old angry English teacher and I got some better results-- Bard said it was disappointed with the student because the speech was disorganized and had grammatical mistakes-- and then I had a stroke of genius and asked Bard to grade the essay like "Al Pacino in Scarface" and Bard said "this thing is a D . . . a D" and then there was a parenthetical that said "points gun at student" and I was like "wow, this thing is getting serious and pretty fucked up" and then I had Bard grade the essay like The Dude from the Big Lebowski and Bard basically said, "I'm not going to judge this, man, but I like what you're going for" and I told my Creative Writing class about this today and they were having a field day with it . . . someone had Bard grade their story by a "drunken Joseph Stalin" who called the piece of writing " a disgrace to Russia" and said the student should be "taken outside and executed."
Tennis Tennis Tennis Tennis
We finished out the regular tennis season with a couple of wins over Colonia and Bound Brook and now we just have to wait and see what happens with the state tournament brackets-- it was nice to play a small Group I school like us today, just so my players could remember we're pretty good at tennis-- we beat Bound Brook soundly and Ian actually won quickly at first singles (6-0, 6-0) which was a nice treat for him-- to get on and off the court quickly-- because every other match this season has been brutal-- he played well yesterday against a good player but lost the first set in a tiebreaker, after a very long bus ride to Colonia because there was a truck on fire on Route 1 . . . anyway, the real season starts next week for us, with the single elimination State Tourney-- and it's going to be a real roll of the die determining who we face in the first few rounds.
We Defy Augury . . . Hamlet Style
Tennis season has really slowed down my podcasting output-- I am becoming downright Hamlet-like in my indecisiveness and aversion to action, but I managed to squeak out a new episode (although you might want to wait a day or two to listen because I forgot to include an audio clip so if I get motivated I'll wedge it in somewhere . . . one of the great things about podcasting is that you can go back and revise your audio for an episode) and one of the reasons I took so long is that this episode tackles some very complicated topics about belief, the morality of whistleblowing, and the existence of Deep State surveillance; it's called "Reality Loser" and it is based on thoughts (loosely) inspired by Kerry Howley's book Bottoms Up and The Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State and Jeff Sharlet's book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
Last Period Ideas
The last 82-minute block is brutal to teach-- especially when you're trying to educate fourth-quarter seniors, but we did come up with a few good ideas today:
1. when a student suggested I get a funny Shakespeare t-shirt (we're doing Hamlet) I said, "I don't wear t-shirts with funny stuff on them . . . I'm the funny one, not the t-shirt" and then we decided that "I'm the funny one, not the t-shirt" would make a great novelty t-shirt;
2. we also decided that words that sound opposite to what they mean-- like "restive" which means fidgety and "enervate" which means to drain energy-- should be banned from the English language.
GMC Monday
Yikes, quite a long GMC Tourney Monday-- we left the school at 7:45 AM (because Jakob was late) but there was no traffic so we made it down to Veteran's Park in Mercer County in record time-- all of our players won their prelim matches (a superset to eight) including-- notably-- Ethan Chen against another HP kid (Jack Shannon, who goes to a magnet school) and my son Ian against a kid from New Brunswick coached by Highland Park alum Felix Rojas-- so some fun small world stuff-- and then Ian advanced another round because the four seed (Edison Academy) dropped due to a hamstring pull and then he was dismissed by an excellent player from J.P. Stevens and our second doubles team also advanced to the second round- Theo and Akhul played the longest possible tournament match you could play, losing the first set in a tiebreaker, then wining the second set 7-5 and then winning the 10 point tiebreaker 10-8 . . . so they got to play the Monroe second doubles team-- a powerhouse school-- but they avoided the double bagel and lost 6-1, 6-1 . . . though they were very very tired-- a fun day had by all . . . nine hours of tennis (the only major error was that I forgot to bring the vinegar and oil for the Tastee Subs we bought last night).
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