The end of an action-packed anniversary weekend: my wife and I made it out after getting lost in the Sourlands-- we walked over the bridge to Cuzin's-- and, as usual, the drinks and the seafood (and the eggplant tower) were all fantastic (if a bit pricey) and the vibe in that place is nuts-- as opposed to Salt, which is a bit fancier and stodgier, Cuzin's always has people dressed casually who are there to spend some money-- the people next to us at the bar were particularly amazing-- a very Jersey couple . . . who may or may not have been a couple-- they frequently cursed each other out and referred to each other as "an asshole" and they required a TON of attention from the bartender-- the dude started out with a $55 tequila shot, then he needed to charge his phone, then his date needed the bartender to come around and show her the channel where there was a hook to hang her purse, then they had a lot fo questions about every drink and item on the menu-- but the woman-- who was 37 but didn't look it . . . according to the bartender-- was a particular kind of fit petite peroxide blonde Jersey girl from Manalapan with a fucking priceless "real housewives of New Jersey" accent that made everything she said hysterically funny-- anyway, Cuzin's is a lot of fun if you've got some money to spend-- it's more like a club that serves seafood than a restaurant, especially if you sit at the bar . . . so a good end to our anniversary-- we finished out the night watching the finale of The Diplomat . . . thumbs up on that show, and then this morning I got up early and played basketball with my son before he had to head to work lifeguarding-- and then he dropped me off at the pickle ball courts-- so I played sports for four hours and then came home, did some requisite cleaning of the house, and then took a two hour nap-- and when I awoke, Ian was back from prom weekend and mowing the lawn!-- he actually read my wife's note and did a chore-- pretty sweet-- and now he's sleeping . . . he must have had quite a weekend-- he started out in Wildwood and then ended up in LBI, staying at a rental organized by one of my EB students-- so maybe I'll get some gossip on Monday.
Nothing Says "Happy Anniversary" Like a Blair Witch Incident
Conflict in the Spider-verse
End of Something (Start of Something Else)
Senior Cut Day!
Sports with the Boys (and more)
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
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
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)
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.