OBFT XXV

The 25th Annual Outer Banks Fishing Trip is in the books, another fantastic one-- thanks Whit!-- here are some of the things that happened:

1) we spent Wednesday night at Whitney's mom's place in Norfolk-- he is living there now-- and his mom and step-dad had just rolled into to town from Florida, but were sleeping elsewhere because we had a house full of fishermen, and so they were showing up in the morning and Whitney's step-dad said he needed to do some work on the house, out back in the little courtyard connected to the garage, so when I woke up at 7:30 AM and heard some banging I figured he was doing aforementioned work, but I also heard the TV, and I figured I would go downstairs and and say hello and help with whatever was going on-- I turned in early and no one else was awake so I went downstairs and the TV was on and no one was watching and the banging was coming from the back door-- it was Johnny G. who yelled "Dave! My savior!" when I opened the door-- he went out for a cigarette at 3 AM and Whitney had just locked the door-- so Johnny was locked out and had to sleep in the car in the garage . . . shades of the McGrant incident at the Weeping Radish;

2) many of us ate salad with a slab of rare tuna on it at Tortuga's and it was good;

3) Hookey was a popular new addition to the usual array of games-- you throw rubber rings at hooks on a circular piece of wood that is hung on the wall and then do lots of math to figure out who wins (and many people, including myself, said the line, "I was told there would be no math," which is paraphrasing, and though I said it, I had no idea where it was from . . . here's the actual origin)

4) the water was NOT good . . . cold and rough;

5) Bruce painted a picture (or commissioned someone to paint a picture-- same difference)

6) Jon (Yes-man) showed up, after a twenty-three year hiatus (he attended the first trip and never came back until this year) and Billy interrogated him as to why;

7) Jon (Lunkhead) attended for the first time ever;

8) Charlie brought back the cooking-- we had fish one night and a tenderloin the next-- there were also some bacon wrapped scallops . . . the long and short of it was it was easy to avoid carbs (and vegetables) because there weren't any;

9) Johnny woke up Friday morning and couldn't find his pants or his wallet;

10) the debut of the pantsless griffin;

11) Rob slept next to his mattress on the back porch;

12) Marls brought his tennis racket but I did not;

13) Scott and I played some guitar together . . . he's really good so I kicked Whitney out of the band;

14) Bruce told a joke and I reciprocated with the Willie Nelson joke (which I also apparently told last year . . . these things are really starting to blur);

15) we all made playlists but I don't think anyone played their playlist;

16) Whitney was a fabulous host for the 25th year in a row . . . already looking forward to XXVI.

Locke and Key May Be Coming to a TV Near You

It took a while-- in fact, I forgot all about it-- but then something jogged my memory (perhaps someone opened my brain with the head key and fiddled with my consciousness) and I remembered to seek out the rest of the Locke and Key comic book series and the boys and I recently read all six of them, in the nick of time, it turns out, because Netflix is about to release a Locke and Key TV series . . . the comics are compelling and wild, but I should warn you, they are also grisly, disturbing, and totally fucked up; Joe Hill-- Stephen King's son-- did the writing and Gabriel Rodriguez did the art and the combination is chilling and horrific, I hope the series captures the mood, as this is a good one.

There IS a Correct Answer to this Question

So Tuesday night at dinner, my eight year old son Alex posed this question to my wife: "Would you rather be bigger or smaller?" and my wife said, "Smaller, of course, women always want to be smaller," and then Alex said, "No, really small, like six inches, or really big, like fifty feet," and then my wife answered the question -- and she gave the wrong answer . . . so take a moment and decide which is the correct answer, and then I'll explain why one answer is correct and the other is not . . . okay, so now you've weighed the pros and cons and you're ready to see how well you've done on this very short quiz -- and, because it is only one question, you will either pass or fail; my wife said she would rather be fifty feet tall, and her reason was, "if you're six inches tall, you might get eaten by a dog," and while I can't deny that, there are many more difficulties to overcome if you are very large: mental, social and physical obstacles that could pose some real problems . . . you would have a hard time finding shelter, especially when it's very hot or very cold (my wife said, "You'd build some kind of shed for me," but judging by how long it took for me to build this shed, she'd probably die of hypothermia before I finished) and you would have a hard time hanging out with family and friends -- you'd be isolated and alienated and alone (even if you were famous) -- and you wouldn't be able to read a book or watch TV or see a movie or go to a party or attend class . . . and everything you did would be very public . . . where would you go to the bathroom? and if you got sick, it would take an incredible amount of medicine to make you well, and you'd have to eat an insane amount each day, and though you'd probably receive fashion endorsement money, it would still be very difficult to manufacture clothes for you . . . but if you were small, you could subsist on very little food and water, and as my friend Eric noted, "you'd only need to buy one bottle of bourbon and it would last the rest of your life," and though you would be reliant on people, you'd be so adorable that people would love to take you places and hang out with you and carry you around . . . you're life would be strange, but not horrible, as you'd still be able to do many of the same things you did before -- you could shrink the font on a Kindle and read a book (you could jump on the screen to turn the page) and a YouTube video on a phone would be like a big screen TV . . . and so I asked my students this question, and many of them got it wrong at first, but then they were generally convinced by these arguments to switch to the small size: did you get the answer correct?

TV Stuff Part II

To continue yesterday's thread, the only TV I have been watching is The Office . . . my kids love it and I barely remember it, so we're going through them all-- we are on season three; in between laughing, during the awkward parts, I think most people invariably determine who they are in the office . . . which character on the show is the best parallel of their work behavior-- the first thing you need to do is eliminate Michael Scott (although if you're Michael Scott, then you don't know that you're Michael Scott) and while I can definitely be inappropriate and insensitive at times at work, I'm not as unaware as him and I'm not as dumb, and I'm pretty sure I have real friends and an actual wife and family-- I haven't photoshopped my face over someone's ex-husband so that I appear to be on a ski-trip with her and her kids-- and I hope people respect me a little bit more than they respect Michael Scott . . . and while I wish I were Jim Halpert, because everyone aspires to be Jim Halpert: funny, sensitive, witty, charming, understated, occasionally malevolent, but with a heart of gold, etcetera . . . unfortunately, I'm not him either, in fact-- after some candid self-reflection-- I'm pretty sure people at work see me as Creed (and this isn't even considering the ladies . . . I'm sure lots of women would like to be the Pam, not the Kelly, Phyllis or Angela . . . or -- God forbid-- the Meredith).

Some Good Movies and TV You May Not Have Seen

My family is heading to the Catskills for Spring Break, but I don't want to leave all my dedicated fans in the lurch . . . so each day I'll give you a clip from a movie or TV show that I highly recommend-- and though I'm certainly no film buff, which is probably a good thing, as I won't be recommending anything really artsy or obscure-- I will try to suggest things that you haven't seen, and all of these movies and shows have the DAVE GUARANTEE . . . my personal stamp of approval . . . so if you watch one of these recommendations and don't enjoy it, I will refund your time in full; my first recommendation is The Third Man . . . it's a classic movie with a modern pace-- I usually don't have the patience for black and white movies-- but I like it better than Casablanca . . . awesome zither music, excellent footage of war torn Vienna, and a fantastic cameo by Orson Welles . . . check it out, you won't be disappointed.

Locke and Key May Be Coming to a TV Near You

It took a while-- in fact, I forgot all about it-- but then something jogged my memory (perhaps someone opened my brain with the head key and fiddled with my consciousness) and I remembered to seek out the rest of the Locke and Key comic book series and the boys and I recently read all six of them, in the nick of time, it turns out, because Netflix is about to release a Locke and Key TV series . . . the comics are compelling and wild, but I should warn you, they are also grisly, disturbing, and totally fucked up; Joe Hill-- Stephen King's son-- did the writing and Gabriel Rodriguez did the art and the combination is chilling and horrific, I hope the series captures the mood, as this is a good one.

Old School . . . Blech

The last TV show I watched in real time was Seinfeld . . . I remember frenetic discussions of the previous night's episode at cafeteria duty . . . and I also remember when Catherine and I taped "The Betrayal," otherwise know as "the backwards episode" because of the reverse chronology (you could mark the passage of time by looking at Kramer's giant lollipop) but when we tried to play the episode back, we started in the middle, and got confused by the reverse chronology (and the lame nature of VHS technology) and ended up skipping around on the tape and watching the episode forwards in tiny fragments . . . but we just got cable TV this summer -- it was cheaper to get it bundled with our FIOS than to not have it at all -- and I watched the season premier of Breaking Bad on Sunday night . . .  and because it's been so many years, I forgot how annoying it is to watch something in real time: you have to endure commercials and previews, you can't put on subtitles, there's no pausing so you can ask your wife pertinent questions or look up tangentially related details on the internet, and, worst of all, you have to wait until 9 PM to get started . . . I will try to make it through the final season because I love the show so much, and also so I can actually talk to people at work about the current plot twists, instead of running out of the room screaming, "DON'T SAY ANYTHING!" when anyone mentions Walter White, but after this one exception, then I am going back to my Netflix rabbit hole.

It's Fun to Eat Junk Food and Watch a Lot of TV

Sometimes it takes an injury to remember how wonderful it is to eat salty and sugary snacks in alternation, while getting completely sucked into a TV show . . . especially when every episode is available on Netflix . . . I have watched thirteen episodes of The Killing since last Thursday, but season one doesn't wrap everything up in a neat package, so I need a new injury so that I can watch season two equally as fast.

All Downhill From Here?

I just finished re-rerecording and re-mixing a song I wrote about a year ago. The lyrics are now ominously prophetic-- although not in the way I thought.

The song is called "All Downhill From Here," a title based on the ambiguity of the phrase. I often use "all downhill from here" positively-- like my life is a bike ride, and now I'm coasting. But there is also, obviously, the negative, spiraling out-of-control connotation (which my wife prefers).

I'm fairly happy with the mix on this one. You can hear everything-- it's not as muddy as the first version-- and I had a lot of fun with my wah pedal.

Here are the lyrics . . .

This is as good as it gets . . .

Big TV, no regrets

Fine woman in your bed,

Kids sleeping like the dead.

No famine, plague or war;

Dog splayed on the floor.

Your interest rate at an all time low,

And free trade with Mexico.

It’s all downhill from here.

When you go down

You don’t need to steer.

It’s all downhill from here,

So drop it in neutral and crack your beer.

I wrote it when I was concerned about Trump, tariffs, and NAFTA. Turn out, that should have been the least of my concerns. We've got a plague-like situation-- although not nearly as deadly as the bubonic version-- and let's hope the economic decline doesn't result in famine for those hit hardest. 

We are certainly enjoying our family dog, our family TV, and uninterrupted sleep. The question is: what sort of downhill are we headed for?

Kudos to Emily Dickinson

While yesterday's quiz hasn't gone viral, I have: for the past three days, I've had achey joints, glassy eyes, and I've gone to bed at 7:30 PM and slept until the alarm . . . and aside from slogging through work, I've been a shut-in . . . and now I'm running a fever and my eyes hurt so much that I can't read or watch TV, and so I don't have much content today, as my blog depends on my stupid adventures in the outside world, plus occasional reviews of books and movies; the only wisdom I have gleaned from this illness is that we should all appreciate Emily Dickinson's fantastic imagination, as she was a shut-in for life-- before the advent of cable TV-- and she managed to pump out two thousand wonderful poems (without the instant gratification of the internet).

V For Paranoia

When I read Alan Moore's Watchmen, I thought to myself: I should write the script for a graphic novel, it would be awesome if someone turned my words into really cool pictures . . . but then I got a look at the actual script for Watchmen and thought better of this idea (here is the link to the script and though you have to download a PDF to see it, it is worth it to see the nearly insane attention to detail Moore takes for each frame of the graphic novel . . . you'd think someone with this kind of visual acuity would want to see the film version) and if you want more of Moore's insanity, read V for Vendetta, which isn't as dense as Watchmen, but has a clearer story-line, and if you want to get a feel for the tone of the book, read the introductions: the first is by David Lloyd, the illustrator, and he recounts an anecdote in a pub . . . he is sitting, drinking his pint, and the TV is blaring one insipid "cheeky and cheery" sit-com after another, and then a sports quiz program, but when the news comes on, the bartender shuts the TV off, and Lloyd finishes ominously: "V for Vendetta is for people who don't switch off the news," and then comes Moore's introduction, in which he predicts that Margaret Thatcher will create concentration camps for AIDS victims (it is 1988) and he describes vans with cameras on top, and police and their horses wearing black visors, and he says that England has turned "cold and mean-spirited," and he's getting his seven year old daughter out of there (although according to the internet, he's still living in Northern England, twenty three years later) and while I think the two of them are paranoid nut-bags, I also think you need people like this, predicting the worst, to remind us of what Arthur Koestler called the darkness at noon, so while I prefer to live blithely and unaware, someday Moore will be able to say: I told you so.

The Carousel is a Merry-Go-Round

After watching the first season of Madmen, I made the claim that the scene when Don Draper renames the Kodak wheel slide projector the "carousel" is the greatest moment in TV history-- but I am prone to hyperbole-- so it was a pleasant surprise when my friend who called me "insane" when I originally made the claim, said that he recently heard Dennis Miller interview Jon Hamm, and Miller expressed the same sentiment about that carousel moment . . . but I think Dennis Miller is kind of annoying . . . so I'm changing my greatest moment in TV history to when the cast of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia did a live performance of "The Nightman Cometh."

Stop Reading This And Go To Bed!

Here are some of the things I learned while reading David K. Randall's book Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep . . . and while his lessons are often commonsensical, he provides descriptions of how these truisms were scientifically proven:

1) We often dream about what bothers us;

2) We often dream the same thing over and over;

3) While dreams don't have symbolic meaning, they can help us solve actual problems in a creative fashion;

4) Better to sleep than to cram;

5) The West Coast team has an advantage when playing Monday Night Football;

6) You need sleep to synthesize new information;

7) If you are deprived of enough sleep, you die . . . from lack of sleep;

8) Friendly fire deaths in the military are most often caused by fatigue;

9) The biggest hurdle in the military is not technological, it is sleep deprivation;

10) If you didn't get a full night's rest, take a nap;

11) You can kill someone in your sleep, and depending on the interpretation of the law, you might either get life in prison or get off scot-free.

12) Teenagers have different Circadian rhythms than adults;

13) Highschools that pushed their start time to 8:30 had higher SAT scores, better attendance, less fights, and a number of other quantifiable improvements;

14) Some popular prescription sleeping pills don't actually improve sleep all that much, they just give the sleeper temporary amnesia, so that it improves the perception of how one has slept;

15) The electric light, the TV, and the computer are enemies of sleep, because they fool our brains into thinking it is still daylight, and thus ruin our Circadian rhythm;

16) Before the advent of the electric light, the computer, and the TV, humans had two sleeps: a first sleep from when the sun went down until around midnight, then there was an hour or two of wakefulness, where people often ate or fornicated or talked, and then a "second sleep" until morning;

17) Sleep apnea is scary . . .

and the final thing to take away from this book is that sleep is really, really important for humans-- important for our health, our minds, and our stress levels-- yet even though we know this, married couples usually share a bed that is too small for the two of them and sleep together despite snoring, flatulence, kicking, blanket-stealing, late night reading, and general disruptions . . . and studies found that women primarily do this because they want to feel safe and that men do it because you never know when you might get lucky, and nothing improves your luck more than proximity.

Dave Discloses His Personal Business (for the Good of Future Scientists)

I used my last personal day yesterday, and I'm going to document what I did with it, so anthropologists in the future have an example of what a middle class homeowner and family man might do with a random day off . . . it's lame stuff, by any standard, but the document might become incredibly important for this very reason, for the extraordinary mundanity, so here it is, in chronological order:

1) I walked the dog and listened to Planet Money;

2) recorded some music;

3) wrote a post for this blog about Planet Money;

4) assembled a fold-out futon . . . this took nearly three hours and the finished product is certainly imbued with this psychological fallacy;

5) did NOT remove the basement refrigerator door and straighten it because I was so tired from building the futon . . . took the dog for a bike ride instead;

6) fixed the side screen door, which wasn't fully closing, by pounding selected portions of the metal lip on the side of the door with a rubber mallet;

7) took all the cardboard packaging from the futon and mattress to the recycling dumpster;

7) tried to take a nap, but couldn't sleep because of the jackhammer . . . our neighbors are putting in a deck;

8) signed the delivery slip for our new TV-- this was the actual reason I had to take the day . . . the only window for delivery was 8 AM to 1 PM;

9) assembled and hooked up our new TV . . . it's smart;

10) ate some sushi for lunch;

11) went to Costco for wine, beer, and easy to cook food . . . Catherine is headed to San Francisco-- Amazon is flying her out there for some educational software summit-- so the boys and I are on our own for the weekend;

12) purchased two pairs of pants at Costco . . . this really worries me-- more than the fact that I went to Costco of my own volition-- because once you start purchasing clothes at Costco, it's the beginning of the end (and the worst part is they're nice pants . . . Tommy Hilfiger, and they fit perfectly . . . this indicates that soon enough I'll spending two or three days a week roaming the aisles, pushing that giant cart at a snail's pace along with all the other geriatrics, buying random bottles of vitamins and ugly walking shoes, feasting on the free samples, and wondering if I could use more razors).

Uh . . . Wow . . . TV?

The third episode of The Last of Us-- the HBO show based on the video game with the same name-- is some very ambitious, very emotional, very amazing TV . . . the episode is really a film unto itself (it reminds me of the Station 11 episode Baby Boom in that respect) when the show takes a worthy detour in time and place to show us Nick Offerman as a survivalist prepper bizarro-world version of his most beloved character, Ron Swanson, with a compelling twist (the other fabulous cameo appearance is Murray Bartlett, another great actor who absolutely stole the show as Armand in White Lotus).

TV . . . It's What's On TV

Catherine and Ian were resistant to watching a new show-- they wanted to forge ahead with Money Heist (which is good, bit it's five million episodes so I wanted some variety) but I reminded them that in the old days you might watch a different show every day of the week and my wife conceded that point (although Ian didn't know what we were talking about) and so we started TWO shows-- both seems similar:  The Society and From . . . both shows are about being trapped in a town, both shows are creepy, and both shows are compelling-- I like From  a little better-- we ended up watching two episodes-- the pilot is pretty amazing-- and I think they will both provide a nice diversion from the infinite money heist.

Respect the Speck

Hockey is hard enough to watch on TV, but if there's a black speck on the TV-- or several black specks on a couple of TVs-- then things can get really confusing . . . sometimes you're following the puck, sometimes you're following the speck, and sometimes-- like that magical moment on The Office when the DVD logo hits the corner-- the black speck intersects with the actual puck and reality breaks down into an inception of the matrix.

Some Good Movies and TV You May Not Have Seen #6

Watching video of something extinct is poignant, nostalgic, and sad . . . but the knowledge of the subject's impending demise imbues the viewing with something special-- for example, check out the video above to see one of the last living thylacines, soon after this film was shot (in 1933) the "Tasmanian tiger' was eradicated by humans; the seminal TV series Freaks and Geeks evoked the same feeling in me . . . as by the time I watched it, it had already been cancelled (only super-hip people watched the show when it was broadcast) and so each episode-- no matter how excellent-- was a countdown until extinction; and once again, my wife and I are in the same predicament, this time with the 2009 sitcom Better Off Ted . . . it's funny, smart, satirical, fast-paced, and rather lighthearted send-up of business ethics, research and development, technology, and office politics; the jokes are clever, and Portia de Rossi is perfectly cast as the cold and callous dragon-lady boss, and though it was critically acclaimed, apparently no one watched it . . . we've got ten more episodes before it dies in front of us, never to be queued on Netflix again.

Sports Potpourri

Catherine and I inhaled a lot of sports in the past two days-- with a mixed bag of results-- yesterday we stopped at the HP soccer game, just in time, to see Ian score a wild back-heel flick volley goal off a long shot . . . and this was an easy 6-0 win so we left at half-time to go to the Rutgers/Nebraska game-- we parked at the edge of town and decided to walk over (we had subs and drinks and we were meeting our friend Dom at the Greek Church lot to tailgate) but someone told us the entrance to the park was flooded, so we hightailed it through the train trestle tunnel (which has no walking path) and then walked on the muddy rutted path parallel to River Road-- and Catherine wiped out in the mud and banged up her knee (before even consuming any alcohol!) and then we realized that the walk along River Road to the church lot was not only miserable and muddy but also really long (3 miles?) and we were walking next to all the game day traffic-- but we made it to the tailgate, cleaned up Catherine's knee, had some food and drinks (Cat made our drinks in ziplock bags, so we could dispose of everything once we were done drinking!) and then walked back to the stadium and met my buddy Haim and his wife (who gave us the tickets) and watched an absolutely awful football game-- a million penalties and TV timeouts, just slow as fuck-- but Rutgers was in it so we stayed until the end, only to see them throw an interception on their last drive, down by one point-- blech-- and then because we stayed so late, the traffic was insane, so we walked back to the car . . . after a nearly four hour game (and I was only wearing a t-shirt because it was so hot walking over, but then it got really cold-- I've been to two Rutgers games this season and that might be it for me, football is fun to watch on TV, when you can do other stuff, but it's pretty drawn out in person (although it was fun to talk to all the Nebraska folk at the game . . . I only know one thing about Nebraska-- that the Ashfall Fossil Beds are one of the greatest paleontological sites in the world, just astounding-- so I brought them up and the guy sitting next to us said he lived an hour south of them, so I had something to chat about-- then this morning I went over to see HP play Timothy Christian and this was a wild and exciting game, which HP finally won 4-3 . . . and Ian scored a great goal, he received a through ball, took a couple dribbles, and then finished nice and early-- before the defense converged on him, and shot a rocket past the big keeper from the eighteen-- he should have scored a couple other but the keeper made a great fingertip save on one headed to the upper corner and he was about to finish a follow and got clobbered (no foul) so Ian is having quite a season-- he scored the game winner the other day against Wardlaw-Hartridge-- and most importantly, he's playing a lot of minutes and his speed and defensive hustle look really good, and-- knock on wood, because he's only 130 pounds-- he hasn't gotten hurt.

 

Copulation > Assassination

A great moment on Madmen: ad-man Duck Phillips is meeting an ad-woman Peggy Olsen in a hotel for a "nooner," and Duck is watching TV while he waits for Peggy at their trysting place and he sees a news flash that President Kennedy has been shot and injured, but he knows his Peggy is just about to show up, and there's no way he's going to let a little thing like this ruin the romantic moment, and so he unplugs the television, and when she walks in moments later she is none the wiser, and then once they are post-coital, smoking cigarettes in bed, he says, "Do you mind if I turn on the TV . . . there's this news story that's bothering me," and then they learn that J.F.K has been killed . . . and I certainly can't blame Duck-- you can't let a national tragedy get in the way of copulation.