One Fish Two Fish Blackfish Blue Fish

I highly recommend the documentary Blackfish, which focuses on the dangers of keeping killer whales in captivity (especially one particularly large and incorrigibly uncontrollable whale: Tilikum) and my wife and kids loved it too, but I should warn you to strap yourself in, as there are some graphic moments: you see some footage of the attacks (and seventy killer whale attacks have been documented, all of them occurring when the whales were in captivity), including the recent one where Dawn Brancheau is killed (but while director Gabriela Cowperwaithe allows you to witness more than Werner Herzog does in Grizzly Man, the footage is just to get an idea of what the whales are capable of, and stops short of being a gratuitous snuff film) and you will also see a killer whale penis-- my son Ian commented: "that wiener is bigger than me"-- and learn about the killer whale version of impotence (male dorsal fin collapse) and while my son Alex's review of the film was flawless: "epic but scary," my younger son said the movie was "awesome" but he only gave it "four and a half stars" because "it was missing something" and it turned out that what he thought was missing was "really good" footage of the attacks . . . but once my wife and I explained to him that these were real people that died, and that their friends and family might be watching the movie, then he understood why they didn't show the entirety of the violent scenes; this film is eye-opening and compelling, and it will certainly make you rethink your trip to SeaWorld (or the ersatz Canadian version, SeaLand).

META-Meta-meta

John Scalzi's novel Redshirts begins as a schlocky and ersatz Star Trek style space opera, but if you're familiar with Scalzi's satirical sci-fi humor then the encounters with ice sharks and Borgovian ground worms don't really hold water . . . and the book soon dives into meta-sci-fi, meta-fiction, meta-narrative, meta-characters, meta-plotlines, and the metaphysical . . . I would say that the meat of the book is more fun, it's totally wacky sci-fi (and sci-fi parody) and the three codas are more philosophical (and also-- surprisingly-- a little touching) and if you're a sci-fi fan looking for something fun and funny then this is the book for you (and if you don't know what the title means-- I didn't-- then check out this video . . . but it's a spoiler).

Arachnids and Dramaturgy

In Philosophy class last week, I introduced my new students to the idea of a heuristic-- a quick and dirty problem-solving technique that someone employs to make it through the day-- and I contrasted this with what Bertrand Russell's calls "philosophic contemplation" . . . the latter mindset obviously takes a great deal more time and mental effort, and while we were discussing this, I was searching through my desk drawer for a paper clip and I saw a spider, which I promptly killed with my stapler-- so that I didn't have to feel the crunch-- and then we went back to the problem at hand, that with limited time it is impossible to philosophically contemplate every moment and dilemma that a typical day brings, and so we use heuristics to navigate most of our decisions (what to eat for breakfast, how fast to drive, who to sit with at lunch, whether or not to copy someone's homework, etcetera) and then I revealed to them that there was no spider-- I was acting-- but that many people use a kill-creepy-crawly heuristic instead of thinking deeply about the spider and its right to live . . . most of the students were glad that I didn't actually kill a real spider and they were impressed with my acting ability (I even picked up the nonexistent miniature carcass with a tissue . . . I learned everything I know from Master Thespian Jon Lovitz . . . acting!) but then I told them the story of the groundhog that I euthanized with a shovel and they were properly appalled; anyway, if you want to learn more about heuristics and just how screwy they are, read the new Michael Lewis book The Undoing Project . . . it's the story of two Israeli psychologists-- Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky-- who uncovered fundamental truths about the flaws in economics and the human mind, and there is liberal use of the word "heuristic" . . . I'm halfway through the book, and I'm hoping for an occurrence of the word "ersatz" as well.

Sometimes the Apple Falls Horizontally

I am slowly making my way through Andrew Solomon's magnum opus, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity . . . and while everyone likes to comment when the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and the kid acts just like his parents (and my boys certainly fall into this category: I have two little versions of myself running around the house, doing Dave-like things, which can either be exhilarating or extremely frustrating) Solomon has tackled a much wilder event -- when the apple falls "horizontally" instead of vertically; when parents give birth to a child nothing like themselves . . . the book has chapters on Dwarfs, the Deaf, Down Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, Prodigies, Transgender, and more -- and each chapter is nearly the length of a book; Solomon himself is a horizontal child -- he is gay -- and though his parents were accepting of him, they still weren't the same as him, so he writes the book from an unusually personal perspective; I have just finished the chapter on the Deaf, and it made with grapple with an ethical dilemma that I didn't even know existed; when hearing parents have a deaf child, they have to immediately decide if they are going to implant a cochlear implant, which wil give the child an ersatz but workable version of hearing, or instead, immerse him in the culture of the Deaf -- sign language -- or do something in between, with speech therapy . . . and the Deaf community views the implants or the attempt to make a deaf child learn to speak as "the final solution," a way to eradicate Deaf culture, which is apparently rich and thriving . . . some radical Deaf believe that hearing parents with a deaf child should give the child up to the Deaf community, but this strikes me as insanely unrealistic . . . Harlan Lane, a Deaf community advocate, wrote: "the relation of the hearing parent to the young deaf child is a microcosm of the relation of the hearing society to the deaf community; it is paternalistic, medicalizing, and ethnocentric," and so the question becomes -- as technology and medicine and genetic screenings start to eliminate hearing loss -- is the Deaf community something worth saving? . . . and if you think I have the answer to this, then you''re sadly mistaken, as I'm having a hard enough time getting my own children, who have excellent hearing, to listen to a word I say.

Midnight in Paris: Romantically Modern

Woody Allen's movie Midnight in Paris did the impossible-- it actually made me want to visit Paris-- he films the old architecture of the city so beautifully, in yellow saturated tones, that it would probably be impossible to find this Paris as a tourist . . . there is no urban sprawl or traffic or arrogant French people, but the theme of the film is paradoxical, as the moral of the story is that you should be happy in your own place and time, yet his portrayal of Paris in the 1920's is so romantic and magical . . . every scene is full of artistic celebrities-- Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Toklas, Picasso, Dali, Eliot-- and they are all friendly and they speak as if they themselves are their own works of art (Dali asks the time traveling Owen Wilson-- an ersatz Woody Allen-- if he likes "the shape of the rhinoceros") and though the moral is an apt one, as we all think some past reality is more creative and golden than our own, the problem with the movie is that Woody Allen's version of the '20's in Paris really does seem more exciting and wonderful than the present . . . maybe he needed to include some of T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism or a bit more of the intractably ugly and inaccessible art of the time, or the feeling that this was a "Lost Generation" . . . or maybe someone should have simply died of strep throat . . . and one last thought on the reason that Owen Wilson finally decides to embrace his present: are all the tour guides and shop-keepers in Paris really that hot?

Road Trip Day One . . . We Become Honorary Pittsburghers

I'm going to stretch the boundaries of the sentence for these posts (mainly because I'm competing against another, ersatz blog being written by my wife -- Sentences of Cat -- and I want to be the definitive and comprehensive provider for information about this cross country trip) and so I'm going to use a chronological listing format to give you all the stuff you need to know:

1) we made it to Fallingwater without much conflict in the car, mainly because of two podcasts -- Song Exploder  . . . artists take apart songs track by track and explain how they put them together -- and Professor Blastoff . . . which is slightly inappropriate for the kids but hysterically funny;

2) Fallingwater makes miraculous use of steel-reinforced concrete, which I just learned all about in the highly entertaining book Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World, and while I could appreciate the aesthetic charms of the place, mainly what kept running through my mind was: this would be an awesome place to have a party! but then I kept imagining drunk people leaning over the low balustrades and falling onto the wet slate below, and I questioned Frank Lloyd Wright's brilliance;

3) Hotwire upgraded us without telling us, and we found ourselves staying in the Pittsburgh Wyndham Grand, with a fantastic view from high above the confluence of the three rivers (the Ohio, the Allegheny, and the oft forgotten Monongohelalhgonelagonorrhea) and so after a surprisingly cheap meal at Pittsburgh's oldest restaurant -- the Original Oyster House-- we were able to watch the sun set into the confluence (and you're not going to get a word like "confluence" over at my competitor's blog;

4) the concierge at the Wyndham asked me where we were coming in from, and when I told him New Jersey, he said, "I've been to Elizabeth . . . they'll murder you twice there before you get out of the car," and I agreed that it was a tough town -- but not quite that bad (we travel there and play soccer, and while they play rather rough and tumble, no one ever gets knifed) and then he said, "I've also been to Camden" and I told him that's a rough town too, but "with a great aquarium" and I didn't bother to explain to him that not all of New Jersey is evocative of Mad Max and that I live in an innocuous Jersey town full of liberals, lesbians, Orthodox Jews, grad students, and a sprinkling of every ethnic group on the planet, and he assured me that Pittsburgh "is like Mr. Rogers" and it did seem to be full of nice old white men like the concierge, but we did meet one black guy, who owned the ice cream parlor we went to . . . the place is called DreamCream and each flavor in the shop represents a charity-- it could be an organization like the Red Cross, or an individual who needs an expensive medical test -- and by purchasing a particular flavor, you support that particular charity . . . so very Mr. Rogers;

5) and while I'm not above trashing my competitor's blog, I will steal one of her pictures.

Diane Ravitch Speaks About Education

REEP, KIPP and TFA Lecture Series from Jon Paul Estrada on Vimeo.

This Diane Ravitch lecture is rather long and dry (like Diane Ravitch's excellent and comprehensive book, The Life and Death of the Great American School System, which I summarize here) but she summarily refutes the claims of Governor Christie's favorite documentary, Waiting for Superman, and she exposes some of the myths behind data based teacher evaluations, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, unions, market driven school reform, and tenure . . . I highly recommend the book, but if you don't care enough about our nation's educational system to read an entire book-- which I completely understand, because it's almost Black Friday and you probably need to start reading the circulars-- then you can use this clip (she starts speaking ten minutes in) as a guide, albeit an ersatz one.