Gas is Funny

I was listening to the news on NPR, and when Soterios Johnson explained that the NYPD released some harmless gas into the subway system it made me laugh out loud in my car, which is pretty juvenile for a 43 year old man.

Longmire Does Philly?

In the third Longmire novel, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Craig Johnson inserts Sheriff Longmire, Henry Standing Bear, and Dog into Vic Moretti's world-- downtown Philadelphia; the usual violence, debilitating injuries, and Western-style detective work ensue-- with a healthy dose of Native American lore and trickery-- and, despite the urban setting, there will be some horses.

We Defy Augury Episode Fifty!

The universe did NOT want me to finish the fiftieth episode of We Defy Augury: I had to re-record audio because an unshielded XLR cable allowed electromagnetic radiation to produce an unbearable hum and then a bunch of inexplicable five-second "holes" appeared in this audio when I was nearly done mixing things down, so I had to patch in little bits and pieces of my voice-- I was also a bit ambitious and wove in audio clips and clips of me playing the guitar-- and it was hard to record simultaneous vocal audio and guitar audio . . . basically, this one was a nightmare but I patiently pieced it together and I think it turned out pretty well, despite all the weird obstacles . . . the episode is called "Let's Talk About Celine Dion: Does Your Taste Stand on Solid Ground?" and my thoughts and ruminations are (loosely) based on Carl Wilson's music criticism masterpiece Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste . . . and there are plenty of special guests: Celine Dion, Huey Lewis and the News, New Found Glory, Robert Johnson, Greensky Bluegrass, The Easy Star All Stars, Bas Gaakeer & Mireille Bittar, Joey Satriani, David Berman, Pavement, Beavis and Butthead, David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel, greasetruck, and Pythagoras.

Altercation at the Tennis Court!

My buddy Cob and I went to play tennis this morning at Johnson Park, and the girl's tennis team was practicing-- taking up a few courts-- and then some older ladies were playing doubles on two of the four remaining courts . . . so we walked over to the far court and one of the older ladies ran onto it and said, "we have this court reserved-- some of our friends are coming at 10" and it was ten after nine and so I told her:

1) this is a public park and the courts are first come first serve;

2) you can't "reserve" courts unless you have a park permit . . . like the tennis team;

and she got very sassy with me and said that she was going to stand on the court and play singles with her friend-- even though all these people do is play very bad old people doubles and I dismissed her and told her to stop being absurd and that I was the varsity tennis coach and knew how the courts worked-- and she said, "well you don't know who I am!" and I said, "No I don't, but I'm telling you who I am" and I told her my name and my position with the school and told her this wasn't like a parking space where you could stand in it for fifty-minutes to hold it for some friends (though I doubt the legality of that move as well) and then Cob and I started warming up and the ladies went back to their doubles game, this lady muttering stuff, and it turned out that more people never showed up and the three courts were plenty for them and then she came over and apologized and told me that I was right and she was wrong and that she was a territorial old bitch . . . NOT . . . despite the fact that they didn't need the court and they all stopped playing before Cob and I because it was hot, she did NOT apologize for her juvenile behavior . . . so obnoxious.

Short Attention Span Literature

It's nice when an excellent author writes something easy and fun . . . so though you may not have had the literary endurance to digest Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece Suttree, at least you can breeze through No Country for Old Men or The Road . . . and I never made it through Denis Johnson's Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke but I whipped through his new one, Nobody Move, a dead ringer for a classic Elmore Leonard novel (complete with precise Leonardesque vocabulary, the car door squeaked because the bushings were shot).

New Jersey Starts to Open . . . Is This a Good Thing? Too Many Numbers to Know For Sure . . .

Outdoor stuff in New Jersey is starting to open.

My wife is down at the community garden today, handing out keys and helping people to reestablish control over their wild-grown plots.

I played tennis with a buddy at the park by my house yesterday.

The dog park is open!

This is great for me. I've gone from interacting with hundreds of people a week to the usual quarantine family-time and Zoom happy hours. The lack of stimulus is making me a little crazy (although I've been passing the time with low-stakes online poker. I'm reading some books and learning some math . . . but I don't think I'm headed to the WSOP any time soon).

The dog park at least restores some random social interactions, for both me and Lola.

This morning, I got to talk to a smart guy from down the street. He's in finance and owns a HUGE house. He's a conservative but thinks Trump is a lunatic. He would have voted for Bloomberg. He thinks the free market economy is rigged against the environment but doesn't like liberal foreign policy. He's the kind of conservative that that-- if you're in a left-wing echo chamber-- you might not think exists (now, of course, he lives in Highland Park . . . which is the most liberal town in a liberal county, so that skews things).

He's a hedge-fund data scientist and he's sanguine about the numbers-- which is a nice change. He says if you look at the data, you really need three things for the pandemic to continue.

1) an elderly population

2) densely populated areas

3) cold weather

You can read all day about #3, but it seems that warmer weather will at least slow the spread of the virus (but this won't prevent it from returning in the winter). And it's getting warm and yucky in New Jersey (in fact, I've got the AC on right now . . . when my wife gets home she's going to yell at me, but it's 73 in the house and humid. That's gross).

I presented the conservative-data-guy the statistics rattling around in my mind:

For every 800 people in New Jersey, one of them has died from Covid-19.

Two percent of the state has tested positive for the virus.

We're still generating over 100 deaths and over 1500 cases a day.

He told me something I know: the vast majority of the people that died were in nursing homes. That doesn't make it right, but it could have been prevented. Old people really can't handle this thing. There does seem to be some long-lasting effects in younger people, but we're probably going to build herd immunity in New Jersey and New York (at a great cost, but the genie is out of the bottle).

He's rooting for herd immunity. It's going to be a long road. I got my antibody test this week-- I'm still waiting for results. The doctor said about 20 percent of people being tested came up positive for antibodies. I think I had it February, but my wife was negative for antibodies. And the doctor said the two things she's hearing most from people testing positive for antibodies are:

1) two weeks

2) it felt like the worst X ever . . . the variable being flu, bronchitis, cold, strep, cough, etc.

My thing in February wasn't the worst thing ever (although giving blood for the test WAS the worst thing ever . . . I was really nervous -- my blood pressure was higher than normal-- and maybe a little dehydrated because I went running. The lady had to do both arms-- she didn't get enough blood out of the first arm. I wanted to give up and leave . . . I didn't like being in a room with multiple people giving blood . . . wounds don't bother me but when blood is circulating through tubes and needles, I get light-headed).

We agreed on a few things. Other countries did a better job.

Taiwan, for instance, had 440 cases and 7 deaths. Part of this might have been the heat, but it's mainly through comprehensive testing and contact tracing.

Our President has failed us on the testing, the tracing, and the plan. This conservative totally agreed with that. Trump, like Putin and Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson, is too macho to deal with something as small and statistical as a virus.

And Americans aren't big on mandatory tracking, testing, and tracing. Our freedoms don't mesh with fighting a virus. So we aren't out of the woods yet.

The attitude of the day is guarded optimism-- for now-- but unfortunately, winter is coming.

Got the Podcast Done Just in Time

First of all, I managed to finish another episode of my podcast We Defy Augury . . . this one is about Steven Johnson's new book and it's called "Revising Our Notion About Pirates" and I got it done just in time-- because I'm going to sound like I have marbles in my mouth for a day or two-- this afternoon, I underwent two hours of clanking and poking and pulling and drilling, and casting and impressing-- and now my old bridge is gone, as is all the decay under my old bridge-- and my dentist, Dr. David, is "cautiously optimistic" that I won't have to endure a root canal before they can put in my permanent bridge (and there's going to be a bit of gold on my permanent bridge! not quite a grill, but it's something) and right now I'm sipping some Olmeca Altos tequila, waiting for the lidocaine to wear off, which it most certainly will-- and then, apparently, my mouth is going to hurt some (I should also point out that the hygienist was pretty weird and nerdy in a fun way, we were talking about how long a day it had been and she started postulating about the possibilities of time dilation . . . and I couldn't really chime in much because I was biting down on some weird goopy stuff in order to make a mold for my temporary bridge).

2017 Book List

I just finished my 46th book of 2017 this afternoon and it's a fitting one for the end of the year; Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millenials by Malcolm Harris is an intelligent, analytical and provocative book written by a millennial about the millennial generation that might just change your mind about millennials in general . . . from my perspective, this book is about the end of my era, Generation X, and any slackerly influence it might have had upon the world: kids these days are more prone to anxiety, work harder, do less drugs (drug overdoses seem to be following the Baby Boomer cohort), have less sex, do more homework, get surveilled more-- for a scary take on this, watch Episode 2 of season 4 of Black Mirror-- take out giant student loans which fund ever expanding building projects on college campuses, intern more, get paid less, compete more in an organized fashion, train for this organized competition in areas that are supposed to be fun and healthy-- sports, music, the science fair, dance; are trained by their cell phones to be more available and productive than any work force in history, and don't have much of a shot at the wealth in our nation, which has increasingly been hoarded by the old and the 1% . . . Harris backs this up with plenty of data-- beware: there are charts in this book-- but it is slender and if you have kids or teach or coach or work with kids in any capacity, then you should read this book; the conclusion is not very hopeful . . . I worry about my own children and this book is making me take a step back in my expectations for them and for myself as a parent; the book is also making me enjoy my stable and noncompetitive union job, as the millennial generation will experience job precarity as a matter of course; anyway, this ties in nicely with my New Year's Resolution, which is to try to live more in the slow, meditative, and profound world of great books, and avoid the twitchiness of the internet as much as possible . . . I did a pretty good job of it in 2017, especially because we cut the cable and I stopped watching football (and playing fantasy football, which is another one of those productivity training devices that "prepares" people for 24/7 availability and efficiency) and while I didn't quite reach my goal of a book a week, I was close . . . anyway, here is the list--  I discussed my seven favorites on Gheorghe: The Blog-- and wrote reviews of all of them here on Sentence of Dave . . . my favorite book of the year is The Power by Naomi Alderman: if you're going to read one book in 2018, that should be the one . . . and you should try to read at least one book a year, just to avoid being part of the American 26% that reads zero books each year; these are just the books I finished, I started plenty of others and bailed, so anything on this list is pretty good:

1) Selection Day by Aravind Adiga

2) Bill Bryson: One Summer: America, 1927

3) Mark Schatzker's The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

4) Whiplash: How to Survive Our Fast Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe

5) The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly

6) The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

7) Steven Johnson: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

8) Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty

9) Normal by Warren Ellis

10) Jonah Berger: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior

11) Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman

12) The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack

13) Tyler Cowen: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

14) Ill Will by Dan Chaon

15) Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell

16) Love Me Do! The Beatles Progress by Michael Braun

17) The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley

18) Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

19) Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty

20) Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific by Robert Kaplan

21) Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

22) Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

23) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

24) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

25) Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World by Jeff Madrick

26) Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

27) 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden Hue

28) Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

29) Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov

30) The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie

31) A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane

32) Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman

33) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

34) David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

35) Michael Connelly: Nine Dragons

36) Gar Anthony Haywood's Cemetery Road

37) Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

38) Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

39) Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

40) How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

41) Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty

42) Roddy Doyle's Smile

43) The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

44) Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

45) The Power by Naomi Alderman

46) Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of the Millenials by Malcolm Harris.

The 70's: I Lived Through Them But Don't Remember Much

David Frum's book How We Got Here: The 70's . . . The Decade That Brought You Modern Life-- For Better or Worse takes a "conservative" look at the decade when the radical ideas of the '60s completely permeated American life, but it's an older brand of conservatism, one of "pragmatism, character, reciprocity, stoicism, manliness, hardness, vengeance, strictness, and responsibility"-- not the new corrupt, Machiavellian Trump/McConnell version-- so Frum acknowledges that great progress was made in many areas of human rights and expressiveness, but he also takes a hard look at the costs; Frum begins by running through the crime, the corruption, the many many scandals-- Watergate was the tip if the iceberg-- and the secrets: the Pentagon Papers, the revelations about JFK (wiretapping MLK) and Lyndon Johnson (starting the Vietnam War over the Tonkin incident) and Nixon, of course-- and the many many more from Tuskegee to plots with the Mafia and CIA to overthrow Castro, and J. Edgar Hoover and the CIA working without oversight, the FBI monitoring many many Americans-- often at the president's behest-- scandal upon scandal, crime upon crime-- this is when 60 Minutes was the number one program and for good reason . . . it made me realize that I grew up in the hangover of this tumultuous decade, the Reagan years-- so I missed out on all the fun, the sex and drugs and new age lingo, the superstition and narcissism and disco-- my generation got AIDS and video games and Reaganomics-- but we also got free markets and deregulation (for good and bad) and missed out on crime and terrorism and gas-lines and horrible inflation and general paranoia . . . Frum blames the turmoil of the 1970's, the terrorism, the smashing of values, the conflict of a demilitarized children vs. their militarized parents, on three things-- the Vietnam War, desegregation, and inflation . . . and while he acknowledges that many things in America were worse in the past-- the racism, redlining, the homogeneous society, the lack of economic creativity, the treatment of the environment-- he also takes the pragmatic conservative position that family and employment, and things like loyalty and conformity gave a purpose to many poor and embattled people, and that assimilation instead of fragmentation, while oppressing diversity, does help with order .. . the 70's was when modern America emerged, technological, diverse, environmentally conscious, litigious, regulated, rights-oriented . . . and while the pendulum may have occasionally swung back, the 70's moved the nexus and so "the past never returns, no matter how lovely it was-- but onward, away from the follies and triumphs of the 1970s and toward something new: new vices, new virtues, new sins-- and new progress."

If You're Gonna Get Shot, Get Shot in the Shoulder

Walter Longmire is definitely a candidate for "Protagonists' Hospital"-- a Demetri Martin bit about a medical facility that only treats shoulder injuries-- and so am I, in fact, last night my aching shoulder kept me awake and ploughing through the intensely plotted Hell is Empty-- Craig Johnson's seventh Longmire mystery . . . this is my favorite one so far, although there's nothing new: the small town Wyoming sheriff braves a snowstorm, chases fugitives, makes rash decisions, messes around with guns, suffers horrible injuries, and has a spiritual experience in the Bighorn Mountains, a land that wasn't always under the jurisdiction of the white man . . . I think you could start with this one and work backwards.

Dave Fixes His Car! With Tape!

Before

If you've been following my life lately (which you should) then you know that I tore a hole in the side panel of my Toyota Sienna; I caught the lip of a guardrail while trying to squeeze out of a tiny parking lot adjacent to the Landing Lane Bridge (and I was in this lot for good reason: I was going for a run with the dog on the towpath, and this lot has the quickest access to the path . . . if you park in the lot on the other side of the bridge, in Johnson Park, then you have to walk across the bridge and the bridge walkway is covered with glass shards, so I was worried about my dog's paws) but I got some Auto Body Repair Tape (eleven dollars on Amazon) and my van is as good as new.

After!

I've Got my Eye on You

All you people who drive into the park (any park . . . I've seen you people in Donaldson Park, Johnson Park, Thompson Park,  Roosevelt Park, and every other park that I have frequented on a regular basis) and sit in your car for a while and then drive out of the park . . . without ever leaving your car . . . I want you to know that I am watching you and you seem really sketchy and whatever you are up to, my dog and I are going to catch you at it and deal with you as we see fit.

Dave's Book List: 2018

Another end of the year book list . . . yuck . . . so let me boil it down to something practical. First some boilerplate: I read a bunch of good books this year, and I'm proud of that (or fairly proud . . . Stacey delivered a healthy whack to my self-esteem) but I understand that you're probably not going to enjoy the same books as me. Certainly not forty-three of the same books.

It's really hard to recommend a good book. Reading-- real reading-- is deeply personal. In the end, it's what you think about the words that makes the book good for you or not. Not that I subscribe to relative aesthetic ethics . . . I think some sentences are written far better than others. But once a book reaches a certain level of competence, then it's really up to the reader to appreciate and make sense of it. And if it sounds like "hillbilly gibberish," as Darryl McDaniels categorized the lyrics to "Walk This Way"-- then even if you sing it like you mean it, it still might not mean much to you at all (even if everyone else loves it).

So skip the list if you want, but grant me one sincere, universal, sure-fire recommendation. A list of one. I would trade all the books on my list for #39. Boom. Literally.

I'm talking about Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson. Anderson is so passionate about his subject matter that it doesn't matter if you're a Thunder/Flaming Lips fan, or a tornado junkie, or a history buff who wants to know more about the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889-- which Anderson says should either be called "Chaos Explosion Apocalypse Town" or "Reckoning of the Doom Settlers: Clusterfuck on the Prairie-- none of that matters, as the book races along at EF5 speed towards the inevitable explosion.

Read it.

1. The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik


2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe


3. Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian Alexander


4. White Tears by Hari Kunzru


5. The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield


6. The Night Market by Jonathan Moore


7. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist by Paul Kingsnorth


8. The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann


9. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson


10. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt


11. Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy by Noam Chomsky


12. Beartown by Fredrik Backman


13. Requiem for the American Dream by Noam Chomsky


14. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin


15. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson


16. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli


17. Drown by Junot Diaz


18. The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind by Michael S. Gazzaniga


19. When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt


20.  The Changeling by Joy Williams


21. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students by Allan Bloom


22. Florida by Laura Groff


23. Ask the Dust by John Fante


24. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie


25. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy


26. The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke by Andrew Lawler


27.  Calypso by David Sedaris


28. World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer


29. The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World -- An Us by Richard O. Prum


30. Borne by Jeff Vandermeer


31. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky


32. A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron


33. Authority by Jeff Vandermeer


34. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher


35. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt


36. The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher


37. Vox by Christina Dalcher


38. Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh


39. Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson


40. Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data Andrew Wheeler


41. American Prison by Shane Bauer


42. Middlemarch by George Eliot


43. Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven JohnsonFarsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most by Steven Johnson

The E-Reader: Pros and Cons

I am certainly what the tech-world calls a "late adopter," for example: I only recently got a cell-phone, and that's because my wife purchased it for me, brought it home, and said: "You have two kids . . you need a phone," and then handed me a slim, white, lime green gadget that my students described as the phone a "12 year old Asian girl would have"-- and so, well behind the rest of the reading world,  I have finally started knocking around the idea of getting an e-reader . . . but, as I am a disciple of Neil Postman, I always think about the pros and cons of any technology before I allow it access to my life . . . and the pros for an e-reader are pretty obvious:

1) I like to read multiple books at the same time and some of them are hefty, so it would save a lot of space and clutter,

2) I hate small font, and so I could adjust this on an e-reader,

3) my book-light would be attached to the e-reader, so I wouldn't always lose it,

4) when we travel, I like to bring a lot of books . . .

but I have decided, for now, that the cons outweigh the pros, and here they are:

1) I like to take books out of the library because (duh) it's free,

2) I like to buy cheap used books off Amazon and Half.com,

3) I don't want to spill coffee or soup onto an e-reader, while I don't care if I spill coffee or soup onto a library book,

4) this one is the most important: if I read on an e-reader, no one can see what I'm reading, and-- if these things become ubiquitous-- I won't be able to see what other people are reading, and maybe I'm obnoxious, but I like it when people see me reading the new translation of War and Peace, and I liked sharing a knowing glance with the dude I saw last week on the exercise bike at the gym reading Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From . . . and if that dude was a cute female, I might have even said a word or two about how much I liked the book . . . so really what it comes down to is that I have enough trouble making conversation, and I don't need the one topic that I am knowledgeable about taken away from me, made obscure by a convenient technology-- I'm still recovering from the switch from boom boxes to personal stereos . . . who knows what the kids are listening to on those head-phones?

7/2/2009

Along with a sense of accomplishment, there also comes sadness when you finish a long novel: I just finished-- after two tries-- Denis Johnson's Vietnam saga Tree of Smoke and though I'm happy that I'm getting it back to the library on time, I'm going to miss William "Skip" Sands and his rogue Colonel uncle; the novel is certainly Pynchonesque, it has tunnels like V, it investigates information theory-- including propagation, distortion, and chain of command-- and it has an inscrutable quality, like Gravity's Rainbow (but not nearly as difficult and without as many characters) but by the end you understand these people that fell into the cracks of the Vietnam war and want to spend more time with them, 614 pages isn't enough.

7/28/2009

I've finished Robert V. Remini's slightly liberal A Short History of the United States (336 pages short) and I'm working my way (481 pages of 1000!) through Paul Johnson's much longer and slightly conservative A History of the American People, which is fun because it's from a British point of view, but for those of you who don't feel like reading 1300+ pages of American history, I am offering here, for the first time ever, a very special presentation from the people here at The Sentence of Dave . . . that's right, you guessed it, a One Sentence Summary of American History, so without further fanfare, here it is: once upon a time, there was a country filled with natives, but then new natives came and killed the old natives, and then the new natives killed the people who wanted them not to be native and then the new natives killed each other, and then they freed the natives from another place, and then more new natives came and worked hard and got everything organized when the old natives prohibited booze and a whole mess of the natives went overseas to help out and lots of them died and then folks were content for a while but then a bunch of new natives kept on coming but the old new natives didn't like that so much so they built a wall, but it didn't matter so much and then Britney Spears shaved her head.

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).

All the Kids With Three Letter Names are Out Today

Our match got canceled today due to some fortuitous wind and rain-- fortuitous because one of our players (Kai) is at Model UN and the other (Udi) is "out of commission" because when he was riding his electric scooter in the rain yesterday, on his way home from our match in Johnson Park, he skidded out and hit the pavement, scraping up his hands and knees (but he's not completely injured-- he's my neighbor and I saw him today and he looked to be in decent shape-- although he was walking home from school, not riding his scooter) so we'll reset on Monday and hope for better weather (and not so fortuitously, we all had to evacuate my high school today during the rain storm because of an elevator malfunction-- the fire trucks had to come-- if the weather was decent it would have been the best delay of class ever, but because of the cold spitting drizzle and gusty winds, students and teachers alike wanted to get back to class and do some learning).

Alex Goes All-in on a Bike Ride to Princeton

Yesterday, just before noon, my sixteen-year-old son Alex called and said he was biking to Princeton with a few of his friends. They were going to take the towpath (a.k.a. D & R Canal State Park) to Rocky Hill and then bike into Princeton and eat. It's a long way. Over twenty miles (each way).

I told him this wasn't a great idea and listed the reasons:

1) it was too late in the day

2) there were supposed to be thunderstorms

3) he wasn't wearing biking shorts

4) he didn't have the proper kind of bike for this long of a ride

He ignored my advice and I didn't forbid him to go; he was with some fairly responsible and athletic kids-- two seniors, one a tennis player,, the other a runner and wrestler. I didn't want to discourage him, but I had my doubts. Alex's friend-- the younger brother of the wrestler-- wanted no part in a 40-plus-mile bike ride that was starting in the heat of the day. He wisely decided to stay home.

But Alex took off with the two older kids. He said they were prepared, with food and water and rain gear. I told him he was an idiot and wished him luck. I should also mention that Alex hates riding a bike, never uses his own bike, and borrowed his brother's bike because that's actually in decent shape.

At the start of their trip, luck was on their side. They avoided the storms, made it to Princeton, ate lunch, waited out the rain, and then decided to take the bus home. My wife and I were happy with this decision, as it was getting late and we figured we were going to have to drive to Princeton and give him a ride home. The bus was supposed to leave from Princeton at 6:15 PM.

I texted Alex at 6:20 PM to see if he had caught the bus and he told me they were biking home. I  called him and told him he wasn't going to make it before dark. He insisted they would and said if they didn't, then they were going to get off the canal path and ride on the road. He said that his friends had flashlights. Alex had no light and was not wearing a helmet, so we didn't want him to ride on the road in the dark. We told him once it got dark, that we would drive and pick him up. He agreed to this and when it started to get dark, we called him and he said he was near Manville.  We told him to get off the towpath and we would grab him. We headed west in the minivan-- traveling parallel to the canal-- towards Manville.

Catherine drove, and I navigated and texted Alex. No answer. We totally lost touch with him. We were driving around in the dark, finding places where the canal path intersected with the road. I was looking over at the path when I could see through the trees and we were hoping to stumble upon him at one of the bridges or park entrances. It was scary and frustrating, mainly because he wouldn't answer his phone.

I had some grim thoughts going through my head, especially because of this tragedy that just happened near us.

I didn't tell my wife about that incident, but we certainly both had the same thing in mind. The path was dark, full of roots and potholes, and surrounded by water. Often there are steep cliffs on either side. And our son wasn't wearing a helmet. If he fell, hit his head, and slid into the river or the canal, that would be an ugly situation.

We finally heard from him around 9:30. My wife was going to call the police at 10 PM, so it was in the nick of time. He told us they had screwed up the location and were actually closer than they thought, well past Manville. We found him and the other boys in Johnson Park. 

Alex is grounded for the week and has a list of chores to complete longer than my arm. It's too bad, because he almost didn't get into any trouble at all. He would have had a great story and been on an epic adventure, and suffered no consequences.

I've been playing some online Texas Hold'em lately-- I read a bunch of books and learned how to play (very) low stakes poker. I also learned a lot of poker lingo and analogies.

I told him this was a situation where he "stayed married to the bet" and "threw good money after bad." One of the most important things in Texas Hold'em is to be aggressive-- to go for it-- and then if you know you are beaten, get out of the hand. Fold. It's the great thing about poker. If you're smart enough, you can quit at any time. You can quit the hand before the stakes get too big. Unless you have the nuts, you don't want to get pot committed, or you're going to go all the way with nothing.

I think he sort of understood this. He made a sequence of bad decisions, starting with taking off towards Princeton at noon. But if he quit the sequence at any point, if they all turned around earlier, if they took the bus, if he got off the path and called us with his location before the sun went down, if he did any of those things, he would have been a hero. When you make a really difficult fold, they call it a "hero fold."

This is what he needed to do . . . he needed to recognize he was with two eighteen-year-olds that were headed to college and didn't have to live with their parents for the foreseeable future. They could go all-in with fewer consequences. They had a bigger bankroll. I think the peer pressure got to him a bit, and that's fine. It happens. I did plenty of stupid stuff like that as well. 

So now he's paying off his bet, cleaning cabinets in the kitchen, weed-whacking, etc. Maybe he learned a lesson? He was so close to not getting into any trouble . . . and then there's his buddy, who did the wisest thing of all. When you're dealt a lousy hand, sometimes you fold immediately, don't get on a bike and head to Princeton at noontime on a hot day, and relax in the AC. But then, of course, you're not really playing cards . . .

The Avalanches Reveal the Fault in Dave's Brain

 I was very excited a few weeks ago when I got to listen to The Avalanches new album Wildflower . . . I clearly remember the day I heard "Frontier Psychiatrist" on WRSU while driving home from work in my 1993 Jeep Cherokee Sport . . . Since I Left You became a staple on my iPod, and I really like the new album as well, but I was surprised to learn that it's been sixteen years since the band released Since I Left You . . . in my mind their last album was from a few years ago, and it is categorized in my brain under "Hip New Music of which Dave is Aware" and maybe this is because of the liberal and bizarre use of samples . . . I suppose I consider Girl Talk to be new music-- but not Paul's Boutique-- or maybe it's that most new music doesn't dent my consciousness, but anyway, it was a bit frightening when I learned that Since I Left You came out in the year 2000, a fact that bears plain witness to just how faulty my memory and cognition is (though I think we all have these experiences all the time: I can't remember who was in the Super Bowl three years ago, but I vividly remember Super Bowl XXIII, the 49ers/Bengals game when Pete Johnson couldn't gain a yard on fourth down) and I guess the lesson here is that you shouldn't trust anything anyone says about things that happened in their past, because people tend to compress the past, or conflate it, we exaggerate memories from our youth, forget the rest, and generally just remember things however we want.