The Gastro-Inevitable

I thought this batch of jalapeno infused tequila I whipped up for Cinco de Mayo was fairly mild (and it was certainly milder than this first attempt) and while some folks at the party disagreed, people liked it enough to finish the bottle . . . which made me think I should step it up the next time-- I can't be making spicy tequila that people can actually consume without clutching their throats and spitting up mucous . . . the only problem is that my stomach thought the mild stuff was more than spicy enough, and no matter how good it tastes, your stomach still has to deal with it later . . . and my stomach is getting old and fed up with stupid shenanigans like that.

Scott Pruitt, You Are My Nemesis

If there's one thing that you can be certain of around here, it's that I despise Scott Pruitt and the new episode of Embedded has not helped matters . . . it's a deep dive into Pruitt's personality, politics and policy tactics and now his fervent passion for rolling back environmental rules and regulations, his desire to bring back coal, and his apparent disdain for science and the mission of the EPA make perfect sense: he's a brainwashed Bible-thumping religious fundamentalist who doubts the science behind climate change and doesn't think evolution is a true thing . . . now it's perfectly legal in America to believe the Bible is literally the word of God (and it's also perfectly legal to believe the Koran is the word of God) but I do not think anyone who think these things should head up a scientific agency designed to protect the air, water, and forests of nations from externalities created by business and the government; this is an agency for the people and he's taking it back, in the name of God, he's carving out space for religion in the public square, and he's going to set things straight again and let the earth be under the dominion of man, to be reaped and raped and domineered-- just like the Bible suggests; he worries about how the radical left worships the earth and the environment, instead of an angry anthropomorphic God, and is another Republican loon racing us towards the brink of environmental disaster; so this guy is anathema, my absolute nemesis . . . weird and joyless and and fighting for the same thing that radical Islam wants-- a government reflective of an ancient book-- it’s ironic (though Pruitt seems too literal to understand irony) and he’s far more dangerous and awful than Trump himself-- because Pruitt has beliefs and principles, while (hopefully) Trump is just a showman and doesn't actually believe anything . . . so maybe he'll fire Pruitt soon enough, when all the corruption shakes out (although I could care less about that stuff-- he should be fired for dismantling an agency that is based on science) and beyond the religious stuff, which will put things into context, the podcast also details a few of the cases that Pruitt pursued: as attorney general in Oklahoma, he managed to stop a classic environmental externality case right in its tracks . . . the Illinois River and water basin in Oklahoma was getting polluted by chickenshit running downstream from Arkansas, and Pruitt did his best to delay and then essentially negate the case that Oklahoma had against Arkansas . . . the case is still pending, eight years later and (ironically . . . but again, Pruitt would be too stupid to appreciate this) Pruitt is now on the other side of the case and could force Arkansas to comply and push the case along, but that ain't gonna happen . . . anyway, the guy famous for suing the EPA and not protecting his state from polluted waterways is now the guy in charge of the EPA . . . there's plenty more to this and I suggest you do some research and then send a letter to your Congressman about this Sunday-school-teacher gone rogue (there's a nice bit in the podcast where Cory Booker takes him on) and I'm going to try to forget about all this shit, because I just ordered an outdoor ping-pong table for our backyard and I'm very excited (and while I know consumption is a problem and making this durable ping-pong table used up many valuable resources, I also think it will keep me and the kids at home in the yard for many days and nights, so we'll drive less and consume less fossil fuels).

Longest Week of the Year

The long angry week: half days with no lunch, four fucking days of spring parent conferences-- unheard of anywhere except East Brunswick-- tennis practice, then back for conferences from 5 PM - 8 PM . . . and Route 18 is all fucked up on both sides so it's white-knuckle middle-finger-flipping chaos to get back and forth from tennis practice in Highland Park to the stupid night conferences . . . and I just got the Rutgers expos essays . . . I should have been a librarian or a hedge fund manager or grifter.

You Got a Choice, Dishwasher

My friend, colleague, and podcasting partner Stacey was taking a run at Capik Nature Preserve in Sayreville last weekend, and she spotted a group of boy scouts setting up camp near the trail; the scoutmaster and some other adults were supervising, and when she got close to them, the scoutmaster-- a middle-aged man-- looked at Stacey, an attractive six foot tall woman in athletic gear, and said, "Hey guys . . . here's our dishwasher!" and then he turned and addressed the young scouts, in case they hadn't heard his chauvinistic witticism, and repeated it to them, "Hey boys . . . look, our dishwasher is here!" and it took Stacey a moment to process the remark-- she mumbled something to the scoutmaster about them probably making a big mess, but then, as she ran on and replayed the scene-- the fact that the scoutmaster remarked on the beautiful weather to the guy that was ahead of her on the trail walking his dog, and waited for her to appear to make his "dishwasher" joke-- and she grew more and more incensed, and like Ransom Stoddard, she realized she had a choice: she could turn around and give the scoutmaster a piece of her mind . . . ask him if he had earned his badge in misogyny or if he still lived in his mother's basement, or she could take the high road and put the stupid remark (literally) behind her . . . but she did neither, instead she ran for an extra forty minutes, planning exactly what to say to this sexist scoutmaster who was supposed to be a role model for young men, but when she looped around again, the scouts were gone-- she had missed her opportunity-- the French call this l'esprit de l'escalier-- the wit of the staircase-- but a staircase is shorter than a running trail, so I'm sure some fantastic things ran through Stacey's mind as she ran-- it's too bad we don't have a transcript.

If Your Friends Jumped Off a Bridge, You Would Too (3x)

On Friday, soccer practice was canceled because the varsity coach and his immediate family had some exposure to some folks who came down with coronavirus. They had to do the whole test-and-wait thing.

So since there was no soccer, my son Alex said he was going to play spikeball with his friends. 

Serendipitously, our acupuncturist had just opened up. She has two rooms at her office, so my wife and I both booked appointments. We told our other son Ian where we were going, put our phones on do not disturb, and went and got punctured.

During that hour block when we were incommunicado pincushions, my son Alex sent a sequence of interesting texts.

He was not playing spikeball. 

Instead, him and his older buddies had decided to head to "the safest place in New Jersey." His definition of "the safest place in New Jersey" was a nearby lake with a small cliff to jump off. He said the cliff was seven feet or so.

We were sort of annoyed that he didn't check with us before he took off on this adventure-- and we added a new rule to the parenting handbook: if you can't contact us, you are not allowed to leave town on a dangerous adventure!

We asked for some details and got them. I've got to commend my son on being the only one in this group to actually disclose where he was headed. The other kids did NOT inform their parents what they were doing.

Of course, he did not FULLY disclose what was going on. Not sure if this was due to ignorance or his desire to protect his mother from the truth. 

First of all, he was headed an hour SOUTH on the Turnpike, not north. 

Second, he was jumping off a forty-foot bridge into a dirty tidal estuary. Kraft's Bridge. While it's not the safest place in New Jersey-- my living room couch is the safest place in New Jersey-- it's supposedly fairly safe, as far as bridge-jumping goes.

This is what happens when soccer practice is canceled due to a pandemic.

Alex was with the same guys that he went on this epic biking adventure with. They just graduated and he's a rising junior, so I can see how this all went down. 

How do you refuse a bridge jumping expedition with some college guys? 

His buddy Gary went as well . . . Gary said he was going to "rocket club." Some of you may know Gary from the NYT Mini-crossword leaderboard. He's a smart kid. So that made me feel better.

As an aside, now Alex and his two older buddies have completed the biking and swimming legs of a very stupid triathlon. 

I assume the running portion will involve streaking.

As usual, though this was kind of a rash decision, things might have gone smoothly, if it wasn't for a lack of communication. Alex stopped answering calls and texts, and we didn't have his friends' cell-phone numbers. 

Like his bike adventure, it got dark and my wife got increasingly worried.

I texted my friend and asked if he had heard from his son. He said no, that his son had gone to play spikeball. I informed him that his son was not playing spikeball, he was down in south Jersey, jumping off a bridge into a river.

"Sounds bad," my friend texted back.

So now my wife and I were just hanging around, worried. We hadn't heard from anyone. 

I call this dilemma Schrödinger's Phone. 

If cell-phones didn't exist-- like when we were young-- then none of the parents would have had any idea of what was going on. Ignorance is bliss. We would have thought that Alex was playing spikeball and he lost track of time.

We would have been annoyed but not worried. 

But it's not 1986 (spikeball didn't even exist in 1986).

It's 2020 and so-- like Schrödinger's cat--  the boys were in a quantum superposition. They were in all states: drowned in the Rancocas Creek, on their way home, broken down on the side of the Turnpike, etc. Alive, dead, injured, safe, sound . . . until we got information from the phone, all the possibilities in the universe are possible.

A message from the phone would reveal (and possibly create) their reality. That's what we were waiting for.

It finally came, around 8:30 PM. They had left their phones in the car, so they wouldn't get wet (except for the kid who drove-- he had a waterproof phone and brought it to the river in case they needed to call 911).

The reason they got held up for so long is that their driver-- the kid with the phone-- froze up on the concrete ledge. He couldn't climb back up to the bridge and he was too scared to jump. I've seen this happen to people. So this poor kid spent over an hour on the ledge, petrified. Meanwhile, Alex said he did the jump three times. From the concrete ledge and from the bridge itself. So did his other two friends. 

Finally, their driver jumped. They all walked back to the car, only to find that their driver has left the keys back by the river. He had to walk all the way back down the path, in the dark, to find his keys. 

Alex said he could see his phone ringing in the car and knew he was in trouble. But he couldn't get to it.

Luckily, the driver found his keys, and they got home safe and sound.

Alex got to clean all the bathrooms in our Saturday morning (and that's just the start of his chore list). 

Once again, he was fairly close to getting through this adventure without consequence, but he was done in by the existence of cell-phones. And, as I said, it turns out he was the only person who gave his parents any idea of where he was going. So there's that.

And it's kind of nice to have someone clean all the bathrooms. I'm sure this won't be the last time he does that . . .

Too Much To Report

I can't even begin to describe this, other than to say that we're extremely lucky and everyone is doing fine; but we are having some transportation woes, as we had ANOTHER bike stolen-- and now we know the thief went into our backyard (we had convinced ourselves that Ian left the other bike in the front of the house, though he thought otherwise) and we had to file another police report and look very very stupid-- because we did NOTHING in the way of security after the first theft; so today was home security update day-- we installed some Ring cameras; replaced our ancient, burned-out motion sensor bulbs; put some actual LOCKS on the bike shed, etc. -- this was a long day on top of packing for vacation, but then we got a frantic call from our older son Alex, explaining that he crashed the car . . . but he was okay-- so we raced over to Piscataway, in the pouring rain, to see a disturbing sight-- our Honda CRV on it's side, in the woods-- but Alex was fine-- he spun out on the wet road, possibly hit the gas instead of the brake, careened over the curb, slid on some grass, ran into some small trees and the CRV tipped over, so he had to climb upwards and out the driver side door-- he was a bit bruised and burned from the airbags, but did not hit his head or hurt anything too bad-- but the car is totalled-- so we're down two bikes and a car right now-- but glad our son is healthy and alive-- and then there's the problem that he wasn't fully licensed because we lost his social security card and the DMV had no appointments during the pandemic . . . so this is going to be an interesting insurance matter (and he's going to get a couple of points on his license) but thank goodness he didn't hit anyone or have a passenger in the car.

Parallel Madness!

This episode of The Indicator informed me of an Amazon Prime show called Counterpart in which there's a world parallel to ours in which life is lived in the shadow of a deadly flu outbreak. Apparently, the post-pandemic world in the show looks "disturbingly similar" to the world many of us are living in now.

The show stars the inimitable J.K. Simmons, so I might check it out.

Then there's there are the murder hornets. An invasive bug from China that manifests itself in Washington State and starts to move across the United States, wreaking havoc on the European honey bees that have not evolved evolutionary immunity to the creatures.

Parallel madness.

Years ago, I pitched a show to Netflix set in an alternate reality. 

Donald Trump runs for President and Russian hackers employ social media algorithms to make it so. Then "President Trump" has to deal with a deadly zoonotic virus that invades our great nation. It comes from the far reaches of China-- from a bat or pangolin-- and Trump and his incompetent federal government have to deal with the medical and financial crisis. 

Chaos ensues!

It's a satire, of course, but Netflix didn't get it. They said it was absurd, and not in a hip, surreal way. More in a sad and stupid way. 

Fred Armisen is the Democratic Inversion of Donald Trump

The Undiscovered podcast episode "Party Lines" is the best piece of non-partisan political commentary I've heard in a long time (especially since Dan Carlin hasn't put anything out for a while) which means that very few people will be interested in what they have to report; the show explains a new mathematical method to determine how much gerrymandering has gone into a particular voting map (and the answer is usually "a lot")  and the groundbreaking method-- like the method of throwing a cornhole beanbag-- is beautiful in its simplicity; votes are tallied and then a computer draws a trillion feasible voting maps and re-tallies the actual votes in regards to these particular borders, so you can see lots and lots of results and determine a few things:

1) what probably should have happened,

2) what's in the realm of possibility,

3) and what's an absurd result because of rigged maps . . .

this method is so beautifully elegant that it has passed through the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (though Trump advised Pennsylvanians to "challenge" the new map, as the "original was correct"  . . . but we know Trump isn't so good at math) and while the Supreme Court is avoiding the issue (probably because gerrymandering helps Republicans right now) they won't avoid it forever, because as soon as Democrats take power, the conservative court will make the logical ruling and trust the numbers; Democrats and Republicans both love to gerrymander, it's just that Republicans control everything right now, so they need to gerrymander while the gerrymandering is good, which I totally understand; my other political thought today, which is a bit of an aside, is that, after much reading, discussion, and research, I've decided that most folks voted for Trump to give the middle finger to liberals and the political establishment-- they don't care about his lack of experience, his policy on healthcare, or his crass buffoonery . . . in fact, his crass buffoonery, unsolicited and stupid lies, lowbrow language, braggadocio, old man whiteness, racism, sexism, unwarranted confidence, clueless sensibility, and general un-hipness is exactly what Trump supporters love about him, because they know this will trigger absolutely irrational unseated anger in intellectuals and liberals-- there is no one more underserving of attention and power than Donald Trump, and therefore he is the perfect candidate to elect . . . so I tried to figure out who would be the perfect liberal candidate to trigger all the same emotions in conservatives and it's obviously not Barack Obama-- Obama actually got elected, because he's too on the nose . . . he's nerdy and intellectual, but he's black-- his saving grace-- because no conservative wants to be that overtly racist in this day and age, so I think the Democratic inversion of Donald Trump is Fred Armisen, he's ironically uncool, indecisive, apologetic but still kind of an asshole, unflinchingly liberal, empathetic, utterly nerdy, capable of weird indignance, and-- like Portlandia-- an inside joke that only liberals get.

Preparing For St. Patrick's Day (and the End of the Anthropocene)

Long after the human race has wound down and gone extinct-- the last of the fossil fuels extracted and burnt; the last of the plastics catalyzed and extruded; the rivers and wetlands polluted and poisoned; the oceans barren and static; the soil-- dry and spent-- blowing in the hot wind; roaches, crows, pigeons, rats, and raccoons the only creatures left to roam the depleted biosphere-- long after this, when some other civilization arises (or visits, from the far reaches of the galaxy) and they examine our digital detritus, they will recognize exactly when the humans stepped off the precipice and plunged into the abyss of frivolity and utter disaster and this moment is when Terry, Cunningham and Liz were in the English Office, looking at someone's phone, and vocalizing superlatives about an Inflatable Irish Pub . . .  for a moment I got sucked into the fun, but then I thought twice-- a difficult action in the time of tweets and and snaps-- and I took a look inside the inflatable pub and I recognized the pub for what it was . . . a waste of plastic, a fruitless endeavor, a giant scam, and a vivid and rubbery air-filled symbol that portends the inevitable fall of man . . . here's why:

1) there is no inflatable floor, so it's not even a bouncy inflatable Irish pub . . . if it were bouncy, you could get some exercise, mosh to The Pogues, perhaps "inadvertently" bounce into that special lass or lad you've had your eye on . . . but nope, this is just a shed made of polymers, similar to the one in my backyard, which I never try to foist off as an Irish pub;

2) there's an inflatable fireplace inside, which is patently stupid because

a) it obviously can't hold a real fire;

b) no one wants to look at a fake fireplace while they're sweating their ass off in an unventilated polyethylene kiln;

3) every Irish pub should have a dart board and this pub does not-- I recognize why it does not have a dart board, as pointed objects would endanger the inflatable nature of the pub . . . but that's the moment when the inflatable Irish pub designers should have stepped back and recognized the idiocy of their project;

4) there are no inflatable leprechauns inside this pub, and while I don't expect leprechauns in a real Irish pub (I am 48 years old) there's absolutely no reason not to have a few blow-up leprechauns in this inflatable abortion, leprechauns you could toss around, punt into the rafters, pretend to hump . . . whatever, in order to differentiate this product from a big plastic lawn tent, which is all it is . . . and so I've decided NOT to attend any parties that host one of these contraptions, in a quixotic (and probably misguided) attempt to take a stand for something, anything, in this absurd economy of ours, and I hope you will do the same.

There's a Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever

When my wife watches Christiano Ronaldo play, she always makes a comment about what a beautiful man he is, and I think that's fine; on the other hand, I've felt a little awkward about opining on the attractiveness of players in the Women's World Cup (not that it's stopped me . . . especially when Sweden's Elin Rubensson was racing after the ball) and so I'm wondering how many comments are acceptable before it becomes gauche and sexist . . . I think the rules are slightly different than women's tennis, where it's literally impossible not to constantly comment on the attractiveness of the players, who often look like supermodels and are dressed in adorable outfits-- the ladies competing in the World Cup are much tougher, more daring, and less concerned about how they come off to the crowd than tennis players, and so in honor of their fierce play, I am going to hold myself to one (1) comment per half about attractiveness, and the rest of my commentary will be about tactics and soccer.

There are Two Types of People

No matter how stupid the idea is, I love it when an essay start with the premise "there are two types of people" and so I will follow suit; there are two types of people: 1) people who talk during movies 2) people who don't . . . and I am a number one all the way: movies are MUCH more interesting when accompanied by my insightful commentary.

Miracles: I Generate Them

While zealous fanatics of Sentence of Dave know that I am no stranger to miracles, I realize that some of my more skeptical readers question the authenticity of these wondrous happenings, and might even doubt my hagiographic qualities . . . but this example will certainly sway them: last Wednesday night, while playing basketball, my leg popped out of the hip socket -- or that's what it felt like -- and I knew to stop playing, but it didn't seem like that bad of an injury, but the next morning it felt much worse, and by mid-day Thursday, much to the amusement of my colleagues, I was curled in a ball on the floor of the English office, unable to find a position to relieve the excruciating pain in my right hip and leg -- and so I had to do the unthinkable . . . cancel soccer practice AND miss pub night, and despite taking Advil and Aleve, I couldn't sleep and my hip kept getting worse and worse, so I took off work on Friday and went to the doctor -- who despite having a very calm bedside demeanor, still scared the crap out of me, since he kept mentioning X-rays and MRI's and physical therapy and possible surgery . . . but the first step was to get an X-ray, which was an epic trip in the rain, considering I needed the use of a cane to get in and out of the car, but luckily all that showed up on the x-ray was a bone spur and lots of wear and tear, so he thought it was probably just a bad "bone bruise," where bone hit bone on the spur, and then everything swelled up, and so I spent Friday in incredible pain, taking a prescription anti-inflammatory drug, and I was unable to sit up, or walk very far . . . and in order to get off the couch, I had to undergo ten minutes of weird gyrations (including a step when I had to crawl on the floor) and I was feeling pretty low -- like I was done playing sports forever, even with my kids, and probably wouldn't even be able to attend Ian's soccer game on Saturday, let alone coach it, but when I woke up Saturday morning, I was able to get out of bed without a problem, and though my hip was sore, it didn't hurt . . . and I now realize the acute difference between those two states, and so I was able to walk the dog, coach the game (we won! Ian scored!) and rejoin the ambulatory world . . . and now I have a new lease on life, an appreciation of the simple things, and I have sworn to take it easy until I am fully healed and not jeopardize my health and the well-being of my family and myself by vainly taking part in adult athletics, because I am long past my prime . . . unless . . . unless . . . this miraculous recovery is a sign from the powers above that I should continue to recklessly participate in sports aimed for people many years younger than me, and I am sure that my stupid brain will slowly rationalize the latter logic, and I will act just like Steve Martin's character Davis in Grand Canyon.

A Basketball Pickle

I raced around like a lunatic, badly stubbing my toe in the process, trying to get to 6:30 AM basketball on time this morning . . . and then we couldn't get the hoops to descend-- the internet was out and apparently the internet is required to send the signal to the motor which lowers the baskets (although we learned-- far too late-- that there is a back-up switch in the equipment closet) but the morning wasn't a total loss-- Jeff and I impressed two willing basketball players into a pickleball match and we got some exercise in that manner and now I'm stuck in class forever-- it's a half-day so there's no lunch and I teach the first three periods, which amounts to being in a room with teenagers from 7:50 AM until 11:32 AM so I'm hangry and tired and hating whoever designed this stupid block schedule . . . and I have to be back at school at 5 PM for three hours of parent/teacher conferences-- which should be abolished at the high school level-- so I can't wait until I retire, because I will still show up for AM sports, and then head home to drink coffee on the porch.

Spring Break! Spring Break?

Long last day of school-- I covered a class so I worked every minute, plus the kids are wild animals the day before break . . . this poor girl in Public Speaking class had to do a speech today-- she was absent last class-- and the assignment was to perform either a toast or a eulogy . . . and kids often eulogize goofy stuff like bad haircuts and their motivation but she was doing a semi-serious one about her dog, a teacup Yorkie-- who died a few years ago-- and her friends got the giggles because she was describing such a tiny dog and then when it got sad, they kept giggling and it got contagious because teenagers are idiots and I pretty much regretted all my life choices that had led me to being in that room full of those teenagers on the day of Spring Break-- but we got through it and the rest of the stupid classes and then there was still tennis practice but now I'm finally home, drinking a beer, listening to Beach House, and winding down from a long fucking stretch of school.

Greasetruck conquers all!

Greasetruck's new song, "The Bear," is an incredible musical accomplishment because not only is it the greatest rock song of all time, it is also-- simultaneously-- the greatest parody of a rock song of all time, and thus, it is impervious to all criticism -- anything you think is super great, is super great, and anything you think is totally stupid, is actually intended to be humorous . . . you see how this works?-- so save your vitriol for the new Coldplay album . . . also, note the use of heavy metal banjo (which is difficult to record, not because of the banjo playing, which is pretty rudimentary, but because it's hard to use the computer keyboard and mouse while wearing banjo finger-picks . . . I doubt Bela Fleck has this problem, but these are the issues that arise for the home recording hobbyist).

Donald Trump Stars in "Risky Business" Sequel (Michael Lewis and The Fifth Risk)

If you really want to hate Donald Trump-- but you don't want to get on your moral high horse and repeat a bunch of stuff everyone knows-- then the new Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk is for you.

First let's state the obvious. There's no question that Trump is morally repugnant, a racist who hates folks from "shithole countries", a laughingstock and a pussy grabber; Trump used campaign money to pay off a porn star and he has a twisted infatuation with Vladimir Putin, a leader that meddled in our election and is rumored to kill journalists and political opponents. His toxic tweets undermine the mission of our government, his lies foment discord, and he believes he's above the rule of law. He struggled to condemn white supremacists and Nazis, and he had trouble praising the recently departed John McCain. He separated families at the border. He's not loyal to anyone (including U.S. intelligence agencies). He mismanaged a crisis in Puerto Rico, and his version of Yule Tide cheer is to shut down the government. He's a gross human. You can go on and on with this kind of character assessment/assassination, but where does it get you?

Michael Lewis does something different in his new, rather short and slightly fragmented book. Lewis gives us a number of factual, quotidian, and concrete reasons to hate Trump. While it might not be as groundbreaking and perfectly written as his classic works (e.g. Moneyball, The Blind Side, Flash Boys, and The Big Short) it's probably more important. First of all, it's timely (the book sprang from articles he wrote for Vanity Fair). It takes a fairly apolitical look at what's happening right now in several departments in the United States Government (The Department of Energy, The Depart of Commerce, The USDA, and the NOAA).

Do Conservatives Think Michael Lewis Is Part of the Liberal Media Conspiracy? Maybe Not?

The second reason the book might be bigly, hugely, and powerfully significant is that Michael Lewis is so well regarded-- both as a journalist and as a writer-- that conservatives might actually read this book. If they do, they will learn something: the American government is great. Not the bipartisan political side of the government, but the mundane departments within the government and the people within these departments. The people who do the things that markets will never do. The people that insure the safety of our electrical grid; the people that contain and monitor all the nuclear waste we've created; the people that collect data on weather and soil and oceans and tornadoes; the people that fight wildfires; the people that concern themselves with the nutrition and health of our impoverished children; the people that monitor the safety of our food and livestock.

Donald Trump, mainly through incompetence and corruption, has managed to severely undermine these departments. And Michael Lewis doesn't even write about the EPA. This might be for political reasons-- the EPA seems to strike a really nasty chord with many conservatives (mainly because many conservatives-- especially in the energy sector-- don't believe externalities should be monitored, they want to do as much damage to the environment as possible, especially if it helps them to make more money . . . and then, they espouse, someday in the dystopically flooded and polluted future, the market will magically clean things up). It's impossible to be apolitical when you start talking about Trump, Scott Pruitt and the dismantling of the EPA. It's egregious. I think Lewis wanted this book to be politically palatable so he avoided this truly hot button stuff. Or he's writing another book.

Anyway, here's what Lewis does explain. When you take over the government, you are legally required to prepare for the transition. You need to appoint 700 people to very important government positions. Many of these positions aren't particularly political. They are positions involved with health, disease preventions, pandemic readiness, data collection, wildfires and nuclear waste, and R & D project management. Trump has done an utterly abysmal job with these appointments. He's appointed business people with conflicts of interest, unqualified friends, Trump loyalists, and-- disturbingly, in hundreds of positions-- no one at all.

You need to read the book to get the full ramifications of this very measurable, very factual incompetence. Lewis doesn't need to get into Trump's character all that much. He simply portrays his brash idiocy in contrast with the professional dedication of these often brilliant, mission-driven government employees; these people who make America great despite Donald Trump. The people who keep our technologically depend infrastructure working. If you think you're some kind of Ron Swanson-esque rugged individualist, then get real. Our government employs 9000 people to keep a glacier sized underground mass of nuclear waste from poisoning the Columbia River. Your gun, your tools, and your wood stove can't protect you from that.

Here's are some highs (and lows) from the book.

The Unlikely Hero: Chris Christie . . .

I'm a public school teacher, so I hate Chris Christie as much as the next guy, but juxtapose Christie with Trump and Christie comes off looking like a gentleman and a professional. Christie took on the responsibility of convincing Trump that in the unlikely case that he won the election, he had to actually prepare to run the government. It was his legal responsibility to create a transition team, and the Obama administration had prepared the best government transition protocol in history (although Lewis commends the Bush administrations protocol as well). Trump-- who apparently had no victory speech written and didn't really believe he was going to win-- told Christie that he was "stealing my fucking money" because Christie used it for the transition team, which investigates potential appointees. Trump told Christie that if they won, they could leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition themselves. Then Trump fired Christie, probably because Christie prosecuted Jared Kushner's father in 2004.

Trump was quite determined to not learn anything about running the government, and also determined to not hire anyone who could help him with this task.

The Chief Risk Officer's Take on the Risky Business

John MacWilliams, DOE chief risk officer during the Obama administration, outlines the top five risks that government agencies monitor and maintain.

1. Theft, loss and/or detonation of a nuclear weapon
2. North Korea
3. Iran's nuclear program
4. Failure of the electrical grid (through disaster, attack, espionage, etc.)
5. ??????????

The fifth risk is the one we can't conceive. The unknown unknown. The problem with these risks from a cognitive perspective is that we can't accurately measure their probability. Trump's lack of appointments may increase the likelihood of a nuclear disaster from one in a million to one in 10,000. That's an exponentially huge increase, but most people will shrug their shoulders at it.

What's the difference? They're both big numbers.

Humans are awful at judging risk. We're more afraid of sharks than we are of french fries. And we have no heuristic method to add up all these small increases in risk and understanding the overall implications. But the truth of the matter, is that every day that goes by without some sort of major disaster in our infrastructure is a testament to our government.

MacWilliams explains the consequences of Trump's proposed budget cuts: ARPA-E loans, climate research, national labs, and the security our electrical grid will all suffer.

All the risks are science based. You can't gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country.

This is the part of Trumpism that's most disturbing and difficult to conceive: the dismissal of science. I know it's tied in to the hatred of elites and Hillary Clinton, that trusting scientific results is somehow akin to trusting the government and the liberal media conspiracy and the deep state, that trusting science will grant the pointy-headed social engineers the power to tell people what to do and how to live. It's true that science may occasionally do these things. Science now tells us that smoking and soda and having a gun in the house are really bad for us, that factory farming is an environmental disaster, and that cows and coal are contributing to global warming. Economists tell us that immigrants are good for the economy. These are inconvenient truths. It's fun to smoke and drink soda and eat burgers and shoot guns and hate immigrants. So Trump supporters don't want to hear it and they cover their ears.

I also understand that science is bringing the robots and factory automation. Destroying traditional industry. It's also measuring the externalities that businesses don't want to deal with. And it's increasing the distance between the haves and the have-nots. The nerds are winning. The Trump supporters struck back at this. So I get it.

Big Pharma is big science, and Big Pharma certainly contributed to the opioid epidemic. Many people in this country feel they have no control over their life, and they are probably right to think this. They might be addicted to opiates, or in an area that has been left behind. Most American don't have one thousand dollars socked away in case of crisis. These same people have access to the internet and see everyone surpassing them, and wonder: what has science done for me? What has the government done for me?

These are the people that need to read this book.

Weirdest Trump Appointee: Brian Klippenstein

To head up the USDA transition team, Trump appointed one man: Brian Klippenstein. A really strange choice. Klippenstein ran an organization called Protect the Harvest, which basically "demonized institutions like the Humane Society." Klippenstein's group worried that if people got too concerned about animal welfare, we would stop eating animals.

Here's what Lewis has to say:

One of the USDA's many duties was to police conflicts between people and animals. It brought legal action against people who abused animals, and it maybe wasn't the ideal place to insert a man who was preternaturally unconcerned with their welfare.

After Klippensteins's appointment, data disappeared. This has been the case in several departments. The USDA suddenly purged all the animal abuse records. There was public outcry and some of the data has been re-posted, but the most important and specific stuff seems to have gone missing. And to access this data, which was public and accessible, you now need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.

National Geographic reports:

The restored records represent a minuscule portion of the 17-year database, and they exclude thousands of inspection reports on puppy mills, private research facilities, and zoos that constitute the public record of commercial animal abuse. Since February 3, those reports have been accessible only by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, a byzantine process that can take months or even years.

What the fuck?

Does Trump Understand Irony?

No way.

Here's an example:

But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked "Rural Development." That's not what happened.

Do rural Trump supporters understand irony? I hope so. Because they fucked themselves.

Does Barry Myers Understand Irony?

Probably less so than Trump. Or he's an amazing actor. No section of the book will make you angrier than "All the President's Data."

Barry Myers is the CEO of AccuWeather. AccuWeather is the Myers family business. Lewis explains that since the 1990s, Barry Myers (with a "straight face") has argued that the National Weather Service should be "with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of AccuWeather. The exception was when human life and property were at stake."

And even when human life is at stake, Myers is hesitant to let people rely on the National Weather Service.

This should piss you off. What should piss you off even more, is that AccuWeather bases all its forecasts on data it receives from the National Weather Service. Data it receives free of charge.

Rick Santorum, a recipient of Myers's family campaign contributions, tried to codify this inanity into law in Pennsylvania. Lewis starts to lose his generally objective tone:

Pause a moment and consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.

The lesson here is to get your weather from weather.gov. That's what I do. No ads. Same information. Straight from the source. If the law Myers lobbied for would have passed in Pennsylvania, then the website would have been blocked there.

Barry Myers is the ultimate symbol of Trump's bizarre business forward political corruption. Everything about what it is to be a Trumpian conservative is rolled up into this appointment, and this part of the book-- while not quite as exciting as the possibility of a nuclear disaster-- is really educational and really really ire-inducing. Don't read it before operating a motor vehicle.

The Takeaway

The end of the book focuses on the people who collect and utilize data for the government, how incredibly valuable this data is for everyone-- citizens, researchers, scientists, and private businesses, and how a new conflict greater than bipartisan tomfoolery is jeopardizing the system.

The NOAA website used to have links to weather-forecast. Now those links have been buried. This is why:

The man Trump nominated to run NOAA thought that people who wanted a weather forecast should pay him for it. There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn't between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.

I'm a public school teacher. I'm in it for the mission. I generate a lot of good ideas every day, and so do my colleagues. I can't tell you enough how smart, dedicated and professional most of them are. We share these ideas with each other. There's no reason not to. We don't get paid more for having better ideas, but it feels good to have them. It feels good to be a better teacher. It increases your status in the eyes of your friends, colleagues, and students. America has grown so cynical that a good number of people don't believe that people like this exist any longer. They view the government as a stupid bloated nefarious system that begets and pays itself. This book might remind them otherwise.

Stacy Inadvertently Prevents Me From Making a Really Stupid Decision

My friend Stacy is kicking herself, because during a discussion on back-hair maintenance, I told her that it might be time to resurrect my idea for a giant tattoo (the great undersea battle between the squid and the whale) because then I would no longer have to maintain my back hair, as hair does not grow through tattoos, but she said, "Hair does too grow through tattoos!" and I checked and she was right, so getting ink all over my back isn't the solution-- but now Stacey is angry because if she didn't open her mouth, then I would have learned the hard way.

Left Tackle Appreciation Day

One of the marks of a good book is how stupid it makes you feel, and The Blind Side: Evolution of A Game (by Michael Lewis, who also write Moneyball) did just that; I usually don't deign to read books about sports, but Malcolm Gladwell listed this as one of his ten favorite books and now I know why: all these years I had considered myself a football fan, but how could I have been a fan when I didn't understand how coveted, rare, highly paid, and important the left tackle is to the modern passing offense-- do you choose a left tackle (or even an offensive line?) in Fantasy Football?-- and not only does the book trace the rise of the left tackle (it all started with L.T.) but it also tells the fantastic story of a poor black kid from the west side of Memphis, who through extraordinary circumstances, escapes the derelict projects of Hurt Village.

Awkward Dave Returns in the Form of a Duck (or a Llama)

Awkward Dave reared his ugly head last Tuesday, and if it wasn't for my colleague Chantal, things might have gotten really awkward, but she heroically stepped in and saved the day; to understand the situation you need a bit of backstory . . . fifteen minutes before this Awkward Moment of Dave, I was introduced to a very silly game on Kevin's phone, called "Duck or Llama": the game is simple but frustrating, you are shown a picture of a duck, or a picture of a llama, and you must press the appropriate button -- "Duck" or "Llama" -- VERY quickly, or you lose; I was terrible at first but once I got the hang of it, I got quite good and scored sixty correct answers in a row . . . more than double what anyone else got; the pictures get more and more ridiculous and abstract: there are line drawings and close-ups and llamas with sunglasses and duck-butts and rubber ducks and stuffed llamas, and everyone has the same stupid story at the end of their round . . . either, "I was doing really well, and then I mistook a duck for a llama!" or "I was doing really well, and then I mistook a llama for a duck!" and this is the sort of thing that I can get obsessed with, which is why I don't have a video game system in my house, and so when a woman from another department, who runs a committee that I am part of, totally went out of her way and came upstairs to the English office solely to help me sign-up for a workshop at Columbia University, I really, really tried to pay attention to her; she showed me some forms and explained how to fill them out . . . but then, without realizing it, I picked up the phone -- determined to get one hundred correct answers in a row -- and started playing "Duck or Llama," and I guess this nice woman, who totally went out of her way to help me out with this project, made quite a face, but luckily my friend Chantal saw the face, and was a good enough friend to yell at me and tell me to focus, and this was enough to break my obsession with the game and allow me to finish the now rather awkward social interaction with the woman who had gone out of her way to climb the stairs and find me in the English office and help me out.

Bloggers Unite!

John McCain may have thought he was being cute with a bunch of his constituents, but when he said, "Now we've got the cables, talk radio, the bloggers-- I HATE the bloggers," and this comment was followed by loud laughter from the crowd-- but that's the moment he lost my vote . . . yes, this was going to be the presidential election that I finally planned to participate in-- to get out and vote, to cast my ballot, to chime in politically, to pull the lever for democracy, but now I might just sit at home and blog about what a stupid comment that was, alienating the most intelligent, creative, energetic, egalitarian cutting-edge, diligent, gritty, inventive, sincere, down-to-earth and timely segment of the media-- the bloggers!-- who I now hope will go jihad on his ass and remind everyone that McCain once wanted to rid the country of the corn and ethanol subsidies but has now changed his tune, and I hope they will dig up all that great blogging scuttlebutt and hearsay and rumor and fact and spread it across the internet in a tsunami of searchable text that will wash away the slightly tech-savvy septuagenarians who recognized the word "blogger" as something liberal and elitist and having to do with computers and therefore deserving derision, along with the McCain campaign itself!