Showing posts sorted by relevance for query tone. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query tone. Sort by date Show all posts
Highland Park's Charter School Controversy Goes National
Wednesday, The New York Times printed an article called "The Promise and Costs of Charters," which focuses on the Hebrew language charter school debate happening in my town, and the article is very similar to the editorial I wrote on the same subject, both in tone and logic, so I am assuming that this Peter Applebome character got all his ideas from me, but I'm not going to force him to confess, because I got all my ideas from Banksy (actually, I got a lot of my ideas from Diane Ravitch, but it sounds cooler to say I got all my ideas from Banksy).
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).
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.
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.
John MacWilliams, DOE chief risk officer during the Obama administration, outlines the top five risks that government agencies monitor and maintain.
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.
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.
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:
National Geographic reports:
No way.
Here's an example:
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:
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 NOAA website used to have links to weather-forecast. Now those links have been buried. This is why:
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?
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 . . .
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.
- Theft, loss and/or detonation of a nuclear weapon
- North Korea
- Iran's nuclear program
- Failure of the electrical grid (through disaster, attack, espionage, etc.)
- ??????????
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
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?
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?
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.
Quest for Frog
I was driving down Woodbridge Avenue Thursday afternoon, behind an ancient Honda Accord that sported three bumper stickers:
1) Don't Steal . . . The Government Hates Competition;
2) What If the Hokey Pokey Is What It's All About?
3) and a third bumper sticker, old and faded, that featured an anthropomorphized frog-- his arm raised and his green finger pointed philosophically into the air-- and next to the frog was a speech bubble with some text in it, but the text was rather small and very faded . . . and-- after briefly meditating upon the first two stickers-- I decided that it was imperative that I find out what the anthropomorphized frog was saying, as his amphibious mantra would not only unlock the personality of the person in the car, but would also offer a key to uniting the yin and yang of our anxious national partisan consciousness-- the first two bumper stickers were so different in tone, one whimsical and silly and the other cautionary and angry-- and the frog's words would resolve this paradox, a paradox lurking at the heart of our national culture and our polarized media; whatever the frog's sage advice would be the balance-- the golden mean-- between absurd vacuous humor and a healthy critical skepticism, between enjoying life's weird and possibly futile ride and being an active, informed citizen in a democracy . . . and so I crept closer and closer to the car, as close as I could possibly get . . . but--alas--I could not read the words that the philosophical frog was saying, and so I drove home, frustrated, and searched the internet but there were no fruitful results for "philosophical frog bumper sticker" and so, for the good of our collective mentality and for the good of our conflicted nation, I have invented his words of wisdom: Life is Short and Then You Croak.
1) Don't Steal . . . The Government Hates Competition;
2) What If the Hokey Pokey Is What It's All About?
3) and a third bumper sticker, old and faded, that featured an anthropomorphized frog-- his arm raised and his green finger pointed philosophically into the air-- and next to the frog was a speech bubble with some text in it, but the text was rather small and very faded . . . and-- after briefly meditating upon the first two stickers-- I decided that it was imperative that I find out what the anthropomorphized frog was saying, as his amphibious mantra would not only unlock the personality of the person in the car, but would also offer a key to uniting the yin and yang of our anxious national partisan consciousness-- the first two bumper stickers were so different in tone, one whimsical and silly and the other cautionary and angry-- and the frog's words would resolve this paradox, a paradox lurking at the heart of our national culture and our polarized media; whatever the frog's sage advice would be the balance-- the golden mean-- between absurd vacuous humor and a healthy critical skepticism, between enjoying life's weird and possibly futile ride and being an active, informed citizen in a democracy . . . and so I crept closer and closer to the car, as close as I could possibly get . . . but--alas--I could not read the words that the philosophical frog was saying, and so I drove home, frustrated, and searched the internet but there were no fruitful results for "philosophical frog bumper sticker" and so, for the good of our collective mentality and for the good of our conflicted nation, I have invented his words of wisdom: Life is Short and Then You Croak.
Trainspotting: The Finale
If you're my age and have a certain Gen X hipster sensibility, you probably love Trainspotting. The book AND the movie. The characters are the archetypes of your mates:
Renton: the scheming, slightly ambitious, slightly amoral, easily influenced, cynical mainstay, with the capability too (almost) fit into normal society.
Sick Boy: the lecherous womanizer
Spud: the slightly daft, but always loyal and kind whipping boy. The gang alternately tortures and takes care of him.
Begbie: the psychopath.
The last chapter of this saga is on sale on Amazon Kindle for $1.99.
Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh.
It's not a great book, but if you're stuck in quarantine and feeling a little nostalgic for wilder times, it's not bad.
The gang is middle-aged, estranged, and scattered about the world. If the book just took a look at the lives of some ex-addicts and how they've managed to fit into our modern society, that would be interesting . . . but it wouldn't be an Irvine Welsh novel. Instead, we get the gang in their full glory and a plot that is a hodge-podge of weird sex and wanton violence and soccer and venereal diseases and stalkers and murders and art exhibitions and EDM music and the criminal underground and an illegal kidney racket.
It's a farce and a mess.
I still had fun reading it: you get to hear narration from all the members of the gang. There's plenty of action . . . too much really, it gets surreal, and while this worked for a gang of heroin addicts on the scam, in Trainspotting, it doesn't so much for a bunch of middle-aged adults.
But if you want to read about realistic middle-aged adults, you can read a Jonathan Franzen novel. This is something different. And now I think I'm done with Irvine Welsh and the gang, but it's a fitting end to the cynical, misanthropic, nihilistic tone of the '90s.
The youth today are much more compliant and socially aware. And anxious.
For example: for the most part, young people seem to be obeying all the Covid-19 social distancing rules, even though this is mainly to benefit their elders. If the Trainspotting gang were asked to hole up to protect the over 60 population, they'd just laugh and head out to the club to score.
Renton: the scheming, slightly ambitious, slightly amoral, easily influenced, cynical mainstay, with the capability too (almost) fit into normal society.
Sick Boy: the lecherous womanizer
Spud: the slightly daft, but always loyal and kind whipping boy. The gang alternately tortures and takes care of him.
Begbie: the psychopath.
The last chapter of this saga is on sale on Amazon Kindle for $1.99.
Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh.
It's not a great book, but if you're stuck in quarantine and feeling a little nostalgic for wilder times, it's not bad.
The gang is middle-aged, estranged, and scattered about the world. If the book just took a look at the lives of some ex-addicts and how they've managed to fit into our modern society, that would be interesting . . . but it wouldn't be an Irvine Welsh novel. Instead, we get the gang in their full glory and a plot that is a hodge-podge of weird sex and wanton violence and soccer and venereal diseases and stalkers and murders and art exhibitions and EDM music and the criminal underground and an illegal kidney racket.
It's a farce and a mess.
I still had fun reading it: you get to hear narration from all the members of the gang. There's plenty of action . . . too much really, it gets surreal, and while this worked for a gang of heroin addicts on the scam, in Trainspotting, it doesn't so much for a bunch of middle-aged adults.
But if you want to read about realistic middle-aged adults, you can read a Jonathan Franzen novel. This is something different. And now I think I'm done with Irvine Welsh and the gang, but it's a fitting end to the cynical, misanthropic, nihilistic tone of the '90s.
The youth today are much more compliant and socially aware. And anxious.
For example: for the most part, young people seem to be obeying all the Covid-19 social distancing rules, even though this is mainly to benefit their elders. If the Trainspotting gang were asked to hole up to protect the over 60 population, they'd just laugh and head out to the club to score.
3/7/2009
If Legally Blonde isn't your cup of tea, perhaps Piece of Cake is your rock of crack-- it's Cupcake Brown's memoir of life as an orphaned gang-bangin', crack addicted, meth scammin', sherm smokin' violent drunk who rises from behind her dumpster to become a lawyer . . . it's the opposite tone of the emo-faux memoir A Million Little Pieces (I would love to see Cupcake Brown kick James Frey right in his puckered asshole) and if you're down in the dumps and need a little inspiration, or you just want the ins and outs of how to smoke crack on a budget (use a car antenna instead of a pricey glass pipe for the cooking) then I highly recommend it.
My fiction is fact: http://http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1166968,00.html
Let's Bask in Dave's Awesomeness
For those of you that visit here solely because you relish Dave's awkwardness, failures, pedantry, and bombast, you might want to stop reading today's post right now . . . because today's post is a tale of success, timing, and perfection; last Thursday, I was running my son's travel team practice at the high school turf field, and there was a lot going on: my other son had practice on the far side of the field, and some high school kids were playing a game of touch football in the middle of the field -- which would have been fine, except that every time they punted the ball it came flying end-over-end into our scrimmage by the goal, and after the third time this happened, I had one of my players bring me the ball -- and then --in the typically grouchy and hyperbolic fashion that I adopt after several hours of coaching-- I yelled to them: "You need to stop punting, because you're not good at it, and you're going to kill one of my players!" and then I held the ball out with both hands, tilted slightly downward and to the left, and launched a picturesque high-arcing fifty yard punt, on a perfect spiral, into the arms of the farthest kid (and I know it was a fifty yard, punt because I was at the goal line and he was at the fifty) and though I was probably a bit over-the-top and obnoxious in my tone with them, because of the beauty of my punt, they apologized profusely (and later on, I gave them a quick lesson on how to punt a spiral).
Horror Recommendations for Both the Patient and the Restive
If you're looking for a gothic novel in the vein of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," then give Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger a shot . . . she wrote it in 2009, but you'd never know it-- it's set in the 1940s and impeccably researched and pitch-perfect in tone-- the disintegration of Hundreds Hall and the family that lives in it mirrors the slow and crumbling decay of the noble class in England . . . the proletariat is assuming more political and economic power, at the cost of old and ancient ways, but the dead aren't going to cede power to the working-class quietly; the book is a slow-burn and often frustrating-- especially the budding yet doomed romance-- but I loved it . . . if you don't have the patience for historically accurate neo-Gothicism, then you can check out the Overlord-- it's streaming on Amazon right now-- the film begins as a harrowing WWII action-flick, but soon devolves into a Tarantino-esque Nazi-zombie genre mash-up . . . it's totally entertaining, gross, and fun . . . my son Ian and I both loved it.
Daylight Sucking Time
Everything always feels topsy-turvy the first Monday after Daylight Fucking Saving Time (otherwise known as I Had a Vivid Nightmare Saturday Night That the Government Stole Time From Me and Sunday Morning It Turned Out It Wasn't a Nightmare Day) and so while I was at school and then the gym, I watched the latest political polarized shitshow in reverse chronological order and I think it made more sense that way: first-- in the English Office-- I watched Scarlett Johanssen's SNL send-up of Senator Katie Britt's absurdly melodramatic SOTU response; next, while riding the bike at the gym I actually watched Katie Britt's entire seventeen-minute oddly unhinged, trad-wife, transitionless, tone-deaf kitchen-centric monologue; and then I watched President Biden's fairly energetic and topical SOTU address . . . and I've decided to cryogenically freeze myself until next December so I don't have to live through this stupid rematch.
2/26/2009
So why is it that when you go to the doctor's office and they give you antibiotics for a sebaceous cyst (which is essentially a big pimple) and you ask if you can drink beer while you are taking antibiotics for this non-life threatening infected hair follicle thing that is essentially a big pimple, why is it that the doctor-- a woman younger than you who looks like a reasonable sort of girl-- looks at you as if you are a lunatic dipsomaniac and says (in a tone somewhere between shock and disgust) "It's only seven days, and you should never mix alcohol with antibiotics"?
Dave Unboxes Something!
The Rutgers Expository Writing class stresses the importance of "unpacking" the prompt-- the students need to really mull over the question being asked and carefully analyze all the implications of the language of the assignment-- and so in honor of the first "unpacking of a prompt," I have made an "unboxing video"-- if you're not aware, these videos are extraordinarily popular (and super-weird) . . . I watched a few to get the tone down . . . I also think this is a good time to celebrate the life and exploits of Henry "Box" Brown, a slave who mailed himself from Virginia to freedom in a small wooden crate-- he endured 27 hours of wagon, steamboat, and train transport before arriving in Pennsylvania, to be "unboxed" by the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee.
The Pathetic Fallacy, Pregnancy Edition
Today at work the ladies organized a "sprinkle" for a teacher who is very pregnant with her second child (and leaving at the end of the week) and it took me a couple hours to comprehend the term for the party . . . you have a baby "shower" for the first kid and then for the next kid, it's not as big a deal, so you tone the weather down a bit . . . and I guess for a third kid, you just get a "mist" or a "fog."
Overwhelmed By Sand
After a recommendation from a friend, I started in on a novel that has the four elements that I generally can't stomach: 1) a map 2) an appendix 3) a glossary 4) lots of made up words with apostrophes . . . I'm talking about "Science Fiction's Supreme Masterpiece" . . . yes, that's what it says on the cover, and like everything else in this book, it is said without irony . . . this is the blurb for Frank Herbert's Dune and, surprisingly, I made it through 400 pages of sand, the highly addictive life lengthening spice-drug melange, imperial plots for the aforementioned spice drug, wild religious prophesy among the Fremen, water reclaiming stillsuits, Sardaukaur, the coming of Muad'Dib, a ride on the maker (a sand worm), crys-knife fights, treachery, desert ecology, and all the rest . . . but I finally skimmed the last hundred pages or so, because-- despite the complexity of the world, the fantastic development of the characters . . . both in mind and lineage . . . and the well-paced and multifarious plot-- after four hundred pages of reading you deserve a joke or two, something funny or at least ironic, but like in the Bible and Lord of the Rings, the tone of Dune is epic, and during this epic and very dry time on Arrakis, nothing remotely humorous happens, nor should it I guess . . . this is a place so desiccated that when you die, they render your body for its water, and the pages and pages of sand finally wore me out (and from what I've heard, the movie is not so much fun to watch either).
Great Ideas in Pub History?
Alec and I are generally full of ideas on pub night, but sometimes these ideas don't sound as good the next morning:
1) last Thursday, I was a bit wound up from playing lead guitar in the Faculty Follies band, and this led to us deciding to form a band (with a rather crass name about a sexual practice that was popular in the '80's and in '80's movies, e.g. Vacation and The World According to Garp) and then make an album and post-date it from the '80's so that people would "remember" us even though we didn't exist-- Pete the bartender/owner shot this one down immediately;
2) moments later someone claimed that the people who are "unboxing" and testing toys and electronics and food and other stuff on YouTube are making "billions," and we wanted in on these untold riches, but realized that most items already have well-followed "unboxers" and so we would need a new niche if we wanted to make our "billions"-- and so we decided we could unbox and test toilet paper . . . I'll spare you the rest of that brainstorming session;
3) and then Friday night we revisited a recurring discussion about Alec's solution to the Washington Redskin nickname controversy-- Alec believes they should shorten their name to "The Skins" and each custom-made super-tight jersey should correspond to the player's skin tone (the numbers would look like they were "painted on" the jerseys in grease-paint) so it would appear that the opposing team would be the "shirt" team and the super-tough Skins would be going bare-chested-- and while I admire the aesthetics of the idea, I think the variety of skin tones on an NFL team (and thus the inconsistency in jersey colors) would make it tough for the quarterback to pick out receivers (and we've never discussed whether the jerseys would have nipples and belly-buttons printed on them).
1) last Thursday, I was a bit wound up from playing lead guitar in the Faculty Follies band, and this led to us deciding to form a band (with a rather crass name about a sexual practice that was popular in the '80's and in '80's movies, e.g. Vacation and The World According to Garp) and then make an album and post-date it from the '80's so that people would "remember" us even though we didn't exist-- Pete the bartender/owner shot this one down immediately;
2) moments later someone claimed that the people who are "unboxing" and testing toys and electronics and food and other stuff on YouTube are making "billions," and we wanted in on these untold riches, but realized that most items already have well-followed "unboxers" and so we would need a new niche if we wanted to make our "billions"-- and so we decided we could unbox and test toilet paper . . . I'll spare you the rest of that brainstorming session;
3) and then Friday night we revisited a recurring discussion about Alec's solution to the Washington Redskin nickname controversy-- Alec believes they should shorten their name to "The Skins" and each custom-made super-tight jersey should correspond to the player's skin tone (the numbers would look like they were "painted on" the jerseys in grease-paint) so it would appear that the opposing team would be the "shirt" team and the super-tough Skins would be going bare-chested-- and while I admire the aesthetics of the idea, I think the variety of skin tones on an NFL team (and thus the inconsistency in jersey colors) would make it tough for the quarterback to pick out receivers (and we've never discussed whether the jerseys would have nipples and belly-buttons printed on them).
Elisabeth Moss Is Not a Kiwi
I am enjoying Top of the Lake, a moody crime-drama set in the wilds of New Zealand -- the tone and structure of the series is similar to The Killing . . . a troubled female detective obsessively investigates one crime over the course of an entire season, and while there is some comic relief . . . Holly Hunter plays a bizarre empowered wild-woman named GJ and the small town folk of Glenorchy are creepy and amusing, but what really threw me for a loop is that Elisabeth Moss -- who plays Peggy Olson on Madmen -- is not a New Zealander, she's only pretending to be a New Zealander . . . and she fooled me (for more on this, watch the video . . . Sir Ian explains it quite well).
Swedish Mysteries
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo inspired me to read another Swedish detective story-- this one, called Sidetracked, by the world famous Henning Mankell, pits melancholy sleuth Kurt Wallander against a serial killer that murders his carefully chosen victims with an axe-- this sounds over the top, but the tone is more like The Wire, slow and careful . . . it took three hundred pages until someone fired a gun; my favorite mundane detail about Wallander is that he doesn't really like soccer, but he tries his best to find interest in the World Cup just to get along with his colleagues, but really he can't understand how people could be worried about such frivolity when there is evil lurking in his once provincial town: fourteen mopeds out of fifteen.
Dave Tries (Awkwardly and Unsuccessfully) to Use an Interrobang‽
The interrobang is a very specific unit of punctuation, designed for use at the end of question that is both exclamatory and rhetorical; I attempted to use one the other night but-- perhaps because of lack of practice-- I did not meet with any success; my wife and I had just rolled in from a night of comedy at the State Theater and I was very thirsty-- it's always hot and dry in that theater-- and so I took a quick of slug of the first bottle of seltzer I found, which happened to be "mint lime" flavor, a flavor which i find detestable, and so I yelled, "WHO BOUGHT ALL THIS MINT FLAVORED SELTZER‽" and as soon as this exclamatory (and rhetorical) question left my lips, I knew I was in trouble . . . because my wife does the grocery shopping and so she bought all the mint flavored seltzer; apparently, she likes the various types of mint flavored seltzer that appeared in our kitchen recently (and the boys and I hadn't gotten around to gently breaking the news that we did NOT like this new-fangled mint flavored seltzer) and so she let me have it-- both for my exclamatory and rhetorical tone and for the fact that I never do the grocery shopping and therefore, I shouldn't be complaining about the products that miraculously materialize in our kitchen for our consumption, and I deserved all this vitriol and more (and then I found a great use for this seltzer that I formerly found detestable: a splash of it goes perfectly with mezcal on the rocks).
This Book Is Nothing Like a Michael Connelly Novel
I am slowly making my way through Jim Holt's book Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story and while in a sense the subtitle is true, as Holt really is searching for clues to the answer to the biggest question of all-- why is there something, rather than nothing?-- but I have to tell you that this is nothing like proceeding through a Harry Bosch investigation; Holt interviews some strange characters (forcing me to learn some new words: Richard Swinburne, an Oxford philosopher who believes that the simplest hypothesis as to why there is something rather than nothing is that an omnipotent God created the universe, explains that he has a theodicy, which is a impossibly precise word that means he has a defense of why an omniscient, omnipotent and infinitely good being would allow evil in the universe . . . Holt calls his tone "almost homiletic," and I had to look up that word too-- it means speaking in the style of a homily . . . just before Holt interrogated Swinburne, he interviewed his "great cosmological adversary," a guy named Adolf Grumbaum who thought that the ultimate question was actually a pseudo-problem, and our problems with time and complexity and the Null hypothesis are all heuristic biases) and while Holt interrogates these folks to the best of his ability, I'm highly skeptical that he's going to wrap this thing up at the end of the book . . . I peeked at the name of the last chapter and it is called "Return to Nothingness" (I knew a teacher who always read the last few pages of a mystery novel first, so he could then go back and enjoy the story and not rush ahead simply to find out the solution to the plot).
3/12/10
I am beginning to think that Hamlet is a little like Neo, from the film The Matrix; Hamlet is somehow subconsciously aware that he is in a play called Hamlet, he realizes that there is a larger reality than the word he inhabits, and this makes him so much larger than any other character int he play--and so he tries to direct the play's action, tone, and content, and eventually he realizes that forces beyond him (Shakespeare? God? Morpheus?) control his fate-- that he is embedded in some kind of five act program.
Trump, Stop Being a Coward (I'd Use the P-Word, But It Would Be Gauche)
The hope that Trump might preside more moderately than his campaign rhetoric indicated has been shattered by his polarizing inaugural address and the hastily mandated executive order to ban Muslims and refugees from America . . . and while I was trying to ignore much of the day-to-day furor over his policies, I think he has drawn the proverbial line in the sand; if you're confused on this issue, I humbly present a few things you should digest and think about:
1) the new episode of The Weeds (The Don't-Call-It-A-Muslim-Ban) does a great job of parsing out the policy and the contradictions and problems with it-- you'll understand why there have been stays by federal judges enacted in regards to the ban;
2) a flat out "Muslim" ban is unconstitutional, so Trump had to make do by banning people from seven mainly Muslim countries-- but putting Syria on the list means that Trump can't help prioritize Syrian Christians-- or any other Christian refugees seeking asylum-- though Trump claims he would like to do this;
3) Trump suspended the US Refugee Program for 120 days and capped refugee admissions to 50,000 (instead of Obama's 110,00, which is still rather paltry considering scope of the crisis . . . global displacement is at an all time high);
4) in 2016, the United States accepted 12,000 Syrian refugees (Germany took in a million in 2015 and 300,000 in 2016) and Trump's executive order bans all Syrian refugees . . . this brings up the point that we weren't doing a terribly good job of addressing this refugee crisis under the Obama administration, and we certainly had a hand in creating this crisis because of our various military actions and inactions in the Middle East, and we are now presenting ourselves as an ugly selfish "America first" nation that is willing to turn its back on a heinous and horrible humanitarian tragedy;
5) if you need something more vivid to illustrate the toll of being a refugee, listen to This American Life: Are We There Yet?
6) if you want to feel especially shitty about your country-- and this is before Trump enacted the total ban on refugees from Iraq, then listen to This American Life: Didn't We Solve This One? and you'll hear the stories of Iraqi translators and defectors who helped us in the war in Iraq, were promised visas, and then were abandoned and left out in the cold . . . Trump expressed his solidarity for the "forgotten man" in America, but these people have been forgotten by America in an exponential and existential sense, and now they have no chance of receiving their due . . . this bureaucratic betrayal sounds like the perfect template to create terrorists;
5) you don't have to tow the party line on this, because tone and attitude towards immigration isn't a Democrat/Republican thing, it's a moral stance . . . for a startling example, check out the video of Bush and Reagan one-upping each other on how welcoming they would like to be and how many services they would like to provide for illegal immigrants . . . and Bill Clinton-- welfare reformer-- slammed illegal immigrants and their drain on social services;
6) Trump signed his executive order over the Holocaust Memorial weekend . . . I don't have to explain the irony;
7) America is a country with great wealth and resources and we are often big-hearted and welcoming to refugees and immigrants . . . but some of our most regretful and humiliating moments are when we treated foreigners poorly-- the Japanese internment and sending a boatload of Jews back to Europe to be slaughtered by Nazis are incidents that come to mind;
8) we are also a country where freedom of speech trumps all other rights-- this is no place for cowards-- and while it is extraordinarily rare that an immigrant commits an act of terrorism, this is a possibility-- but it is a possibility that we must endure if we are going to be a free country;
9) while I find it absurd, it's not illegal in America to literally believe in the words of the Koran or the Bible or any other outdated religious text . . . and it's not illegal in the United States to have radical religious opinions or radical political opinions or any other kind of belief, even if it be ridiculous unfounded and stupid, and because of this ur-policy, we are going to occasionally suffer some collateral damage-- but again, this is not a country for cowards . . .
10) the 2nd Amendment allows for the proliferation of guns and conservatives are fine with the collateral damage associated with this;
11) Trump and the Republicans want to deregulate environmental rules and regulations-- they're willing to let people drive around as much as they want, and pollute as much as they want, though this leads to the warming of the globe, the loss of biodiversity, and the death of lots of folks in automobile accidents . . . but conservatives show no fear of these dire consequences of their policy;
12) conservatives are also not afraid of obesity, going without health insurance, and pandemics-- Trump don't need no stinking vaccines . . . so if Great Americans, Trumplike Americans are not afraid of any of this, if they are willing to embrace death in so many ways, then I'd like to implore them-- Trump, his followers and the rest of the conservatives-- to stop being so cowardly about immigration; we love danger here in the US, whether it's getting run over by a drunk driver or shot by some lunatic in a movie theater or daring the oceans to rise and swallow our coastal cities, so let's embrace the danger and embark on a great adventure and let in all kinds of asylum seekers and immigrants-- let's expedite the system instead of drawing it to an ugly halt-- and let's do it for the forgotten men and women of the world, the people that have truly lost everything, who have nowhere to go and no one to look out for them . . . the huddled masses, the wretched refuse, the homeless . . . this is a concern that is beyond political polarization . . . where you stand on this issue determines not only what kind of American you are, but ultimately, what kind of person you are.
1) the new episode of The Weeds (The Don't-Call-It-A-Muslim-Ban) does a great job of parsing out the policy and the contradictions and problems with it-- you'll understand why there have been stays by federal judges enacted in regards to the ban;
2) a flat out "Muslim" ban is unconstitutional, so Trump had to make do by banning people from seven mainly Muslim countries-- but putting Syria on the list means that Trump can't help prioritize Syrian Christians-- or any other Christian refugees seeking asylum-- though Trump claims he would like to do this;
3) Trump suspended the US Refugee Program for 120 days and capped refugee admissions to 50,000 (instead of Obama's 110,00, which is still rather paltry considering scope of the crisis . . . global displacement is at an all time high);
4) in 2016, the United States accepted 12,000 Syrian refugees (Germany took in a million in 2015 and 300,000 in 2016) and Trump's executive order bans all Syrian refugees . . . this brings up the point that we weren't doing a terribly good job of addressing this refugee crisis under the Obama administration, and we certainly had a hand in creating this crisis because of our various military actions and inactions in the Middle East, and we are now presenting ourselves as an ugly selfish "America first" nation that is willing to turn its back on a heinous and horrible humanitarian tragedy;
5) if you need something more vivid to illustrate the toll of being a refugee, listen to This American Life: Are We There Yet?
6) if you want to feel especially shitty about your country-- and this is before Trump enacted the total ban on refugees from Iraq, then listen to This American Life: Didn't We Solve This One? and you'll hear the stories of Iraqi translators and defectors who helped us in the war in Iraq, were promised visas, and then were abandoned and left out in the cold . . . Trump expressed his solidarity for the "forgotten man" in America, but these people have been forgotten by America in an exponential and existential sense, and now they have no chance of receiving their due . . . this bureaucratic betrayal sounds like the perfect template to create terrorists;
5) you don't have to tow the party line on this, because tone and attitude towards immigration isn't a Democrat/Republican thing, it's a moral stance . . . for a startling example, check out the video of Bush and Reagan one-upping each other on how welcoming they would like to be and how many services they would like to provide for illegal immigrants . . . and Bill Clinton-- welfare reformer-- slammed illegal immigrants and their drain on social services;
6) Trump signed his executive order over the Holocaust Memorial weekend . . . I don't have to explain the irony;
7) America is a country with great wealth and resources and we are often big-hearted and welcoming to refugees and immigrants . . . but some of our most regretful and humiliating moments are when we treated foreigners poorly-- the Japanese internment and sending a boatload of Jews back to Europe to be slaughtered by Nazis are incidents that come to mind;
8) we are also a country where freedom of speech trumps all other rights-- this is no place for cowards-- and while it is extraordinarily rare that an immigrant commits an act of terrorism, this is a possibility-- but it is a possibility that we must endure if we are going to be a free country;
9) while I find it absurd, it's not illegal in America to literally believe in the words of the Koran or the Bible or any other outdated religious text . . . and it's not illegal in the United States to have radical religious opinions or radical political opinions or any other kind of belief, even if it be ridiculous unfounded and stupid, and because of this ur-policy, we are going to occasionally suffer some collateral damage-- but again, this is not a country for cowards . . .
10) the 2nd Amendment allows for the proliferation of guns and conservatives are fine with the collateral damage associated with this;
11) Trump and the Republicans want to deregulate environmental rules and regulations-- they're willing to let people drive around as much as they want, and pollute as much as they want, though this leads to the warming of the globe, the loss of biodiversity, and the death of lots of folks in automobile accidents . . . but conservatives show no fear of these dire consequences of their policy;
12) conservatives are also not afraid of obesity, going without health insurance, and pandemics-- Trump don't need no stinking vaccines . . . so if Great Americans, Trumplike Americans are not afraid of any of this, if they are willing to embrace death in so many ways, then I'd like to implore them-- Trump, his followers and the rest of the conservatives-- to stop being so cowardly about immigration; we love danger here in the US, whether it's getting run over by a drunk driver or shot by some lunatic in a movie theater or daring the oceans to rise and swallow our coastal cities, so let's embrace the danger and embark on a great adventure and let in all kinds of asylum seekers and immigrants-- let's expedite the system instead of drawing it to an ugly halt-- and let's do it for the forgotten men and women of the world, the people that have truly lost everything, who have nowhere to go and no one to look out for them . . . the huddled masses, the wretched refuse, the homeless . . . this is a concern that is beyond political polarization . . . where you stand on this issue determines not only what kind of American you are, but ultimately, what kind of person you are.
So Funny?
Many people have written about the difficulty in expressing tone in electronic communication, and I will add an example to the list; a few weeks ago my son Ian had to go to the dentist to have an infected tooth extracted and I was too squeamish to accompany him, and so I sent my my wife . . . later that day, while I was eating lunch, I had a moment to check my cell phone and read the text my wife sent: "Ian was really brave but it was pretty bad and there was a lot of blood and he cried some . . . I grayed out from migraine effect and had to lie down . . . so funny" . . . so funny? I didn't think this sounded funny at all, in fact, it sounded horrible-- horrible enough to trigger this absurdity-- but, in retrospect, I guess it could have been worse-- my wife might have blacked out (or, if you are a fan of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, she could have "browned out") and in the end, Ian was quite proud of himself and the gaping hole in his mouth and his extracted tooth . . . in fact, he was so proud of his extracted tooth-- which he placed in a little plastic box for safekeeping--that he didn't want the tooth fairy to take it from him-- but he did want some money-- so I suggested that he draw a picture of the tooth and put that under his pillow and see of the tooth fairy accepted the drawing as fair currency, and wonder of wonders!-- the tooth fairy did accept the drawing, which raises some serious questions about fungibility in the fairy world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)