A student told me this story yesterday, and it was so bad that I have reproduced it here verbatim: "Last night at work, I met this guy and he totally reminded me of this other guy I know."
3/19/2009
If there's one thing I've learned about politics from reading Nixonland: the rise of a president and the fracturing of America, it is that neither political party is for state's rights: if a state wants to legalize medicinal marijuana or pass civil rights laws, then the Republicans are against state's rights . . . and if a state wants to make abortion illegal or remain segregated, then the Democrats are against state's rights.
3/18/2009
If you live each day like it is your last, then very soon one of them will be . . . if you live life to the fullest, soon you will be very fat (or at least that's what would happen to me . . . maybe some people would spend time with their family or repent their sins or do a lot of crack, but I have a feeling that if someone told me I had one day left to cram in everything I could, I would be most concerned about planning my meals-- I think that I would skip breakfast foods entirely, and instead have tamales with mole sauce for breakfast, and then go from there . . .)
The Wrestler: This One Hit Me Below the Belt
I give The Wrestler nineteen staple-gun wounds out of a possible twenty-- and it's worth seeing on the big screen because the movie is almost entirely visual-- the screenplay must have been a pamphlet-- and, I must warn you, it is PAINFUL to watch this thing-- you're not sure if you're watching the decay of a fictitious character called Randy the Ram, or if it's actually Mickey Rourke falling apart on screen: it's painful to watch him take a shower, walk down the street, try to read a book, play his own character on a Nintendo game with a neighborhood kid, work the deli counter, et cetera-- and though Marissa Tomei-- Randy's stripper love interest-- is naked a lot, which was one of the reasons I wanted to see the movie, she's not very sexy: she's painfully skinny, her face is drawn and tired, and, Like Randy, she's a little too old to be in a profession that relies on a youthful body; as a bonus, the movie is set in New Jersey, and between the grainy film and the Acme that time forgot (in Rahway?) and a scene on the Asbury Park Boardwalk, this story makes the New Jersey of the Sopranos look like Beverly Hills.
Two Reasons to See Happy
I give Mike Leigh's new movie Happy Go Lucky nine trampolines out of a possible ten-- it's very funny and the soundtrack reminds me of the opening theme of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
3/15/2009
We did a double take and then used the internet to check the facts, but it is sad but true-- the median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was 7,500 dollars . . . that's right seven thousand five hundred dollars, writing it out insures that you know that I didn't make a typographic error; this is what I propose: we all buy vacation homes on the same block and instead of summering in the Hamptons or Chatham, we head out to our Detroit porches to drink Mad-dog 20/20 and hit the rock-- not only will we be saving money, but someday Detroit will rise again and we can cash in . . . so who's with me?
3/14/2009
As my sophomores liked to nebulously state in their essays: Alexander Rodriguez and I are similar and different . . . we are similar because we both just had our cysts drained, but we are different because ARod is going to need six to nine weeks of recovery, while I played indoor soccer four days later (albeit poorly, and sweating copious amounts of wine and take-out Indian food-- it was no treat to cover me, I'm sure).
My Greatest Contribution to Western Culture
Edison had his light-bulb, the Wright brothers their aeroplane, and Ben Franklin his eponymous stove . . . but I don't think I will ever invent anything tangible . . . although I HAVE invented something incredibly useful, but it is a concept, not a thing: my invention is a dinner-time mind-trick called the "don't eat it" game; when you want your kids to eat something, you simply point at the item and say, very seriously, "Do NOT eat those green beans, especially not those three-- those are mine and I don't want you to eat them" and then you go back to eating your meal, and inevitably, the child will take the green beans you pointed at, steal a glance, make a devilish face, and then scarf them down . . . because it's fun to disobey; the funny thing is, now my kids know the trick, but they often still insist that I do it just because they enjoy it so much, and they eat so much faster if we play-- even though they know they are being manipulated; I know my creation isn't as valuable as the polio vaccine or the internal combustion engine, but it has caused me more happiness than either of those inventions . . . plus it's portable and very cheap to manufacture.
3/12/2009
My five year old son Alex told my wife that his friend Tiko said he "didn't like Jews" so they had an awkward and serious conversation about racism and prejudice, but it turns out (this was clarified at dinner last night, inadvertently in a story about how Tiko was eating strawberries) that Tiko has no problem with those of the Jewish faith, it is "juice" that he abhors (perhaps he meant O.J. Simpson, which may or may not warrant another serious discussion).
Kids Say the Darndest Crassest Things
3/10/2009
Do other people, when they sample free meats, cheeses, and crackers from the enticing little bubble shaped displays at the grocery store, chew slowly and pretend to savor the tidbit-- as if saying, I'm taking my time and tasting and evaluating this item, because if it's really good, I might purchase it-- even though there's no way in hell they're going to purchase it, and they are actually just feeding their faces . . . or is it just me?
3/9/2009
I attended the renowned middle school Potato Pancakes and Pierogie Party Friday night, and like the Polack of the joke, I did something very stupid-- after several games of beer-pong, Ed commented on how deceptively heavy the quoit ring base was and I called him pansy (which is ridiculous, Ed builds elevators and at the Highland Games he flipped the twelve foot caber) and then I told him that I could lift the quoit base with my pinky, which I then did . . . and then Ed had to do it as well, of course-- but when he woke up this morning, his wrist probably didn't hurt as much as mine.
3/8/2009
They must see some nasty shit at the doctor's office, because the phrase "healing nicely" and the giant open wound on my back (where they sliced and drained my sebaceous cyst, in case you haven't been following) do not belong in the same sentence.
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
Arboriculture, Dave Style
You know you're a real homeowner when you find yourself on your front lawn, armed with a football, duct-taped to a length of thick rope, staring at a huge broken limb hanging precariously in your tree, but stretching out over your neighbor's sidewalk and driveway, and you're trying to determine if you're able to heave the football through the tiny Y shaped crevice and get some leverage and pull it down; after twenty or thirty throws (and learning to coil the rope AROUND the football and let it unravel in the air) and the encouragement of my neighbor and her son, I was able to snare the limb and then rock it violently until it came loose and crashed to the ground . . . it was WAY bigger than I thought, and I really should have left it to a professional-- but think of the money I saved (and for Catherine it was win/win, either we would save a few hundred dollars or she could cash in on our life insurance policy).
3/5/2009
This sentence is rated PG-13 for brief nudity (nothing too provocative, just my bare back, but I do have some hair growing there, so I thought a warning was warranted) and excessive pus: yesterday at the doctor's office I underwent my first operation-- though it seemed more in the style of a Medieval barbershop bleeding: they were slicing and draining the sebaceous cyst cyst on my back, but because a new doctor (the fairly cute one who looked at me with disgust last week when I asked if I could drink beer on Keflex) was doing the procedure, an older experienced lady watched and helped her, so I got to hear a descriptive play by play as they worked, including such phrases as "juicy" and "make that bigger or it will shoot pus like a geyser" and "I like to be a little more aggressive with the knife there" and "stick the needle in there more . . . now there and there and there, right on that line" and "pull that out with the forceps, I really want to cut a piece of that" and "now I'm going to squeeze that edema really hard" and, finally, "you were a really good sport."
3/4/2009
The one benefit I can see about getting old is-- simply through trial and error, time, and word of mouth-- we now know an honest contractor and an honest mechanic.
3/3/2009
Some days you think of something brilliant to write-- such as The Dog Hollerer-- and sometimes you've got to steal someone else's sentence . . . so here's on written by the essayist E.V. Lucas: "I have noticed that people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them."
A Gross Present
I share my birthday with a Cat named Seuss--
who, like all writers, liked his juice
as I like mine, fermented and sweet . . .
especially for a birthday treat--
but this year, instead of getting pissed
my present is a sebaceous cyst.
Very Specific Audience
If you're looking for a novel where the protagonist is a doctor in the witness protection plan because he was once a hit-man for the mob, and he desperately needs to fashion a weapon for an impending knife fight, so, with an exposed piece of metal in a locked freezer, he cuts open his own calf, then reaches through the tendons and muscle until he locates his fibula, and then snaps it off so he can use it as a makeshift blade, then Josh Bazell's Beat the Reaper is the book for you.
2/27/2009
It must be really hard to be an unbiased and objective news reporter; case in point, how do you NOT inject some sarcasm into this story from The Week: "Orchard Park, N.Y. The founder of a television network devoted to improving the image of Muslims was charged this week with beheading his wife . . . Hassan founded the Bridges TV network to counter negative stereotypes about Muslims after the 9/11 attacks" -- so, does his network cover the story . . . if they do, it's certainly going to promote a negative stereotype, but if they ignore it, it's going to promote a different negative stereotype.
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"?
2/25/2009
Apparently, Tiger Woods hasn't played golf for a year, but I didn't know this-- my brother actually claimed I was lying to him when I told him I wasn't aware that Tiger hadn't hit the links in a while and accused me of "living under a rock"-- so I'd like to offer an official apology to Tiger Woods (and give him a coveted photo-op on my blog) and I'd also like to say I'm sorry to all other athletes and celebrities that I have not paid enough attention to in the last year.
2/24/2009
I thought raising kids was hard enough, but now what do I say when they bring up the subject of marijuana use . . . you might end up like Michael Phelps . . . or the President . . . or even (gasp) Cheech and Chong! (maybe mentioning that Bill Clinton didn't inhale will set them straight).
2/23/2009
Saturday night Catherine and I went to a "reunion" of the Melody bar; Catherine wanted to see her old roommate, who often played music there and who invited her on Facebook-- but on the Facebook invitation it said that only those 36 and over would be admitted, which we thought was a joke, but when we got to the Elks, the old bouncer from the Melody was working the door (wearing a NASA suit and looking as dour as ever) and he checked our ID's and actually turned a fellow teacher away who was 35 3/4 years old, so he had to wander off to meet other people at Harvest Moon, but he didn't miss much-- it was hot and crowded inside, and although we talked to a few people and everyone looked half familiar (and scarily old)we were ready to go after an hour (you couldn't get a drink-- they had the old bartender from the Melody working, too, and he looked like he was about to have an aneurysm)-- Catherine got to see her roommate again, who looked exactly the same (except I think she got a nose-job, but I didn't ask)and once we got outside there was actually a giant line to get in, and luckily we saw the rest of the North Brunswick crowd we were supposed to meet (I think this is as close to a twenty year reunion as class of '88 is going to get)and pulled them out of line and went to Harvest Moon, and it was definitely fun to see everyone-- but I still don't understand how Harvest Moon has survived for so long, it's been making average to awful beer for a over decade now-- you think they'd either get better at making beer or go out of business, but it's always crowded.
The One Reason to Love February (Unless You Are a Ground Hog)
Sorry about yesterday's sentence about nothing-- today's will be about something far more concrete: money; February is my favorite month because I make more money per hour (due to the fact that the month is the shortest, yet my bi-weekly paycheck remains the same) though I suppose if I were an extremely dedicated teacher, I would try to cram in a little more learning each day in February so the taxpayers would get their money's worth.
2/21/2009
I'm trying something new, I'm starting this sentence with absolutely no idea, no topic, not a thought in my head, and I'm just going to roll with it and see where it goes, and hope some kernel of a thought, some nugget of consciousness, some crackle in my synapses sends a concrete subject to my mind which will then flows effortlessly into my fingers, to be typed for your entertainment and pleasure-- but if in the end, when all is said and done, the sentence says nothing at all, then still, there is this question: was this a waste of time for everyone involved, or something more significant?
Why Whisper When you Can Holler?
Last night, our next door neighbors went out for the evening and in the mad rush (they have five kids) they left their dog out and he was barking incessantly while Catherine and the kids were trying to fall asleep, so I opened the window and yelled "Colby, stop it!" and, unlike my children, he actually listened . . . so I'm thinking I could star in a TV show called The Dog Hollerer (and in addition, an hour later, when he started to yelp again, I opened our bathroom window to use my hollering skills once more, but he shut up at the sound of the window opening so I've definitely got some kind of special power here).
2/19/2009
My microwave oven was taking so long to melt the cheese on my tortilla chips (like 35 seconds!) that I had a snack while I was waiting for my snack: I was able to open a container of cashews and down a handful before my nachos were fully nuked.
I Think You'll Understand . . . I want to Read Your Sca-aaaan
A funny sentence from Daniel Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music-- a book that has as much technical neuroscience as it does music theory, Levitin was a session musician and record producer but now he runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University: "The research on the development of the first MRI scanners was performed by the British company EMI, financed in a large part from their profits on Beatles records . . . I Want to Hold Your Hand might well have been titled I Want to Scan Your Brain."
2/17/2009
Random recollection from the surreal time before children: Catherine left my alone for the day, but when she came home I was in the same spot as when she left nine hours earlier, but with greasier hair (I had hair then) because I discovered speed chess on the internet.
2/16/2009
I gave up reading Netherland, a subtle novel about cricket and divorce in post 9-11 New York-- it was too subtle for me, perhaps someone can explain what it was all about and why it got such great reviews; instead I read two easy books with very long titles, both of which I highly recommend for people who want something less subtle: 1) Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . . Understanding Philosophy through Jokes, which delivers what it promises-- it's a great review of both the classic joke structures and the classic debates in philosophy (A sadist is a masochist who follows the Golden Rule) and 2) The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston, imagine a darker, gorier and less romanticized version of the world of Winston Wolf in Pulp Fiction, in fact, substitute a giant fat Asian for Harvey Keitel and set it in the sleazy side of Los Angeles, in a world where you actually have to use cleaning supplies to get rid of splattered brains, throw in a teacher with a past who is way out of his depth, and you're getting to close.
2/15/2009
I recommend Transiberian if you want to watch a fast-paced thriller set in an exotic locale, plus it has one of those hysterical movie conventions where the hero suddenly and fortuitously uses what you thought was a random skill mentioned earlier in the story-- I won't ruin it, but it reminds me of when Benjamin Braddock (The Graduate) runs out of gas on the way to the wedding and has to hoof it to prevent the marriage of Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine to the med school guy-- but luckily, as was mentioned in the beginning of the movie-- he's a track star!
2/14/2009
My son Alex said that his friend's nanny died, and so I asked him if he told his friend he was sorry; Alex looked at me and said, "Why? I didn't do it."
2/13/2009
It made me happy that I put the drawer slides upside-down in our new TV stand, because I was forced to reach into the drawer recess and unscrew them, which gave me an opportunity to use the tiny flashlight at the end of my power screw-driver, something I just discovered (though we've had it for ten years) the other day by accident . . . and when the tiny light popped on because I hit the little switch I had never noticed before, I wondered: "When the hell am I ever going to need a tiny flash light at the end of my battery powered screwdriver?" and now I have answered my own question.
I Unwittingly Give A Pregnant Student Anxiety
You would think that after yesterday's debacle, I'd have learned my lesson, but today in Creative Writing class I was demonstrating some point about sensory detail and-- spurred by a line in the instructive essay we were reading that portrayed birth as a wonderful, joyous event . . . I decided to provide a counter-example-- and so I launched into a graphic description of my son Alex's birth, which was pretty hairy: the umbilical cord was wrapped several times around his neck and the staff had to toss Catherine back and forth like a sack of potatoes to try to loosen it so he wouldn't suffocate, and then the doctor said, "You've got three pushes to get this baby out or we're going to have to do an emergency C-section!" and somewhere in the middle of this visceral tale I looked down and noticed that one of my new students, a chubby girl, was turning green and looked like she was going to pass out, and then I noticed why . . . she wasn't chubby, she was very very pregnant, but it was too late, I was already deep into the story and so I had to finish it (and I talked to her later and told her I was sorry and that I didn't meant to scare her and she said the story wasn't as horrific as she first thought it was going to be) but the real question is who am I going to target tomorrow?
There May Be Something Wrong With Me
Warning: if your opinion of Dave is already low, this sentence may make it subterranean, so proceed at your own risk . . . yesterday was the second day of my new Creative Writing Class (we switch at the semester) and one of the students wasn't quite in his seat when the bell rang, so I yelled in what i thought was a playful but slightly admonitory tone, "If you're not in your seat when the bell rings you're late!" and the student limped to his seat-- and I thought hmmm, looks like he has a limp and then got on with the class; later in the period we went on a "field trip" to the cafeteria, and the same late, limping student was the last one out of the classroom-- so I had to wait for him before I locked the door-- and I noticed that he had a brace on his hand, so I asked him, "Hey, how did you get injured?" and he quietly said to me "It happened when I was born" and then, in a humiliating rush of cognition, it all came together in my very stupid little brain-- he wasn't limping from a skate-park injury, he was crippled, and that wasn't a brace because he jammed his thumb playing hoops, his elbow joints were inverted-- and so I apologized to him about how I managed to put my (left) foot in my mouth not once but twice in a manner of minutes-- and though I said I was sorry, this kid must still wonder how he drew such an insensitive and cruel teacher for an elective (unless perhaps-- and I'm rationalizing like a madman here-- perhaps the disabled student liked the fact that I didn't notice his disability and was just as callous with him as I am with everyone else) and the class, which is composed almost completely of sweet girls, must think I'm a complete lout, and so, to remedy these faults in my personality: I swear here in this Official Sentence of Dave (TM) to START PAYING MORE ATTENTION TO MY SURROUNDINGS AND TO THINK MORE CAREFULLY BEFORE I SPEAK.
Dave is Transitioning . . . Slowly
After interviewing many friends, students, and co-workers, I have decided to switch to a Mac; I told my students it feels like I'm getting ready for a sex change but they said it isn't that severe-- so now I'm ready to switch teams (or switch back, as I once had an Apple IIe) and now all I need to get this transition going is for some charitable soul to buy me an iMac.
2/9/2009
Building your own custom bookshelves is easy . . . you just saw the wood, sand it, and then screw it together . . . it's so easy it makes me laugh-- HA HA HA HA HA HA-- it's so easy you should buy the cheap grade of lumber, because you can just push real hard and then it will fit together squarely, everything snaps together just like Legos, pardon me I have to laugh more because I had so much fun building my own book shelves--- HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAH!
2/8/2009
Whenever it's under fifteen degrees, the driver side door of my 1994 Jeep Cherokee Sport freezes, and everyone in the school parking lot is treated to the sight of me sliding my butt onto the glove compartment, spinning my torso, and then ejecting myself out the passenger side door.
We're Number One! (In Middlesex County)
Good news for my property values: New Jersey Monthly just came out with it's top one hundred high schools in New Jersey, and Highland Park is number 31 in the state and number 1 in Middlesex County; only the gods know how they frakkin' determined this, they claim to have used some kind of complex algorithm, but who cares?
My Apologies
Yesterday, I got some kind of virus on my computer-- it did something weird to the blog and it made it impossible to surf the internet (every time I tried to navigate to a page it would take me to a used car site or something equally as ridiculous) and I spent five hours following some directions I found on a tech site, editing the registry, deleting random files, uninstalling things, etc. but the only option is reformatting; I think I'm going to get an iMac.
2/6/2009
One of the benefits of playing soccer is that it keeps you vigilant about your toe-nail maintenance.
Rule #1: Do Not Read War and Peace in Public
I defeated the premise of sociologist Dalton Conley's new book Elsewhere USA: how we got from the company man, family dinners, and the affluent society to the home office, blackberry moms, and economic anxiety, he illustrates the economic "red shift" in America, how for the first time in our history (and maybe the history of the world) people who make more money also work more hours, and how they are usually married to someone else who makes more money and works more hours, thus the divide between rich and poor is growing quicker than ever, and if you are in the "top half" than though you are doing materially better than anyone at any time in history, it still appears as if the other people in the top half are moving away from you in economic class, because now we have the ability to work all the time (home office, Blackberry, cell phone, outsourcing around the clock, etc.) and those of us who are making money realize that all our time is billable and valuable, and so we become fragmented, and we pass this "weisure" ethic on to our kids, and the result is we can rarely focus ourselves for a long enough time away from work, technology, social networking, etc. to read an entire book in one day unless you are a teacher and it is exam period, which I love, because you get a duty where you are sentenced to guard a hall for several hours, and then you have to sit in a room and proctor an exam, and then the school day is over-- so it's an excellent time for total reading focus, in fact, several years ago this is how I got deep into War and Peace . . . but the only problem was that when people walked by me in the hall, and saw the giant book I was reading, they jokingly asked, "What are you reading? War and Peace?" and I would have to say, very apologetically "uh, yes, it's really good, actually" and show them the cover . . . but they would still look at me like I was a big asshole, because who goes around reading War and Peace when you can update your Ebay and your Facebook and your stock portfolio and your tutoring schedule and your kid's activities from a cell-phone or an I-touch, unless you're some kind of deviant miscreant up to no good?
2/4/2009
So I'm at gymnastics, and Alex's class has begun, but Ian's class doesn't start for another ten minutes and so he's playing on the mat and the balance beam and this other little kid (who is going to have an Earnest Hemingway complex, he wears long braided blond hair and Ian always calls him a girl) spits a big loogey onto the mat and his mom, a butch Rutgers psychology professor who was busy grading her blue books, tells him that it's rude and she would prefer him not to spit, but she doesn't wipe it up-- and it's right on the mat where everybody walks, not in the corner or something, and it's not like this is a kid's play gym or something, there's college and high school gymnasts walking around as well-- and I'm sitting there hating the fact that I care about these things now, but I'm also thinking that if my barefoot kid steps in your kid's spit, I'm going to punch you in the face-- and if I had any balls I would have went to the bathroom and got a paper towel and wiped it up but instead when Ian said, "That kid spit there" I said, "Yeah, that's gross-- don't step in it" and I'm wondering if I'm going insane now that I'm a parent, but isn't it common courtesy to wipe up any bodily fluids your kid produces?
2/3/2009
Yesterday I wrote a lame sentence, and this is what Eric commented: "I usually wait until they make a movie about the Nobel or Pulitzer winner, then, if the actor playing the role the Pulitzer or Nobel winner is worthy of acclaim, and only then, do I consider them noteworthy, and commit them to memory, like when Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford won the Pulitzer," which I think is really funny (and also saves me from having to write my own original sentence today, which is important to me-- not to do any good work on the day after the Super Bowl, because I want to contribute to the country-wide post-Super Bowl malaise in hopes that someday the NFL, in the interest of national productivity and for the good of the economy, will move the damn thing to Saturday.)
2/2/2009
An irony of illusion and reality: nearly everyone can reel off the movies and actors that collected an Academy Award, but who can recall the winners of the year's Nobel and Pulitzer prizes?
Anti-social Notworking
What Facebook needs (I'm not sure why I am prescribing this, since I don't have an account) is a list of enemies to complement the list of "friends"-- otherwise, the term "friend" has no meaning, plus, you really know someone when you know they people they hate, and, more significantly, the people that hate them; perhaps someone has already thought of this . . . is there a social networking forum that shows both sides of the coin?
A Sentence Wherein I Poorly Imitate Lester Bangs
Hey kids, hipsters, dudes, etcetera, I've been dosing on the loopy speculations and discursive postulations of Lester Bangs-- the collection is called Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and it consists of rock'n'roll reviews and opinions on the rest of the universe, and though I don't always recognize the bands he's talking about (The Fugs?) I certainly grok his groove, if only because he digs Iggy Pop and tears Jethro Tull a new one . . . he's all about seeing how many pop culture allusions, meta-cognitive delusions, and political anti-solutions he can juggle at once, he's the Philip K. Dick of pop music, the Jack Kerouac of Creem, and he's a kindred soul of mine, as he's not afraid of the incoherent run-on sentence.
Snakehead = Coyote?
Bad Traffic, the new crime novel by Simon Lewis, is supposedly the only UK book ever to receive a cover blurb by Elmore Leonard-- who calls it a "honey: suspense that never loses its grip" and I certainly don't disagree, the book is exciting enough to incite a stomach-ache, and-- like every good crime novel-- you learn a new term from the underworld . . . "snakehead."
1/29/2009
After reading this, you'll either have the urge to call DYFUS or the Patent Office: the other night we made the mistake of allowing our three year old to eat Cheezits on the couch; of course by the time he was through he had gotten Cheezit Brand crumbs all over his pajamas and the cushions, but I had one of those epiphanies that only happens in a Joyce novel: I ran to the kitchen, grabbed the dustbuster, ordered Ian to lie flat and then vacuumed not the couch, but vacuumed him . . . and he loved it!
1/28/2009
You know you're living the high life when you buy the shredded cheese instead of grating it yourself.
1/27/2009
I just read a conspiracy theory that claims that George Bush Jr. was actually a Manchurian Candidate type patsy placed in office by the DEMOCRATS, so that when the Democrats inevitably took office after him, they would have an easy time taking the moral high-ground, and then, of course, the country would be receptive to their policies-- think about how easy it is to galvanize the support and spirit of the country and the rest of the world when you get to abolish TORTURE during your first week in office . . . (actually I didn't read that conspiracy theory, I made it up).
This Makes Sense to a Three Year Old
It was Sunday afternoon, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why my three-year-old son kept asking, "What about the moving rocks? Can we see the moving rocks?" -- but my wife explained it: a few minutes earlier, I had asked him if he wanted to watch The Rolling Stones play some music . . . I was going to check out Scorsese's Shine a Light . . . but then I got occupied by another task, and I wish I had a brain scanner, so I could see what geologically psychedelic movie was playing in Ian's head while he waited for me to play this DVD of rocks that could rock.
A Better Ending For "I Am Legend"
The word on the street is accurate about I Am Legend-- it's scary and apocalyptic, but the ending is abrupt and kind of lame-- but (spoiler alert!) I have a much better ending for the film, and if you like, you can forget the old ending and imagine my new ending in place of it: instead of tossing the grenade, Will Smith allows the Dark Seekers to EAT him, and when they ingest his blood (which is naturally immune to the virus) it acts as a vaccine and cures immediately them, but it's very embarrassing when they turn from Dark Seekers back to regular citizens, because they look down and realize they've just feasted upon the flesh and blood of a prominent African American actor who once sang innocuous rap songs, so they all kind of shuffle away, mumbling things like "Let's not ever mention this again" and "Please don't tell my wife that I ate his nards" and once they wander out of the lab, then THEY are eaten by Dark Seekers, who are cured, and this goes on and on in a chain reaction until everyone is cured (and pretty much everyone is dead).
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.
1/23/2009
It was freezing in my house, and so I asked my four year old son if he was cold and suggested he put some socks on-- but I guess my job as a parent is close to complete, because he said to me, "Why are you asking me that? If I'm cold, I'll tell you I am cold . . . If I don't tell you anything, then I'm not cold."
1/22/2009
A first over the weekend, we made a trip to the Museum of Natural History without our kid-carrying backpacks-- Alex and Ian had to pull their own weight, although coming home, when we got to Penn Station our train was boarding, so we did carry them while we raced through the insanely crowded station, but it was worth it because we made the train and got to sit on top of a double-decker car; here are the three highlights of the trip 1) the butterfly conservatory . . . a particularly fleshy giant moth landed on Alex's face, scaring him, and he swatted it away and it fell to the ground, apparently dead, so Alex started crying, because he didn't mean to kill it, and the museum lady consoled him, but then the moth recovered and flew back into the shrubbery; 2) Alex and Ian riding the subway, they refused to sit and instead clung to the pole like midget commuters 3) at the IMAX we sat in front of the most annoying kid in the world, who never shut up, kept slamming into my seat, bopped Alex on the head, gave random saliva-filled raspberries, and could not be controlled by his weak-assed father and mother and generally gave me a stomach-ache and pissed me off, but this was a highlight because it reminded me how my kids are usually NOT annoying and made me thankful for that.
How Many Hours In Are You?
Finished the new Malcolm Gladwell book the other day-- and apparently, if someone asks you what you're reading and you reply in an enthusiastic voice, "the new Malcolm Gladwell book!" -- then you are a big asshole; it's called Outliers: The Story of Success and, as usual, it's well-written and will also change the way you think about a lot of things: you will learn why being born in January is important to Canadian hockey players, the magic of 10,000 hours (although some people didn't want to hear about this magic-- they wanted actual magic, we got into an argument in the English office because Gladwell claims the Beatles became the Beatles not because of some perfect chemistry, but because they put in 270 five to eight hour shows at a strip club in Hamburg) the ethnic theory of plane crashes, why Asians excel at math (not why you think) and a cool fact about mathematical ability, you can figure out how well someone will do on a math test by how many questions they answer on a 120 question poll that accompanies the test-- tolerance for tedious, time-consuming work and skill in math exactly correlate-- and, the worst thing of all, but perfectly logical when you look at the numbers, why, if we care about educating the poor, we should not have summer vacation.
1/20/2009
While I was making coffee Monday morning, I remembered the classic bit in Airplane! when Jim surprises his wife because he asks for a second cup of coffee, and she thinks (in voice over, of course) "Jim never asks for a second cup of coffee at home," and then later, after some turbulence, when Jim barfs into a bag, she thinks, "Jim never vomits at home"-- this was a great gag based on an old Folgers commercial, but now that the media is so fragmented (the loooooong tail), and you can't rely on the fact that everyone has seen the same commercial or watched the same television show or heard the same music or shared any particular media experience, does comedy have to be broader to avoid being obscure?
1/19/2009
There are brief moments in Redbelt where the movie is so Mamet it might be a parody of Mamet-- does he have to direct his actors to speak in that repetitious and robotic tone, or do they just know to do it because they are in a Mamet movie?-- but aside from that the movie is elegant and excellent: a chivalrous jujitsu instructor has to move through the usual well-plotted Mametian house of mirrors . . . and all the Mamet regulars are present, plus a few fun cameos (Randy Couture and Tim Allen, to name two).
1/18/2009
Since my students read two essays that were essentially about lying, I though it appropriate that I fabricate a quotation in their writing prompt; I told them they had to connect both essays to a line Samuel Jackson delivered in The Negotiator: "People don't lie because they need to, they lie because they want to" but, oddly, when I pointed out the quotation on the white board, one girl nodded her head like "yeah, I remember that" and even when I revealed to them that I made the line up, she insisted that it was in the movie-- and that she was going to bring in the scene (which is more flattering than what another student said when I revealed the truth: "I knew Samuel Jackson wouldn't say anything that stupid!)
1/17/2009
Just as when Proust's narrator (barely a narrator) eats the madeleine cake in Rembrance of Things Past, and it starts him down memory lane, when I ate a kiwi this morning it made me laugh: I was remembering a friend's story from college: he had just begun his freshman year and he was a member of ROTC, the Sergeant told him to make sure his boots were black for the first meeting, and to use some Kiwi on them . . . and so he went to the store and purchased several kiwis and attempted to polish his boots with them, smashing them into the boots until he made a juicy, citrus mess, which made th boots no blacker; unfortunately his girlfriend had to break the news to him that Kiwi was a brand of shoe polish.
1/16/2009
Alex, Ian and I were rocking out to Neil Young's "Down by the River" in the car, until the lyrics got too disturbing and Alex asked, "Why did he shoot his baby? Would someone shoot a baby? Is he a mean guy?" and then Ian chimed in with "that guy shot a baby, he killed a baby" and I had to explain to them that the term baby didn't have to refer to a very young human, it could also be used to describe a chick or a babe or piece or a slice or a hottie or a foxy mama-- but then I still had no good answer as to why he shot her, because the lyrics are pretty obtuse, but I did some research and his "baby" may have been heroin and so then shooting his baby is a metaphor for breaking his addiction . . . so it's like he shot the monkey on his back . . . but there's no way I'm explaining that to the kids . . . maybe I should stick with Laurie Berkner.
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