9/11/2009

Absence does make the heart grow fonder: you'd never suspect, seeing our happy family eat Chinese food, that just days before we were close to entering a violent no holds barred death match in our house . . . but all we needed was some time apart, once we all went our separate ways in the morning, to our separate classrooms, we found newfound love for one another when we got home.

One Pill Makes You Larger . . . and One Pill Makes You Italian

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small-- and according to Steve Silberman in his article in this month's Wired magazine-- it doesn't matter if the pills are made of sugar, as placebos are consistently vying with mood enhancing drugs in effectiveness, as long as they are administered by a caring physician, and even the color of the placebo has an effect: yellow sugar pills are the best anti-depressants, red pills are the best stimulant, green pills reduce anxiety, and blue pills make a good tranquilizer . . . unless you are Italian-- why?-- because Italians associate the color blue with vigor and athleticism, as their national soccer team is the Forza Azzurri.

9/9/2009

Something overheard in New Brunswick the other night: "we were so shit-housed, I can't believe we built the entire gazebo . . . and we started at like ten at night!"-- I note this for two reasons 1) I've never heard the words "shit-housed" and "gazebo" in the same sentence 2) gazebo is on my short list of least favorite words, along with "bonanza" and "jubilee."

Amish Market Etiquette

I was sternly reprimanded by a customer at the Amish Market last Saturday, and I probably deserved it . . . but you would have done the same thing, I swear; my wife and I were trying to browse Beiler Dairy Farm's selection of delicious fresh cheeses, but the boys were running amok and I was a little hung-over and not thinking totally straight, and there were all these little sample containers full of cubes of different kinds of cheese-- farm cheese, smoked Gouda, goat's milk cheese, and horseradish cheddar . . . and when I read the words "horseradish cheddar," naturally, without thinking, I reached out and grabbed a cube and popped it in my mouth, and then went back to tending to my kids, but an older guy behind me noticed my breach of etiquette and said, "That's what the toothpicks are for!" and grunted and stomped off, and after a bit of looking, Catherine and I found the toothpicks, intended for spearing cheese cubes, but they were NOT prominently displayed and Catherine said that the last time she was there she grabbed a couple cubes for the kids with her fingers, so I'm thinking the proponent of toothpicks over-reacted a bit-- it's not like I double dipped a chip . . . and anyway, if you're eating any kind of publicly displayed sample food, you're playing Russian roulette with your immune system and you should know that and accept it.

9/7/2009

Neill Blomkamp's new movie District 9 should be a TV show: like the new Battlestar Galactica, the movie uses sci-fi to explore politics, bureaucracy, racism, and the character of someone thrust into a leadership position (but Wikus van der Merwe is no Laura Roslyn, he's pretty much a chipper bumbling idiot) and the first forty-five minutes are awesome-- tense, satirical, and like City of God in their gritty depiction of a shanty town, but then the movie has to end, and it becomes a Hollywood action flick . . . but if it were a TV show, instead of a blockbuster movie, then they could have kept going in the same vein, instead of blowing up things for an hour . . . but what can you do-- except write, produce, and direct your own sci-fi movie?--and it is certainly worth seeing so I give it seven cans of cat food out of a possible nine.

9/6/2009

Another reason not to pay 100 bucks for a Broadway show: these performers are so polished it's not really live, there's little to no chance of improvisation or sloppiness or a major screw-up . . . in fact, it's closer to watching a video, except without all the comforts of home; would you see a band in concert if they sounded exactly like the album?

This Land is My Land, This Land is Methland

So I started this great book by Nick Reding, Methland: the Death and Life of an American Small Town, right? and it was so gripping that I wanted to just read and read and read, so I went and saw my man and then, it was like I couldn't stop reading, like I was a super-reading machine, like I knew the end of the sentence before I started, like a train, like a rolling stone, like a greased up hog on a luge coated with Vaseline, because the story was so compelling, just wild, the ma and pa labs, the single batchers, the superlabs, the Mexican DTO's, the ephedrine laws, the pseudoephedrine chemistry, the ins and outs of the dealers and the traffickers and the narcs and the informants, it was just great, but then it got a little complicated, and I started to slow down, lose focus, get a little edgy, you know? because it was convoluted . . . the political take on big agriculture, Monsanto and Cargill, the demise of family farms, the socio-cultural underpinnings of doing a drug that essentially makes you feel so good that you WANT to work, whether it's meatpacking or agriculture, and the book, there was something wrong with the pages, too much friction maybe, because when I turned the page it was so LOUD, like talons on a chalkboard, like a dentist's water-pick, like a billion gnats in a megaphone and I couldn't read well anymore and I kept seeing severed heads out of the corner of my eye and then, right when I started to understand the drug lobbyists' complicity in the epidemic, I saw a black helicopter hovering above my house . . . they knew I was getting to the truth and they were ready to pounce on me, so I got under my bed and read with my flashlight and finally, finally, I turned that last page and there were no more pages, just a crazy looking picture of the author, one of those pictures where it looks like he's looking at you no matter where you turn, like that Uncle Sam Poster, and that's when I knew I was done . . . and I give the book one trillion canisters of anhydrous ammonia out of one billion gallons of Coleman lantern fluid.

9/4/2009

Alex transmogrified the Sister Sledge chorus "We are family" into a ditty about the long-pig . . . "Eat your family."

Methland

If the Tom Arnold story isn't for you, then perhaps you'd prefer his sister Lori's rise and fall . . . I just learned about her in Nick Reding's new book, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town-- apparently she went from high school drop-out to the nation's most successful meth dealer in several years, buying from enormous amounts of the drug from the Mexican mafia and then building her own super-lab, and laundering her profits with a bar, a car dealership, and fifty-two race horses (plus horse farm, grooms, jockeys, etc.-- hiding drugs in a horse trailer is a great way to smuggle) before it all fell apart and she went to prison.

9/2/2009

For two weeks at Sea Isle City, we watched the same odd scene enacted over and over in front of the life guard stand: the same burly blond wild man would emerge from the ocean, perhaps by kayak, perhaps not, run towards the stand and do his signature move, a forward roll/flip (no mean feat for a guy this size) and then he would talk for a moment or two to the cute female lifeguards, but soon enough he would erupt into a dance/karate routine, complete with moves running from the crane to the sprinkler to the spin and hair flick-- and I have to remind you that this is a big guy, shaggy haired and burly-- and he would continue the dance routine for a number of minutes, one time even dancing his way backwards into the ocean until he disappeared . . . and our kids thinks he lives in the ocean (Poseidon's retarded son?) but we can't figure what his story is, but it has been an added amusing bonus for vacation, and I'll miss him if we're at a different beach next year.

9/1/2009

After a long day of running, skim-boarding, and beach soccer, I made the mistake of complaining about my bad ankle in front of my wife; she showed no sympathy, played the tiny violin, and wondered sarcastically what she should reply to my complaint . . . maybe something like, "I'm so sorry your ankle hurts, do you want me to rub it for you? You're so brave to continue vacationing while injured" but she was punished for her insouciance, the next day at "Boot Camp" on the beach she sprained her ankle, badly enough that the trainer drove her back to our beach house and made her keep her foot in a bucket of ice water until she nearly screamed and we had to take a trip to the medical clinic in Avalon for an x-ray . . . and though we contemplated gettin one of those giant bubble wheeled wheel chairs to get her down to the beach, instead I gave her a piggy back ride, which was fun on the first three trips, but after the pavement got hot and I had a few beers, it might have been ill advised.

Spelling Tarantino Is Hard Enough

In his new movie, Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino extends the Indiana Jones quip in The Last Crusade (Nazis . . . I hate these guys) into a tense, rich, satirical, funny, gory, violent and extremely entertaining two and a half hours-- the movie has nothing to do with WWII, it is a thinly disguised Western, with the Jews as John Wayne and the Nazis as Liberty Valence . . . and though the best performance comes from Colonel Landa, The Jew Hunter-- polyglot Austrian actor Christoph Waltz-- Brad Pitt delivers the best line, when he's told, "You'll be shot for that!" and he replies: "No . . . more like chewed out . . .and I've been chewed out before."

Recommended Eating

While we were on the beach, Catherine gave me the rest of her buffalo chicken sandwich and I ate it while standing in the ocean; I highly recommend this.

Bruce Springsteen Was Born To Drive, The Tarahumara Were Born To Run

Part six: so I'm telling my wife about all the new-found knowledge I've learned while reading Born to Run, and I'm especially amped because I've been training barefoot for a few months now (mainly on the basketball court at the gym) and my experience coincides with Christopher McDougall's-- my feet feel better-- and so instead of talking about the book, I'm making grand proclamations about how I'm not going to buy running shoes any longer and I don't really want our children to wear sneakers because I've been observing them while we play soccer on the grass at the pool-- which we do barefoot, of course-- and their running mechanics look very natural and although I think I am making some sort of logical sense, in retrospect, I now realize that what my wife is hearing is: let's send our kids to school without shoes! humans should never wear shoes! humans that wear shoes are stupid! and I'm sort of reinforcing this by saying things like, "Well, you didn't read the book so you can't argue about it, all you can do is listen to me" which is not only an asinine statement, but it is also very poorly phrased (the theme!) and so we had a "discussion" on how I was presenting my ideas and then I apologized and I tried to objectively explain the ideas in the book  and I also told her that I hadn't finished it yet, which makes me think I'm insane because I was making all these grand statements and I hadn't even read the end of the story . . . but now I have, and I highly recommend the book and I'm about to go for a run over to the track, where I will ditch my shoes and see how I fare.

8/30/2009

Alex swam the width of the pool a few days ago in the four foot section (which is over his head) and he used the dog paddle to breathe and the breast stroke to propel himself-- it's as close to drowning as swimming can possibly be, his main problem is lack of body fat . . . if he's not moving forward or paddling furiously, he sinks like a stone; in other news, Alex can ride a two wheeled bike fairly proficiently . . . I have to RUN to keep up with him in the park-- I'm thinking by next summer the kids are going to be on their own in the water and on the land.

8/28/2009

Part five: Born to Run espouses a less is more approach to running footwear, and makes some well researched and valid claims that bulky expensive running shoes lead to more injuries than running with cheap flimsy shoes or with no shoes at all . . . I'm not going to get into it, if you're a runner you should read it, the theme of this serial edition of The Sentence of Dave is: I need to phrase things better.

I Need to Work on How I Phrase Things (Part 4)

Example number four: after I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, I had a meltdown about all the products we were using with corn 2 in them; I freaked my wife out and made her life even more difficult and made her doubt the safety of much of the food we were giving our children . . . and I must admit, I probably went a little overboard . . . especially since there's no way we could feed the entire bloated population of the earth without corn 2 and factory farming, nor can we even afford to switch our entire diet to organic and local stuff, and still have money for the important things in life, like guitars and electronic gadgets.

Live Update from the Beach

Sorry to break the flow of the serial story, but here's the quick report on the Lecompt Show at the Springfield Inn: 1) we got to hang out with him for a while before the show, he talked about the Phillies and their unassisted triple play and how when they play in Avalon they have to lighten up their set and how he plowed into someone while using his cell-phone, among other things (in fact he talked so long we wanted him to stop and get up and play, the drummer was waiting) and Dom said he sounded "slow" while Rob said he "sounded like a million other musicians" 2) Lecompt's brother was in town from L.A.-- he is a studio drummer there and he looks to be about fifty five, so Lecompt's claim that he played with Miles Davis might be true, and he played an insane version of "Wipeout" and the regular drummer joined in-- it was like nothing I've ever heard 3) another special guest took the stage (among many, a local cop sang "War Pigs" and some chick sang "Bobby McGee") and the band actually played "Freebird," and when the solo started the special guest, who we later learned played in Lecompt's band Tangiers in the 90's, played the solo in perfect lock-step with the normal lead man . . . and the band did their usual and played until 2:30 AM, and they are playing again Friday night-- so perhaps one more time before school starts?

8/26/2009

Part three: But I have a wife, and she has to live with me after I read a new book.

8/25/2009

Part Two: Sometimes when I read a book, I get really excited and forget there was ever a time before I had read that book, and want to implement all the ideas in the book immediately.