1/31/10

This is a very subjective review, but the new Neon Indian album "Psychic Chasms" seems to be tailored exactly for my brain-- it's a collection of short, psychedelic heavily filtered pop-like compositions that I can't stop listening to, it's like Ween doing even better drugs than Ween has access to, it's like the band channeled my thoughts and set them to music . . . so I don't know if this review is helpful, but The Week gave the album four stars and those people over here agree, so it's not like I'm crazy or something.

Some Cars

More Malcolm Gladwell tidbits from What the Dog Saw: in most cities, five percent of the cars produce 55% of the carbon monoxide pollution; most cars, especially newer models, run quite clean, but "kit" cars, older cars, and dirty engines can produce carbon monoxide emissions which are one to two HUNDRED times more than standard-- so the pollution problem isn't so much about everyone driving, it's about a small group of people driving a small group of annoyingly filthy cars.

1/29/10

According to a Malcolm Gladwell in his new anthology What the Dog Saw (and also according to the cities of Denver and St. Louis) it is easier to cure homelessness than to manage it; in other words, giving the most incorrigibly recalcitrant homeless people their own apartments-- for free-- and providing one counselor per ten homeless people to check up on them and aid them in gaining a foothold in society is far cheaper than paying the medical bills they generate because of frequent ambulance rides, detox, dialysis, pneumonia, and head injuries (they are constantly being brought in to the emergency room, where they are given treatment despite their inability to pay . . . thus how Reno's Million Dollar Murray earned his nickname) but this solution often meets with outrage from the general populus, despite its cost effectiveness, because it just doesn't seem fair that someone might work three jobs in order to make ends meet yet someone who contributes nothing to society gets a free ride . . . but the store owners in Denver were quite happy when the crew of chronic inebriates (whose drink of choice was mouthwash) were no longer a permanent fixture on Sixteenth Street.

1/28/10

I hate our new coffeemaker, though it looks much nicer than our old coffee maker-- which was a cheap piece of junk, and it had no built -in grinder, so we used a little grinder, which wasn't very loud; this new machine is fancier, and it has a built-in grinder, but the problem with this is that the built in grinder gets wet from condensation every time you make coffee, so you really need to clean it far more often than the old combination, and it sounds like an airplane taking off . . . so in essence, our upgrade was a downgrade.

1/27/10

Good thing there were witnesses: after eating most of my apple last Friday, I announced to Stacy and Rachel (that's right, go ahead and ask them; they will confirm it!) that i was going to throw the core over my head, without even looking first, and it would drop into the wastebasket, which was probable twelve feet behind me (but guarded by the mini-fridge and the table with all the food prep stuff) and Rachel said, "You'll splatter it over everything," but she was so wrong, because I dunked it.

1/26/10

If you want to watch something weird and artsy, with shades of Welcome to the Dollhouse (a world where children are more adult than the adults that "care" for them) then check out Me and You and Everyone We Know: Miranda July (who actually is a performance artist) and John Hawkes are both incredibly difficult not to watch-- they are visually compelling as well as bizarre, and there a few priceless scenes that are nothing like anything you've seen . . . I give it 6000 punctuation marks out of a total of 8000.

1/25/10

I know it's crass, but sometimes when I'm about to complain about something trivial, I think to myself: what do you have to complain about? at least you don't live in Haiti! and then I move on with my life, suddenly feeling fortunate . . . but I wonder, where do Haitians think of when they want to feel fortunate . . . stop complaining, at least you don't live in a box on the surface of the sun?

Seamen Nailing Things

You know it's going to be a good history book when you read a sentence like this: 

"Among the able seamen, the initial going rate was one ship's nail for one ordinary fuck, but hyper-inflation soon set in"

and this sentence was written by author Richard Holmes, while describing Lieutenant James Cook's expedition to Tahiti in his book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

1/23/10

In the Loop is a political satire with enough profanity rival David Mamet's Glengarry Glenross and enough droll comedy to rival the original version of The Office; it satirizes two governments (Britain and America) in the midst of the most monumental decision making process-- the the decision of whether or not to go to war; the plot is Byzantine and the language dense and allusion filled (Catherine stopped watching because she said it didn't seem like they were speaking English) but when the Prime Minister's angry Scottish spin master refers to opera as "subsidized foreign fucking vowels" and threatens to "hole punch" someone in the face, it really doesn't matter if you know what 's going on: I give it 11,000 troops out of 12,000.

1/22/10

I was rushing to finish "making water" because the bell had rung and I needed to get to class, and in my rush, I somehow flung my paperback copy of Much Ado About Nothing into the urinal, but it didn't get particularly soaked with urine, and so-- thinking of the title of the play-- I pulled it out, wiped it on my pants, and went to class, and my students were none the wiser.

Update!

Click here for the news story about what I witnessed yesterday-- see the sentence below-- the guy who I watched jump off the edge of the bridge over the Turnpike in order to elude the police broke both his legs!

1/21/10

While driving home from Monroe yesterday after a Craigslist purchase of a desk for Alex (which filled the back of my Jeep because there was also a hutch, which I balanced on top of the desk) I came one car away from being smashed: it was just before the Hilton towers on Route 18, where the road divides, and a white four door car raced by me on the right, rolled onto two wheels, spun out to the left, parallel to the oncoming traffic, smacked the side of a pick-up and then crashed into the divider . . . and by the time I stopped my car and took a breath, the lunatic driver extricated himself from the airbag, leaped from car, ran back across Route 18 and jumped off the edge of the bridge to whatever lay below, and, in the meantime, a police car pulled beside me on the right and a cop jumped out and pursued the insane driver/bridge leaper, and the guy who was clipped by him in the pick-up also pursued him, but when they reached the edge of the bridge they just stood there and looked down, so I'm assuming it must have been a steep, rocky, impenetrable drop that only someone who was wanted by the law would chance; I took the scene in for a moment and then slowly rolled past, feeling sorry for the people farther behind, who would be stuck on the exitless stretch of 18 for the long time it would take to sort out the mess.

1/19/10

We have the screen saver on our new iMac hooked into iPhoto, so it shows random pictures throughout the day, which is cool, except when it selects shots I took of our old refrigerator for Craigslist.

It's Cool, Man

Alex had the misfortune of having two accidents at school in one day: 1) he misjudged the consistency of his flatulence 2) he soaked himself with his own urine . . . and I was able to keep my cool about this-- because, honestly, what can he do?-- and so I tried the tact of reminding him that all the other kids in his class saw this, and I tried to make him see the embarrassment of having to change into his "emergency clothes," but apparently, these days, kindergarteners are pretty understanding when it comes to bathroom accidents, because Alex reported that, "no one laughed at me at all, it happens to everybody."

1/17/10

Something I am proud of: in twenty two years of driving, I have never run out of gas (I mention this because my wife told me a teacher at her school ran out of gas the other day . . . how does this happen in central New Jersey, where there is a gas station every twenty five feet or so?)

1/16/10

In Benjamin Phelan's essay "How We Evolve" (another from the collection The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2009) he explains how scientists have changed their view about human evolution: once it was thought that we were at the end of the line, that because of medicine, longevity, the end of polygamy, equal rights, and ample opportunity to mate, human evolution had all but stopped, but now that DNA analysis can trace alleles in populations ancient and modern, scientists have found that natural selection is still alive and dynamic in human populations . . . and one of the most studied mutations is that of lactose tolerance, which was non-existent in 5000 year old German skeletons, at 30% rate 3000 years ago, and nearly (but not quite, thus the need for Lactaid!) ubiquitous now . . . so the real question is, what will we evolve into and how will that creature regard us?

1/15/10

At some point during every successful rock band's existence, they underwent a radical change, a phase change, and it must have been wild and it must have led to the downfall of a number of rock stars; I am talking about the night where the band switched from setting up their own gear-- assembling the drums and cymbals, tuning guitars and the PA and effects boxes and mixing boards and cords and changing strings and generally sound checking the rig-- to allowing their newly hired roadies to set everything up . . . this must be when bands realize they've "made it," when they're sitting around backstage while other people do the worst part of the musical performance; why might this be the beginning of the end for many rock stars . . . more time to do heroin.

1/14/10

If you miss old trippy Ween, check out Animal Collective's album Merriweather Post Pavilion-- it sounds like the album cover (above).

1/13/10

I feel sorry for businessmen because there's no way they can live up to the standards George Clooney sets for them: in the looks, coolness, and vocal delivery department there is no one else who better portrays the company man (and I'm glad he hasn't made it a habit to play high school teachers . . . I've only got to compete with Gabe Kaplan and Howard Hesseman) and he pulls it off again in Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, which has enough laughs to temper a grim topic; Clooney is an expert at curtailing redundancies in human resource departments . . . he travels around the country and fires people; the film is a cautionary tale and it features the reactions of real people interspersed among the actors, which is powerful in itself; the moral of the tale is both existential and inspirational (and partly delivered by Sam Elliott in a great cameo) and so I give it 8 million miles out of a possible 10 million.

1/12/10

Intelligence is immunity, stupidity a contagion.