7/13/10 A Literary Analogy

I Read Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night while I was on vacation and I liked it much better than The Great Gatsby, and the best way to explain this is an analogy:  The Great Gatsby is like Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men: it is artistic and archetypal and thematic and and lean and memorable and literary . . . Tender is the Night is like Cannery Row: it is ragged and specific and autobiographical in spots and rambling and not as focused-- chronologically or thematically-- and looser and more fun . . . Fitzgerald has time to write lines like "she crossed and recrossed her knees frequently in the manner of tall restless virgins" and though The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men will forever be taught in school because they are symbolic and unforgettable, Tender is the Night and Cannery Row are better books, denser and more engaging and easier to get lost in.

I'm Back! And Dumber Than Ever!

I inadvertently made my wife quit caffeine cold turkey on our vacation last week, although she did not know she was quitting . . . here is how it happened: I always get up early and so on vacation I'm in charge of figuring out the foreign coffee maker and making the coffee-- and aside from one small flood-- I was successful, but I didn't realize the green bag of coffee was decaf (for my father, at home we don't have any decaf coffee so I can't make this mistake) and it took Catherine three days of migraine head-aches to figure out my error . . . but in the end I think she'll thank me, because now she knows if she needs to quit, she can do it . . . aside from the head-aches (and if you want a full analysis of our vacation, I've written my first installment of The Battle of the Beaches: The Jersey Shore vs. Cape Cod over on Gheorghe: The Blog).

7/11/10

My brother found it extremely amusing that my father, slightly overwhelmed by the expansive menu at Aroma (a delicious Thai restaurant) asked the waiter this question about the Grilled Duck: "The Grilled Duck?  Is that duck . . . grilled?"

7/10/10

Fooled you again . . . I'm sure I didn't step foot inside the Chatham Library all vacation . . . I'm probably collecting shells with my kids right now on an idyllic beach, drunk, surrounded by bikini clad Swedish volleyball players; I wrote all the sentences ahead of time . . . sorry for my behavior, but tomorrow fresh sentences will begin again.

7/9/10

Just kidding about yesterday's sentence . . . I wrote it at the Chatham Library, a lovely red brick pile set back from main street and framed by huge old oak trees; it is such a charming old building that the internet terminals seem incongruous inside, anachronistic, as if the future invaded the past . . . and the dusty shelves of old books and the ancient maps of the Nantucket Sound on the walls make me yearn for a past time, when information had a physical component, when you had to riffle the pages of a dusty book to learn what you needed, or unroll a map, or pull a newspaper from a wooden spool, or search among cards in a monolithic wooden cabinet . . . but those days are gone, of course, and how long will libraries like this one be necessary?

7/8/10

I am on vacation in Cape Cod right now, and I have no access to a computer . . . so I am writing this sentence with my mind-- I am letting my thoughts flow in binary code and telepathically transmitting them to the internet (along with my Google password . . . trivia question: why is George Costanza's ATM password Bosco?) and the words are appearing right in front of your eyes, or maybe, if things are going according to my plan, you aren't even looking at a screen right now . . . maybe my thoughts are transmitting straight into your brain, and you just think you are looking at a computer monitor or your Blackberry or iPad or iPhone or other tiny device, but you're really not looking at anything at all, and if this is the case, then very very soon, I will be taking over the world, and, luckily, you will be in my monkey-sphere of power and influence, because you are a fan of Sentence of Dave, and so, for you, everything is going to be just fine.

A Sentence Where The Title of the Sentence is Longer than the Sentence Itself (But Not as Long a Title as a "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening")

Last night, I dreamed I came face to face with a mountain lion.

7/6/10

It's sad when you try to take your children to your childhood bait and tackle shop, and in its place you find a new business called NJ Bail Bonds . . . but it does remind me of when I learned what a bail bond is, which is the exact same time everyone my age learned what a bail bond is: right after watching The Bad News Bears when you asked your parents-- what is Chico's Bail Bonds?

7/5/10 The World Cup Causes Me Trouble: A One Sentence Memoir

Though I had an extremely long day of World Cup Imbibing (10 AM to Midnight) the day before Ian's kiddie birthday party, I thought I recovered nicely-- I got up early from Stacey and Ed's place in South Amboy and drove Stacey's stick shift car (not my forte) to Helmetta so I could get my car, and I was still home before 7 AM, and I immediately starting doing whatever my wife asked me to do-- I picked up the cake and balloons and juice boxes and other ingredients, I cleaned the kiddie pool, I straightened the back yard, and I attempted to fill water balloons-- but by the time the party rolled around I was dragging a bit, and I guess I wasn't as involved as I should have been, and mainly I talked to my friend Dom about a new book he was reading that sounded interesting (Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced the Working People) but any time Catherine asked for help I helped her and then later in the day when we were at the pool I jokingly mentioned to a friend that I had "failed" at Ian's kiddie party and she said, "Let me guess what happened . . . one of the parents there was a friend of yours that you hadn't talked to in a while and instead of helping your wife, who was running around like a madwoman, you sat and talked to your friend and had to be reminded by your wife to help out," and I said, "That's remarkably accurate, how did you know?" and she said, "Because my husband did the same thing and I said to him, 'Look asshole, if you want to talk to your fucking friend, then you call him up like an adult and you go meet him in a god-damned bar like a grown-up but right now you're going to help me with this party'" and I should mention that this is a friend who rarely uses profanity.

7/4/10

So we put our digital camera on a tripod the other day and made a stop motion Lego movie . . . the plot was very simple:  two cars drove at each other and then crashed, resulting in a pile of Legos, but we were able to screw up every aspect of the film;  there are fingers in several shots, it's choppy, the crash looks awful, the lighting switches because we used the flash on some pictures and not on others, and we were too far away for it to look very good . . . so when you go on  YouTube and watch a decent Lego movie, understand that it took A LOT of skill.

7/3/10

It is 8:30 AM and the boys and I are returning from the park, and Alex is talking a mile a minute about his remote controlled car, and Ian is trailing behind us, saying: "You know what?  You know what?  You know what?" in his high-pitched squawk, and Alex finally takes a breath, so I say to Ian: "What?" and he says, "Boats can explode."

7/2/10

Freedom is when your wife tells you exactly what to do.

A Really LONG Sentence About a Really BIG SHORT

I just finished the new Michael Lewis book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, and I've probably got a three day window to explain what a "synthetic sub-prime mortgage bond-backed C.D.O." is-- but I guarantee no one will ask me this (thus the purpose of the blog) and I can also explain tranches (both senior and mezzanine) and credit default swaps and the corruption in the AAA ratings of these bonds and lots of other good stuff . . . I had to read many paragraphs two or three times, but Lewis intersperses financial analysis with the story of a group of investors that were "in the know" and it's these characters that propel the plot of the book: caustic and gritty insider Steve Eisman-- who was on a mission to get back at all the people who foisted the terrible no-doc sub-prime mortgages on the working poor--and the one eyed medical doctor with Asperger's, Dr. Steve Burry, who became obsessed with sub-prime mortgage bonds and CDO's and actually read the prospectuses and realized that the whole trillion dollar house of cards was bound to collapse, even if the housing market didn't fall, even if it just stopped rising as quickly as it did in the years past, and then there's the "garage band" hedge fund started by Jamie Mai and Charles Hedley to short the housing bond market, and that helps explain just how difficult it is for regular people to invest in the same markets that the big brokerages firms are controlling; I've read a few good books on this theme, including House of Cards and The Black Swan (and also Michael Lewis's last collection of essays Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity) but this new book really explains the exponential nature of this dilemma . . . we all know some wacky mortgages were issued (and some with good intentions, the initial reason for a greater variety of mortgage types was to allow people with weaker credit to purchase homes, in the hopes that they would then be able to save money in the form of real estate) and I think everyone knows now that the bonds that were based on slices of these mortgages failed, but Lewis really gets into how CDO's multiplied these loans exponentially into more and more nested products which only contained more of themselves, and how the ratings agencies saw this as "diversification" even though many of these funds contained pieces of each other and even though they were ALL based on the price of housing (unlike earlier derivatives, which were based on a wide variety of weird loans: credit cards, airplane leases, etc.) and he explained just how opaque this market was, and how "inside" and how difficult it was to even obtain the shorts (the credit default swaps) on these products, and how even after housing prices started to fall and everyone was defaulting on their mortgages, the insurance on these CDO's still didn't sky-rocket in price because the funds were being propped up even though the reality beneath them was caving in-- and it makes you feel really out of the loop as a regular person, even rich people didn't have access to these markets (but we all had access to the information!) and the ending is sad in a way, because everyone involved in the crash walked away with money, even the investors who went long with the sub-prime loans, everyone got paid and the government bailed out the banks and brokerages (except Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers) and though we, the people, couldn't get in on the party, we will pay for the clean-up (at least with the oil spill, though we are paying for the clean-up, we've been in on the party, driving around like lunatics all our life).

Portugal vs. Spain: A Riotously Good Time in Newark

A single sentence can't do our soccer pilgrimage to Newark justice,  so head over to Gheorghe:The Blog to read my photo essay about our trip:  I promise you drama, tension, a celebrity sighting, crack, riots, technology, and a flaming sausage.

6/29/10

Though I doubted their skinny bodies could remain buoyant for a full length of the Rutgers pool, both my boys proved me wrong and passed their deep water tests last week-- so now they have complete freedom in the pool and are allowed to jump off the diving board-- which Ian did seventy or eighty times in a row, including a few "360's" . . . a term which he learned from another boy while in line, so it's going to be a more pleasant summer than the last one, when the boys could swim, but not so well, so they always looked like they were on the verge of drowning, which makes it really hard to look away from them and at the page of whatever book you are reading (and I have banned them from the kiddie pool, which they like to fool around in when they get cold in the big pool, because they are now big enough to be considered the annoying kids who the parents of actual toddlers hate because they fear for their toddlers lives when the big kids invade the kiddie pool, and this is nice as well, because now I don't have to look for them in two bodies of water, only one).

Hose of Plenty

It has been pointed out that perhaps Americans have TOO much of everything; that there is such a thing as too much "plenty" in the "land of plenty," and that all this choice and plenty doesn't necessarily lead to happiness-- we never make the top ten in any of the "happiest countries" surveys, though impoverished places like Guatemala and Nigeria are always high on the list, and even Mexico-- while in the midst of a violent drug cartel war-- was ranked as the second happiest place in the world in a University of Michigan study-- and nowhere is this paradox of plenty leading to misery more evident than on the nozzle of my garden hose, as there are NINE settings, count them: 1) fan 2) cone 3) shower 4) center 5) jet 6) mist 7) soaker 8) flat 9) angle . . . and no matter which one I use my shorts always get soaked and there is no difference between angle and cone and fan . . . and "soaker" should just be called "leaking" and I am sure that in El Salvador (another happy country) they just put their thumb over the end of the hose to control the spray.

Likeable But Forgettable

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is cute and funny, and the "graphic nudity" at the start and finish of the movie-- that's the explanation next to the R rating-- made me laugh and made sense (which is rare for graphic nudity) but the film never really pushes the premise (that it's hard to get over the love of your life when you are vacationing at the same resort as her, and she's there with an ultra-cool rock star . . . and you are there all alone) and I am afraid-- though I love Judd Apatow and crew-- that Forgetting Sarah Marshall will be rather easy to forget.

Rock Which Town? And When?

I was listening a rockabilly program on Princeton college radio (WPRB) and the DJ was playing classic stuff by Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran and Bill Haley, but then he played "Rock This Town" by The Stray Cats-- which is in some ways indiscernible from the other, older music-- though it is from 1982 . . . and my post-modern dilemma is this:  "Rock This Town," which I consider somehow disingenuous and satirical because it is from my youth, a period of punk-rock, synth-pop, and Men Without Hats-- and though The Stray Cats made great music, there was an element of parody in their dress, their musical style and their lyrics . . . but they sounded like they were from the '50's, and now the song is so old (and regarded as one of the 500 most important songs of all time by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) that it has become classic, so "classic" that the DJ didn't point out the difference between "Rock this Town" and the other "authentic" songs he was playing, and I know this shouldn't bother me and maybe it's because it makes me feel old, that I can make the distinction between an eighties band and real rockabilly and it's so far in the past that no one else seems to know or care . . . but it is scary that the eighties are the same amount of years from the fifties as they are from the present.

Keeping It Yogi

Here's a real quotation said by a real administrator at our end of the year meeting, I think it does Yogi Berra proud: In order for things to happen, a lot of things have to get done (and this is so much better than my bogus Yogi Berra quotation but not nearly as good as my sincere apology for my phony Yogi Berra quotation).

Free Thesis

This sentence might end up being an essay over at Gheorghe: The Blog some day, but for now it is just a thesis that anyone is free to steal: sports have "sweet spots" of entertainment and aesthetic value, and once the players get too big or too skilled, it's no longer much fun to watch-- college basketball is excellent viewing, there's lots of strategy and different ways to move the ball around and manufacture points, but once you get to the NBA, the best is method is the most boring one-- it's not worth passing too much when your athletes are so big and so quick and so strong and can shoot from so far away . . . women's tennis is fun to watch because of the extended rallies but men's tennis is a bore because the points are over so quickly-- and I appreciate the fact that they can serve 140 million miles an hour, it's just not fun to watch . . . high school football isn't so great, college is good, and the pros are fantastic because it's the highest level of warfare possible . . . major league baseball is the only level even tolerable for most people . . . and nothing is more aesthetically pleasing than the World Cup . . . especially when the US team makes you really, really, really earn your entertainment (and nothing was more absurd than seven grown men and one grown woman jumping up and down screaming and high-fiving over the Donovan goal yesterday . . . it might actually require slightly more energy to watch the US team play than it does to actually play on the US team).