I Can Neither Read Nor Cook
I learned something about couscous the other day: I was trying to time dinner so that everything was ready exactly when my wife and kids got back from swim lessons, and so I followed the instructions on the couscous box and prepped the mixture ahead of time so that it would be ready to cook at a moment's notice . . . I mixed the flavor packet and the couscous and 1 1/4 cups of water and left that on the stove while I chopped up stuff for salad and then when I went to boil the water, I found that the couscous had absorbed soaked it all up, though the stove wasn't on, and when Catherine got home I told her what I had discovered: that you need to cook couscous right away or it absorbs all the cold water, and she said, "It says to add the couscous to boiling water," and I disagreed, but we checked the box and she was right . . . I must have read the instructions wrong, which is weird because I'm an English teacher.
The Damned United is Damned Good
The movie The Damned United, which portrays Brian Clough-- England's most celebrated, enigmatic, abrasive and outspoken soccer coach-- is probably much more fun to watch as a clueless American . . . I have heard Clough's name mentioned by my British friends, but I didn't know his story: his great and bitter rivalry with Don Revie; his ups and downs with the brains of the operation, Peter Taylor; and the saga of his coaching career . . . the film also contains excellent archival soccer footage and lots of kitsch from the late sixties and seventies: cars, uniforms, wall-paper and style: ten footballers out of a perfect eleven.
I Use Probability to Solve A Marital Mystery
Once again, I discovered my gym bag in the closet upside-down, and I was not the one who did this-- because I never put my gym-bag away, nor do I ever zip it shut-- but my wife often throws it into the closet and if it lands upside-down, then my gym equipment falls out of the bag: my goggles and socks and deodorant, etc.-- and though I noted this with frustration for years, it finally dawned on me . . . perhaps my wife was throwing the gym bag into the closet upside-down because she hated the fact that I always left it out, unzipped, with it's bowels exposed . . . because if she was just tossing it into the closet without any passive-aggressive anger, then 50% of the time it would land right-side up and 50% of the time it would land upside-down, but the gym bag ALWAYS seemed to land upside-down and, as I said, this had been happening for years so I had a decent sample size to evaluate, so I approached my wife about this and after a moment of denial she admitted that perhaps it did end up upside-down more than probability might dictate and that perhaps she was angry about my habit of leaving it out all the time, and so I told her I would try to put it away, and she promised not to throw it into the closet upside-down and the moral is: the key to a good marriage is clear communication and a grasp of basic probability.
I Am A Winner (And I Didn't Even Know It)
Each year San Jose State University sponsors the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, where entrants are challenged to write the worst beginning sentence to a novel . . . and I usually get my Creative Writing students to enter and I send a sentence of two myself, and I last week Googled myself (you've got to Google yourself every once in a while, right?) and, although I was never informed of this great honor, I found one of my entries in the Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions but if you don't want to read through them all-- though I recommend this because they are funny-- I have copied it here for your convenience: As always, that morning he awoke to the melodious sound of a stream of water cascading into a still pool, punctuated by several ominous silences-- and he could judge, by the length of the silences and the volume of the cascade, just how much of his three-year-old son's urine he would have to wade through to get to the sink.
Louie
Though the Seinfeld gang led pathetic and shallow lives, they could always turn to each other for camaraderie-- even at the end in their jail cell-- and Larry David's misadventures in Curb Your Enthusiasm are even more awkward and painful, but at the end of the day, Larry still has Cheryl and Jeff by his side (until Cheryl leaves him) but in Louis C.K.'s hysterically funny and sincerely sad and depressing FX comedy Louie, Louie has no one except his young daughters-- and they tend to add to his anxiety rather than assuage it-- and aside from them, there are no other recurring characters that appear in every episode . . . Louie faces his depression alone, whether it be during the opening theme when he joylessly inhales a slice of pizza; or on stage doing his stand-up, which seems to be the only happy time in his life; or on his various adventures in New York . . . and he is doing the show on the cheap, so FX has given him carte blanche to do what he wants, so the show goes from clever to bawdy to surreal, often in one twenty minute episode: ten gallons of ice cream out of ten.
My Son Wisely Keeps His Mouth Shut
My six year old son Alex expressed his skepticism over the clairvoyance of Punxsutawny Phil, and he also expressed his disdain for his first grade classmates who believed in Phil's meteorological predictions, but he told me that he didn't say anything derogatory to those classmates about their irrational beliefs . . . and I told him that was a wise decision.
My Lips Save the Day . . . Now Who Will Be My Valentine?
Sunday morning, while playing indoor soccer, I hit a slick patch on the gym floor and my feet slid backwards and into the air, and it happened so quickly that I didn't have time to brace my fall, and so I fell on my lips, which really hurt . . . but good thing I have such juicy and luscious lips or I might have suffered a broken tooth.
My Use of Mathematics Makes A Young Lady Weep
In my composition class, one of the options for the classification and division essay is an assignment I stole from Bess Ward, a science professor at Princeton (I found this in a book by Natalie Angier called The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Basics of Science) and her idea is to take something you worry about and do a risk-assessment on it . . . for example, you eat two cans of tuna a week and you want to figure out if this is actually dangerous so you do the math-- you figure out how much mercury is in each can and you multiply this by what you eat and check the EPA web-site and see if you are consuming a dangerous amount of mercury . . . so first I ask the students to list specific things they worry about . . . and they list things such as: shark attack, tanning too much, not getting into college, dying alone, being eaten by spiders, smoking etc.-- and then I have them classify them into three categories-- Innocuous, Worth Consternation, and Red Alert!-- and then I have them switch so someone can constructively criticize their logic . . . and here I offer some statistics and mathematical strategies they can use when assessing the risk of their various worries . . . for instance, the odds of an American being killed by a shark is 1 in 264 million . . . so maybe you don't need to worry about that as much as drowning or being hit by lightning; so after the class has done this and I'm walking around inspecting lists, I notice a pair of worries that would be instructive for the class, so I ask the student if I can use her list (and this is a student who mentioned when we started this that it might bring up some serious emotions and anxieties) and she says sure (I've had this student in several classes) and so I proceed to explain to the class that the girl's fear of dying in a plane crash isn't statistically likely (over 10 million flights and no fatalities last year) but that her fear of "her college boyfriend leaving her" might be something worth worrying over because there was probably a far greater chance of a high school relationship disintegrating than the hull of a Boeing . . . and I guess my logic was so convincing that it upset her and she broke into tears and needed to take a walk to compose herself . . . but she was laughing about it by the end of class, and because of my previous track record of invented scenarios, the other students thought it was some kind of pre-arranged set-up . . . but I told them it was NOT and I will be more careful with my razor sharp logic in the future.
Zombies Vs. Men In Tights
Last weekend, I consumed 11 volumes of Walking Dead comic books (but now I am back on track with the new translation of War and Peace) and I am completely addicted . . .the plots are inventive, surprising, and very, very dark . . . and I was pleasantly surprised as to how appealing a zombie apocalypse is to think about: it's not like the typical superhero scenarios of good versus evil-- where you contemplate what sort of hero the world needs and what sort of actions that hero needs to implement; The Walking Dead forces you to ruminate on survival scenarios, about how far you would go to continue living and to protect your wife and kids-- it reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in that sense, but the series is much more fun to read because of the pictures-- unlike Watchmen, they are easy to digest . . . sometimes my eyes would race through an entire page and then I would go back and read the text to see exactly what happened-- and each volume has a serialized pulp feel and ends with a cliffhanger or major event, without ever being especially campy or cheesy: ten lurkers out of ten.
Retreat!
Last Saturday, during the freezing rain storm, Alex and Ian built an elaborate fort in the living room: they covered a card table with an afghan, surrounded their make-shift tent with walls of large pillows, and made beds with camping pads and sleeping bags inside; their plan was to sleep in it Saturday night-- Alex even went so far as to bring clothing down for the next morning, so he wouldn't have to bother climbing the stairs-- and they stocked their fortress with books and flash-lights and other necessary toys so they could entertain themselves . . . I turned the downstairs bathroom light on so they could get their bearings in the dark, but it was a windy night, and twenty minutes after lights out, we heard footsteps on the stairs and Alex told us that both of them decided-- mutually-- that they would rather sleep upstairs, although neither mentioned why they retreated so rapidly and I didn't press them on it . . . perhaps they will be braver next time.
I Am Calling Out Alan Moore (Despite His Scary Beard)
I have mentioned that I can't really understand why fans of the graphic novel Watchmen despise Zach Snyder's movie version . . . I think it's a good rendition of that universe, and after seeing Snyder's previous movie, 300, which is an adaptation of the eponymous Frank Miller graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae, I find the film Watchmen even more impressive . . . because 300 is one of the cheesiest movies ever made (despite some cool battle gore and monstrous humanoid warriors) but I guess some people will never be happy with the film version of anything, such as the counter-cultural icon Alan Moore himself, who wrote Watchmen; Moore claims he has never watched any of the Hollywood film adaptations of his creations . . . this includes V for Vendetta and From Hell and Constantine and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I am calling bullshit on this . . . I think he has seen them and he's not admitting it . . . a man of his intellectual stature and creative powers would be overcome with curiosity about how his art withstood the transformation into film, and despite his hatred for Hollywood blockbusters and all the vapidness they represent, he must have seen a bit of at least one of these films . . . at least a trailer or a YouTube clip or something . . . so Alan Moore, confess, you were curious and you checked out one or more of these movies . . . it's okay, your fans will forgive you.
Plastic Bag Saves the Day!
I was suffering the embarrassment of an "invalid magnetic strip" at the grocery store-- for both my ATM card and my credit card-- and the cashier suggested I encase the card in a plastic bag and then slide it through the machine, and this trick worked . . . though when I asked why, she had no answer for me (better to ask this guy) and so the irony is that although I brought my own reusable cloth bags in order to save the environment (even though they may kill me because of the high lead content) it was a good thing that they had those environmentally awful plastic bags, or I wouldn't have been able to pay.
I Am Relieved
While walking to a friend's house I thought of a brilliant way to parody the hit Cee Lo Green song "F*ck You" . . . instead of the profane chorus, I would sing Frak You and make the lyrics all about Battlestar Galactica, and so I started composing lyrics as I walked-- "I see you flying round space with the girl I love and I'm like Frak You!" . . . and if you were a Cylon, you'd still be my one, I'd keep you on the ship . . ." -- but when I got to my friend's house, I quickly checked YouTube to make sure no one had thought of this idea, and someone had; the parody isn't great, but it's funny enough and it has muppets at Comic-Con, and to be honest, I was sort of relieved that the parody existed already, because it saved me a great deal of time and effort that I would have spent on something pretty absurd (although considering the song I did recently produce, it's not like I spent my time on something better).
I Share Two Dreams (But For For Good Reason!)
I usually stop listening when someone begins describing a dream, as descriptions of dreams are usually incoherent, fragmented and torturous-- unless, of course, the dream is mine-- so please bear with me, I promise it will be worth it: last week I had two vivid dreams: one where someone rudely stole my swimming lane at the gym and the other where I was rescuing drowning children in a flood at a playground . . . and both dreams had something in common besides water . . . in both, after the event happened, I went to the computer and started composing a sentence about the dream, but I was still dreaming this, so I was composing the sentence in a dream state, thinking what a great sentence it would be for the blog, when the event wasn't actually real, and both times, when I awoke, for a moment I thought I had a good idea for a sentence, but then I realized that it was only a dream . . . and though the dreams did provide fodder for this particular meta-sentence, they also may be telling me that I need to quit writing this blog and take up a more mindless hobby.
If You've Got The Winter Blues, Unbroken Is The Cure
When I am about to complain about things that really aren't serious enough to warrant complaint-- such as this ridiculously ugly winter-- certain stories prevent me from unnecessarily bitching, stories of people that have coped with far, far worse situations than I could ever imagine; inspirational tales of overcoming pain and anguish and hardship and suffering and loss . . . such as the story of Dieter Dengler's escape from a Laotian internment camp (retold by Werner Herzog in the movie Rescue Dawn) and the story of the American quadriplegic rugby team (documented in the film Murderball . . . if my students complain about an assignment, I put this movie in for a few minutes and then ask them if they actually have anything to complain about) and the story of Michael Oher (told by Michael Lewis in his book The Blind Side) and the story of Johan Otter and his daughter, Jenna, who survived a brutal attack by a grizzly bear and, though both were severely injured, they cheerfully tell the tale, glad they survived . . . and now I will add the Unbroken, the story of Louie Zamperini to this list; Zamperini was a wild Italian-American youth who channeled his frenetic energy into running, and who could have become the fastest miler in the world (and run a sub-four minute mile before Roger Bannister) if he didn't have to go to war and fight the Japanese . . . and his epic war story of ocean survival, torture, internment camp starvation and misery, and post-traumatic stress seems to be beyond what a human could actually endure . . . Laura Hillenbrand's book makes you root for the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the atomic bomb, for anything to end the torture that the POW's suffered at the hands of the Japanese (disturbing statistic: 1% of American POW's died in Nazi and Italian internment camps . . . 37% of American POW's died in Japanese camps) and Hillenbrand's writing is extensively researched and full of sensational details, yet she manages to give the narrative a novelistic feel-- you are with Louie every step of the way, during his bombing missions over the Pacific, when he and his raft-mates contemplate resorting to "the custom of the sea," his daily battles with The Bird, and his mental and spiritual battles with loss of dignity: ten shark livers out of a possible ten.
Can Someone Do A Study?
I know this is hard to measure statistically, but I think there has been a marked increase in people who take the wrong exit, realize this moments too late, stop on the exit ramp, and then go in reverse-- against traffic-- in an insane attempt to rectify their mistake, when they could simply drive a few hundred yards down the road and do a U-turn.
The Future of Anxiety?
In the '50's we worried about Communism and in the '60's we worried about Civil Rights and in the '70's it was the environment and in the '80's we worried about nuclear war (remember The Day After?) and in the '90's it was AIDS and in 2000 it was terrorism; these were all serious issues, but I hope in the coming decade we will choose something more entertaining to worry about . . . such as angry poltergeists or giant ants from the center of the earth or Ice 9 because, as George Lang says in Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner: "Worry is like interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due."
Once Again, I Unleash My Super-Potent Rhetorical Forces
You may be aware of my super-potent rhetorical powers, and I have been forced to use them once again; this time I have unleashed a rhetorical tornado upon Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, in an attempt to get him to move the Super Bowl to Saturday (and also to make it a home game for the team with the best record) and you can read my extremely persuasive missive over at Gheorghe: The Blog-- and I guarantee you will be moved to my opinion on the matter.
Despite My Disappointment, Zack Snyder Probably Made a Good Decision (But What Do I Know?)
I Appreciate Those With A Sense of Style
I had to return a pair of jeans to Kohls on Saturday (I am less fat than my wife thought . . . a 36'' waist is too big) and and this errand made me remember why I generally dress like a hobo: buying a piece of clothing is insanely difficult . . . I wanted to exchange the jeans for a similar pair a size smaller, but they didn't have any that were exactly the same in the smaller size and because the price was different, I had to go to customer service, and she suggested I try the "kiosk" and order on-line-- but this was too difficult as you had to enter your address, credit, and shipping information by selecting letters with a key-pad (and I had already been three places to find some indoor soccer shoes, so I was shopped out) and so I finally elected to get store credit and try my luck on the racks, and I soon found myself lost in piles of 569's and 505's and 520's and 560's . . . and each number had different variations in style-- Loose Fit, Relaxed Fit, Slim Fit, Comfort Fit, Relaxed Straight Fit, Flamboyant Fit-- and also variations in color: distressed, faded, black, blue, blue with weird gold thread . . . which leads to billions of permutations of jeans . . . I tried on ONE of these billions of permutations and got fed up and left the store . . . and so now I see just how difficult it is to have style (unless you're rich and pay a stylist to pick out clothes for you, like Ralph does for Howard Stern) and although I will never have the patience to have style and I will continue to dress like a hobo rather than repeat shopping experiences like this . . . I now truly appreciate what it takes to dress well.
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