For Once In My Life, I'd Love To Be On The Inside

The first half of Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job  is a clear review of the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis-- the film explains collateral debt obligations, synthetic mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, highly leveraged banking, banking deregulation, the merging of investment and traditional banking, and sub-prime mortgages . . . if you haven't done your reading, it's a good primer on these subjects, and there is some excellent footage of Iceland as well-- but the second half of the film spirals into less focused frustration and anger (despite some inspirational and slightly cheesy narration by Matt Damon) and the big players either refuse to be interviewed (Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke) or hem and haw under aggressive questioning, which is satisfying in one sense, but really doesn't help to explain anything, and then the film explores high salaries and bonuses for Wall Street traders and the culture of excess-- there's some rather pointless gossipy chat with a high-end escort who serviced numerous Wall Street employees . . . but, honestly, as long as the system gets fixed, I could care less how the traders spend their money; despite these flaws, the movie is certainly a must see and I'm going to teach it to my students during the business ethics unit (I'll use it instead of the Enron documentary-- The Smartest Guys in the Room-- which, though it's a bit dated, has better music and a more insular and resolved story . . . though it also gets a bit off topic when it rather gratuitously explores Enron exec Lou Pi's fascination with strippers . . . I guess when you've got a documentary with a lot of numbers, you need to throw in some T&A) and another advantage of Inside Job is that it is relatively non-partisan: the film also criticizes the Obama administration for appointing the usual suspects to fix the problem (Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers) and the film claims that Obama's new banking regulations lack teeth, and as far as I know the facts are fairly accurate . . . or as accurate as you can be when you try to make a movie about something as complicated as this. 

Costanza-esque

I don't know about you, but when I say, "I'm really hungry, does anyone have any food?" and a colleague says, "Oh no! I just threw a Pop Tart into the trash!" then I go into the trash and fish out that Pop Tart (which was still protected by it's foil wrapper) and eat it, because otherwise it would be eaten by rats in Edgeboro Landfill, and who wants to be defeated by a rodent?

An Analysis of My Netflix Queue

My Netflix queue has swollen to 233 films, and though I'm never going to view these films, they do reveal quite a bit about about my hopes, dreams, personality, and aspirations . . . and if you head over to Gheorghe: The Blog, you can read a Close Reading of the list.

I Am A Bad-ass

I was going to take my kids to the pet store and let them each choose a fish for our new fish tank, but they get into a fist-fight while getting into the car (they were arguing about who was going to get in and who was going to have to walk around the car and get in on the opposite side) and so I said I wasn't taking them as a consequence for fighting about something so stupid, and instead I made them pick up sticks and bark in the backyard (and the worst part is that I was looking forward to going to the pet store and getting some new fish, so I had to punish myself as well as them, but as I indicated, I am a bad-ass parent who will not back down when it comes to fish).

The Giving Ski

I was gung-ho on teaching my two boys to ski this season (for purely selfish reasons . . . I love to snowboard and this gives me an excuse to go) and after several days of ski school and some hairy trips down the mountain trying to help them while on my snowboard, I am proud to say that they can ski, and now that they've learned, there's part of me that wishes they would unlearn, because as a parent it is petrifying to see your progeny hurtle down an icy mountain, when you know that they don't make good decisions anywhere (moments before we drove from the hotel over to Windham, I watched my older son-- who is seven and should know better-- trying to stuff a rectangular Lego box into the round hole of a ruck sack, and he was jamming it in long ways and it was stuck, and he couldn't figure out to turn the box on it's side and slide it in) but I guess it's like anything else you give your children, like the ability to ride a bike, you imagine that it will create wonderful scenes of family unity, but instead they take the skill and use it to wreak havoc and chaos . . . perhaps I should have taught them to play tennis, how much havoc can you cause with a tennis ball?

Humble Buffet

I shouldn't be reading heralded economist Ha-Joon Chang's book  23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, because I'm trying to keep my happiness index up and thinking about economics never leads to greater happiness, but it's frustrating when politicians are saying their hands are tied about budget cuts, yet they won't consider raising taxes on the rich (or even renewing a current tax on the rich!) despite the fact that the rich in America earned their money just as much because of the American system as because of their wits-- as Chang puts it: there's no such thing as a free market; every market is regulated and stipulated by its context and the rich are beholden to that system for their wealth . . . but don't listen to me, listen to Warren Buffet, who said: 'I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned . . . if you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil . . . I will be struggling thirty years later . . . I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well-- disproportionately well."

I May Have Given These Words of Wisdom to My Students

The difficult thing about family vacations is that you're out in public, so you can't hit your kids.

You Make The Call

The United States spends 1.1 percent of the budget on foreign aid, the lowest percentage of any wealthy country besides South Korea . . . yet in absolute terms the 39.4 billion dollars that we donate to other countries for humanitarian, economic, and security concerns is the largest absolute amount allocated by any single country-- so the question is: are we stingy or are we generous?

Olfactory Query

My five year old son Ian asked a fair question last week: "Can you smell over the phone?" and-- considering the smell of most people's breath in the morning-- it's a lucky thing that the answer is "no."

El Cambio es Bueno

Hola, mi nombre es Juan, y aquí es una frase excelente para que usted pueda disfrutar, y me gustaría dar las gracias a David por la externalización de algunos de sus trabajos para mí, y le aseguro la calidad de este blog no van a sufrir a pesar del hecho de que yo va a hacer la mayor parte de la escritura ahora.

In Afghanistan, Happiness is a Warm Poppy

Eric Weiner's book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World won't give you any definitive answers about how or where to find happiness, but it is an incisive and entertaining tour of how some cultures reach contentedness: in the Netherland the method is tolerance; in Switzerland it is democracy, cleanliness, nosiness, boredom, and stability; in Bhutan, Weiner is advised to think about death five minutes a day . . . but this is also a country where they feed marijuana to pigs because it makes the "pigs hungry and therefore fat"; in Qatar easy money does not bring happiness; and in Moldova, comparing oneself to the Swiss and other Europeans makes Moldovans sad; in Iceland, darkness, failure, generous state-subsidized health care and unemployment benefits, and binge-drinking make for good times; in Thailand, it is best to think less; in Britain, muddling along is good enough (especially if you live in Slough); in India, to be happy you need to embrace the mysticism and the chaos, the wealth and the poverty, the yin and the yang, the thing and the anti-thing; and in America, sometimes in our search for happiness we forget what actually makes us happy, friends and family, and focus too much on money and materialism, so the next time you are unhappy, don't go shopping, go out binge drinking with your friends and then muddle along through your next day of work without thinking.

Saxondale: A Show To Watch When Your Wife Goes Out

As a rule, I never watch television alone (unless it's a sporting event, because then I feel like I'm with the crowd at the event) but the exception is made for Steve Coogan shows-- generally my wife and I have similar taste, but Steve Coogan is where we agree to disagree (although we both watched Hamlet 2 in its entirety, and while I can't really recommend the movie, the final play is pretty funny, especially the big musical number "Rock Me Sexy Jesus") and I already knew this from past events: for example, I loved "Knowing You Knowing Me," the fake talk show hosted by Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) but my wife didn't find it all that funny, and now Coogan's new show, Saxondale, is beyond the pale in its alienation of the fairer sex; Tommy Saxondale (Coogan) is an ex-roadie-- he toured with all the huge rock bands in the '70's, except Led Zeppelin, which is his life's biggest regret-- but now he's an aging rocker who lives in the suburbs and runs a pest control "business" (he employs one other person) and loves his muscle car (a Mustang) as much as his chubby live-in anarchist girlfriend Magz-- though he still has anger issues about his ex-wife and the general decline of his coolness . . . and I can identify with this: these day I can't really stomach listening to Deep Purple and Jethro Tull any longer-- I've outgrown them and so has Tommy (to be honest, I've always hated Jethro Tull) but I still love jokes and references about them and all the other bands and the muscle cars and I can relate to Tommy's confrontation with his age and his inability to rock-out any more, but my wife could care less, and I can kind of see why . . .  so this will be a show to watch when she goes out with the ladies.

Best Intentions

When I first started teaching, I thought I was going to be one of those teachers who rewarded kids with candy, and so I bought a bag of Hershey's miniatures and put it in my desk, but then I ate them all during my off period (it's really hard not to eat while grading essays) before I could dole them out as rewards, and instead now I'm the kind of teacher that scrawls "Metaphor Contest Champion" on a piece of scrap paper and hands it the winner, who then says: "This isn't even a whole piece of paper . . . it's got a chunk torn out of it!"

Literary Psychoanalysis

I am more like Hamlet and my wife is more like Fortinbras . . . and this works out well.

Are You An Orchid or a Dandelion?

 The most powerful essay in The Best American Science Writing of 2010 is called "The Orchid Children," and the author, David Dobbs, explains a metaphor that has recently cropped up in psychology-- that of "orchid children" and "dandelion children"-- the orchid children being those that have a genetic disposition to certain negative behaviors including depression and ADHD, while the dandelion children do not-- and the research is being done particularly with regards to ADHD and a particular "risk allele," but the findings that are explaining these alleles in an evolutionary sense and turning behavioral science on its head is the fact that these "orchid children" with the shorter allele and proclivity towards ADHD, also have the potential-- when raised in a secure and fruitful environment-- to excel beyond the "normal" weedy children . . . the dandelion children are more stable, and they generally don't exhibit the negative behaviors however they are raised, but the "orchid" children are a genetic risk: they are more sensitive to their environment, positive or negative . . . when they are given positive interventions (I'm not going to describe all the experiments but Dobbs does) they have a greater increase of success; the author bravely gets his alleles sequenced and finds out what he knew-- he's an orchid-- but he doesn't want to know about his kids, it's enough for him to be aware that when he "takes his son trolling for salmon, or listens to his younger brother's labyrinthine elaborations of his dreams," that he is "flipping little switches that can help them light up," but I suspect that my kids might be dandelions, and I think I'm one too-- we all remain remarkably consistent in our habits and our behavior, and we all pay very little attention to our environment, and honestly, despite the amount of time I spend with them, my kids rarely pay attention to me . . . I try to flip some switches, but I think I may just sound like the parents in Peanuts to them.

It's Really Hard To Eradicate Weeds

The sixth season of Weeds will grow on you, unlike the previous season, where the show nearly withered and died--  it's a return to its earlier, earthier form, mainly because Mary-Louise Parker is in nearly every cramped and dirty scene, and she is the soil that holds the straggling, weedy, and dysfunctional Botwin family together as well as the dramatic, photosynthetic, flourishing center of the show (Kevin Nealon is funny but he doesn't have the roots to hold the show together and neither can any of the other actors and actresses . . . Parker is the pro)-- and their wild road trip comes to a perfect conclusion, as fitting as the end of that unweeded garden in Elsinore, where things rank and gross must finally decay and die. . . but then I learned, that like a perennial, the show has been renewed for a seventh season, and my question is: how?

People Ruin Everything

More from The Best American Science Writing of 2010: Elizabeth Kolbert, in her essay "The Sixth Extinction?" points out that whenever people come to town, all the cool creatures are wiped out; the mastodons, mammoths, giant beavers, dire wolves, short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, toxodons, and saber tooth tigers died out just after we came to the Americas . . . the giant wombats, giant tortoises (as big as a VW Beetle!) and giant ten foot tall kangaroos died out soon after we colonized to Australia; this pattern holds true for New Zealand, Hawaii, and pretty much everywhere else-- the big and cool looking stuff can't survive in the places we colonize, but this is happening with smaller creatures as well-- there is a great die off of amphibians happening right now, notably the Colombian golden frog (which is technically a toad) and bat populations are also rapidly declining-- and Kolbert explains (and demonstrates) that this is probably caused by a chytrid fungus spread by humanity called Bd (actually it's called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, but by the time you finish saying that, another species has gone extinct) but, luckily, some species are not affected, including the hardy salamanders that we discovered in the woods near the litter strewn banks of the polluted Raritan River, but it does make me worry that we might have to stop visiting our "Jersey tough" amphibians.

Did Banksy Create Rebecca Black?

Despite writing this blog, I remain fairly isolated from what's being passed around on the internet-- and I'm sad to report that I learned about this song on NPR-- but even though I was the 38, 945, 234th person to watch the YouTube video of Rebecca Black's "Friday," I think I have something valuable to say about the song (which was written and "created" by Ark Music Factory, supposedly the brainchild of Patrice Wilson and Clarence Jey) and it is this: the lyrics are so unlyrical, the theme is so banal, the music is so auto-tuned, and the video is so literal that this kind of satirical "fun fun fun" could only have been the work of the arch-prankster and super-cool street artist Banksy . . . and I have to admit that the song is very catchy, which is impressive, since it doesn't rhyme, makes no attempt to have a unique voice, coins no new catchy phrase, and contains lyrics about how the days of the week are ordered and eating breakfast cereal . . . unless that line is a veiled marijuana reference: "waking up in the morning . . . gotta have my bowl" . . . only Banksy knows for sure, but this has to be a practical joke on par with the creation of Thierry Guetta (and right now, twenty minutes after I wrote the previous sentence, I still can't get the song out of my head . . . so perhaps "Friday" is brilliant in its stupidity . . . so derivative that it parodies itself . . . Rebecca Black, you are a super-genius in the same realm as Mr. Brainwash!)

The Influence of Digital Media on My Caloric Intake

On the rare occasion that we eat at my favorite Mexican restaurant-- Tortuga's Mexican Village in Princeton-- I usually order a tamale and a chorizo burrito, but Saturday night I got a tamale and a chorizo taco-- and the taco was tasty but not as large as the burrito . . . and I did this for the taco count, of course, but maybe the taco count, which in one sense is an exercise in gluttony, will actually make me eat fewer calories in 2011, because, as I mentioned earlier, tacos are smaller than burritos.

Sometimes, You've Got To Do What You've Got To Do (Despite the Stupid Name)

I put it off for a week, because it's absurd and embarrassing and it has a stupid name and nothing feels more foolish, but in the end, it had to be done, and as usual it cleared up the problem . . . if you're congested, nothing works better than the Neti Pot.