Sketchy Samaritan
Yesterday afternoon, I was walking my dog and he pooped for a second time-- but I did not have a second bag-- and so I sheepishly left the poop where it lay, but I am a responsible dog-owner and I hate it when other people don't clean up after their dogs, so I made note of where I was: Third Avenue across from a brick building, I walked the dog home, and then I got on my bike (armed with a plastic poop bag) and rode my bike back to the scene of the misdemeanor . . . but there's a lot of brick buildings on Third Avenue and I didn't take exact note of the cross street nor did I register exactly where he pooped . . . so I parked my bike against a tree and began my quest for poop . . . and while I knew I was doing the right thing, and I knew I was being a good person, I certainly don't think it appeared that way to the people walking and driving past . . . in fact, I think I looked downright weird, plastic bag open, searching the ground from corner to corner . . . and so from here on in, I'm always going to carry two bags when I walk the dog (a lesson I should have learned long ago).
I Did Not Receive a Tip
Turn the Dial and Lose That Smile
If you've got Netflix and you've been overly sanguine lately, and you're looking to a way to quell your cheerful alacrity, I suggest Happy Valley (irony!) if you want to be scared, anxious, and depressed for twelve episodes and Short Term 12 if you want to be scared, anxious and depressed for ninety minutes . . . both are visually compelling, well-structured, and emotionally exhausting . . . and don't let them fool you, they both start with relatively humorous scenes, but it's a trap!
The Test 52: The Test Test
Believe it or not, Stacey, Cunningham and I have been recording our podcast The Test for a year now-- we did a trial run in Stacey's classroom last June (which never aired due to poor sound quality) and we've produced an episode a week since then; Stacey starts season two with a meta-bang (my second favorite kind of bang) by administering a test on tests . . . I do fairly well, and-- season two plot twist-- so does Cunningham . . . so check it out, keep score, enjoy the new intermission music, see how you do, and welcome to season two.
Dave Revises His Thoughts on Unemployment in Greenland
For nearly thirty years, I thought Vizzini's threat to Andre the Giant was the height of humor: "Do you want me to send you back where you were? Unemployed . . . in Greenland!" but now that I've listened to the Embedded podcast "The Arctic" I'll never hear that line the same way again . . . I learned that Greenland has the highest suicide rate in the world, and the tragic phenomenon is pervasive among young people-- there isn't much work, the isolation is daunting, firearms are plentiful, and knowing someone who has committed suicide increases the chance that you will commit suicide . . . and everyone in Greenland knows someone who committed suicide; you can read about it here, but I recommend listening to the podcast, it's absolutely compelling from the first minute, but I warn you-- this will ruin a very funny scene from The Princess Bride.
Dave is Romantic (when it's convenient)
From time to time, I'll buy my wife flowers, but I never have them delivered to her place of work-- I'm too cheap and having flowers delivered is exorbitantly expensive-- but Friday was our sixteen year anniversary, and I had a half day at school (prom!) so I bought some flowers and delivered them to my wife's school myself (and then I tipped myself for the effort).
Baking Is Insanely Difficult
I heard an advertisement on a Hidden Brain podcast for some veggie crackers made in a "nut free bakery" but I'm more interested in the rival bakery, across the road, that is run by madmen and lunatics.
Old People Can Have Senioritis Too
I've been spending my days with a bunch of disaffected/soon-to-graduate teenagers, and I think their senioritis might be contagious because lately I've been having trouble getting my sentence up in the morning . . . or maybe I'm just worn out from trying to finish Ibsen's A Doll's House in the final days of school with these kids-- I love this play, but it's very realistic, which was quite revolutionary for its time, but if you're a senior in the final days of school, then realistic = boring (although in all three of my classes today, the person playing Helmer misread "tarantella" as "tarantula" and everyone agreed that the ending would have been much more exciting if Krogstad was eaten by a giant spider).
Camera Redux
The first sentence I wrote for this blog was short and sweet:
"I am shopping for a new digital camera because my wife has a habit of leaving things on the roof of our car,"
but I have grown more prolix over the years, and so this time around I'll provide you with more details; last week, my wife said, "I did something stupid," and then she told me that she left her fancy Canon digital camera (with detachable lenses and accessories like that) in the high school auditorium . . . she took some pictures while Alex performed at the middle school concert and then her tooth hurt so badly (botched root canal) that she left it in the aisle and I freaked out a little bit and said things like "Did you call the school?" and "Did you email Craig?" and "Are you sure you left it there?" and she said yes, she did all those things, and that I wasn't supposed to react like that, and instead I was supposed to say, "Don't worry about it honey, I'm sure someone will find it," and I said, "Okay, you're right, I'm sure someone will find it" and someone did . . . and --more importantly-- they gave it to the office and, now that I've thought about it, leaving a camera in an auditorium, which is stationary and rarely full of people, is a major improvement over leaving it on top of the car and then doing 70 mph on Route 18, and so what I should have said was, "Okay, no big deal, that's much safer than leaving it on the roof of the car" and the next time that this happens, that's what I will say.
"I am shopping for a new digital camera because my wife has a habit of leaving things on the roof of our car,"
but I have grown more prolix over the years, and so this time around I'll provide you with more details; last week, my wife said, "I did something stupid," and then she told me that she left her fancy Canon digital camera (with detachable lenses and accessories like that) in the high school auditorium . . . she took some pictures while Alex performed at the middle school concert and then her tooth hurt so badly (botched root canal) that she left it in the aisle and I freaked out a little bit and said things like "Did you call the school?" and "Did you email Craig?" and "Are you sure you left it there?" and she said yes, she did all those things, and that I wasn't supposed to react like that, and instead I was supposed to say, "Don't worry about it honey, I'm sure someone will find it," and I said, "Okay, you're right, I'm sure someone will find it" and someone did . . . and --more importantly-- they gave it to the office and, now that I've thought about it, leaving a camera in an auditorium, which is stationary and rarely full of people, is a major improvement over leaving it on top of the car and then doing 70 mph on Route 18, and so what I should have said was, "Okay, no big deal, that's much safer than leaving it on the roof of the car" and the next time that this happens, that's what I will say.
Can YOU Hear the Hum?
Not only have I never heard "the hum," but until a few days ago, I had never heard of the hum . . . but apparently-- according to this New Republic article by Colin Dickey-- the hum is a constant noise that by some estimates two percent of the population experiences, a thick low inescapable buzzing sound that makes some people depressed and crazy . . . which is totally understandably, my son was bouncing a ball in his room the other night for ten minutes and I nearly cracked; the hum might be due to tinnitus, but no one is sure and there's not an exact correlation with people who experience ringing of the ears, and there haven't been many experiments to find the source of the hum, so the jury is still out, but geophysicist David Deming believes it might be a result of very-low wave frequency (VLF) aircraft communication with submarines, as these waves can penetrate most anything . . . anyway, the real question is: can YOU hear it?
Highs and Lows of our One Night Trip to Philly
Considering we were only away for one night, our trip to the City of Brotherly Love had plenty of highs and lows:
1) listening to Steve Buscemi's audio tour of Eastern State Penitentiary was spooky and excellent-- and the kids really enjoyed the ruined ambiance, the haunting anecdotes, and the punishment cells . . . plus, I coerced my son Alex into asking me if I believed in ghosts;
2) after touring the penitentiary, we decided to eat at Bridgid's instead of Jack's Firehouse-- both are great places and Jack's is right across from the jail-- but when we got to Bridgid's, we learned they were serving brunch . . . yuck . . . nobody in my family even deigns to say the word "brunch," let alone eat it and so we turned around and walked back to Jack's and they were serving brunch . . . but this turned out to be fine, because they had regular lunch stuff on the menu as well as brunch stuff, and my kids were highly amused by the finches that kept sneaking in through the big firehouse doors and stealing cornbread;
3) on the ride to Philly we listened to stand-up comedy, something my older son has gotten into lately-- and I tried to turn him on to Steve Martin and Steven Wright, but those early comedy albums aren't recorded all that clearly and the compression is terrible so it's hard to hear the jokes and then if you turn up the volume, the applause and screaming between bits blows out your eardrums;
4) we settled on Jim Gaffigan, he's funny, my son loves him, his voice is crystal clear and his albums are not only family friendly, but he also makes plenty of jokes about hotel rooms and hotel pools, which was perfect, since we were staying in a hotel with an indoor pool;
5) just as Jim Gaffigan predicted, the hotel pool was kind of gross-- it was a billion degrees in the pool room, too hot to lounge and read, and there were some very young kids in the pool, who would have probably urinated into the water if they weren't so dehydrated from the heat;
6) my kids loved Rocket Fizz, a store full of weird candy and "gourmet" soda-- Alex got a grapefruit pop that was tolerably good, and Ian got some sweet marionberry concoction called Martian Poop, which he had trouble finishing . . . but he kept the bottle as a souvenir;
7) we had been walking all day, and we kept on walking-- we started in the museum district (we were staying at the Sheraton) and went all the way down Arch Street, through the old city, out to Penn's Landing and then down to this new spot, Spruce Street Harbor Park, which was full of food trucks and corn hole and giant chess and hammocks and live music and weird hanging lights and would have been fun, if it wasn't insanely packed with people, and so we kept on walking, to South Street and ate at a place called Nora's which had decent authentic Mexican food and incredibly authentic Mexican weather (I sat next to the little portable air-conditioner which was maintaining between 86 and 85 degrees) and I was slurping down lots of their super-spicy churrasco salsa so my balding head was covered with droplets of sweat which my son said looked like "warriors ready to do battle in a forest";
8) after ice-cream on South Street, we took our first family Uber and the driver was super nice and full of information and she arrived quickly, which was fantastic because it was starting to rain;
9) the kids were happy watching a Harry Potter marathon and I was happy to pass out at nine;
10) I was not happy to be awoken at 1 AM by my wife, who told me I needed to find a 24 hour pharmacy and get my son allergy medicine and ibuprofen, because he had a terrible earache-- I blame the gross pool-- and I was less happy when I found a Walgreens and it was closed and then I walked a long way in the rain to a Rite-Aid, and then couldn't get the Uber app to work on my wife's phone, and so I took a regular cab back to the hotel . . . the driver was indifferent;
11) the medicine worked and my son passed out, but I couldn't fall back to sleep-- probably from all the stimulus of walking the city streets late at night-- lots of sketchy folks, drunk people, and restaurant workers finishing the late shift;
12) the hotel pool was closed Monday morning, and so the hotel gym was overrun with kids-- I bailed on my workout after a few minutes;
13) we had trouble finding a spot for some breakfast food and finally settled on Dunkin' Donuts-- yuck-- and the stools were all taken and my son Alex sat on the floor and started eating his Boston creme, until we explained to him that if you're civilized, you usually don't sit on the floor of a grubby chain restaurant in a major city and eat donuts-- Alex is twelve years old, so you'd think he'd know this;
14) we had a great time at the Drexel Academy of Natural Sciences . . . it's not the Museum of Natural History, but it's still full of great stuff-- and the film on how they make the museum dioramas is worth the price of admission-- there are zero bones in those stuffed animals-- and we got to see a possum up close and personal, they are perhaps the most ugly misshapen mammal in North America (and yes I considered the armadillo in that calculation).
1) listening to Steve Buscemi's audio tour of Eastern State Penitentiary was spooky and excellent-- and the kids really enjoyed the ruined ambiance, the haunting anecdotes, and the punishment cells . . . plus, I coerced my son Alex into asking me if I believed in ghosts;
2) after touring the penitentiary, we decided to eat at Bridgid's instead of Jack's Firehouse-- both are great places and Jack's is right across from the jail-- but when we got to Bridgid's, we learned they were serving brunch . . . yuck . . . nobody in my family even deigns to say the word "brunch," let alone eat it and so we turned around and walked back to Jack's and they were serving brunch . . . but this turned out to be fine, because they had regular lunch stuff on the menu as well as brunch stuff, and my kids were highly amused by the finches that kept sneaking in through the big firehouse doors and stealing cornbread;
3) on the ride to Philly we listened to stand-up comedy, something my older son has gotten into lately-- and I tried to turn him on to Steve Martin and Steven Wright, but those early comedy albums aren't recorded all that clearly and the compression is terrible so it's hard to hear the jokes and then if you turn up the volume, the applause and screaming between bits blows out your eardrums;
4) we settled on Jim Gaffigan, he's funny, my son loves him, his voice is crystal clear and his albums are not only family friendly, but he also makes plenty of jokes about hotel rooms and hotel pools, which was perfect, since we were staying in a hotel with an indoor pool;
5) just as Jim Gaffigan predicted, the hotel pool was kind of gross-- it was a billion degrees in the pool room, too hot to lounge and read, and there were some very young kids in the pool, who would have probably urinated into the water if they weren't so dehydrated from the heat;
6) my kids loved Rocket Fizz, a store full of weird candy and "gourmet" soda-- Alex got a grapefruit pop that was tolerably good, and Ian got some sweet marionberry concoction called Martian Poop, which he had trouble finishing . . . but he kept the bottle as a souvenir;
7) we had been walking all day, and we kept on walking-- we started in the museum district (we were staying at the Sheraton) and went all the way down Arch Street, through the old city, out to Penn's Landing and then down to this new spot, Spruce Street Harbor Park, which was full of food trucks and corn hole and giant chess and hammocks and live music and weird hanging lights and would have been fun, if it wasn't insanely packed with people, and so we kept on walking, to South Street and ate at a place called Nora's which had decent authentic Mexican food and incredibly authentic Mexican weather (I sat next to the little portable air-conditioner which was maintaining between 86 and 85 degrees) and I was slurping down lots of their super-spicy churrasco salsa so my balding head was covered with droplets of sweat which my son said looked like "warriors ready to do battle in a forest";
8) after ice-cream on South Street, we took our first family Uber and the driver was super nice and full of information and she arrived quickly, which was fantastic because it was starting to rain;
9) the kids were happy watching a Harry Potter marathon and I was happy to pass out at nine;
10) I was not happy to be awoken at 1 AM by my wife, who told me I needed to find a 24 hour pharmacy and get my son allergy medicine and ibuprofen, because he had a terrible earache-- I blame the gross pool-- and I was less happy when I found a Walgreens and it was closed and then I walked a long way in the rain to a Rite-Aid, and then couldn't get the Uber app to work on my wife's phone, and so I took a regular cab back to the hotel . . . the driver was indifferent;
11) the medicine worked and my son passed out, but I couldn't fall back to sleep-- probably from all the stimulus of walking the city streets late at night-- lots of sketchy folks, drunk people, and restaurant workers finishing the late shift;
12) the hotel pool was closed Monday morning, and so the hotel gym was overrun with kids-- I bailed on my workout after a few minutes;
13) we had trouble finding a spot for some breakfast food and finally settled on Dunkin' Donuts-- yuck-- and the stools were all taken and my son Alex sat on the floor and started eating his Boston creme, until we explained to him that if you're civilized, you usually don't sit on the floor of a grubby chain restaurant in a major city and eat donuts-- Alex is twelve years old, so you'd think he'd know this;
14) we had a great time at the Drexel Academy of Natural Sciences . . . it's not the Museum of Natural History, but it's still full of great stuff-- and the film on how they make the museum dioramas is worth the price of admission-- there are zero bones in those stuffed animals-- and we got to see a possum up close and personal, they are perhaps the most ugly misshapen mammal in North America (and yes I considered the armadillo in that calculation).
The Test 51: Dave Does a Song Quiz?
This week on The Test, after weeks of fanfare, I finally unveil my first song quiz, and while I make my case on how it is far better than any of Stacey's song quizzes, empirically, this may not be the case (as the ladies discover) but despite the problems, we still have a good time-- see if you can figure out the overarching theme from the seven clips (and as a bonus, I reveal my plans for season two of the show).
Textbooks Matter
I've been binge-listening to all the old episodes of Vox's policy podcast The Weeds-- and while I'm not sure if I'm retaining all that much, I am learning how little I know about how government policy works-- which is always the first step in getting smarter-- anyway, this episode taught me about a Brookings Institution study by Thomas Kane that finds that good textbooks are clearly linked to academic success (especially in fourth and fifth grade math) and buying new textbooks is an easier solution than replacing mediocre or poor teachers with better teachers-- it's much harder to find good teachers and/or train them, and firing bad teachers takes time and resources-- and the gains from having a good textbook are significant, as Kane explains:
student achievement would rise overall roughly an average of 3.6 percentile points . . . although it might sound small, such a boost in the average teacher’s effectiveness would be larger than the improvement the typical teacher experiences in their first three years on the job, as they are just learning to teach . . .
which is a HUGE gain, because the difference between a first-year teacher and third year teacher is the difference between pandemonium and order; I also learned all about the new education policy that replaced No Child Left Behind in this episode and why there might be less standardized testing in our future. . . and this article is a nice summary of some of the lessons learned from what didn't work with the previous national education policies . . . and the takeaway from this rambling sentence is that you've got to feel dumber to get smarter.
student achievement would rise overall roughly an average of 3.6 percentile points . . . although it might sound small, such a boost in the average teacher’s effectiveness would be larger than the improvement the typical teacher experiences in their first three years on the job, as they are just learning to teach . . .
which is a HUGE gain, because the difference between a first-year teacher and third year teacher is the difference between pandemonium and order; I also learned all about the new education policy that replaced No Child Left Behind in this episode and why there might be less standardized testing in our future. . . and this article is a nice summary of some of the lessons learned from what didn't work with the previous national education policies . . . and the takeaway from this rambling sentence is that you've got to feel dumber to get smarter.
Higher and Higher Dudgeon
Nothing puts me in a higher state of dudgeon than having to look up exactly what "high dudgeon" means (and now that I know what it means, I'll be using the phrase to put other people in a state of high dudgeon at my overbearing prolixity).
Cold > Heat
When it's cold and I'm tired, I fall into a deep, dreamless slumber, but when it's hot and I'm tired, I get listless and crabby and my feet swell and I want to start a land war in Asia.
Dr. Ferrari Makes You Go Faster
I knew Lance Armstrong had been involved in a doping scandal, but I didn't understand the extent until I listened to the Planet Money episode "Lance Armstrong and the Business of Doping"-- I will warn you, in case you're vasovagal like me, that there's plenty of blood in this episode, but I learned plenty: cycling is a team sport, so not only did Armstrong have to use the services of the aptly named Dr. Ferrari, but so did his teammates-- it was just as important that their blood was super-rich-- and this required a large-scale cover-up, plenty of subterfuge, and a code of silence . . . but there is a silver-lining, it seems that large-scale doping may have been curbed a bit recently, as winning times are much slower than they once were . . . but it's only a matter of time before the riders figure out some other way to super-charge their bodies; anyway, if you're not familiar with the specifics of the scandal, this is a good place to start.
Words of Wisdom from One Sibling to Another
My older son gave this piece of advice to his younger brother: "You can't really make yo'mama jokes to me because we come from the same mother."
When You're 46, Jargon > Slang
While it's embarrassing and cheesy for folks over thirty to use the lexicon of the youth-- I try to never use slang in front of my students unless it's obviously ironic-- but I did learn some excellent terms that I can sprinkle into conversation this week, I picked them up while listening to Vox's super-wonky policy podcast The Weeds:
1) dark fiber . . . is not bran cereal, it's a term for fiber optic cable that is not being used-- no light pulses are going through it, so it's "dark" . . . during the dotcom boom, shitloads of fiber optic cable was laid, and then the bubble burst, but the infrastructure was in place, just "dark";
2) shadow inventory . . . is not a bunch of captured souls in Satan's warehouse, it's the properties in the real estate market that are in foreclosure or haven't been listed because people are waiting for the market to improve, and this makes it difficult to peg the supply because there's al this inventory in the shadows, lurking . . . this reminds of the the term "overhang" in the diamond market, which refers to the massive amount of shadow inventory that prevents used diamonds from being worth anything near what a new one costs;
3) decouple . . . we're not talking trains, we're talking about decoupling health care from employment, which has its pros and cons, but mainly pros-- which is why most first world nations do it that way . . . anyway, while I won't be using any of the new slang words I learned in the near future (although once I turn seventy-five, I'm using all the youthful slang, because nothing is more hysterical than a really old codger claiming "this shizzle is off the hook") but I'm certainly going to try to work this new economic jargon into my daily conversation, preferably, all in one long intimidating sentence.
1) dark fiber . . . is not bran cereal, it's a term for fiber optic cable that is not being used-- no light pulses are going through it, so it's "dark" . . . during the dotcom boom, shitloads of fiber optic cable was laid, and then the bubble burst, but the infrastructure was in place, just "dark";
2) shadow inventory . . . is not a bunch of captured souls in Satan's warehouse, it's the properties in the real estate market that are in foreclosure or haven't been listed because people are waiting for the market to improve, and this makes it difficult to peg the supply because there's al this inventory in the shadows, lurking . . . this reminds of the the term "overhang" in the diamond market, which refers to the massive amount of shadow inventory that prevents used diamonds from being worth anything near what a new one costs;
3) decouple . . . we're not talking trains, we're talking about decoupling health care from employment, which has its pros and cons, but mainly pros-- which is why most first world nations do it that way . . . anyway, while I won't be using any of the new slang words I learned in the near future (although once I turn seventy-five, I'm using all the youthful slang, because nothing is more hysterical than a really old codger claiming "this shizzle is off the hook") but I'm certainly going to try to work this new economic jargon into my daily conversation, preferably, all in one long intimidating sentence.
The Test Turns 50!
This week on The Test, Cunningham teaches us a lesson about finishing strong-- not only does she quiz us on the closing lines of some famous novels, but she also finishes the episode with a rousingly inspirational peroration . . . Stacey and decide that we prefer to start like a ball of fire and then fizzle . . . and that's exactly how we perform on this test.
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