My New Band


Black Swan Keys Eyed Peas Sabbath Crows


Furniture Hockey


It's hard for me to write for very long at a stretch. First of all, at any given moment I'm usually very tired. Second, I'm easily distracted, and, third, I'm not very talented. On top of all that, my neighbors have just resumed their endless game of furniture hockey. As best I can gather from what I hear through the uninsulated wall between of our 125 year old tenement apartments, furniture hockey involves uncarpeted wood floors instead of ice, and any item of furniture instead of a puck. The players seem to have shed ice skates in favor of what I imagine to be bowling ball shoes.  Not bowling shoes, bowling ball shoes. The goal of furniture hockey is not to slide the furniture into an open rectangle of metal piping. The goal of furniture hockey is to utterly and completely shatter my mind. Them 1, Me 0.


Rich v Poor

The NPR show, Morning Edition, did a feature monday on a study about the differences between the ways in which rich and poor people raise their children and how that impacted education. The study was remarkable on many levels. On the first level it is remarkable because, unlike most of the studies NPR cites under the heading of "Why it sucks to be poor," the answer to this one was not merely reduceable to "Because they have less money." [As opposed to earlier studies such as those that showed that poor people often receive worse health care or drive crappier cars, or the one that showed a staggering 100% of all poor  people have less money than their wealthier counterparts]. One of the major findings of this study was that rich people tend to talk to their kids more. A lot more. More than three times as much. This finding supports my own findings even from among my generally affluent students. Often I get students who, in spite of being quite intelligent and even moderately well read, still have horrendously limited vocabularies. I always ask them if the members of their family speak to one another of if they merely grunt. After a few laughs, they usually say "Grunt." 


Is He Having a Laugh?

Now that Ricky Gervais has lost the weight he joins the ranks of Joe Piscipo and Roseanne Barr as those  who, after dealing with longstanding physical insecurities, cease to be funny. In his recent HBO special Gervais spends a good 20 minutes of the hour telling us, with all the transparent self-loathing he could muster, why it's proper to make fun of fat people. As if no one had ever been brave enough to do that before. Edgy. 




Why I Love My Wife

Beth emailed me the web page above with a confirmation of a motel reservation she made for me in Long Beach.


I wrote back:
Thanks, and thanks for having them stock the pool.


To which she replied an instant later:

It's catch and release, though.

Why I Love My Wife, Part 2

This Tuesday evening as we were sitting in the front room trying to wind the kids down for the night, I looked out the window and saw a clear and giant fire in the window of an apartment across the street from us. At first I thought the fire was inside the apartment; then I realized it was a reflection. From across the street. From us. 


Beth and I were down the stairs at once, leaving the boys behind a closed apartment door. We got to street level, Beth got out the door first, and all I heard was her say, "Oh my god." Luckily the fire wasn't in our building at all [do you know how hard it is to replace a 2/3 bedroom rent stabilized apt on the Upper West Side?]. The fire was in the six foot high pile of garbage and Christmas trees next to our tiny walk-up building. The flames were easily twice the height of the trash and  ridiculously bright yellow. The doormen from the huge apartment building next door [whose trash it was] were out front milling about. Then one of them disappeared, presumably to call the fire dept or dig up a hose. Beth told me to get a fire extinguisher. I dutifully ran back into our building, stopped and asked her where one was. To her undying credit she didn't say, "On every landing of every floor you've walked past at least twice a day for the past 15 years." She just said, "On the landing."


I got the fire extinguisher, pulled the pin [which I found myself still clutching another 20 minutes later], and went for it. All I heard before I let 'er rip was some dude behind me say, "Good luck with that, man."