Entry 326: A List of Six Things Happening in My Life

1.  S left today for Ghana for a week, which means I have both kids -- or more accurately I have one kid since S's mom is here and she does pretty much all the work with the baby.  It's mainly going to entail a lot of driving around, as Lil' S1 is on Spring Break, and so we've signed him up for "gymnastics camp."  But we were quite late in enrolling him, and some of the days were already full, so he has to go to daycare a few days.  So depending on what day it is I have to pick him up/drop him off somewhere different.  Kids are a pain in the ass, eh?

[We are going to miss S while she's Ghana way.  I used that one on FaceBook too.]

2.  In a previous entry I wrote this about Lil' S1:

But I’ll be damned if he doesn’t say some funny shit.  A few of my favorites: glubs (gloves); tow-food (tofu); scrapter (scraper, a type of truck in one of his books), and being-haive (“Daddy, daddy, can I watch something?  I’m being-haive.”).  He also has a memory like a black hole.  He just pulls in information and doesn’t let it go.  I’ve learned to give him the benefit of the doubt when he tells me something I think isn’t right, as often it is right and I’m wrong or I’m misunderstanding what he’s saying.  And now, when this happens, he follows it up with “See!  I told you!”  This bodes well for the future.  I would love to have a little know-it-all son.

I went back and read this entry because I was trying to figure out what day a certain event happened, and I was struck by the term "scrapter".  I've since learned that it's "scraptor" and it is a type of character on the show Dinotrux.  That's what he was talking about.  He wasn't mispronouncing scraper at all.  And this in the same paragraph where I talk about giving him the benefit of the doubt.  How ironic!  If I find out there really is actually something called "tow-food," my mind will be completely blown.

3.  I had another crossword puzzle published in the New York Times yesterday.  You can read about it here if you are so inclined.  (Warning: link contains spoilers.)

4.  Earlier this week, I also recorded a short segment about my book with a radio station in Pittsburgh.  Apparently the producer was having a conversation about the great baseball player Honus Wagner's lesser-known brother Butts Wagner, so he looked up Butts online and found my book through a $5 add I bought on a baseball website, and then he sent me a media request through CreateSpace.  I think the interview went pretty well.  It hasn't run on air yet, but the producer said that he will send me an audio link when it does, so... yeah... cool.

[Butts Wagner]

5.  Speaking of books, I've started working on another one.  It's going to be about sports myths, but not the serious myths that people actually care about.  It's going to be about the silly myths like that Bo Jackson was the best character on Tecmo Super Bowl -- stupid stuff like that.  It's not going to be done for a while.  When your only time to write consists of a half hour at the end of the day when you are completely exhausted progress is pretty slow.

6.  Lil' S2 can sit up on his own now, but he still can't quite crawl.  He's getting so close though.  I think it is going to happen within the next few weeks.  Then the really fun begins!

Alright, that will do it.  Until next time...

Entry 325: Poxes Be Gone! ... Please

I thought this was going to be the week that everybody got better -- that I wouldn't have to write yet another entry about how everybody is sick.  Instead, things totally went the other way.  Lil' S1 doubled down on the sickness last weekend, running a fever so high we nearly took him to the emergency room.  But a little Children's Motrin cooled him off, and it cooled off S too, as she was growing quite concerned.  (I, for my part, was steely, because that's pretty much how I always am, for better or worse.)  We kept him home from school on Monday, and then I made a last second call to keep him home on Tuesday too.  We were all dressed and ready to go when I looked over to see him laying on the couch with his jacket, shoes, and backpack on, saying, "Daddy, I'm sleepy.  I wanna take a nap."  I told him OK and sent him upstairs where he slept nearly the entire day.  So it was obviously the right move to keep him home.  We finally sent him back to school on Thursday, but even then his teacher said he had almost no energy.  He's at school right now, and I told his teacher to text me if he needed to come home, and I haven't heard anything yet, so... fingers crossed.

Oh, also, S is gone for the weekend, and Lil' S2 is recovering from croup.  Lucky me!  The saving grace is that S's parents are in town, and her mom helps out tremendously with the little little man.  She's basically a 24/7 nanny who also cooks every meal.  That part is great.  S's dad on the other hand... Well, he doesn't really help at all.  I try not to get annoyed with him -- he's old, he has two bad shoulders, and he doesn't know how to handle Lil' S1 -- but sometimes it's like, dude, can you please offer to do something, anything, with this kid to give me a break?  Read him book, draw with him, play with his Dinotrux, just distract him for 15 minutes so that I can send this work email or eat my dinner in relative peace.  (Although, I should be careful what I wish for.  The other morning he got Lil' S1 some milk, but didn't put the lid on right, so Lil' S1 just dumped it all into his lap.  So not only did I have to get out of bed, but I had to tend to a sopping wet kid.)

Now, don't get me wrong.  I don't want to sound ungrateful.  I'm just venting.  S's dad has been so unselfish with us -- with me -- over the years.  He literally gave us his car -- two of them, actually.  And every time we visit he always makes sure I have a prime spot to sleep and I have everything I need.  In fact, pretty much anytime we need anything at all, he will provide it or helps us obtain it if he can.  He's a very good and generous man.  He's just not great with needy toddlers is all.

-----------------------

Okay, to switch gears completely, I'm going to give you a few political predictions.

Prediction no. 1: Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic presidential nominee.

Too obvious, you say?  Not if you read the posts of the Bernie Sanders supporters on my FaceBook feed.  My goodness they are delusional.  It reminds me very much of four years ago when Republicans insisted that all the polls had a liberal bias and Mitt Romney was actually the favorite in the general election.  With Bernie Bros, they obviously don't claim a liberal bias, instead they claim a "corporate" bias.  The corporate media is lying to us all and downplaying Bernie's chances in order to prop up their preferred choice, the "establishment" candidate Hillary Clinton.  Here's an example of what somebody posted:

Okay, let's break this down.  According to this graphic, a candidate must get 2,173 delegates to reach a majority.  Given that Sanders currently has 818, he needs 1,355 of the 2,394 remaining.  Since Democrats award delegates more or less proportional to the percentage of the vote, this means Sanders needs to claim 57% of the vote moving forward.  He's reached this percentage just seven times in the previous 24 contests, and now he has to average it over the remaining 26 to win.  Currently he's at just under 42% of the vote (again according to this chart).  So, not only does Sanders need to beat Clinton in the remaining states, he needs to crush her.  He needs to up his share of the vote by 15% -- a whopping total given that half the country has already given us a good idea of how we are leaning.  A swing this large would be extremely difficult to pull off even if Sanders was beating Clinton in the polls in the remaining primaries.  But -- spoiler alert! -- he isn't.  He's projected to lose handily in Arizona and also lose in Utah.  So not only do the polls have to be off for Sanders to gain any real ground, they have to be way off.  Yes, I know, Michigan and all that, but Michigan was an historical anomaly.  Thinking every poll will be off in Sanders' favor at a Michigan-type level is like thinking global warming is a hoax because we once had a cold day in July.

The thing that Sanders supporters are having a very hard time accepting is that more Democrats genuinely prefer Clinton.  It's not corporations, it's not Wall Street, it's not the party elites, it's the people -- rank-and-file voters.  They like Clinton better, plain and simple, fair and square.  It's democracy in action, and the people are democratically choosing Hillary.  The media isn't lying to anybody about this (if anything, they are being too generous to Sanders because they don't want the horse race to end this early).  In fact, the people who are being dishonest are the people who made the above graphic without giving any accompanying analysis.

Look, Sanders could still be the nominee (betting markets have him around 6%).  Hillary could get charged with a felony, she could have a stroke, she could have a religious epiphany and endorse Ted Cruz.  There are countless things that could happen that allow Sanders to win.  But barring one of these wild, unforeseen game-changers, he is going to lose to Hillary.  His supporters don't have to like it, but it would be nice if they weren't in mindless denial about it.

Prediction no. 2: Trump Does Not Secure a Majority of the Delegates, the Republican Nomination is Decided by a Brokered Convention and the Candidate Is... Donald J. Trump!

There is a decent chance Trump wins the nomination outright, but there is an equally decent chance he doesn't.  It's about a coin flip.  If he doesn't get a majority of the delegates, and neither does any other candidate (and nobody else is close right now), then chaos will ensue, and the Republicans will have to somehow pick somebody at their convention in July.  Although several names have been bandied about -- Ted Cruz and John Kasich, obviously, but also Paul Ryan -- I bet, if it comes down to it, they will pick Trump anyway.  Why?  They aren't actually willing to go all in against him.  The #nevertrump movement is a total bluff, and Trump knows this, and he has repeatedly called it.

If Republicans really wanted to spot Trump, they could, easily.  All they have to do is announce that under no circumstances will they vote for Trump in the general election.  They could even run a third-party, write-in candidate against him: Paul Ryan on the True Conservative ticket or something like that.  This would absolutely stop Trump.  It would also gift wrap the election for Hillary, but it would stop Trump.  And for as much as Republicans like to talk about purity and integrity and honor, they would rather stand behind a crass, xenophobic, racist liar than have four more years of *shudder* a Democrat (with a few exceptions).  The Republicans want Trump to go away, but they don't want him to take his supporters with him.  Trump knows this and is like, hahaha... fuck you guys.

I mean, here's how I think it would go down at a brokered convention.

Republican Elite: I say we nominate John Kasich.
Trump: That would be a 'uge mistake.  If you do that, I'm going to tell my minions not to vote for him.  In fact, I might even run as an independent.  I'll be the best independent candidate God ever created.
Republican Elite: Fine, let's nominate Donald Trump instead.
Ted Cruz [out of the side of his mouth]: I say we nominate Ted Cruz.
Trump: Shut up, Lying Ted!  Nobody likes you, anyway!

That sounds about right, doesn't it?

Alright, until next time...

Entry 324: You Got Me There

It's a beautiful day today, 75 degrees and sunny, but not too sunny -- just enough so that you contemplate wearing sunglasses when you go out.  Hmm... do I need them or not?  Maybe I'll just wear a hat instead.  Yeah, a hat...  It's a great day to work from home -- or at least it would be if I wasn't so effing annoyed.  I was planning on going for a run during my lunch break, but the pest-control people ruined it (fucking Orkin!), so instead I'm spending my break waiting for them and writing this post.  They did that thing where they give you a time-window, and then don't show up during it, thus negating the entire purpose of the time-window.  (They already have leeway as to when to come; that's precisely why it's a window and not a set time.)  It's especially annoying for me because S set up the appointment, and so I can't even vent my frustration properly, because if I do then she will tell me that I should set up the appointment myself next year, which I probably should do, but that is not the point.  The point is: fucking Orkin is fucking up my entire day!  And all for a checkup in which they never find anything anyway.  So I'm basically paying $50 to have my day ruined.

But other than that things are going pretty well.  I'm constantly tired all the time, and so is S, but help is on the way.  Next week S's parents are coming to town and her mom is going to stay with us until June.  She will get the baby when he fusses in the middle of the night and wake up with Lil' S1, which will make things so much easier on us.  The sleep deprivation is what gets me.  If I'm reasonably well-rested then I can deal with all the other parenting bullshit.  If I'm tired, then it turns the smallest things up to eleven.

Lil' S1's teacher had to have an unfortunate "talk" with us because he hit another kid with a block and then he started calling people booty-faces and poop-butts.  He's at that age.  We were mainly concerned with the hitting -- mostly because it's wrong to hit people, but also because if he keeps doing that, he's going to hit the wrong kid, a kid who's bigger and tougher than him, and that kid is going to hit back, and it's not going to go well for my beanpole son.  We took away the iPad for the night, which, for Lil' S1, borderlines on cruel and unusual punishment, and it seemed to work.  The next day after school, he came home and said, "Can I watch something?  I didn't hit anybody today!"

I'm significantly less concerned with the potty-mouth.  That's completely a function of being a child, I think.  It seems like pretty much every little kid reaches a point in which they realize poo-poo talk gets a reaction, and they think it's funny, so they have a phase where they use it a lot.  (Thankfully, it usually only lasts a few decades.)  I don't really care, other than I wish he wouldn't use it in public.  When he uses it at home, we usually tell him not to, but we don't really discipline him over it.  And sometimes we laugh at it, because it’s genuinely amusing, which, of course, only encourages it.

It's funny too how kids will pull a "you got me there" on you.  The other day, Lil' S1 was in the bathroom after going number two, trying to wipe himself, and not doing a very good job of it, so I was telling him to stop because he was getting poo-poo everywhere, and he said to me, "Daddy, you said no poo-poo talk."  I told him it was okay if you are actually in the bathroom going poop.  So the next time he's doing his business, he shouts to me, "Daddy, can I do poo-poo talk?!"  I said he could, so he starts singing a little song: "poo-poo... poo-poo-poo... poo-p-poo-poo... oh yeah... oh yeah... poo-poo... poo-poo… bootie-wootie… oh yeah…"  And I was thinking, “Well, you got me there.”  At least he asked permission.

Overall, however, I think he's doing pretty well.  His teacher says he's one of the more advanced students in his class, which is good being that he is literally the youngest kid in the entire school.  Like me he’s got a late summer birthday, so we have to decide whether or not to keep him with his current class, which is where he's supposed to be according to DC public school rules, or try to hold him back a grade.  I also have a late summer birthday, my parents held me back (or more accurately, enrolled me in kindergarten a year later than I could have been), which worked out for me, because of how I developed physically (I was a little bit of a late bloomer), but I certainly could have kept up academically had I been a year ahead.  Plus, it wasn’t such a big deal back then.  Now, because parents have started gaming the system, districts have had to crack down on keeping children in their appropriate classes, which I completely understand.  I mean, somebody has to be the youngest in their grade.  If everybody with a child born in August or September holds their kid back a year, then July just becomes the cutoff, which is no better (or worse) than having the cutoff in September.  And then parents with children born in July would want to hold back their children and so on.  The only way to stop the creep is to stop the creep.

And this segues nicely into one of my least favorite parts of parenting – the scholastic competition.  I hate the constant jostling and maneuvering that parents are basically expected to do to give their child a leg up and everybody else's.  Can't we all just work together work together for the good of all our kids?  It is particularly bad here in DC, because we have charter schools that select potential enrollees through a lottery that happens in early March every year.  So right about now, it is the talk of the town among parents with young kids.  What schools are you trying for?  Did you hear about this new one?  It has a Chinese immersion program.  But this other one is Montessori.  Yeah, but it only got a 4.4 rating from the School Board.  Yeah, but they have 30 new openings and that other one only has 5.  Plus, it’s all they way on Capitol Hill – the traffic!   Yeah, but it's worth it, it got a perfect 10 rating!  We are going to put in bids for both our kids, so that we double our chances.  Make sure you do it for pre-K3, otherwise they won't have any openings.  Well, if we don’t get in, we’re going to think about private school...

I mean, I get it, everybody wants to do what’s best for their kids.  But the way we do education in this country is not right, and it’s a huge part of the reason why we have "two Americas."  If I could make any system from scratch, it would be publicly funded neighborhood schools, in which every school in the state is funded from the same source and doled out in a manner so that all schools perform roughly the same.  Everything is equal (more or less) regardless of where you live you; everybody pays for everybody else’s kids.  Schools in poor parts of the state would get the same resources as those in rich parts (perhaps more to overcome other disadvantages).  I would even go so far as to say that you cannot fund-raise on behalf of an individual school.  You have to fund-raise on behalf of all schools (or maybe just on behalf of your school and another "sister" school of different demographics; I haven't worked it all out yet).  You want to have a bake sale to get new basketball uniforms?  Great, but part of that money is going to go somewhere else too.

Yes, this means rich people would pay for poor people’s kids.  Yes, it’s socialism.  So what?  I believe in socialism for kids, because the alternative – that you begin life at a profound disadvantage if you happen to be born into the wrong circumstances – is something much worse than socialism.  A nontrivial reason why I want my kids to go to their neighborhood public school is because I believe in the community aspect of it and because neighborhood public school cannot survive if parents like S and I aren’t willing to “invest” in it.  Of course, it helps a great deal that our local public school is decent – not spectacular, but decent.  If it was like something out of Lean on Me (timely reference), I might feel differently.



Okay, I gotta go, but before I do, everybody’s favorite recurring segment: Health Update!  I did some physical therapy the other day and the therapist said that it is probably not a rotator cuff injury and probably won’t require surgery.  Instead she thinks it’s inflammation caused by overuse and that it will come down in time with rest and physical therapy.  This actually makes a lot of sense as I noticed it shortly after I got back into weightlifting.  I probably overdid it – too much, too soon.  Sometimes I forget that I’m now a legitimate 20 years removed from my physical peak (frowny face emoji).  It also doesn’t help that I live with a three-year old who thinks I’m his personal jungle gym.  Oh and by the way, he's sick right now.  Somebody all four of us will be healthy at the same time... hopefully.

Until next time…

Entry 323: More Maladies

Nobody was sick this week.

After complaining about having an upset tummy, Lil' S1 threw up in his bed in the wee hours of the morning today.  He seems to be doing well now, but it's like -- ugh -- why can't we all just get healthy?!  Then to make matters worse, S and I both ended up going to the doctor yesterday.  She has a foot infection, and I have a shoulder injury.  S's malady is probably more serious in the short term; mine is probably more serious in the long run.  S got a blister on the bottom of her foot that got infected somehow and caused the upper half of the sole of her foot and middle toe to swell up.  It's causing her quite a bit of distress -- it's painful, and it's hard for her to walk -- but she's soldiering on.  It's the type of thing that should clear up in a few days with doses of antibiotics, but the first drug the doctor proscribed didn't work, so he gave her something new today.  It's a bit worrisome that her body didn't respond to the initial dose of antibiotics, but if the new ones work as expected, she will be completely cured in a few days.

I, on the other hand, am probably in for a long stint of rehabilitation, possibly surgery.  There is no way to really diagnose the problem without an MRI, and insurance companies typically don't pay for MRIs unless they absolutely have to, so I have to try physical therapy first.  It's probably for the best, anyway, as a doctor once said to me "start with the simplest treatments and work you way up from there."  I likely have an injured rotator cuff, and if it's not torn then physically therapy will fix it.  If it is torn then either I will need surgery or I will need to live with it.  Being that I expect to live at least another 40 years, and I want to do things like throw a ball without discomfort during those 40 years, I will almost certainly opt for surgery.  Plus I've had good experience with surgery.  In 1995, I tore my meniscus and for months it nagged at me to the point that I forgot what it felt like to be normal.  I kept pushing back surgery despite the doctor offering it as an option because I wanted it to get better "naturally," which just wasn't happening.  Finally, I relented and had the operation, and within two weeks I was fully recovered and my knee felt amazing.  I remember thinking: "Damn!  Why didn't I do this weeks ago?!"

My current injury is not putting me in excruciating pain, and I can still lift things (weirdly, rotator cuff injuries don't effect your strength at all), but it's limiting my movement, and worse, it's uncomfortable and annoying.  I'm pretty sure I injured it during an exercise class at the gym, but I don't remember anything specific.  I just remember it bothering me a little bit.  And then like a moron I didn't heed the warning my body was giving me, I didn't change my routine and go easy on it, and so now two months later it's only gotten worse.  Yeah, duh.  Well, at least now I have a reason for why I've been losing in racquetball.  It might not having anything to do with it, but that's my reason all the same.

In other news, I've been loving the Republican primaries.  Sure, I won't be so entertained if one of them actually becomes president, but I've blocked that possibility from my head for now.  I'm just enjoying the farce.  And weirdly I'm rooting for Trump.  Actually, that's not that weird because although Trump is the biggest demagogue of them all, he's also the most unpredictable, which means there is a possibility he won't toe the "Conservative Establishment" line if he actually did become president.  Cruz and Rubio are serious about their disastrous proposals -- Cruz because he's extremely religious and ideological and Rubio because I think he will literally (and I mean that literally) do and say whatever will further his career in the Republican party.  But Trump, who knows?  Trump seems to crave adulation above everything else, so maybe he would be a more centrist president to maximize his popularity.  (The Arnold Schwarzenegger analogy has been tossed around quite a bit, but I don't think it's very apt.  Schwarzenegger was never as despicable or idiotic as Trump.)  Also, I could see Trump doing the opposite of what his party wants just because he can -- just to flex his muscle and prove he's in charge.  But then again, I could also see him starting a nuclear war.  So, you know...

Then there is the other thing about Trump: I think he will get smoked by Clinton in a general election (sorry, Bernie Bros, I like him too, but Hillary's got this).  There is a lot of talk about Trump fracturing the party and of a third party joining the race and all that, and maybe that happens, but even if we assume most Republicans do eventually accept Trump (as I suspect is the case -- we're already seeing it happen), he still has an uphill battle.  Think about this way: In order for Trump to win a general election against Clinton either (a) he would have to get many more votes than Mitt Romney got in 2012, or (b) Hillary would have to get many fewer votes than Obama.

It's tough to see how (a) happens.  Trump is overwhelmingly popular with Caucasians, but Romney already got nearly 60% of the Caucasian vote in 2012, which is already beyond what we would "expect" (white people lean Republican 50%-40%).  Is there a huge group -- a clan, if you will -- of untapped whiteys who will vote for Trump that didn't turn out for Romney?  Perhaps, but it seems strange that all these new white Trump fans wouldn't have taken the opportunity to vote against the black guy in 2012.  Also, it seems unlikely that they are living in swing states, and not in the South where a Republican will win no matter what.  And even if he does bring out a bunch of new racist white voters, he is still despised by a lot of white people who voted for Mitt Romney (e.g., Mitt Romney).  It's hard for me to see how he does significantly better than Romney with white people.  And without white people what has Trump got?

As for (b), this is a legit fear of mine.  Clinton is not as well-liked as Obama, and, if my Facebook feed is any indication, she is downright loathed by many Sanders supporters.  But if she wraps up the nomination relatively soon, which she might, I have to think (hope (pray)) that Bernie lovers will get over their hurt feelings and vote against Trump in the fall.  Negative partisan is actually much stronger than partisanship, and if ever there was a candidate for liberals and minorities to rally against, it's Donald Drumph.  I mean, what percentage of the black vote is Hillary going to get?  I think all but three -- not three percent, I mean all but three people.  Ben Carson, Herman Cain, and Stacey Dash could very well be the only black voters in the entire country who vote against Hillary -- and honestly I'm not even completely sure Herman Cain is still alive.

Look, nobody knows what is going to happen for sure.  It could very well be that I'm missing something and that the Trump Train just cannot be stopped, and we are going to be the laughing stock of the world in a few short months.  But it could also be that Trump is the catalyst that severely damages the Republican party as we know it.  That is in play also.  (Or we end up somewhere in the middle of these two scenarios, which is the most likely outcome.)  And since I extremely dislike all of the candidates in the Republican party, rooting for chaos and destruction is a rational course of action.

Alright, I'm tapped out on political talk.  Until next time...

Entry 322: Sicknesses and Arguments

Came down with something awful Sunday evening -- stomach flu.  It wiped me out for a day, but I'm feeling much better now.  I though perhaps it was food poisoning, but it got S too, so it almost certainly wasn't food poisoning.  Whatever it was it was nasty -- violent vomiting, chills, aches, enervation, and ague (if you don't know this word, you need to do more crossword puzzles).  Thankfully it passed quite quickly.  My tummy still isn't completely settled, but it's no longer a Pandora's Box.

[You did not want to be around when the Evils from my internal Pandora's box were released, believe you me.]

So now I'm normal again, which is good.  Only when you are sick do you so pine for the mundanity of everyday life.  I could barely get out of bed Monday morning, and I was thinking to myself I just want to feel good enough to take my kids to school -- not because this is something I had to do, S picked up the slack (I returned the favor at night, when she got sick), or even something that I enjoy doing; it's just that I wanted to feel good enough so that I could do it.  It's my barometer when I'm sick.  When I'm healthy, I have dreams and aspirations.  When I'm sick my only goal is to get back to the ordinariness of my quotidian routine.

Although S and I got hit, the kids seemed to come out unscathed, which is also good.  Well, actually, it's possible that they already got it.  Lil' S2 has had a bug for about three weeks now, resulting in seaweed poo and a brutal diaper rash (now mostly gone).  S asked the doctor about it at a checkup, and she said it was "daycare diarrhea" and there wasn't much that could be done about it other than waiting for it to pass.  Shortly after he got sick, Lil' S1 also came down with something, but it just seemed to be the sniffles, and neither of them was completely decimated like S and I.  So, I dunno, maybe it's all related, maybe not.  Maybe S and I just needed to sleep -- like really sleep, like not-get-out-of-bed-until-noon sleep -- and our bodies knew the only way that would happen is to get sick.  Can your immune system take one for the team?  Who knows?

Other than getting really sick, things have been going pretty well.  I've been trying to workout and eat better -- you know, the typically struggles of the desk-job-working, nearly middle-age, white man.  It was SO much easier to do without kids than it is now with two hellions (or rather one hellion and one soon-to-be hellion).  I've joined a racquetball league, which is good, but for some reason I suck now, even though I used to be good, so that's a bit dispiriting, but it's still a good workout, although I can really only play once a week.  I've joined a gym as well, but again it's hard to go more than once a week, and even then, it's an ordeal because I usually have to bring one of the kids with me, usually Lil' S1, and he often doesn't want to go, and then when I make him, he bothers me about going to Target (in the same building as the gym) to buy him a toy, and if I don't do it then he pitches a fit, and it's not like the 19-year-old community college student at the gym daycare wants to or knows how to deal with him.  So usually I give in and just buy a little $3 action figure at Target to placate him, which I don't really like because (a) he's already spoiled enough, (b) our house is quickly becoming a repository for cheap plastic shit made in China.

Actually, I have to fair, last time we went to the gym, it was pretty nice.  Afterward we went to Panera and had a pleasant lunch.  (Nothing like undoing all the hard work you just did at the gym by eating half a loaf of bread.)  It was a good bonding moment.

["It's not a lizard, Daddy!  It's a rep-tool!"]

In other news S and I have been averaging about 0.8 fights per night the last few weeks.  We don't have one every night, but four out five seems about right.  It pretty much always boils down to the same things, for the same reasons.  The main thing is that we're both just tired and overworked, so we are cranky and things that would normally just be discussions or disagreements get turned up to 11.  Then we often start fighting about our fight (a meta-fight, if you will).  She gets upset by my tone, and I get upset because I don't understand why we are even having the discussion in the first place.

  

What happens is, S likes to ruminate about major life decisions.  She's also comfortable making what I consider big changes more frequently than me.  (I'm all about moving slowly and incrementally and savoring the process as I go.)  So she will bring something up, and I won't want to talk about it, and then she'll get upset, and I'll get annoyed.  And then she'll say that I never want to do anything, and I'll ask why she wants to bring this up now, when we have two small kids and are struggling just to find the time to do basic life maintenance like exercise and sleep.  And then... Well you get the idea.

S and I just see life differently.  The analogy is this: Imagine you are stuck in traffic, with no break in the immediate future.  There are two types of people: Person 1 wants to stay in the car and make the best of things -- turn on some good music, tell some funny stories, and ride it out, because he knows it's temporary.  Person 2 wants to pull off the road and go somewhere else for a while, maybe try some different roads.  The roads might  not get her to her destination any faster or be anymore scenic, but the experience will be something new -- something different.  I'm Person 1; S is Person 2.  And we've known this for a long time.  We knew it before we got married, and we knew that it's something we had to manage.  And we will.  But it's not always easy.

Alright, party people, that's all I got this week.

Until next time...

Entry 321: Stuff in the World

Time is of the essence today.  I have four periods set aside throughout the week during which I can work on this blog.  Usually at least one of them is open.  This week, however, they all got snatched up by "real-life" things.  During two of them I had to do work work -- things have been busier than usual at the office.  During another one of them I had to watch the kids because S had to do something, and during the final one I had to take Lil' S1 to a birthday party.  So now I'm in a mad scramble to get something up before somebody in my family figures out what I'm doing and demands my time be focused on them.  It could be any of the three of them.

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So a lot happened this week in the world this past week.  The first, of course, is that Justice Scalia died.  You never want to cheer a man's death (Osama Bin Laden excepted), but the dispassionate truth of the matter is that this is a boon to many liberal causes.  It's already a big deal, but it could end up being a really big deal depending on how this year's election goes down.  I don't expect a replacement to be appointed by Obama.  The Republican-led Senate is unlikely to go for that, and frankly I can't really fault them -- if the situation was reversed, I wouldn't want a successor approved -- but the Democrat is at least a slight favorite to win the election, and in the interim, there are some Supreme Court cases that will likely end in a 4-4 tie in a manner favorable to liberals.  If Scalia were still on the court, he would almost certainly swing the vote to the conservative position.  The biggest one is probably a ruling on Obama's authority to limit emissions from power plants.  A few others are rulings about California teacher unions and how the state of Texas counts voters in a district.

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Another thing that happened is that the government got a court order telling Apple to hack an iPhone owned by that terrorist who shot up the Christmas party in California.  Apparently Apple has made their iPhones more secure in the wake of the Edward Snowden debacle, and the cops don't know how to break into an iPhone without the password.  Apple apparently doesn't know how to do this either and is balking at it (they're appealing the ruling), because it would require them to build a "back door" that currently doesn't exist, and that they don't want to build for customer privacy reasons.  In fact, as I understand it, the latest version of the iPhone, the 6, is so secure that Apple couldn't even break into it if they wanted to.  The terrorist had an earlier version -- the 5c, I believe -- and this apparently is hackable, but not with existing functionality.

I find this case fascinating, but every article I read or podcast I listen to about it, just makes me more confused.  Here are the (perhaps naive) questions I have about it.

1.  If the current functionality to hack the terrorist's phone doesn't exist, but everybody knows it can be built, can't a third-party figure it out?  Could the government turn the phone over to a group of independent hackers and say "do what Apple doesn't want to do?"  Does only Apple have the expertise and background knowledge to do this in a timely fashion?
2. One of the big reasons Apple doesn't want to do it is because they don't want this back door to exist at all.  The government says it's a one-off and will never be used again.  Apple says it will set a precedent and once something exists, you never know who will get their hands on it.  But if the back door is only possible because the phone is an older version, and under the newer version Apple couldn't build it even if they wanted to, then how would precedent be set?  Once everybody starts using the iPhone 6, it won't matter anyway, right?  It seems like some grandstanding on the part of Apple.
3. Is anything ever truly unhackable?  It's only unhackable until a hacker hacks it, right?

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Lastly, the primary races are really starting to heat up -- especially on the Republican side.  Trump continues to confound the naysayers and win votes.  Most the odds makers have him a bit better than 50-50, Rubio a bit worse than 50-50, and everybody else a long shot (with Cruz the only remotely realistic possibility among the long shots).  That seems about right to me.  I'm pulling for Trump.  I think he will get smoked by Hillary in the general election, and I'm loving the way he is destroying the Republicans' myths about their voting base.

On the Democratic side, it's still looking like Clinton all the way.  Sanders is certainly making it a decent fight, but despite his progress, Hillary is still a strong favorite.  Sure, a big upset could happen, but it would be just that -- a big upset.  I for one, really hope it doesn't happen.  I am not feeling the Bern.  I'm sympathetic to his ideals, but I'm a technocrat, and he isn't.  I want the pragmatists, the wonks, the empiricists, the nerds in charge -- I don't want ideologues, even those with whom I largely agree.

OK, that's it, gotta run.  Until next time...

Entry 320: On Coen Brothers Movies

The Coen Brothers dropped a new film recently Hail, Caesar!.  I haven’t seen it yet but probably will at some point in the not too distant future.  I see pretty much every Coen brothers movie.  They are one -- or two, I suppose -- of the only filmmakers, whose films I make it a must to see.  In fact, it's pretty much just them and Quentin Tarantino.  There are other filmmakers I like, but the Coens and Tarantino are the only ones I really make it a point to watch.  Incidentally, Tarantino came out with a new film himself relatively recently The Hateful Eight (which I also haven't seen, but want to) but in this post I’m going to talk about the Coen brothers because I am inspired by this article.

I think the author mostly gets it right, not completely right, but I would say more right than the voters in the readers' poll.  (If you vote at the end of the story you can see the readers' picks.)  Here's the “real” ranking, i.e., my ranking.  I haven't seen Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, The Ladykillers, or Hail, Caesar!, so I can't rank those, but 13 out of 17 is enough to make the definitive list, right?  I think so.

The list:

13  Intolerable Cruelty
12  O Brother, Where Art Thou?
11  The Hudsucker Proxy
10  Barton Fink
9    Inside Llewyn Davis
8    True Grit
7    Burn After Reading
6    Raising Arizona
5    No Country for Old Men
4    Fargo
3    A Serious Man
2    The Man Who Wasn't There
1    Big Lebowski

And here’s some commentary broken down into category form.

Three Most Overrated Movies
1.  O Brother Where Art Thou?
This is easily their most overrated movie.  I wouldn’t even say it’s a good movie, but the readers have it in the top five.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I recall it just being a hodgepodge of weird scenes.  There was no there there – no movie there.  That it is supposed to be based on The Odyssey does absolutely nothing for me.  There best thing about it by far is the soundtrack.

2.  Raising Arizona
Solid movie, but I watched it relatively recently and didn’t think it was nearly as funny as I remembered.  Part of this might be the pacing and style of comedies of that era -- the timing often seems slow when you watch them now.  Really great movies last the test of time, and this one doesn't quite hold up.  I put it in the overrated category because the author of the article ranked it no. 1, and it doesn’t even crack my top five.  It does, however, have one of my all-time favorite Coen brothers' lines in it.  A police officer is questioning the crusty old tycoon Nathan Arizona about what his missing child was wearing the night he disappeared.

Police Officer: What did the pajamas look like?
Nathan Arizona: I don't know. They were jammies! They had Yodas and shit on 'em!  

3.  No Country for Old Men
Great movie – just not Oscar-winning great (in my opinion; The Academy obviously feels differently).  That’s why I'm proclaiming this one overrated.  Fantastic individual performances (especially Javier Bardem), fantastic individual scenes (especially those containing Javier Bardem), but as a coherent, complete movie it came up just a tad short – the sum of the individual parts were better than the whole.  The buildup was fantastic, but there was no payoff, and I really wanted some sort of payoff.  I think they couldn’t write a good ending, so they did the artsy thing and just abruptly ended it.  To me, it felt much more like a copout than anything else.

Three Most Underrated Movies
1.  A Serious Man
I love this movie.  In fact, I think I might love this movie more than any other Coen brothers fan loves this movie, being that it barely makes the voters' list at all.  I have it as the Coens' third best all-time, ahead of Fargo by a sliver, because it’s more my style of movie.  I like movies about really interesting characters where nothing “exciting” happens, as opposed to thrillers.  The biggest knock on this movie, however, is that it does the thing I was just complaining about: it ends out of nowhere.  This wasn’t nearly as unsatisfying for me as it was in No Country for Old Men though.

2.  Burn After Reading
This one was much stupided than most other Coen brothers movies – by which I mean it was goofy and silly, not unintelligent.  But it was pretty fun (lighthearted, in a very dark way) and pretty funny.  So I put it in my top-10, higher than the author or the readers.

3.  The Man Who Wasn’t There
No. 2 on my list.  Billy Bob at his finest, with Frances McDormand also giving a boffo performance.  This has one of my favorite Coen brothers scenes in it of all-time.  The one where the woman comes to the barber’s door to talk to him about space aliens... You have to see it to get it.

Boringest Movie
Inside Llewyn Davis
Here’s how this went for me – drag, drag, drag, drag, kinda funny part, drag, drag, drag, drag, way too long song, drag, drag, drag, another way too long song, drag, drag, drag, another kind funny part, drag, drag, drag.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Yet, weirdly, I didn’t think it was a bad movie.  I don’t think it was great, and I never want to watch it again, but it wasn’t bad.

Excitingest Movie
Fargo
Actually, it's probably No Country for Old Men -- I think I was much more rapt during that one -- but I already talked about it, so I'll give some love to Fargo instead.  Great, great movie, and the TV show is pretty solid too.

The Worst
Intolerable Cruelty
Honestly, I don't even remember much about this movie, but one of things I do remember is that I really didn’t like it.  I think it was one of those every-other-scene-is-a-plot-twist type of movies -- the conman is actually getting conned by his mark, but she’s getting conned by her friend, who’s getting conned by the conman's accountant, but the quiet old woman nobody suspects is conning them all, but the original conman knows this so he’s conning her, so on and so forth.  I really dislike those movies.  If everything is a plot twist then there are no plot twists, because the audience isn't expecting anything anymore, so there is nothing to twist.  Much like the abrupt non-ending ending, it feels like a copout.

The Best
The Big Lebowski
And frankly it's not even really close.  The Coen brothers mainly write comedy and Lebowski is by far their funniest movie.  In fact, in my opinion, it's the funniest movie ever.  (Or rather, I should say, it's the funniest comedy ever.  I think Pulp Fiction actually made me laugh more the first time I saw it, but Pulp Fiction isn't a comedy in the same way The Big Lebowski is.)  There are so many Lebowski scenes I could end on, but let's go with this one.  It's probably my favorite.



Until next time...