Eric Berlin

Good weekend. Saturday the wife had to work, so I took the kids to soccer. This is theoretically for Alex’s sake, but since it’s not really a team, and it’s not really a practice — and hardly anyone shows up anyway — nobody minds if Lea participates as well. This week she wanted to be a goalie. That was fun for a while until I scored a goal against her.

Mean daddy!, you cry. Scoring against your own kid! Sure, like I can control what happens to the ball after it launches away from my foot. I’m not exactly a precision player on the soccer field. The best I can do is hope that the ball travels in the same direction I am facing, and not sideways or backwards. Once, as a child, in the middle of a real soccer game, I went to kick the ball into the goal and missed entirely, my foot getting nothing but air, as if Lucy had pulled the ball away. When I brought my foot back down, then it connected, sending the ball backwards to one of my teammates, who kicked it into the goal for the score. I received an assist.

No one was more surprised than me when the ball snuck into the narrow gap between Lea’s body and the rest of the kid-sized goal. Well, maybe one person was more surprised, and that was Lea herself, and she had a fine, old-fashioned temper tantrum. Alex, meanwhile, didn’t want to be there in the first place — the ground was soggy from the overnight rain, and he didn’t want to practice kicking, and he didn’t want to have a catch. Why did we come here? Why were we staying? I had no answer to either of those questions, so we left.

Went home, changed clothes, and headed over to the Ansonia Nature Center with its big, beautiful wooden playground. (That picture doesn’t even capture the entirety of it — there’s more to the left.) The kids could run around, and I could solve a Hex cryptic. Win win!

We wound up staying for close to two hours. Lea made friends with two little girls in identical tie-dyed shirts. That was par for the course. More unusual is, Alex made a friend, too. He and a little boy named Zachary sat at the top of the big, curvy slide for something like half an hour, dropping handfuls of pebbles to hear them rattle their way down. No way was I going to break that up. Lea at one point said to her friends, “That’s my brother. He doesn’t make sense.” I really need to talk to her about saying things like that. Her heart’s in the right place, and I know she’s simply preparing her new friends for the Alex Experience, which can be, shall we say, non-linear. But there’s got to be a better way to phrase it than that.

Sunday. Mother’s Day. There’s an art fair on the town green, and we go, even though the past DOZEN art fairs have ended with Lea saying, “I don’t like this. I’m tired. Pick me up. I want to go home,” and Alex falling apart at the pure, overwhelming boredom of it all. Luckily, just as they are at the verge of calling social services on their abusive parents who make them go look at art, we pass a stand selling homemade fudge. All is forgiven.

As we walk the green, my wife says, “Do you think that guy will be here?”, and I know exactly who she means: The worst artist in the world. We love this guy, because his paintings are hypnotically awful — unfunny cartoons with sledgehammer punchlines, drawn with the talent of a sixth-grader. Imagine walking around an art show… not everything is great, but there are some appealing abstracts that make you pause a moment, and some interesting watercolors and a lot of good photography… and then, smack in the middle of the show, your eye is helplessly drawn to this.

Okay, I admit the idea behind this one sort of made me smile for a moment, even if it’s rendered in the same crayon-in-fist style. But, jeezlouise, $350?! I think you left out the decimal point, friend.

After the art show, I go to the supermarket to get the fixings for salmon risotto. The Stop and Shop has opened its garden center in the middle of the parking lot, so I pick up a couple of trays of cheerful yellow flowers. Janinne spends the afternoon planting them with Lea’s assistance, while I’m in the kitchen chopping onions and shredding spinach.

Dinner. The kids actually eat the salmon. Someone fetch me the smelling salts, I may pass out from the shock.

After dinner, the kids watch part of a movie while I kick myself for not working more with Alex. Bathtime, pajama time, book time, bed. J and I top off a very nice weekend with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It’s bleak and hopeless, but at least it’s over two hours long! We resolve never to rob a jewelry store.

This weekend: The Washington Post Hunt. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there!

Thousands of gas pumps can’t handle prices greater than $3.99, and can’t accept a grand total over $100.

Coming to theaters, June 2008: Baghead.

Coming to theaters, August 2008: Towelhead.

It looks like they may have changed the name of that second movie, but I think we all agree that would be a shame.

Fontstruct is a new, online font-creation tool that I am NOT going to have to time to play with anytime soon, dammit. The demo on the homepage makes me drool, though.

(Via Kottke.)

An interesting article showing how America’s reaction to 9/11 resembles The Godfather. The neocons are Sonny, the Democrats are Tom, and the authors sorely wish someone would step up and play Michael. The analogy gets a little forced, I admit, but they get further along with it than I would have expected.

(Via The Plank.)

Don’t look down!

Puzzability offers a Conga Line — better known to variety crossword fans as a Labyrinth — in this month’s Spirit Magazine.

Hey, it’s been a while since their last New York Times extravaganza… might we see another one in the future?

Update: I tend to gravitate to the word puzzles, but the Tentaizu logic puzzles are pretty great, too. Just the right level of difficulty for someone like me, who tends to be intimidated by all these Nikoli logic variants.

You’re not just solving a puzzle; you’re making a scientific breakthrough.

The Electric Company is being revived! Sort of…

In the first episode Mr. Reale establishes the show’s conceit: Somewhere in the big city lies a natural-foods diner that is headquarters to a not-so-secret society known as the Electric Company. The four semi-superheroes who meet there — Keith, Jessica, Lisa and Hector — have pledged not only to use their powers for good but also to eat sensible portions of healthy meals. The gang ranges in age from 13 to 20 and can scramble, recall, project and animate words in astounding ways.

A natural-foods diner? The characters have pledged to eat sensible portions? What the hell?

“Mr. Reale” is Willie Reale, who helped to create the lovely musical for kids A Year with Frog and Toad. And apparently the music is being done by three people from the current Broadway show In the Heights. I’m always in favor of theater people breaking into other forms of media, and I wish them well. Just keep the dietary preachiness to a minimum, please.

Professional miniature golfers will be happy to tell you.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry thinks so. I guess it’s always fun to debate something that’s never going to happen.

Artist Mario Amaya has taken a bunch of famous logos and pointed them elsewhere. Fun stuff.

(Thanks to Neatorama.)

We talked about the upcoming movie Swing Vote a few months back. Now the trailer is out. The basic premise still seems beyond the reach of logic, but if you’re able to get past that, I’ve got to admit: This has some potential. Still lots of hurdles to overcome, and the odds aren’t good — I suspect this movie is going to engage in a form of feel-good pandering to the little guy that Clinton and Obama could only dream about. And there are signs that the Republicans will, as usual, be Unthinking Evil Robo Clones. Still, I shall allow myself to be tentatively hopeful. I would love to see a great, modern political comedy (I mean, what was the last one?), so here’s hoping the moviemakers can somehow pull this nutty idea off.

Michael Gerson in the Washington Post:

Obama’s explanation for [the flag lapel pin’s] absence — that it had become a “substitute” for “true patriotism” in the aftermath of Sept. 11 — is perfectly rational. For a professor at the University of Chicago. Members of the knowledge class generally find his stand against sartorial symbolism to be subtle, even courageous. Most Americans, I’m willing to bet, will find it incomprehensible after 20 additional explanations, which are bound to be required.

Of course they have one.

When I first read about Priya Venkatesan, the English teacher at Dartmouth who is suing her students for creating a “hostile working environment,” I thought: Okay. There’s a 85-90% chance this woman is simply crazy.

Via Julian Sanchez comes an interview in the Dartmouth Review with Ms. Venkatesan, after which I think we can boost the odds to 99.99999%. The best part is where she discusses a particularly abrasive student:

PV: One of the things that she did, this is also really interesting, was that she would always ask me how to spell things. That was her thing. She would say how to do you spell this? How to you spell that? I mean—what am I supposed to do?—so I would tell her. One time Tom Cormen was sitting in the class, and she asked me, how many T’s are in Gattaca. This was the kind of question she was asking, “how many T’s are in Gattaca?,” and I was about to answer her and Tom Cormen pre-empted me, “two t’s.” I’ll leave you to interpret it.

TDR: No. No, I don’t understand that.

PV: I have to tell you: it means tenure track.

TDR: Oh, okay.

PV: Because I wasn’t tenured track.

TDR: Oh, okay, yes.

PV: They were trying to intimate that I wasn’t ready for tenure track.

TDR: Yes, okay, I didn’t realize that’s what that meant.

PV: I’m kind of making this leap because this is the kind of subversiveness that was going on in that environment. That [girl x] would ask how many t’s are in Gattaca and that Tom Cormen would respond, “two T’s” as if I had no grasp on tenure track. ..but with [girl x], something’s going on with her. I’m not a doctor, but she’s not all there.

I enjoyed this cartoon… and two days later was deeply amused to come across this.

(Via BB-Blog.)

From Boing Boing: “The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band who could not afford a camera crew for their video, ‘performed’ in front of a load of CCTV cameras, requested the footage from the camera operators under the Freedom of Information Act and then stitched the results together for their music video.”

A woman is suing Norwalk, Connecticut, because her 1-year-old son stepped in dog poop.

(Via Overlawyered.)

Ladies and gentlemen, Zach Feinstein has made himself eligible for the 2008 NBA draft! This despite the fact that he doesn’t play basketball.