Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 538

There must be something wrong with people who actively tan. Right?

Is it wrong for me to assume that anyone who is still using a tanning bed on a regular basis, after all the evidence linking tanning to skin cancer, is clearly plagued by issues related to poor self esteem, feelings of worthlessness and a lack of self concept?

Is there any other reason why a reasonably intelligent person would risk skin cancer in order artificially darken his or her skin tone?

Mind you, these are not people who fail to reapply sun screen after two hours in the sun or forget to wear a sun hat to the beach. These aren’t even people who forget the apply sunscreen altogether. This is not a case of carelessness or laziness.

These are people who pay money to purposefully fry their skin under concentrated UV lamps because they believe that others will think better of them, or they will think better of themselves, if their skin is darker than their natural skin tone.

It sounds insane. Doesn’t it?

In discussing this with my wife, she compared the dangers of tanning to that of smoking, and while I agree that both carry great risk, I think there is an important difference between the two:

Though smoking is exceptionally dangerous for your health, cigarettes are also highly addictive. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on the planet. Yes, smoking is a stupid thing to do, but quitting the habit can be exceedingly difficult.

Quitting tanning is as simple as deciding that your natural skin color is acceptable and that you need not to be browner than most in order to feel good about yourself.

This is not a case of addiction. It’s simply a case of placing one’s vanity ahead of one’s health.

It’s sad and stupid. Right?

Hate reading and hate watching: What a stupid, disingenuous waste of time

I’ve heard a lot about hate reading and hate watching over the past week.

In case you aren’t familiar with the terms, hate reading is the idea that a reader can despise a book and everything it stands for but still find pleasure in reading it all the way through.

Please note that this is very different from reading a book that you expected to love but did not. Hate reading is actively choosing to read a book that you expect to despise under the premise that you will enjoy hating it.

For example, I know several people who have told me that they are reading 50 SHADES OF GRAY for this very reason.

The same concept has been applied to television as well. This week, for example, Slate’s Stephen Metcalf acknowledged that he has been watching The Bachelor for years and explained that it is his hate watch.

I have been thinking about the concept of hate reading and hate watching and have arrived at a conclusion. Specifically, if you are in the business of hate reading or hate watching, I believe that you probably fall into one of two categories:

You are utilizing the concept of hate reading or hate watching to conveniently explain your consumption of content that you genuinely enjoy but consider beneath your typical standards of good taste. It is a dishonest and hypocritical attempt to mitigate any potential embarrassment over the pleasure that one is garnering from what he or she has deemed low brow content.
You have far too much free time on your hands. If you have hours to spend reading or watching content that you knowingly despise, you should seriously reconsider the way in which you are utilizing the precious minutes of your life. With all the great literature and film in this world, it strikes me as idiotic to spend even a minute consuming content that you know you will hate.

Despite my position on hate watching, my wife and I  inadvertently hate watched a show this week called America’s Got Talent. Before switching over to Mad Men on the DVR, we caught about 45 seconds of the show, which turned out to be about 35 seconds longer than we should have given this piece of trash. We watched a troop of mimes and a guitarist get booed off the stage by an exceedingly angry audience and immediately felt like we needed to take a shower.

But it left me wondering how anyone could spend even a minute hate watching something with so much great film and television available, especially now that it’s possible to watch almost any television program or film ever produced from the comfort of your couch, and with the touch of a button.

I simply cannot accept that someone would read page after page or watch episode after episode of content that they loathe without also thinking that choice either utterly stupid or a pathetic attempt to mitigate embarrassment over something they love but feel they shouldn’t.

Either admit that you genuinely enjoy The Bachelor, Stephen Metcalf, or acknowledge that your life is so empty of meaningful pursuits that you have the kind of time on your hands to watch a television show that you genuinely despise.

Go to bed (in a whisper)

Two days ago my daughter took a rather hard lined (and hilarious) approach to the animals in her book while putting them to bed.

Just one day later, her position had eased considerably.

How to win at tug of war

Victor Mather of the New York Times proposes 10 Olympic events that should be resurrected for the upcoming London games, including tug of war.

Tug of war was an annual competition at Yawgoog, the Boy Scout camp where I spent many of my childhood summers, and my troop, Troop 1 of Blackstone, Massachusetts, was a frequent winner.

Unfortunately, we were also frequently accused of cheating.

In order to ensure a fair competition, a weight limit was set for each tug of war team. Only so many pounds of boy were allowed to pull on the rope during a competition. 

Our strategy was to place as many boys on the rope as possible, regardless of their size or strength. In fact, the smaller the boy, the better, since an especially small boy meant we might be able to squeeze an additional body onto the team. My Scoutmaster understood that leg power was far superior to upper body strength in a tug of war competition. So while the opposition might have a half a dozen muscle-bound monsters on their end of the rope, we would have a dozen or so kids who were less than half their size pulling on our end while I anchored the end. 

To an outsider, it looked like our troop didn’t stand a chance. Our team consisted of small, wiry, middle school boys whose voices had yet to change, and we were competing against teams of high school juniors and senior who looked more like men.  

Yet almost without fail, we would win with ease, causing the other troops to question our compliance to the weight limit. More than once, our team was  forced to mount the scale and confirm our total weight.

It was one of the few instances in life when the little guy was able to defeat the big guy in a contest of strength.

Heady days that I will remember with aching fondness until my last breath.

A rare glimpse at a master teacher at work

Hans Rosling is an incredible teacher. One of the best I have ever seen. I was completely mesmerized by his TED Talk despite my initial lack of interest in the subject.

This is the sign of a master teacher at work.  

Go to bed!

Our new favorite video.

It involves Clara and a book, of course.

Deathbed regrets revisited

Two years ago, in response to a piece listing the most frequent death bed regrets of the dying, I listed what I thought would be my most likely death bed regrets.

There were:

I did not travel enough.
I never pole vaulted again after high school.
I did not spend enough time with Clara.
I did not get into enough fist fights.
I started publishing novels too late in life and did not have a chance to tell all my stories.

Looking at this list two years later, it holds up surprisingly well. I have still not traveled nearly enough, I have yet to pole vault (though I may do so in the near future), I never feel like I spend enough time with Clara, and I still have a pile of story ideas clamoring for a place on the page,

In terms of fist fights, however, I may need to change my thinking a bit. When I was younger, I fought a lot, and though there was always inherent danger involved, the adrenaline rush, the primal nature of hand-to-hand combat, and my surprising ability to take a punch and remain calm in the midst of violence always made fighting a thrill for me.

Then I grew older and fighting ceased to be a part of my life. There were simply fewer and fewer instances in which people wanted to throw down.

Actually, fighting didn’t entirely stop. I punched a guy last year in an effort to break up a fight at the local gym, but that was a single sucker punch. Hardly a fight at all.

And perhaps I’m lucky that this was all the fight amounted to. Slate’s Brian Palmer recently wrote a piece about how easy it is to kill a man in a fistfight:

It happens more than twice a day, on average. Fists and feet were responsible for 745 murders in 2010, or 5.7 percent of all murders that year, according to FBI statistics.

Though Palmer goes on to explain that although most of these deaths are the result of the continued beating of the victim once he is unconscious, single blows to the head and chest have also resulted in death. 

Although I may regret the lack of fist fights in my life, perhaps it is a regret that I should more readily accept. As he father of a three-year old and a baby on the way, there is no need for me to risk my life or the life of another human being in order to enjoy a brief adrenaline rush or demonstrate my proficiency at fisticuffs.

Best of all, in the two years since I first assembled my list of death bed regrets, I cannot think of another regret to add to my list, and the list of most common death bed regrets still do not apply to me.

Yes, I’ve made no progress in eliminating any regrets, but I have yet to add any to my list. A small victory.

Not that I plan on ever dying, but it makes for an interesting means of examining one’s life.

I don’t like hot drinks.

I don’t drink coffee, which places me in an extreme minority, at least among my friends and colleagues.

I also do not drink tea or even hot chocolate. For years, I have told people that I don’t like hot drinks, a statement that is often greeted with a furrowed brow and many questions, particularly on a frigid day.

Now my unusual taste preference may have an explanation. 

A new study reported in Scientific American this week finds that the intensity of some flavors varies with temperature.

While this might not be terribly surprising, the study also finds that for most people, temperature can enhance flavors. But for some, dubbed thermal tasters, temperature alone can be a flavor. Heating or cooling parts of the tongue creates the sensation of taste without food.

So my distaste for anything other than a chilled drink may have less to do with the actual taste of the liquid and more with its temperature.

Hot drinks just taste bad to me.

Except for coffee. That stuff is gross regardless of temperature. Even coffee ice cream makes me want to wretch.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to ruin ice cream?

Ranking Stephen King’s 62 books: Some minor quibbling on my part

Vulture recently ranked Stephen King’s 62 books. Not an easy task, and overall, I think they did a surprisingly good job. I have read all but one of King’s books (see below), and despite the excellence of Vulture’s rankings, I would like to quibble a bit about a few of their decisions.

First and foremost, I would have lumped all seven (and now eight) of King’s Dark Tower Series together or (preferably) excluded them from the rankings entirely. Though I admire the attempt to rank each book individually, these novels are inseparable in my mind. Had I been forced to include them on the list, I would have lumped them into one entry and placed them in the first position.

Ideally, however, I would have left the Dark Tower books off the list completely, explaining that they are quite separate from his stand-alone books. Placing them on the list is akin to comparing apples to oranges.

Other, more minor quibbles:

I would rate Insomnia and Black Housemuch higher on the list, but this is admittedly because their connections to The Dark Tower series were readily apparent and much appreciated by me.
I would rate Duma Key and Christine much lower. Duma Key is the only Stephen King book that failed to hold my interest, and the premise for Christine was just too silly for me to accept (but the movie might have also ruined this book for me).
I did not love Rose Madder, but I do not think it is King’s worst novel. I would reserve that position for Cell (you can’t simply turn your derision for cell phones into a novel) or Duma Key.  
I was happy to see that the short story collections Hearts in Atlantis and Night Shift were placed in the top third of the list. I feel hat they are often overlooked. Both are better than Skeleton Crew, another short story collection which is also excellent but should be ranked below them.
I liked From a Buick 8but it does not belong as high as #16.
I did not like Under the Dome. I found the novel to be long and disappointing. I felt it was one of King’s worst books. The ending of the story was a complete letdown. Placing it at #12 is crazy. Vulture’s worst decision.
Danse Macabreis an interesting and well written work of nonfiction, but it does not stack up to his best works of fiction. It has no place in the top 20.
I have never read Lisey’s Story, which is ranked #10. This is an oversight on my part that I will soon correct.
I would have placed The Green Mile in my top 10.
I am so happy that It was placed at #3. This is exactly where I would have rated it as well. I freakin’ love that book.

I was equally pleased to see the respect given to On Writing, a book that inspired me to continue writing when all hope was seemingly lost. It is a brilliant combination of memoir and inspiration.

I think Vulture’s top 5 are ranked perfectly. I think this is the most impressive aspect of their entire list. The wisdom to place It and On Writing along such obvious choices as The Stand and The Shining is impressive.  Misery is ranked #6. I think I would have placed Salem’s Lot at #6, but Misery would have remained in my top 10.

Its a girl!

At least that's what my daughter thinks. She refuses to even acknowledge the possibility that her future sibling could be a boy. 

Note her use of distraction and the the way in which she turns every question into an opposing question. Verbal jujitsu at its best.   

This is one serious case of denial.