CALL ME SNAKE

We were trying to remember how many pizzas were consumed, and left over, at the annual springtime event at my kids’ school which I volunteer at regularly. That’s when a friend made the following statement whose eternal truthiness I had not recognized until he uttered the words: “I realize that one’s pizza memories is one of the first things to go with age…”

Touche’, sage friend. Truer words have ne’er been spoken…

An Arlington friend called to tell me that I’d better head over to his pond for skating, as the ice was fabulous. (I won’t say the name of said pond for fear that all the people reading this blog will head over in droves and create gridlock on ice.) I skated one long lap and was cruising along, admiring the beautiful, sunny day, when something crashed into my head and sent me sprawling on the ice. A guy ran up and said, “Are you OK?”  I asked him what the hell hit me. He said it was his plane, and I saw a large model airplane with a good two-foot wingspan lying on the ice about 20 feet from me. “Are you crazy?” I screamed at him. “Flying that thing with all these people around?” He asked again whether I was OK, and I asked again whether he was crazy.

The truth is, I didn’t know if I was OK. My head did hurt, but it wasn’t bleeding. When I left a half hour later, I saw him load his plane into his big SUV. I remembered his license plate # in case I had brain damage and had to sue him later. But I still remembered the number an hour later after I had bicycled 4+ miles home, after making several stops for errands along the way. I figured the fact that I remembered the numbers by the time I got home–and still do now, 7 hours later–is a good sign at least with respect to my short-term memory.

A report from the Alliance for Biking and Walking ranks Boston #1 in the percentage of people who get to work by foot or by car. Oklahoma city ranks last and Charlotte is the worst for biking where, according to the study, 0.0% of the people get to work by bike.

Here’s what I saw for the first time at WHOLE FOODS (aka WHOLE PAYCHECK) the other day: “SALT-FREE SALTINES.” Just what we always needed…

I was helping out shoveling the ice at our skating club. I was trying to tell whether the task was futile or not and asked another guy, with a shovel in hand, how long he’d been at it. He evidently misunderstood my question as his response was: “Several years.”

My book is being edited now. Here’s what my editor said about Chapter 1 in a marginal comment: “Have some pity for your readers!” OK, point taken. But couldn’t he return the favor & have some pity for his writers?

I’m expecting someone to serve papers (i.e., sue me) at any moment. This is not a common situation for me, but here we are. A few minutes ago I heard a knock on the door and thought: “Here we go…” But it was just a campaign worker for Martha Coakley urging me to get out and vote for her candidate of choice. (Which I will do promptly and maybe not come back today. Or ever.)

It’s nice to get calls from Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Vicki Kennedy, but I hope they don’t make a habit of it–especially calling in the middle of the dinner hour, as they did, to ask me to vote for Martha Coakley, whom I was planning to vote for anyways and who shouldn’t have needed the help in the first place if she’d ran a halfway decent campaign. Let’s hope she’s not like Scott Harshbarger whose best speech every was his concession speech.

In my last batch of new emails, one said: “Your check is in the mail!” I was hoping that was a big check that I’d been waiting for for a long time (more than two years!) for work I’ve done on a book. But it turned out to be a $2 rebate check from Staples for printer paper.

I did not apply for an astrophysics writing award this year because I was busy doing other things. But that did not prevent the director of that competition from contacting me to say that I “have not been selected as this year’s winner.” I thought I’d be spared such a letter this time around by not applying, but they still seem intent on delivering the bad news (for me and the good news for a colleague who gets a free trip to Hawaii out of the deal).

Since we all bicycle in the winter, I bought my wife and daughters face masks for Christmas. My wife told one of her colleagues at work that the face mask was a gift from me. Her coworker was unimpressed, asking: “Why didn’t he buy you a car instead?”

At my usual rink, we always go the same way–CLOCKWISE. When my youngest daughter told me she only knew how to do crossovers one way (in that same clockwise direction) I knew it was time to take action. I asked every adult in the rink if they’d mind changing directions in about a minute. Everyone signed on. Then I told everyone to change & we did. It was liberating. But then it was time for me to leave. “Are you going to leave everyone skating counterclockwise,” someone asked me after I took off my skates. “That’s up to them,” I replied. “My work is done.”

I would have preferred to have started out 2010 on a positive note. I would have preferred to have started 2010 without a litany of complaints. But I don’t make the facts; I just report them. And here’s what happened at the library today. I walked in the main doors of the new, fancy main branch library. Upon entering the library, a guy about 10 feet away said in a loud voice: “THANKS.” I realized he must have been talking to me and surmised that he wanted me to stand there and hold the door for him and was, therefore, chiding me for my lack of civility. But where’s the civility in castigating me for nothing. I didn’t even see the guy. And what’s the big deal about opening your own door, especially when both of his hands were totally free. He wasn’t carrying a book and looked like the kind of guy who never read one anyway.

Personally, I’m sick of that whole door thing. I don’t like standing at a door to let others walk in unless it’s someone in a wheelchair or pushing a stroller. And I don’t like people standing around, holding a door for me, so that I’m then forced to say thanks for their doing something I never asked them to do and didn’t want them to do in the first place.

Despite my opening remarks, I think we’re off to a good start in 2010. Let’s see if anything else worth griping about happens in the coming year.

Five years ago, someone explained his interest in blogging this way: Having a blog, he said, can encourage you to try to have at least one good idea a day. I had occasion to speak with this same fellow today, five years later, and let him know that I found his words inspirational. Though I am worried that he will visit this blog and find it wanting, in all these years, of even one good idea

In my ode to fortune cookie writers — or at least to one anonymous and unheralded fortune cookie writer — I related the hidden message from memory, not being able at the time to put my hands on the tiny slip of paper. I have finally located said slip of paper and am proud to report that the original is even better (and more accurate) than I remembered. To wit: “Your wisdom is a treasure for all time.”

Usually the fortune cookie message is vague and generic enough to apply to anybody. One size fits all, as the say. But the fortune cookie message that I got to tonight fit me like a glove: “Your wisdom is a treasure to all.” My hat’s off to the lonely, underappreciated fortune cookie writer. This time you really hit it on the head.

I knew something was odd when I got an email holiday card from a friend that had a picture of him & his sons. His wife was not anywhere to be seen & I wondered what that meant. I gathered that she was out of the picture, so to speak, and that turned out to be correct. A picture, in this case, was worth a thousand words.

I just received a card from a friend in Wat Rakhang, Banghok. In the picture, he is wearing a pink shirt in honor of the King’s birthday, & it occurred to me that I’ve never done that–I’ve never worn a pink shirt in honor of the King’s birthday. Of course, I’ve led a sheltered life, which is not the case for my well-travelled friend.

Rarely has a single post had such an immediate and visible impact. Last week I wrote about a guy I vaguely knew who was surprisingly sporting a Mohawk. I commented about that in these pages, and the next time I saw him the Mohawk was gone, replaced with a buzzcut or “Nohawk,” as I’m calling it. I’m not saying the guy necessarily read my post and reacted to it. But just by putting my statement on this blog, I had somehow put the word out there. It was on the WORLDWIDE WEB for god’s sakes. How could it not get to him? And, as a result, how could he not act on it, even if he didn’t know who was pulling the strings. Or why.

Someone had to vet an article I wrote. I suggested that he not worry about the fine print, just make sure there were no grievous errors. Instead he took it upon herself to change every double dash or ellipse I put in (–) to a single dash. So much for the big picture.

Yesterday I saw a guy I knew from my kid’s school, a fellow dad, with a new look: He was sporting a Mohawk. That really threw me. Seeing the guy with that get-out made me think I didn’t really know this guy at all. I’d always figured he was just a normal dad, whatever that means. But the mohawk has changed things. Now I don’t know what to think. The only thing I know is that I really don’t know this guy at all.

All my life the word terra (as in terraflop or terrabyte, etc.) was something far removed from me. And I never figured it would be part of my world. But yesterday I bought an external hard drive for my wife and family . And it can store a trillion bytes–enough to hold 200,000 copies of my entire book draft on PDF (not counting illustrations), not that anyone would want more than one. And few people would want to give up  5 megabytes of hard drive to have even one. But the point, once again, is that I have entered the terra world, which is a place I thought I’d never be.

Steve Pagliuca, my favorite whipping boy of late, advertises proudly that his campaign has taken “no money from special interests.” He doesn’t have to now because he already made a big pile of money at Bain, and much of that came from special interests. Which is why he doesn’t need it now.

I hadn’t realized it but a friend has been calling me “Honest Abe,” though I’m not sure how I earned that moniker. I only learned about this yesterday from my wife who was reminded of it when I told her the following tale: I received a check yesterday from a magazine for two articles that I’d written. I was just about to go to the bank, which I often do when I check comes in, but this time I first checked my records to make sure the sum was correct. That’s when I discovered that I’d already been paid for these articles. Then I had to make the hardest call of my life, telling my editor that I’d been paid twice for the same articles–hard because I could have desperately used the money, which was not an insignificant sum and would have been enough, for instance, to pay off the large hospital bill we’re running for our deceased cat who we were unable to save after she was hit by a car in the fall. But I made the call anyway and tore up the check. Why? Because I’m Honest Abe. And, more to the point, Stupid Steve.

If you’ve ever struggled to open those plastic containers as I have — and Larry David did on CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM — you might be pleased to know that the phenomenon has finally reached the point where it has its own name, “wrap rage,” as today’s press release from the Pennsylvania Medical Society attests:

Wrap Rage: a Holiday Injury Waiting to Happen
A study of Pennsylvania adults show that 17 percent have experienced or know someone who has been injured while opening a holiday or birthday gift. Pennsylvania physicians offer tips on wrap rage and how to avoid injuries…

You know the economy is in the toilet, so to speak, when the first (& only) Christmas card you’ve received so far has come from your drain-cleaning (clearing) service. I just got that card today–a week after getting a nice thank you card from my auto body shop. Yes sir, times is tough.

Maybe this will take the pressure off during the coming holidaze season–a press release from Wake Forest University: “Samuel Gladding is no Scrooge, but he is on a mission to redefine what it means to be “happy” during the holidays. Gladding, chair of the counseling department at Wake Forest University and an expert on family counseling, says research shows that it is the pressure to be happy that often leads to sadness and even depression during the holidays.”

Times must be tough cause last week I took our car into an auto body shop to deal with your average fender bender. A couple of days later, I received a card from them, saying: “Thank you for choosing us to repair your vehicle. We sincerely hope our service meets with your complete approval… It’s been a pleasure serving you…” Some might interpret as a sign that the people who run this shop are really nice. That might be so but I thinks it’s an even stronger indication that our economy is in the toilet, as they say…

I just saw a hilarious movie starring the inimitable Danny McBridge, ‘FIST FOOT WAY.’ One review put it well: “It’s like a Will Ferrell movie only funnier because Will Ferrell isn’t in it.”

This just in from the University of Haifa: Why Israeli Rodents Are More Cautious than Jordanian Ones — A series of studies carried out at the University of Haifa have found that rodent, reptile and ant lion species behave differently on either side of the Israel-Jordan border. (Editor’s note: No comment. [What can I add that would possibly top this?])

A friend who’d been living in Paris for the past 20 years asked for a copy of a book I published 16 years ago. It was available on amazon.com and one copy cost just a penny (plus modest shipping&handling fees). I bought that one up, as it was an outrage to me and every other author, living and dead. The book had been in the University of Michigan Library–at least through 1997–after which there was no record of anyone checking it out further. As a matter of policy and pride, I will continue to purchase every book of mine that is available for just a penny.

I just got assigned a fun article by a publication sometimes billed as the world’s leading scientific journal. Which is all to the good except for one wrinkle. The head of a major astronomical observatory told me that if I went ahead with the story, he might be fired & the observatory shut down–not because anyone did anything wrong there but because this kind of publicity might imperil an already dicey situation. So now I have to figure out what to do. If I go ahead with the piece, and this guy is right, I’ll only be known for one accomplishment in my entire life–as “the man who killed ____ Observatory.” But at least I’ll be known…

I started my book tour a year early, talking about string theory and geometry to my 2d-grader’s math class. I figured it would be a pretty tough crowd but they behaved themselves well, sitting through the whole boring lecture without incident.

I’m not as active in my daughters’ school as I’d like to be but, the fact is, I don’t have time to take on much. At a recent meeting, they asked for a volunteer to run the next meeting. As no one else was stepping up to the plate, I raised my hand. Afterwards I asked a friend, “What exactly did I volunteer for?” I really didn’t appreciate the scope of the responsibilities I’d taken on. “The future of the school lies on your shoulders,” someone else told me. And in some ways, I guess that’s true. If my role had not been broadcast so widely, I’d be looking for a way to back out of it now.

I’m not as active in my daughters’ school as I’d like to be but, the fact is, I don’t have time to take on much. At a recent meeting, they asked for a volunteer to run the next meeting. As no one else was stepping up to the plate, I raised my hand. Afterwards I asked a friend, “What exactly did I volunteer for?” I really didn’t appreciate the scope of the responsibilities I’d taken on. “The future of the school lies on your shoulders,” someone else told me. And in some ways, I guess that’s true. If my role had not been broadcast so widely, I’d be looking for a way to back out of it now.

A friend came back from a restaurant in Portland, Maine, where he ordered a “bowl of slop.” But he was
disappointed in the final product. “Really?” I asked.
“It didn’t live up to your expectations?”

I’ve long wanted to break into the movies and came close to literally doing that this evening. I was in Harvard Square, in a hurry to get down Dunster Street, so I could buy burritos around the corner at Dunster Street. Except Dunster was closed because they were filming the Ben Affleck picture, “The Town.” I was in a rush, as I said, because our babysitter was leaving in 15 minutes and I didn’t want to get caught in a long line with a bunch of kids on the burrito meal plan. So I barged ahead on my bike, practically riding right through the movie set. All the while, I was imagining the director or A.D. saying: “Film this guy on the bike. That’s gonna make our movie realistic because Harvard Square is full of these nuts.”

The old Robert Redford movie, THE HOT ROCK, starts
with what looks like your typical jailyard shot. But wait,
there’s a difference! The men are all playing handball.
Is this jail? Or have all these men gone to heaven? Were
it not for the presence of a man in a tower, holding a rifle,
the scene was no different from my weekly (or biweekly)
games at the YMCA.

For some reason, my daughter cracked up yesterday when I called the video store. I’m not sure what was so funny. I just asked them: “Do you have any copies of ‘Drag Me To Hell’?”

My wife and I have noticed that the eggs we’ve been getting of late are sticking to the fry pans, and there seems to be no way of getting them off. As a result, our frying pans are now covered with a thin, intermittent coating of flaky egg crust. It’s made me wonder what’s behind this development–perhaps some evolutionary adaptation to make eggs a less attractive choice to human consumers. If so, I’m curious as to what’s behind this change, the chicken or the egg?

We just got a letter from our city’s new school superintendent who said he was “appreciative to ____ _____ for leading the ___ School as Acting Principal.” I’m not sure if his sentence was technically ungrammatical but it sounded bad to my ears. And the superintendent might want to set a higher standard than your average neighborhood blogger.

This morning before school my 7-year-old daughter said exuberantly: “I am fully ready for winter.” I’m afraid I can’t say the same. I’m still harboring hopes of one last beach volleyball outing, and it appears that’s not going to happen. I need to adjust my attitude, as my daughter has already done, and embrace the change that is coming whether I like it or not…

I like to think that the relationship between a man and his drain cleaner is about as close as it gets. I’ve been seeing the same guy from Rooter Man for many years owing to a longstanding problem involving tree roots and our drain (“main line,” as it’s called). I’ve always thought that we got along well. That is until I got a message from him today on my voicemail saying: “Hello Steve… F_ _ _ you, a _ _ hole!” He later explained to me the usual line: It’s not me, it’s you. Or something like that. Actually he was having trouble parking his van because of street cleaning and some joker was giving him a hard time. The real explanation then was: “It’s not you, it’s him.”

I’m sick of the ads for Steve (Joe) Palooka who’s trying to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. The guy wants to tell us his positions on various issues and I say who cares? I could care less what that guy thinks about health care or anything else. So what if he earned a lot of money while working at Bain? How does that qualify him to fill Kennedy’s shoes? His TV ads suggest that we can do better. And I heartily agree. We can do better than Steve (Joe) Palooka.

I’m writing about Benjamin Peirce who was arguably the first mathematician of note at Harvard. I found that he wrote a history of Harvard from its founding through the Revolutionary War and ordered it through the library, thinking I might find something useful in it. What I found was that I had the wrong Benjamin Peirce. This guy was a librarian at the university; he entered college 16 years before his namesake, the mathematician. That’s never happened to me before. I have never gotten the wrong Benjamin Peirce before and, given the upset it has caused me, I hope I never get the wrong Benjamin Peirce again.

If you go through life thinking you’re an original—someone who routinely “breaks the mold”–the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony can be a humbling experience. The event, held each year at Harvard University, celebrates weird science as you’ve never seen it before. That is unless you’ve attended an Ig Nobel ceremony or two. I’ve been to all 19 of them, and have seen some strange things over the years. Last night’s show was no exception. I came out reeling, as I do every year, struck by the realization that I’m actually pretty ordinary. The “wild and crazy” ideas that I come up with wouldn’t even rate a footnote next to the accomplishments of the true Ig Nobel laureate. When I’m done recounting what went on last night, you’ll know just what I mean.

Thursday, October 1, 7:27 pm I arrive in Sanders Theatre to a packed house, rife with anticipation. The house is so packed and so rife, in fact, that I have to ask a rather hefty woman to slide over so that I can squeeze into my assigned seat on the bench.

The natives are becoming restless, as they say, and a chant—“Ig, Ig, Ig Nobel!”—begins to circulate through the hall, starting as a faint rumble and building to a din. It’s a traditional Ig rallying cry, according to legend, “attributed to the first person who chanted it.”

7:30 A safety monitor of some sort discusses the types of activities that will, and will not, be allowed onstage. Laparoscopic surgery is one of the banned activities, as is a proposed sledgehammer toss from the balcony. But waterboarding is considered permissible. Sword swallowing is also on the “approved” list, and I sense some foreshadowing here.

7:36 The master of ceremonies Marc Abrahams, dressed in tux and top hat, takes the stage explaining that “tonight we’re going to honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” That’s been the party line for the past several years when they stopped using words like “psychotic” and “mind-numbingly stupid” to describe the things people were about to see and hear.

Abrahams, the editor of THE ANNALS OF IMPROBABLE RESEARCH, introduces the eight genuine Nobel laureates participating in the proceedings, noting that a couple of others may surface later. (Two, in fact, do surface later, although one of those is merely an image projected on a slide.) He also introduces some Ig Nobel winners from previous years including a scholar who investigated the effectiveness of Coca-Cola as a spermicide and another brave pioneer who successfully cured hiccups through digital rectal massage. Upon hearing about this technique, the crowd suddenly grows quiet.

7:47 Dan Meyer, a former Ig Nobel winner, swallows a long sword onstage, which is removed by two Nobel laureates. Which brings to mind the old gag: “How many laureates does it take to remove a sword from an esophagus?” I suspected that we would get an answer before the night was done.

7:59 Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractals, delivers the keynote address on “Risk” in financial markets, which is a topic he’s written about before. It’s also the theme for this year’s festivities. The speech is supposed to last 60 seconds, but it appears that Mandelbrot does not have enough material to fill even that brief interval. He stalls and is eventually rescued by “Miss Sweetie Poo,” an 8-year-old girl who’s charged with moving
the show along by letting speakers know when she’s bored. She’s not at all subtle, droning on and on—as 8-year-olds are wont to do—about how bored she is. The kid is effective, but her act can get tiresome.

8:04 The first part of a never-before-seen opera, THE BIG BANK, is presented. The title of the act, “Two bankers meet in a bar…,” sounds like the start of a bad joke. But the singers can belt it out. And the lyrics aren’t half bad either: “I love meeting people I’ve just met, especially if they know how to leverage debt…”

8:15 “Let’s get it over with,” Abrahams says, announcing the announcement of the Ig Nobel Prizes. Ten are to be given out in all. One for each finger. That is if thumbs are fingers—a point I hope we clarify later.

8:18 The Veterinary Medicine Prize goes to Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson from Newcastle University, who discovered that cows that are given names by their keepers produce more milk than cows that are nameless. “There are many I’d like to thank,” says Rowlinson, upon accepting the award. “Some humans, but mostly cows. Thank you Bluebell, Buttercup, and Daisy. I could go on with lots of cow names that are very popular.” But fortunately, he does not, as Miss Sweetie Poo puts a stop to that one, but good.

8:26 Five from the University of Bern get the Peace Prize for conducting experiments that answer the question: Is it better to get hit over the head with a full bottle of beer or an empty one? The answer turns out to be a full bottle of beer, perhaps because you might get to sip some of it afterwards? Speaking above the laughter, one of the Bern scholars tell us that this is an important legal matter that frequently comes up in the courtroom. Not that Miss Sweetie Poo cared. She had begun her irrevocable death march, and the Peace winners were soon to become history.

8:34 The Chemistry Prize went to a trio from the National Autonomous University of Mexico who made diamonds (or at least diamond film) from a liquid. That has been done many times before without anybody winning an Ig Nobel Prize. But, of course, no one thought of making diamonds with tequila—a conceptual that put these three into the winner’s circle. Javier Morales revealed the key to their success: “If you drink a lot of tequila, you will see anything you want.”

8:41 Donald Unger, an 83-year-old allergist from California, wins the Medical Prize for showing that—contrary to what his mother, several aunts, and (later) his mother-in-law told him—cracking knuckles does not lead to arthritis of the fingers. At least in the case of his one experimental subject, himself. For 60-plus years, Unger cracked the knuckles in his left hand at least twice a day, while leaving his right knuckles alone. Neither hand ever developed arthritis.

Unger appreciated the acclaim he was now receiving, figuring he probably deserved some sort of award after 60 years of knuckle cracking. “Now the only thing left for me is to decide what I want on my tombstone,” he tells the crowd. Apparently, he’s already decided: “Here lies Don Unger, who has finally quit cracking his knuckles.”

8:50 Act 3 of THE BIG BANK. “The big banks took their revenue and shot it into the sky,” the singer croons. “What could be stupider? Sending money to Jupiter?”

8:58 Elena Bodner of the University of Chicago walks off with the Public Health Prize for designing a bra that can double as a pair of emergency face masks. “Isn’t it wonderful that women have two breasts and not just one?” she asks. “That means we can save not only ourselves but the man of our choice.” The device takes only 25 seconds for the average woman to use, she explains. “Five seconds to unlock and apply, and 20 seconds to decide who the lucky man will be.” To demonstrate, she slips off her bra, detaches it, and places masks on two Nobel laureates, Wolfgang Ketterle and Paul Krugman. She slips off a second bra, which she drapes around her mouth and that of another laureate, Orhan Pamuk.

Of course, Nobel laureates who participate in the Igs are used to such indignities. A few minutes later, another laureate, Martin Chalfie, serves as the booby prize in a Win-a-Date contest. Here’s how this illustrious man of science is described to the audience: “A folk guitarist who enjoys playing with worms and singing Swedish drinking songs while hopping like a frog.” Too bad the guy wasn’t just draped with a bra.

9:03 The sword swallower is back on stage. They’re going after a “world record,” with nine Nobel laureates retrieving the sword from his mouth. Although the feat proceeds without complication, I wonder whether this was one record that would have been best left unset.

9:12 Fumiaki Taguchi of Kitasato University gets the Biology Prize for showing how kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90 percent when exposed to bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas. Taguchi begins to extol the virtues of panda feces, particularly its lack of smell, when young Miss Sweetie Poo decides enough is enough. And in this case she was right.

9:21 After the photo opps and farewell speeches, the crowd begins filing out of the auditorium. On my way to the exit, I dodge Francis Fessmire, the returning Ig winner (of digital rectal massage fame) who’s passing out anti-hiccup kits to any and all takers. I want no part of this, and keep walking without looking back.

The meeting between two celebrated bloggers, one hailing from the East Coast, the other from the West, went as smoothly as could be expected. The East Coast guy appreciated the fact that the Californian did not rub in the fact that he was the recipient of a coveted “Best of the Blogosphere” prize, only one of which has been awarded so far. Such restraint was probably warranted in this case, however, given that the East Coast guy was the one who handed out said prize.

Sometime in the next day or two, I am likely to meet a celebrated blogger face to face–someone with whom I’ve communicated in the blogosphere but never met before. It’s a big step & a moment I face with some trepidation, because I’ve enjoyed my blog interactions with this individual and can only hope that the direct interactions will be as pleasant.

Thirty years ago, when I was still a youngster, I used to live in a group house near Harvard Square across the street from two guys who I frequently saw walking their white poodle. Today, on my way back from coaching soccer, I saw those same two men walking a similar-looking white poodle. Only these men were now senior citizens, one walking with a cane and the other rather stooped. I guess they’ve aged a bit over the past 30 years, and come to think of it so have I.

Last year I wrote a nice column (or so I was told) about a guy who had retired from running a music school after 40+ years. The story was about what the guy was doing next in this new phase of his life. Only now it appears that we need to scrap that whole thing, as I ran into the fellow today (at the YMCA pool) and he told me that his replacement did not pan out and he was back to working full time, running the school once again. So much for retired life. And so much for my acclaimed column. (Or at least acclaimed by my mother-in-law who is no soft touch.)