CALL ME SNAKE

I sent this letter to the New Yorker. Will they have the guts to print it? That remains to be seen.

GUIDED BY FAITH?

In "Political Science" (March 13, 2006), Michael Specter makes the oft-stated assumption that President Bush's policies are "guided by faith." Why should we believe it? Because he uses the word "God" a lot and refers to himself as a "man of God," and because journalists like Specter accept that unchallenged? From the very beginning, Bush has always played to "his base," and I can't see that faith has anything to do with it. (Unless by that you mean "faith in his base.") A friend of mine, Smitty, says it well in a bumper sticker he's been selling for years: "Jesus to Bush--Stop using me as a reference!"

The magician/illusionist David Blaine will attempt to break the world's record by holding his breath while under water for at least nine minutes. ABC will broadcast this feat, or attempted feat, a week from Monday in a two-hour special called "Drowned Alive." I don't intend to watch this show and don't, as a matter of practice, watch breath-holding programs, but I am curious about one thing: How can ABC take an event that won't last much more than nine minutes, if that, and stretch it out into a two-hour program? In my book, that feat is even more impressive than the one Blaine is trying to accomplish.

I'm an innocent. I've had my hand in a number of books (whatever that means), but I've never written a novel. (Maybe a novella, if you stretch the definition.) So it's clear I don't know the first thing about it. I thought novelists wrote the books themselves. I had no idea there was such a thing as "book packagers" like Alloy Entertainment (with 17 New York Times bestsellers in 2005!) that actually write (they say "package") the books for you. All this came to light for me--and for many of you, no doubt--when stories surfaced about the poor Harvard undergraduate who apparently was overly zealous in "internalizing" the novels of another author. (Perhas the Harvard girl should have picked a more obscure writer?) The question now is whether that other author--the one who "externalized" it rather than "internalized" it--wrote the books herself, or did she leave the prose to the pros at Alloy or similar firms?

It's not often a comment rises to the level of "Celebrity Guest," but the following missive from the pen of one Turd Blossom does that in spades. Turd Blossom is that rare person who recognizes the plight of handball in Cambridge as the pressing issue that it undeniably is. He speaks eloquently, from the heart. And now, without further ado, let's hear just what he has to say....

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TURD BLOSSOM SPEAKS: I was going to call the following into the Cambridge Chronicle SpeakOut line, but then I decided it wasn't up to their usual lofty standards. So, I thought, where to go with material not fit for loft standards? The Blogosphere! Interestingly, I also mention your lack of Pulllitzer.

I have to hand it to Steve Nadis. His heartfelt hand-wringing about the imminent demise of the sport of handball in the April 20th Chronicle brought this too-long ignored issue to the attention of the people of Cambridge. If there were a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of dying sports, Mr. Nadis would win handily. The fact that there are only a handful of players left at the Cambridge Y -- you can count them on one hand -- is a tragedy that words fail to describe.

Having tried the sport myself once, I can add my voice to the chorus of complaints that Mr. Nadis reports. My hands not only hurt, they swelled to about 3 times their normal size, and turned a yellowish-grey color. My hands were so injured that I was unable to dial the Chronicle SpeakOut line for several weeks.

Despite my complaints, I hope that the residents of Cambridge will lend Mr. Nadis a helping hand and give the sport a try. Failing that, they could at least call him Snake.

What happened to the Bumper Sticker contest announced last month? Who are the winners? What are the prizes? I'm sure these and similar questions have been coursing through your heads over the past three-and-a-half weeks since the March 30 announcement. The answer is this: It hardly seems like a Bumper Sticker contest without our perennial champion, Gatemouth, joining in. So this is a time of humility for me. I'm on my knees begging Gatemouth to send in his entries for which, no doubt, he will be duly rewarded. Please Gatemouth, an important tradition is depending on you. And surely we cannot let too another "important tradition" go down the drain, along with phonebooth stuffing, goldfish swallowing, and the like. As James Jones once said (or was it James Joyce?): There's a subtle difference between man and beast--a thin red line known as "THE FIRST ANNUAL APRIL FOOL'S DAY BUMPER STICKER SWEEPSTAKES."

To those who have been wondering, I did not win a Pullitzer Prize last week. Part of the problem, I now realize, is that for all these years I have been spelling it wrong. (There's just one "l" in "Pulitzer," and maybe that's why the award-givers looked elsewhere. NOTE TO MYSELF: Practice spelling!) So although I did not capture journalism's most illustrious prize, I did get the second best thing: a letter published in my local newspaper, the Cambridge Chronicle. The subject of said missive was handball (another digression from our main topic of volleyball), namely that handball is dying and if we--and by that I mean WE ALL--don't do something fast, there'll be no more handball here. Period.

The letter came out two days ago, and I was already starting to worry about the fact that I had not yet been approached by any new handball players, when something strange and wonderful happened. After taking an afternoon swim today at the Y, I chatted briefly with the lifeguard in the locker room. He suggested I should take up competitive swimming. I said that I could never swim that far or hard without seriously damaging my shoulders. "There's one game...," he started to say but then caught himself. "Nah, I guess with bad shoulders you'd never play..."

"What game is that?" I asked.

"Handball," he said tentatively.

"Well, you're talking to the right person. If I didn't exactly write the book on handball around here, I did at least write the letter," I said, pulling out a copy of my celebrated Chronicle dispatch.

He read it in amazement, and things progressed from there. We've already set up a game. Next, he and his partner--both a generation younger than our usual crowd--will get to meet the gang. And the future of handball in Cambridge, for those of you who've passed sleepless nights worrying about it, is suddenly looking a lot brighter.

Some news accounts on the radio have suggested that Bush's trusted aide, Karl Rove, got a demotion, handing over his policy management responsibilities to Joel Kaplan. But that's far from true. They can call Rove whatever they want but his true job will always remain the same: that's telling Bush what to do when Dick Cheney isn't telling Bush what to do.

It's well known that kids say the darndest things, and if there is any lingering question on that score, this should settle the matter beyond "reasonable doubt." (NOTE: Is there such a thing as "unreasonable doubt"?)

My three-year-old was choking at the dinner table, as she is wont to do. Concerned, I beseeched her to speak: "Say something! Say something!" After a dramatic pause, she smiled and said, "Fabulosa!"

After preschool one day, my three-year-old complained that her best friend was mean to her and didn't play with her. "Did that make you sad?" I asked. "It didn't make me sad," she replied. "It made me mad."

Years ago, our former neighbors had a young boy named Will who went through a prolonged "hi" phase. He would call out "hi" to me endlessly from his deck. I always said "hi" back to him, about 10 times a day. This went on for the entire summer. At the end of the summer, I ran into Will and his father on the sidewalk, and I greeted the lad warmly. "Daddy," he said. "Who's that man?"

Save for a few mitigating factors, I might have been on that fateful bus that pulled into Boston's South Station at 8:15 last night. I could have been one of the people splattered with blood when murder suspect Stephen Marshall shot himself in the head with a .45 caliber handfun. I was up in Portland, celebrating Easter with my wife's family. My wife and kids were going to spend the night. I decided to go home, partly because we had left our cat Sunshine outside, and Sunshine is spoiled. (I don't know how she would have coped with being left outside all night.) The other factor was my mother-in-law, who has a tendency to work a lot and was thus open to the idea of heading back to Boston last night. So I drove back with her, rather than catching an evening bus from Portland. The rest, as they say, is history...

We're introducing a new feature here at Call Me Snake (introducing new features is what we do best) and this one is called "QUOTE O' THE DAY." Last month, as you may recall, we introduced "Quote of the Day," but that one flopped for some reason and instead of becoming a regular feature, as advertised, it looks more and more like a one-shot deal. Based on our meticulous market research, I'm confident that "QUOTE O' THE DAY" will fare much better. We'll be offering a new quote every single day we feel like offering one--driven to some extent by consumer demand.

Today's quote comes from the physicist Richard Garwin, whose influence extends far wider than his celebrity. Among his many accomplishments was coming up with the design for the world's first hydrogen bomb. Garwin did this at age 23--at a time when many kids are just graduating college and moving back in with their parents. When asked by an NPR reporter whether he saw the test explosion in 1952 which demonstrated the fruit of his labors, Garwin responded: "I haven't seen any nuclear explosions. I hope never to see it. I don't need to--I have a good imagination."