CALL ME SNAKE

[EDITOR'S NOTE: I wrote this a week ago and meant to post before my trip but evidently it did not get up there. Sorry about that folks though I'm pretty sure it was somebody else's fault.] I'm tying up loose ends, taking stock, getting ready for a trip. I had to buy a few items in Harvard Square and twice during my bike ride, I came across the strong scent of weed among the pedestrian walkways. Was it the same pothead or is the Square full of them these days? One of the items on my list was gym shorts, so I stopped at City Sports, the likely place for this sort of thing. I couldn't find the ones I wanted so I asked for help. "What are your cheapest gym shorts?" I asked a clerk. He took me to an area where the so-called cheapest shorts were, except that they cost nearly $10 more than another brand I'd already seen. "They're comparable," he explained when I asked him about it.

"Yes they are," I replied. "And when you compare them, the ones you showed me were $10 more."

Moving on, I stopped off at a friend's to return a book we had borrowed, JACK&THE BEANSTALK. And I wanted to pay off some gambling debts my wife had accrued at a Hanukkah party a few weeks back. She had bet against his kids on which candle on the menorah would go out first and had lost twice, owing on 5 cents and the other a quarter. I paid off the total, plus the interest, so that I could head off on vacation and into the New Year's free and clear. Free and clear, that is, except for the mortgage, and second mortgage, and credit card debt, plus a few miscellaneous IOUs floating around.

Happy New Year everyone. CALL ME SNAKE will be taking a brief siesta. We'll be back in a week or so with a dazzling set of new stories. I can't wait to share them. But I've got to live them first.

It's hard to believe it, looking from the outside, but December 2007 is shaping up to be a banner month for Call Me Snake with well over 6,000 individual visitors before all is said and done and more than 400 visitors on a single day--a record for this site. Personally I've had a hard time understanding it, as it seems like, if anything, interest has dropped off rather than grown. So I did a little bit of research to see how people got here, what searches brought them to Call Me Snake, and here are some of the phrases that led them here: “maggot therapy” “history of chips ahoy” “snake pinata,” and the perennial favorite,“Brazilian butt fill.”

I've sometimes had aspirations of putting out some kind of highbrow fare but it's clear from the foregoing that if Call Me Snake has any appeal at all, it is to the Lowest Common Denominator. So here's to my comeuppance, and Happy New Year to you too.

Sometimes fame is fleeting. Warhol spoke of 15 minutes. In this case 15 seconds is probably more accurate. But attention spans are short these days, and 15 seconds is not bad. In any case earlier today (or yesterday, if you want to be that way) the following notice suddenly appeared on a popular blog called, "Knight Science Journalism Tracker." Well here's what the "Tracker" had to say about yours truly, from one blogger to another: "AND FURTHER, should you wish to read a stupefyingly scholarly, if not merely stupefying, analysis of the Holy Grail in its greatest sphere of excess please consult “Decontructing Astronomy’s Holy Grail” by S_ _ _ _ N_ _ _ _, in the Annals of Improbable Research, May-June 2006."

Personally I'm honored. I've never seen my work referred to as "stupefyingly scholarly," if not merely "stupifying." (It has, on the other hand, been referred to as "scholarly" on a number of occasions--primarily by me in this blog.) Well, I think my 15 seconds is up. If I continue, it will become 30 seconds and I might risk overstaying my welcome. Farewell gentle readers and thanks in advance for your unfailing support.

I recently got an email referring to some big question that was being put to important thinkers in the world of science. There was nothing unusual about that; I often get emails of this sort and delete them reflexively. But this one was different; this time I was one of the "thinkers" whose views were being solicited. I stared at the list of luminaries in disbelief and wondered: What was my name doing there? There must be some mistake, I told myself. I have been accused of many things but I've never been accused of being a thinker. Still my name was on there and unless it was due to some kind of computer glitch or virus, I'd have to try to rise to the occasion. The question was challenging for me because, as I've said before, I'd never thought about it and had no obvious example to draw on. But maybe if I stretched things a little bit I might be able to provide the illusion of answering the question. Which I did. And it seems to have worked. But for how long? As the old sane ghost, you can fuel sum of the peepholes sum of the thyme, but you can't fuel oil the peepholes oil the thyme. Or words to that effect...

After handball, the other night, my handball partner asked me in the locker room if I'd heard about the black hole that ate the galaxy. He'd heard from someone else that it was 12 billion light-years away. That sounded far away to me but I hadn't read any of the articles about this even though quite a few had been sent electronically. A guy in the locker room I'd never talked to said he'd read that it was only about 1 million light-years away. That sounded too close to me but I told him I hadn't seen the articles yet.

Later that night, I looked it up and found out the guy was right. The very next day I ran into him on the sidewalk and told him he was, in fact, right about the black hole that ate the galaxy. "It WAS about a million light-years away." That pretty much ended our conversation and we may never speak again. But why should we? We're not likely to top that story.

Maybe Apple salesmen are under pressure to unload their IPhones. I was at the mall the other day trying to figure out a way to download digitial pictures from a new Sprint cellphone, which I'd just purchased for my wife, onto her Mac. I went to the Apple Store, which was right next to the Sprint Store, to try to find an adaptor that would do the job. They acted like I was crazy--like the kind of technology I was looking for did not exist. My best best, they said, would be to buy an IPhone (at a cost of $399). But I just need a USB adaptor, I insisted. Sorry, I was told, but we don't know how you could patch something like that together. Rather than buy an IPhone, I went down the hall to Best Buy, where I purchased the adaptor I needed for just $14.99. In this case, the store lived up to its name.

We all agree the presidential campaign goes on for too long, but it does provide time for us to get to know the candidates and one thing we've learned about Mitt Romney, the pious one, is that he is a pathological liar. He has said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he had seen his father, George Romney, march with Martin Luther King, Jr. Only it turns out he didn't "see" that in the literal sense, only in the figurative sense. As quoted in the Boston Globe, Romney said "I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort." Oh good, glad we cleared up that little misunderstanding, except for the little problem that his father never marched with Dr. King.

And how does he explain that other statement he made in the Boston Herald, some years back, about how "my father and I marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. through the streets of Detroit"? Does he mean "marched" in the figurative sense too, as in "being aware of my participation in that great effort"?

My five-year-old can get pretty silly before bedtime and last night was no exception. First she asked me if I ever tried coffee. I told her I hadn't. She said I should try it. When I asked her why she mentioned something about these little things out there that we couldn't see. I pressed her further, trying to figure out what little things she was referring to. Finally she said that there were tiny strings everywhere, too small to see, that tied the world together. I asked her if she'd ever heard me talking about that before. She swore (on her pinkies) that she had not. I told her that some very smart people believed in ideas that were very similar. That made her very proud because she thought she'd just made it up. She then asked me if I believed in the little strings. I said it was the best idea anyone had had so far but we didn't know for sure if it was right. "We'll never know for sure," she said, "because you can't see them."

I'm either losing my mind or felt the need for some extra exercise this morning. After walking with the kids to school this morning (about a mile--through the snow, I might add), I stopped halfway home to buy stuff for dinner. That's when I realized I still had their lunchboxes in my backpack. So I hiked back to the school to drop off the lunchboxes and came back to the store to retrieve the groceries. Then I went to the bank to do a couple of transactions, the nature of which shall remain confidential (though it did involve deposits and withdrawals). More than halfway home from the bank, I realized I'd left a bag of groceries in the bank. After retrieving that, I made it home without incident. But at that point my two-mile walk had become nearly four and I either needed a new pair of shoes or my head examined.

It's Wednesday which means, you guessed it, time for one of our most popular features here at Call Me Snake, Freaky Friday. A bizarre thing happened yesterday which just might qualify as "freaky." I was doing something on my computer when a document entitled "New Order!" suddenly appeared on my desktop. I closed the document and was asked whether I wanted to save it. I said no and it disappeared, gone forever, leaving no trace behind nor any plausible explanation for it's sudden appearance. The only thing that comes to mind is the quantum vacuum, where particles regularly pop in and out of existence. Maybe the same thing happened here only instead of the quantum vacuum, it occurred on my lowly desktop.