CALL ME SNAKE

I saw all the equipment and all the cameras lined up in the block before the Y, where a banner proudly read: “The Cambridge Family YMCA welcomes Columbia Pictures!” I parked my bike next to the catering truck figuring that Hollywood had heard about all the drama played out in the YMCA handball courts and they wanted in. But when I went inside, I found out they were just using the upstairs theater as a place for people to change and a place for the extras to hang out. In fact, I spoke briefly with a friend of mine, who was either an extra or an extra extra. I learned that they hadn’t come to film my handball game, after all. Instead, it was just some movie with Kevin Spacey called “Bringing Down the House.” But on the way out, I still stopped off at the catering truck to check out the potato salad that Hollywood is famous for.

I stopped off at CVS on the way back from my daughter’s preschool this morning to buy some cat food. “Is that for the homeless guy in front with the cat and dog?” the cashier asked. “People have been buying pet food for him all day.”

“No,” I replied. “I didn’t see the guy. I was selfishly thinking of my own cat.”

But upon reflection, the whole thing strikes me as a bit odd. All day long, people have been buying food for the homeless guy’s cat and dog, but they’re not buying food for the homeless guy himself. Why is it we can’t bear the sight of hungry animals, yet we have hardened ourselves to the sight of hungry, homeless people?

In my last post (“My New Calling”), I carried on rather shamelessly about my newly-discovered talent as a caption writer. In my deluded state, I assumed I was going to win the first New Yorker caption contest I had ever entered. But today I learned that was not to be. Not only did I not win the competition outright, I was not even one of the honorable mentions (i.e., “also rans”). Well, you can say there’s always next week in the caption-writing game. And generally speaking that’s true. Still I had a comeuppance coming to me, and come to me it did. In the meantime, I’m casting about for a new calling. Perhaps blindfolded Rubik Cube-solving will turn out to be “the next big thing” for me.

I’ve found a new calling and a new way to waste time that’s giving my Sudoku habit a run for the money. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started sending in caption ideas for the cartoons in the New Yorker, Boston Globe Magazine, and perhaps other outlets if I can find them. Not to be immodest but I’ve got a real flair for caption writing, a hitherto unknown talent that I never would have discoverd had I not noticed such a contest in the New Yorker for the first time a few weeks ago. And now I’m hooked. Just another thing to do before I go to bed at night–part of a growing list of things. If it gets much bigger, I won’t have to bother going to bed.

I just heard from Jungle Jerk last night, a folk hero of the blogosphere (see link at right), who was returning to these 48 states after five weeks in South America that involved tromping around in the jungles, the highlands, and lowlands. It was late, and both of us were tired, and little of what he said made sense to my overly fatigued brain. He spoke of various visions he’d had, sweat lodges in Colombia, Lakota sun dances in Indiana and South Dakota, ayahuasca rituals in the Andes, and swimming in green sulfuric lakes in the mountains of Ecuador. He went on and on, Andre Gregory-style, and half the time I had no idea what he was talking about. None of his experiences were familiar. I could barely picture any of it except for when he described the return flight from Bogota to JFK during which he saw “A Good Year,” the latest Russell Crowe vehicle.

“How was it?” I asked.

“Not too good,” he said.

I know I’m too old, too stiff, and too light to be the next heavyweight champion of the word. Everyone has told me that already. But now that Stallone says he’s done with Rocky 6, somebody has to step up and make Rocky 7. That somebody is me, and don’t try to talk me out of it. My mother has begged me (“you can’t take the punishment”), my dad has berated me (“you can’t handle the truth”), and my wife has implored me (“think of the children”), but it’s no use. My mind is made up, so now all I gotta’ do is convince my body. While we’re having that conversation (my body and me), I’m going to run up the steps to our deck a few times. Next I’m going to run over the butcher store to check out some slabs. On the way home, I’m going to get some marbles so I can practice talkin’ right. I mean talkin’ good. Then it’s just a matter of writing the script that’s going to get me the heavyweight crown. If I can pull that off, which is going to take an amazing bit of writing, I’ll not only be the champ, I’ll win Best Screenplay too,

I only saw a few minutes of this program so I don’t want to knock it unfairly by saying it’s a show about nothing. First of all, another show about nothing, as we know, ended up doing fairly well. But this one, called Nanalan, is actually about nothing, so far as I can tell. In the segment I saw with my preschooler (that’s the target audience), a kid and her grandmother hang around the house humming and making funny noises in an unintelligible language. Whereas Seinfeld, despite the pretense of being about nothing, was actually about things (like masturbation, Chinese restaurants, fascistic soup vendors, etc.), Nanalan shows what true nothing is all about. Again, that’s no knock on the program, which just might be a hit. At least they have one big fan in my youngest daughter.

Ron Hassner of UC-Berkeley has written a funny article in the current issue of the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) called “The Travels of the Lorenz Butterfly.” Starting with the 1972 paper by Edward Lorenz, “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas” (a landmark in chaos theory), Hassner tracked the flight of this butterfly in the published literature where it turns up in Peking, Paris, Switzerland, and other locales. Charting the movement of the butterfly over the years in graphic form, Hassner reproduces a prime example of chaotic behavior known as the “Lorenz attractor.”

When I suggested writing about this to an editor, she said: “It does sound amusing but it doesn’t sound like real research, which is what we need.” I say to her: How can research get more “real” than this?

“Rich men must live in fear of this moment,” my wife said upon seeing the headline of Monday’s Boston Globe: “Tom Brady’s former girlfriend pregnant.” The article discussed Bridget Mohnahan’s pregnancy and her claim about Brady’s role in that development.

My wife might be right about this (she usually is), but I think a person of modest means would fear that sort of moment more than a multi-multi-millionaire star athlete. Besides, Brady has already moved on to supermodel Gisele Bundchen, and for all I know he’s on her right now.

As for the Globe, the decision to make the Brady story the headline is surely one of its lowpoints. Now the only thing separating it from the New York Post is that the Post would have been sure to have a good, saucy title to go along with such a dubious story

Last night I read a fun article in the Jan./Feb. Mother Jones about “hypermilers’–the latest bunch of kooks to come down the pike–drivers who are pushing fuel economy to crazy extremes. To get 100 miles per gallon or more and thereby claim the crown of “Most Fuel-Efficient Driver in the World,” these drivers will go through red lights and stop signs, negotiate the curves on highway exit ramps at more than 50 miles per hour, and draft dangerously close behind giant trucks on the freeways. I’ve long been in favor of auto efficiency and have written on these matters, off and on, for several decades, but if there is such a thing as going too far, this is clearly one of them.

I went out to dinner with some friends tonight, which is something I don’t as often enough as I ought to. (Of course, I probably ought not do it as often as I ought to, for if I did do it as often as I ought to, I’d be even more broke than I am now, not doing it as often as I ought to.) The company was great though my meal (from a culinary standpoint) fell way short of that mark. Apart from the conversation, which was faultless (though verging on the anecdotal at times), one of the high spots of the restaurant was its sparkling-clean bathroom. They had a cool hand dryer called the Xcelerator (WARNING: product placement!) that lived up to its name. You put your hands in front of it and get a powerful blast of hot air that dries you in seconds. Normally I don’t bother with those things but in the winter I get a chapping problem, and this thing, the Xcelerator (Warning: second product placement!), really did the job. And that was my big night on the town. I guess you could say I lead quite an exciting life.

Call DSS. Lock me up. I’ve gone and done it now: I’ve introduced my impressionable young girls to Jerry Lewis–”Cinderfella,” to be precise. This could warp their minds, I’ve been told. This could ruin them, I’ve been warned. This could lure them toward a life of bad slapstick. But I went and did it anyway, and now there’s hell to pay.

But maybe things won’t turn out so badly after all. I mean we grew up on Jerry Lewis–at least if you are over 40 and/or French you did–and see how far we’ve gone. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be able to go that far too. Though personally I wouldn’t mind if they make it a bit farther.

I recently had an unnerving conversation with a mother at my daughter’s preschool. “Do you work out at the Y?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I told her. “Why do you ask?”

“This guy who walks his dog in our neighborhood said he sees someone from this preschool at his gym. A ’skinny guy,’ he said. So I thought it was you.”

What, me skinny? I never thought of myself that way. Maybe lean and mean, if you want to put it in those terms. Or maybe just mean. But definitely not skinny. I’m no 97-pound weakling or even a 98-pound weakling, am I? Well, I guess I’ll find out the next time I go to the beach and see if anyone kicks sand in my face (my young daughters excluded). In the meantime, I’ll be loading up on nutritional supplements.

I accidentally dropped a gallon of milk in front of the 7-11 in Central Square. I then had to walk nearly a half mile over icy, puddle-strewn streets, carrying a split-open milk container far off to my side to keep from getting covered with milk. I suppose I didn’t have to do that; I could have just thrown the breached container out and been done with it. But had I thrown it out, which is something a normal person would have done, I would not have heard something I’d never heard before in my life, called out to me by a homeless guy standing in front of the store: “Hey buddy, MILK!!!”

It’s Valentine’s Day in case you missed the advertising blitz, which means it’s time for our First Second Annual Valentine’s Day Sweepstakes. The contest was inspired by something I heard during the pledge drive for my local NPR station, WBUR. People bought flowers (with the proceeds going to the station) and dedicated them to their Valentines.

“To my first ex-wife,” the first one read.

“You’re my Valentine, no questions asked,” the second one read.

Here’s my offering: “To my Better Half. From the Lower 48.”

Please send in your entries without delay. This competition promises to be a spirited one, with all the controversy now swirling as to whether such contests are “rigged.” (They are not, but there are some sore losers out there.)

Today our ex-governor makes public what has been obvious to the citizens of Massachusetts since before he became our governor: Mitt Romney (after having spent most of his time in state office campaigning for what he he hopes to be his next job) is officially a candidate for president. You can almost see young Mitt in 1968 biting back the tears in the wake of his father George’s failed presidential bid and vowing to himself, “Never again.” You can almost hear George telling Mitt before the 2002 Winter Olympics, “If you build it, they will come,” and repeating those same words today, speaking metaphorically of Mitt’s incipient campaign. Romney clearly has the desire to be president and has shown himself to be a man who will say anything to be elected. The question now is whether that trait, and his anchorman countenance, will be enough to get him elected.

We (as in my family) are often late for things, though I never used to be late for anything. I have an effective strategy, however, for dealing with this problem: I blame it on the kids. But that’s not fair. The fact is, we’re barely making it through the day. I’m late; they’re late; we’re all late. I’m late getting to sleep each night and late waking up each morning. Even this post is late (by about 15 hours), to pick an obvious example.

Given all that as a backdrop, it’s kind of surprising that my wife, in a fit of optimism, signed up our youngest daughter for “early dropoff” at her preschool. Every day I take her, we’re “late for early,” as my daughter puts it. With any luck, we’re still “early for late,” as she says, though on many occasions we’re even “late for late.” In those cases, I can’t help wondering why we’re paying a considerable sum for the privilege of being late every single day for early dropoff–paying, in other words, for the privilege of being “late for early.” And setting our poor innocent child up for failure.

While rollerblading along the Charles River earlier today, I saw a striking young woman in jet black hair, bangs, a miniskirt, and high-heeled boots walk on the bike path. She was sporting a distinctly “mod” look, and for a moment I felt like I’d stepped into London of the 60s. The friend I was blading with evidently was thinking the same thing, though he put it even better. “I just had an Austin Powers moment,” he said.

On one of the many radio talk shows on our NPR station (the names of which blend together, OnPoint, Here and Now, Day to Day, etc.), Jonah Goldberg of the National Review was one of the talking heads yesterday, though on radio maybe a more apt term is disembodied heads. Goldberg laughed off charges that the Bush administration lied about WMDs to get us into war. He said [in a rough paraphrase]: “There was no conspiracy. The WMD thing was just the simplest story that everyone would buy.”

The first statement is flat-out wrong. The second one is fairly plausible and wouldn’t sound objectionable as an explanation, except for the fact that Goldberg sees nothing wrong with that. To him, it’s fine and dandy to say whatever it takes to get us into war–the simplest thing that people are likely to buy. I’d love to see that guy, and other cavalier people of that sort, sent on the next airlift to Iraq. Now there’s a “surge” I could get behind.

Yesterday, if anyone had any lingering doubts, listeners of All Things Considered learned why economics is often called “the dismal science” (and even that may be too charitable). Gary Becker, the Nobel prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago, defended the growing inequity between the haves and have-nots. According to Becker, the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer is a good thing, not a bad thing, because (as explained in the radio segment) the “gap is creating the right incentives. Poor people are learning that to get ahead, they need to get more skills. And the more skilled the workforce is, the better the overall society does.”

Wow, and to think they hand out Nobel prizes for this kind of reasoning. Yet there has never been a single Nobel prize awarded for mathematics. What a wonderful world we live in.

Saw this in yesterday’s Metro, my sudoku paper (do you sudoku?): “A Mattapan man with a history of conflict with his father allegedly ended the longstanding feud by bludgeoning the man to death, dismembering the body and spreading parts of it–including the head–in a Roxbury backyard.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is exactly the kind of behavior that gives “conflict resolution”–as well as “anger management”–a bad name. Brings to mind the oft-quoted query posed by American folk hero Rodney King: “Can’t we all get along?”

You’ve all seen the T-shirts: “02138. The most opinionated zip code in America.” It’s a silly inscription that mainly owes to the TV show, “Beverly Hills, 90210.” I wonder what they claim for 90210, “the largest-breasted zip code in America”? But getting back to Cambridge, if 02138 is America’s most opinionated, who’s second?

I’d like to make the case for 02139, and I say this with no disrespect intended for 02140, 02141, and 02142, which are fine zip codes in their own rights–one of which I called home for a number of happy years. (Or at least I thought I was happy until I moved into 01239 and discovered what happiness really is.) I say all this not just because I presently live in 02139 and have opinions on every possible subject, especially those I know absolutely nothing about, which are of course the best opinions of all. (Isn’t that why they’re called opinions rather than facts?) Then there are my neighbors, as opinionated a bunch as you’re likely to meet. One of them, a close friend, is always firing off letters to this paper, the Globe, and any other journal that has an email inbox and an outdated spam filter. Another neighbor, a distinguished jurist, lectured me on the Supreme Court, Homeland Security, and other matters, while I was stuck in the checkout line at Whole Foods. And on and on. The examples abound.

Still 02138 offers some stiff competition. It’s got Harvard University, for one thing, and the Kennedy School of Government, the op-ed capital of the western world. These people are paid to have opinions and they’re not shy about sharing them.

Curiously, I thought I was moving into 02138–moving up in the world, you might say–before purchasing my current home. All the documents provided by the previous homeowner used that prestigious zip code, and it was not until the the actual closing on the home sale that the documents said 02139, which is in fact the correct zip code. The old owner, it seems, was trying to pull a fast one, surmising (correctly in this case) that some chump would be willing to pay extra to live in America’s most opinionated zip code.

You can see how that strategy could have backfired. Who wants to move into a situation like that if it means people are going to be out on the streets, debating with each other at all hours? Still some folks will pay a premium to inhabit a superlative, even if it means living in “the most dangerous zip code in America.” That owner was banking on the fact that I was one of those shallow individuals. As a business man, he was suspect, but I’ll give him this: He knew how to read people.

He professed ignorance at the closing when the true facts emerged. Yet all the documents said 02139, in plain black and white, and it was hard talking one’s way out of that. But the sale went through, without a price adjustment, which is how I find myself residing in America’s second most opininated zip code. Or so I opine: They’ve got Harvard, but we’ve got MIT. They’ve got Alan Dershowitz, but we’ve got Noam Chomsky, who’s one of the great opinion-makers of all time. They’ve got Steven Pinker, but we had Steven Pinker and Pinker’s legacy of opinionatedness compiled during his MIT (02139) tenure stacks up well against his years at Harvard (02138).

I feel so strongly about this 02139 thing, I’m willing to back up that conviction with money, especially if someone is inclined to donate some. With sufficient funding, I’ll print out a new brand of T-shirts–”02139. The world’s second most opinionated zip code.” Everyone loves an underdog, and I’m confident these will soon outsell the already-passe 02138’s, especially after I get the MIT Coop on board. (Inter-Coop rivalries are always good for drumming up sales, aren’t they?) So look out Cambridge: 02139 is gonna’ make a run at number two, and we’re sure to ruffle some fathers along the way. “You can’t make eggs without cracking a few omelets,” as George Bush might say. “So are ya’ with me or agin’ me?

I heard this on the radio while I was doing other things (sock drawer, etc.), which means the details are sketchy. The basic story is that a woman gave birth while driving in the carpool lane of Interstate 5 in California. It’s a marvelous tale–bringing a new life into the world and all that. But the curmudgeon in me has to wonder: Is it OK to drive in the carpool lane if you start out with just one person in the car and end up with two? Just wonderin’…

The other day, I saw two women saying goodbye to each other (in a coffee house, or something like that, or was it in the lobby of a gym?). One put her hand on top of her friend’s hand and said: “Take good care.” It was a well-intentioned phrase, in all likelihood, but I for one take offense. What’s wrong with simply saying, “Take care”? By saying “take good care,” one is almost implying that “take care” is not good enough and that those who employ the short form don’t really care all that much. But the revised expression is inflationary in my opinion. If we go down that path, soon everyone will be saying “take very good good” and before long “take exceptionally good care.” If that happens, we would have traded in a perfectly acceptable two-syllable phrase for a cumbersome and unwieldly eight-syllable one. Well, that’s all I have to say on this subject for now except for some parting words of advice. If anyone says “take good care” to you, reply in as polite a manner as possible: “No thanks. But I will take care.”

The other day my hygienist told me I had plaque buildup on one side of my mouth and stains on the other (but no plaque), which she found “puzzling” to say the least. That’s either TOO MUCH INFORMATION or the makings of a good dental mystery. Which reminds me, with all the successful medical TV shows, why not a dental TV show? With the backstage drama of dentists, hygienests, orthodontists, and oral surgeons rubbing elbows, quite literally, with a host of quirky patients–the slutty soccer mom, the seductive soccer dad, Delta Dental plan members of every stripe, the co-pays (1st and 2d party), and the pay-as-you-goers, all of which is sure to add up to a steamy mix. (I realize that’s not a proper sentence but, uh, who cares?) I’ve even got a good title I’ll put out there, free of charge, which will pretty much on its own guarantee a surefire hit: THE DENTAL OFFICE. Better yet, I promise to tune in just as soon as some enterprising “creator” (or should I say “decider”) gets off his or her butt and makes this show. David Kelly, Aaron Sorkin, Steven Bochco? I’m talkin’ to ya.

Yesterday I spoke with a man many have called the greatest physicist since Einstein. I can’t evaluate that claim–or know how to rank the physicists of the past century–though I’m certain this guy would come near the top of any reasonable list one might construct. It was our third phone conversation in the past five years, and they’ve always been quite brief. I’ve kept them short for two reasons: First, I could tell he was no windbag and had no inclination to blab on indefinitely. Second, I was mindful of the claim that he might possess the “greatest mind since Einstein.” If that’s really true, I’d like him to apply that mind to unraveling the mysteries of the universe and not waste it on the likes of me.