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.