CALL ME SNAKE

It’s already out of control. I already do the daily sudoku puzzles in the Boston Globe (7 days a week), plus the free paper Metro (5 days a week). But over the weekend I heard there was another free daily in Boston, which I’d sort of seen around. Today I picked up my first copy of Boston Now and checked out their “Games” page. Sure enough they have Sudoku–not one but three puzzles each day. If I do them all, that will be a lot to keep up with–nearly five puzzles a day (with time off for holidays and good behavior). I already cut corners on sleep; can I survive on an hour less per night?

Yesterday I made four trips to Central Square, the seamy underbelly of Cambridge, in one hour. That might be some kind of record, and not one you’d like to top. First I got some pillow cases at a discount store for sack races for my daughter’s fifth birthday party and some papers for cupcakes. But the cupcake papers had footballs on them (I wasn’t paying attention), and my daughter didn’t care for them. So I went back to the store to exchange the football-decorated papers for the balloon version. When I got home my wife decided we needed two more pillow cases for the sack races, so it was back to Central Square again. As soon as I returned we realized we had run out of bread, which was going to be an important part of our dinner, so that was the fourth trip–all completed in an hour. Mr. Ripley, you can believe it or not.

Several people have expressed shock when I mention that I still watch “Lost,” as if that were so passe. (It’s also surprising because I don’t watch TV, but that’s another matter.) My 16-year-old niece laughed at me. “It was OK in the beginning but that show is so over,” she said. “It’s well beyond toast.” Her words and those of others were enough to shake my confidence in my own judgment. So I put the question to a friend, a local writer/editor/publisher/impressario who was, at least at one time, a “Lost” fan. (In fact, he’s the guy who turned me on to the show during the summer rerun period after the first season had concluded.) Does the fact that I still like “Lost” make me a loser, I asked. “If you’re a loser, count ___ & I in as well for we feel that, if anything, the show has gotten better,” he replied. The Boston Globe TV critic said today that he’ll be sorry to see the season end because, in his words, the show “has been on a roll.” After tonight’s season finale, the show will go into hiatus until February 08. Then members of the loser’s club that I belong to will become truly lost souls. Each of us will, somehow, have to muster up a life of our own–one that does not involve worrying about “the others.”

Relax! Take it easy! If your food drops on the floor, you now have more than five seconds to pick it up. New studies from Connecticut College suggest that the 5-second rule needs an ugrade. The researchers found that it takes at least 30 seconds for wet food to get contaminated by bacteria and even longer for dry food to get contaminated. So as the pace of life has gotten faster and faster, this is one area where we can afford to slow down. That tempting morsel of food sitting there on the floor is fine where it is; pick it up when you’re good and ready and not a second before.

On Thursday, my favorite movie theater (the Brattle) is showing “The Cockfighter,” a 1974 movie starring Warren Oates who plays a man who trains fighting cocks in Georgia. The movie (which I have not seen) is based on a novel (which I own, but have not read) written by Charles Willeford, a pulp novelist I am fond of. While looking up the movie online, I came across this fake tagline: “He came into town with his cock in hand, and what he did with it was illegal in 49 states.” As I said before, that’s gotta be the best movie teaser never used…

Since a smoking ban was imposed in Cambridge restaurants and bars in 2003, I’ve run into a friend of mine at least a dozen times in front of two local pubs, the Plough&Stars and the People’s Republik. Just about every time, I’m headed to the 7-11 to buy a gallon or two of milk, while he’s talking with some friends on the sidewalk and smoking a cigarette. My friend is a former space artist turned genetic artist about whom I’ve written frequently, and we’ve had quite a few interesting conversations during these late-night “milk runs.” If possible, I try to have the conversations on the way to the 7-11 rather than on the way back, as my arms get tired holding onto all that milk.

Is it unfair that Wolfy (Wolfie?) was forced to resign over an impropriety that probably would not have done him in were he not one of the main architects of America’s misguided war in Iraq? Put in other terms, should a man be held accountable for initiating a senseless war that has already killed untold numbers of people–probably hundreds of thousands, though we’ll never know for sure. Wolfowitz is one of the most reviled men in the world–along with Bush, Cheney, and Rumself–and he has paid a price for being a member of that select group known as the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

My daughter and I were late this morning getting to her bus stop, and I stepped into the street to get a view of the approaching bus to see if it was hers rather than one of the others that follow the same route. A crossing guard scolded me for setting such a bad example for the children. She continued to harangue me after we’d walked past her on the way to the bus stop.

My 7-year-old told me not to feel so bad. The same crossing guard had also insulted our friend’s dog, calling him a “cur” or some such slur. My daughter also suggested that I take a different route home to avoid another interaction with the irascible guard. But I told her that would be the cowardly way out and that I’d better face the music.

I just filled out a survey (that I had to do, unlike most of them that get immediately tossed). The questions were of the “modern” variety and some I did not even understand. To wit: “What is your gender? Or, more specifically, what is your gender identity? Female, male, other, or none.” 

 How about “none”? Does that work for you? 

 

 

I had to go to the FedEx place in Harvard Square and parked my bike near a walkway between Mt. Auburn and Brattle Streets that was recently written up by the Boston Globe architecture critic. I had been through there (44 Brattle, I think it’s called) before, but it had recently been “finished,” as the critic Robert Campbell described it. So I took a little excursion between the two streets, and it was fun to find some new sights in a town that, after 30 years, I’d come to know all too well.

I had a funny phone conversation yesterday with an astrophysicist who called me by mistake. He was trying to call someone named “Stephanie” and must have gotten my number after typing in “Ste.” Since I had him on the line, I asked him about a recent paper he had coauthored involving data from an experiment called MiniBooNE that was consistent with the existence of extra dimensions. He started to talk about that but then had to stop. It turns out he was spending the night in a sleep laboratory and they were about to hook him up to all kinds of apparatus to see if he had sleep apnea. Which meant he had only two minutes to contact his friend Stephanie and now he was out of luck. An ordinary wrong number and he still might have been able to reach her. Too bad he ran into me by mistake and could not shake me off in on time.

It’s not easy being a barber, and no one said it would be easy. A skilled barber is always walking a fine line. He needs to keep the conversation with the client flowing smoothly and easily, without ever going too far in expressing his opinions. Yet he cannot seem to be holding back either. It’s not easy, as I said before, which is why I’m glad to be the guy sitting down in that relationship, rather than the guy doing the cutting.

In response to questions put to him yesterday by the House Judiciary Committee, Alberto Gonzales admitted that his previous descriptions of prosecutor firings had been “inartful.” Gonzales had weeks to prepare for these hearings, and I’m wondering who came up with that word, “inartful,” which we don’t hear of much around these parts. Was it Karl Rove or some other wordsmith hired by the Bush administration to further the cause of deception and evasion?

Still, inartful is a curious word choice, any way you slice it. First of all, it’s not even a word. “Unartful” is a word, however, and it means lacking in art or skill. It seems that Gonzales was apologizing to the nation for being such a clumsy, unpracticed liar. But don’t worry. The longer he survives in this administration, the more practice he’ll get. And one day he will become the artful dodger that Bush had originally hoped to appoint when he picked his faithful, longtime lackey.

For years, I’ve heard the term “nitpicker” and have used it myself, in the figurative sense, on quite a few occasions. But it’s only been in the last week, when head lice infestations broke out in my daughter’s classroom, that I’ve come to know the literal meaning of the word. Nitpickers are thought to be overly fastidious people who seize on the smallest detail and go after it with a vengeance. Once they find what they are looking for, they cannot be deterred. These traits can be considered a real pain in the ass, but there is a time when those qualities are, instead, a real virtue. And that happens to be a time when there are real nits to be picked.

An article in yesterday’s Boston Globe discussed new products for mental fitness targeting aging baby boomers, which are the only kind of baby boomers to be found. Some of these cognitive exercise products cost hundreds of dollars. What ever happened to crossword puzzles. Or my old standby, sudoku?

A friend gave my wife an article to pass on to me. I haven’t seen it yet, as I don’t know where it ended up in our house, but evidently it’s about how people who worry live shorter, less productive lives. Since I haven’t talked to that friend since receiving the article, I want to thank her now for giving me something new to worry about.

Have you heard that Hilary Clinton has the nomination already locked up? That’s what the Republican strategists want you to hear. They keep saying it on the radio and the TV talk shows because they feel that if they say it enough maybe people will go along with the inevitable. Why is this? Because they feel confident that Hilary is beatable, and they’ve got their own Swift Boats lined up to sink her. Obama is a wild card who scares them; they haven’t yet found the Swift Boat that would bring him down. On the other hand, they see Hilary as their best, and perhaps only, chance to keep a Republican in the White House.

I just wrote a post about a scary movie called “JESUS CAMP” in which I learned that one in four Americans (25%) are crazed Evangelical Christians. But in the debate last week among Republican presidential aspirants, three out of ten candidates (that’s 30% folks!) said they don’t believe in evolution. In other words, they pretty much disavow all of science. The fact that 30 percent of the leading Republican contenders hold such a neanderthal view is really pretty scary. But then you might start to wonder where our current president stands on this issue. He might not even have an opinion, as there’s a good chance that he–the so-called “leader of the free world”–really does not understand what the word “evolution” means. That’s kind of disturbing too. For don’t they say that those who cannot learn from evolution are doomed to repeat it?

I said this last year before I’d seen the movie, and I’ll say it again now that I’ve seen the movie, at least in part: JESUS CAMP is one scary film. Watching defenseless young children getting brainwashed by deranged Evangelical Christians is not a pretty sight. JESUS CAMP makes the claim that 25% of our country consists of Evangelical Christians–people who the movie suggests are totally psychotic yet, nevertheless, constitute one of the most powerful voting blocks in the U.S. The fact that a group of ignorant people, who deny everything we’ve learned through science, could become so influential is by far the scariest thing I’ve seen or heard about in a long time.

I’ve been a little slow in turning my attention to this development but, what can I say, it’s been a busy year. Still I personally find it somewhat distressing to see that the White Hen Pantry in Porter Square has been converted to a Gourmet Express. Is that a sign o’ the times? Speaking of signs, the former White Hen sign, which used to cover the upper part of the building, has been stripped down to reveal an underlying brick facade. Very classy. But inside, it still looks like the same old White Hen–a place I liked partly because of the name as in “Let’s go to the Hen!” or “See ya’ at the Hen.” I suppose I could say, “See ya’ at the Gourmet Express,” but that doesn’t quite have the same ring, now does it?

We don’t want those “politicians in Washington” telling our troops what to do, President Bush is fond of saying. But the last I checked, the White House is located in Washington, D.C., and our troops are dying in Iraq because our president sent them there. Maybe in his mind, Bush is still clearing brush in Crawford, Texas. But we’re stuck in a horrible war (four years after Bush proclaimed “Mission accomplished!”) on account of the decisions made by the president and his political chronies who, by the way, call their shots from a place called Washington.

I’m writing something about string theory and geometry. I’ve been at it for six months now and may be at it for another year (assuming I get some encouragement to continue). My spellchecker, however, is not up to the task. Here’s what it suggested in my latest document: Write bran for brane, tours for torus, choral for chiral, barns for branes, cornfield for conifold, freemasons for fermions, and Lodge Harden Colluder in place of Large Hadron Collider.