CALL ME SNAKE

(Inspired by the greatest motion picture of all time. No not PATTON. I'm talking about RUDY.) My wife called the other day when I was kind of in the middle of somethin'. "Sorry honey, I'm talking to the NRA right now. Would you like to say hi...? No...? OK, how about if I call you back later, as soon as I'm done kissing some ass here...? Love ya'."

A friend of mine, a computer programmer, has been, like me, freelancing for a long time. But last week he traded in his freewheeling consultant status for a regular, 9-to-5 desk job. He sent me this, Dilbertesque missive during his first day on the job: "Help! I am back in a cubicle!"

My tiddlywinks post evidently struck a chord. It was so successful, in fact, that it comes up first when you GOOGLE me, which means I no longer have that embarrassing problem to worry about. What's more, I was able to do that without writing about my affair with Paris Hilton. (Thanks anyways, Gatemouth.) No, I did it the old-fashioned way, by writing about tiddlywinks. Which brings us to today's CELEBRITY GUEST COMMENT, penned in this case by none other than my COUSIN BOB (see link on right). So without further ado, take it away Cousin--the "conch" is yours, so to speak...

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COUSIN BOB: Surprised you didn't know this, Cousin Steve. Years before I competed in the World Championships of Rock, Paper Scissors, brother Kenny had his heart broken at the national tiddly wink trials. He was just a wink and a tiddle away from making the national time.

To this day, Kenny blames his loss on one an unscrupulous act by one of MIT's finest winkers of all times. Kenny doesn't talk about it much any more-- too emotional. However, just after it happed he told me the full story.

According to Kenny, his finest squidger was messed with just before the semi-finals. The squidger looked and felt just as it did before. Kenny knew it was messed with because it was warm and smelled like Old Spice -- the telltale sign that it was what they used to call... (TO BE CONTINUED)

Last night, I had about 15 minutes before the weather and sports came on at 11:18. So I sent an email to arguably the world's most respected string theorist with a question--related to the project I'm working on--that has been gnawing at me for some time. I heard back from him instantly, before the weather came on, and have spent the better part of the day trying to understand his response. Not that he wasn't clear. No, I'm sure he was perfectly clear in what he said. I just don't have a clue as to what it means. (Which reminds me of a cartoon I liked as a youth: "Mr. Natural, what does it all mean?" "It don' mean shit. It don' mean shit...")

A friend in Switzerland asked me to write about the annual "Mystery Hunt" at MIT, which is something like the Olympics of puzzle-solving. I spoke with a veteran of that event yesterday who told me something I was not aware of, despite the fact that I have been to MIT literally hundreds of times--for volleyball, a research fellowship, and for journalistic and other work. We all know MIT is famous for science and engineering and is consistently rated one of the top universities in those areas. But the Institute is much more than that, he told me: “MIT has produced some of America's top tiddly winkers.”

I complained the other day about GOOGLE listing the thing that I least wanted other people to see first. Yet I know that others have it even worse. I'm going to meet with a professor later this week for an article I'm writing. When you GOOGLE him you get several comments from students saying he was the worst teacher they ever had in their lives. By that standard, I'm doing OK. Thank you professor. We haven't met yet and you've already made my day.

A week or so ago I had an ill-advised post for which I took considerable (well-deserved) heat. I was hoping the thing would blow over but my friends at GOOGLE won't cut me any slack. It's the first thing that comes up under my name. I'm hoping to move on, put the whole thing behind me, but GOOGLE won't let me. Come on guys, give me a break, please? As the Rodney once said: "Can't we all get along?"

I don't really know. Fortunately I've never met any of these people. Yet I think the charismatic, murderous kingpin--such as the character played by Jack Nicholson in The Departed (supposedly modeled after Whitey Bulger)--is a literary conceit. Do guys like that really go around spouting literary allusions and, through their learned discourse, carry on like deranged college professors? Or are they, in more brutish fashion, using intimidation and fear to get others to do their evil bidding? I think the latter but fortunately I don't really know. I've never met any of these people.

We enter our house by means of an exterior stairway and deck, which I painted today while our kids were at school and tenant was at work. My daughter questioned me about it on her way to school this morning. "You're going to paint the deck today?" she asked. "Don't you work on Thursdays?" Once again, I've been shot down by an eight-year-old.

Last week I spoke momentarily to the secretary of MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP), trying to locate a visiting physicist from Stanford. This week, I was back at CTP again, trying to locate another physicist from Stanford. The secretary, who'd only seen me for a total of 10 seconds in her life, acted like I was an all-too-familiar fixture at the center. "He's upstairs, in the same office his wife was in," she told me without looking up.

Today, meanwhile, I was at Harvard's high-energy physics center, talking to a visiting scientist from Princeton. One of Harvard's string gurus popped into the office in the middle of the interview and shot me a look that said: "Oh, it's you again." So it's clear that I've now become an official string theory groupie. That's not the goal I set for myself when I embarked on a writing career many years ago. Still, that might be one step above being a group theory stringie.