CALL ME SNAKE

I already mentioned (boasted about) the fact that our house was "featured" in yesterday's Boston Globe. However, I did not realize that I personally was mentioned in the article, in addition to the photo of our house. The article said that "neighbors wanted an urban greenery that would appeal to adults and children..." And by "neighbors," I'm pretty sure they meant me.

I also had an Op-Ed piece in yesterday's paper about our governor, Deval Patrick, who has just lined up a fat book deal. While I didn't actually write the piece (the named author is Joan Vennochi), she said everything I wanted to say on the subject so that I feel my opinion was well represented. More on that subject later, which is worthy of a post on its own. Well, I think that's enough bragging for now. By my reckoning, by 30 or 45 seconds of fame is just about running out.

We got a call this morning telling us our house was in the newspaper. That made no sense because our house, though it is so "very, very fine," would never make it into the Real Estate section of the Sunday paper. I figured it had to be the park across the street and, sure enough, I was right. The shot was taken from the back end of the park and somehow our diminutive house made it into the frame. I think I was overstating things when I referred to 15 seconds of fame. One second is more like it.

Our daughter had her first sleepover last night. My wife mentioned that to a friend whose daughter used to have sleepovers often but now does it rarely. "I don't mind the sleepover part--the dinner, the movie, the wrestling them to bed," her friend said. "I just don't want to see those kids again in the morning. For me it's like one of those bad one-night stands you just want to be over with."

Around this time of year of the NCAA basketball championships, Friday turns out to be a big day for--who guessed it?--vasectomies. The idea, according to a surgeon at the Oregon Urology Institute, is that after the procedure men are supposed to laze around for a couple of days taking it easy. So why not get it done on Friday and then have two to three days to watch basketball--this time with a perfectly legitimate excuse to watch TV and do nothing else. That's why on Fridays during March Madness, urology departments are such busy places to be. In case you've been wondering...

A year and a half ago, I wrote an article about why woodpeckers don't get headaches. I can't remember the details but it has something to do with the cushioning inside the cranium and the musculature on the head and neck. Now the chickens have come home to roost, so to speak. For the past week, a woodpecker has been going steadily at the tree in my backyard--right near my bedroom and office windows. I'm not going to complain, because it's part of nature and that woodpecker is probably doing something good for the tree and for the environment and for, or against, global warming (I should know after my article though the details presently escape me). Still, I have to say, maybe that woodpecker is not getting a headache from all his (her?) nonstop activity, but I certainly am.

Yesterday I heard an interesting interview of the authors (David Brock and Paul Waldman) of a book critical of John McCain. The media, they claim, has given McCain a free pass. In one month, they found that he was referred to as a "maverick" 1200 times--not by his staff but by so-called journalists who are not paid to do PR for the candidate. Has McCain earned that moniker? Not according to the authors who say that McCain has voted with his party 85% of the time, which puts him squarely in the middle of the pack. By that standard if he’s a maverick so are most of the people in Congress, and we know that’s not true.

Yesterday TV & radio were all abuzz about a new recording that had been recovered from someone high in Al Qaeda’s leadership and guess what? They still want to kill us. Every time someone in Al Qaeda reminds us of that fact, it seems to make front-page news. Maybe we should just take that--their deep-seated desire to kill us--as a fact of life and stop giving all these malcontents so much publicity.

Something odd happened yesterday morning. I was bicycling down Mass. Ave. (that's not the "odd" part, as I do it many times a day), and a guy whom I’d never seen before called me an "ASSHOLE!" from nearly a block away. Makes you believe in those “action at a distance” ideas from physics commonly ascribed to Einstein. I'm not saying the guy was wrong to call me that, but I do think he was a bit hasty in his judgment.

My youngest daughter was recently invited to a Purim party hosted by an Israeli family at her school. Here's how the mother who threw the party explained Jewish holidays to the gentiles in the crowd. They're all kind of similar, she noted. "Wicked people tried to kill all the Jews. But somehow, miraculously, the Jews managed to survive. Now let’s eat!”

I got a call from the other day and, as I was at my desk, I grabbed the phone on the first ring. "The first ring?" a friend said at the other end of the line. "My aren't we overanxious today." I was reminded of a scene in the movie "Swingers" in which a guy  asked how long, after getting a girl's phone number, he had to wait before calling her. I can't remember the advice he got but he was told that the "industry standard" was something on the order of a week. Which brings up the question at hand: What about telephone rings? If one shows signs of desperation and five will land you in voicemail, what establishes the right tone for the rest of the conversation: two, three, or four? What I'm getting after here, I guess, is this: What's the "industry standard" for telephone rings?