CALL ME SNAKE

I talked to the principal of my daughters’ school in Cambridge, and when we talk it’s usually about bike racks. The subject was a bike that’s been abandoned and left there all winter and is now taking up valuable real estate. I told him who the likely suspect is and the name of another possible owner–both boys in the 8th grade. The next step is to find the owner, clip the lock, and remove said bike from said rack. It may not sound glamorous, but that’s a typical day in the life of our school’s self-appointed bike czar.

Yesterday a guy in California gave me some help with geometric images for the book. Based on his website, he appears to be a man of eclectic tastes. His list of “Favorite Movies” includes: The Wizard Of Oz,  Batman, The Princess Bride, and Buttslammer.

My mother-in-law called tonight after everyone else had gone to bed. As we spoke on the phone, I looked out the window and saw something white scurry in the park across the street. Knowing the park pretty well, I figured I’d see the creature–whatever it was–emerge before long. And sure enough a skunk came out a minute later, walking down the sidewalk across the street from me, before turning down a sidewalk towards a friend’s apartment.

A couple of nights ago, I saw a rat just below the steps as I came outside my house. The rat was as surprised to see me as I was to see him (her?). He ran down our sidewalk onto the driveway and cut across towards our neighbor’s house. Would he be back to visit again? I was hoping not but I felt like I’d interrupted him on a path toward our door.

Nature is all around us, even in a dense urban jungle such as I inhabit. Being a night owl, I’m often awake when most people are sleeping. But eventually I turn in too. And that just leaves the animals to attend to whatever business they care to. And odds are, we’ll never know what they’ve been up to behind our backs.

I found this description of CABIN BY THE LAKE in today’s TV guide: A screenwriter (Judd Nelson) becomes a serial killer to research a film.

Needless to say, the concept leaves me speechless. And I guess that’s why I’m writing about movies rather than writing movies.

An AP story attributes the decline in shark attacks in 2008 to the sagging economy: fewer people vacationing on the beach means fewer people for sharks to chomp on. If so, it’s not only people suffering from the economic downturn. Sharks are suffering too, but we’re not feeling their pain. Or at least not as much as we used to.

Call me a sap but I fall for those sports movies. They’re formulaic, obvious, and corny (and most of them star Dennis Quaid), but I still fall for them. The latest one that got to me was THE EXPRESS, the story of  football star Ernie Davis. Despite the film’s sentimentality, I was still moved by it. I was also moved by the last sports movie I saw, but I can’t even remember what it was. Nor can I remember the one I saw before that. But I’m pretty sure it moved me too.

I’ve been around the block, so to speak. I’ve lived in Cambridge a long time and have walked and bicycled through most of it–some streets hundreds, if not thousands, of times. And my vote for the windiest block in Cambridge is the stretch of Green Street between Pearl and Magazine, especially two-thirds of the way toward Magazine. I’ve bicycled on the stretched several times in the past two days where I could barely make any forward progress owing to the wind gusts. I did not experience gusts like that on any other stretch of road during those same days.

In fact, over the years this block has consistently been the windiest I’ve come across in Cambridge. I still remember a time about 7 years ago when I went with my daughter, then two years old, by bike to the florist in Central Square to get flowers for Valentine’s day. It was an extremely cold day–below zero wind chill–and my daughter was on the baby seat. (She insisted on going along, even though I tried to talk her out of it.) We barely made it through the stretch because the wind, and wind chill, was so brutal.

Fortunately she survived and the flowers did too. Another thing that has survived since then and probably before is that stretch of Green Street as the windiest block in all of Cambridge. But I think I’m repeating myself.

This year during February school vacation, we’re doing something special. We’re staying home. I thought that was because we were uninspired dullards who couldn’t think of anything to do. But it turns out we’re on the cutting edge of a new trend called “the stacation” (pronounced stay-cation). So while I was feeling a little depressed before as I saw our friends go off to California or on ski trips, I now feel good that we are pioneers in this new idea which just might have staying power.

I got hit in the side by a handball a couple of weeks ago, and it still hurts like hell. Last night it hurt even more because I was laughing so hard watching HAMLET 2, starring the hilarious Steve Coogan. It  may be the funniest movie I’ve seen since The Full Monty, yet it did not get great reviews and I don’t think it did well at the box office. People I’ve mentioned it too haven’t even heard of the movie before. I think that’s a shame because this is one funny movie and they’re not many of those. When one comes along, it deserves an audience. Though this one is not for the little kids…

I taped the 3-point shooting and slam dunk contests last night, as I thought my daughters might enjoy them. I thought wrong.

After watching a few seconds of the 3-point shooting competition, my younger daughter said: “Why is he missing so many shots?”

After watching a few seconds of the slam dunk competition, my older daughter said: “Can we can back to CURIOUS GEORGE, please?”

My 4th-grader is starting to study some interesting things in math. Last week it was symmetry. This week it was shapes, and I used one of the assignments to explain to her and her younger sister the difference between geometry and topology. “My book is all about that,” I said.

“You say  that about everything we study in math,” my 4th-grader countered, remembering that I’d made the same point in our discussion of symmetry last week. And she’s right. Because string theory is sometimes billed as a “theory of everything,” and as such it consumes everything in its path. Even when things don’t seem to be connected to string theory, a way is often found to bring them into the fold. That’s one of the reasons the theory is so annoying to its critics and one of the reasons that my book is so annoying to my daughter.

This morning, my wife had to drive to work because she was going to our daughters’ school first and otherwise would be late. But the girls decided they would rather bicycle than take the car. So we all biked there instead. I was sorry that made my wife a few minutes late to work but was glad the girls insisted on bicycling.

Some friends of ours recently had twins, two healthy boys, which was a source of great joy given difficulties they’d had conceiving. Their 4-and-a-half-year-old son, however, was less enthusiastic about the new arrivals. “I ADORE you mom,” he said, using a word they’d never heard before. “I adore you too, dad. But I don’t adore those twins.”

For years, a friend of mind has put up with unfriendly and disrespectful treatment from a fellow physics professor at her university. My friend assumed that he was not comfortable with the idea of minority women in physics. But after a recent meeting, during which this same professor unfairly laid into a new faculty member who happened to be a white male, my friend realized that the offensive behavior she’s endured all this while may not have had anything to do with her color or gender. “He’s just a jerk!” she said.

I’ve just finished writing a book related to string theory and got a rude awakening when I saw a used book (in “very good condition”) on a similar subject advertised on Amazon.com for just “$0.01.” (A penny, in other words.) Of course, that book’s been around for nearly 10 years. I’m hoping mine doesn’t start at that price as that wouldn’t leave much room for future price reductions.

A friend came over for brunch yesterday, and after she left my daughters paid her the highest compliment. “Playing with her is not like playing with a grownup,” they said.

In the past few weeks, I have pushed several cars out of snow-covered parking spaces. But yesterday I pushed my first motorized wheelchair, which was blocked by a little snow mound at the corner of Pleasant and Green Street behind the Central Square Post Office.

I mention this because bloggers are, by the very nature of this pasttime, self-absorbed people who are of the opinion that their navel-gazing, unlike other, more pedestrian navel-gazing, can afford the world rare and indeed novel insights. But occasionally, we can get outside of ourselves and do something that’s of value to somebody else, like pushing a person in a stuck wheelchair. Then, unlike other, more humble do-gooders, we get to brag about it in our blog.

My cat was born on a farm in rural New Hampshire, but after a few years in Cambridge, she has become much more urbane. In fact, I just discovered  that she has a fondness for tandoori chicken. What’s next. Moo shu pork?

Correspondence regarding Cambridge Youth Soccer is starting to heat up; registrations are being solicited and rosters are being drawn. As I’m a coach in the Under-10 Girls League, I’m getting more and more of this stuff these days. One thing that happens early in the season (normally in the fall) is picking a team name. And the last time we did this, the girls tossed out a slew of possible names including one I had to nix: “The Green Idiots.” I told the girls this one would not fly as I didn’t want to be the first coach to be thrown out of the league for yelling: “Kill ‘em, Idiots!”

I got a letter today from an editor at a science magazine who was writing about the use–and misuse and overuse–of the term “holy grail” in the scientific literature. She sought my advice as I was, in her words, “the chief grail hunter in all of science.” I earned that moniker, in a sense, by virtue of three “scholarly” papers on the subject, plus a talk (mostly incoherent) that I delivered at last year’s conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was interested, in particular, in historical trends on grail use and my “thoughts on what’s made scientists so grail crazy.”

I’ve never received a letter like that in my almost 15 years of grail tracking, which  has mostly been a solitary pursuit. The only other letter I’ve received on this subject, as best I can recall, was from a classics scholar who told me I didn’t know the first thing about the holy grail. He was right about that. But I did know the second thing, and the third and fourth, as well as the five thousandth.

I just reached a milestone in a project I’ve been working on for more than two years. “Are you going to take some time to dig out?” a friend asked the other day. No, I replied, I’ve still got stuff to do. But today, while waiting for some feedback before taking the next step, I didn’t have much to do on it at all. Which was a weird sensation, after being under crushing weight for such a long time.

Not sure what else to do, I literally did some digging out, going through stacks of science magazines–about four feet high–that had piled up since the fall of 2006. I got all of them out of the bookshelves in our dining room, which should please my wife, as well as the huge pile on my office floor. It’s all going in the recycling, save for about two dozen articles that I’ve clipped and filed for future reference. Although it’s nice to dig out, I’m going to try to keep the piles from getting quite so high next time.

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl with my kids but we did catch some of the halftime show. What did my 6-year-old think of Bruce Springsteen, a 50-something rocker, a man of my generation, putting on his usual pumped-up, high-octane act on arguably the largest stage in the world? “He’s scary,” she said.

The other night it was pretty cold, down in the single digits (about 12), and my cat was out and I couldn’t get her back. From midnight until 1 a.m., I went out to my street to call her, but no luck. I didn’t want to leave her out all night, as she’s become wimpy about the cold now that she’s an “adult.” But I couldn’t stay up all night, could I? I gave it one last try at 1:15 a.m. and finally said, “Enough is enough.”

When I got to the bed, there was the cat–on my side, right next to my wife who was fast asleep (and evidently let the cat in without my knowing it). To all my neighbors, whom I might have disturbed with all my late-night catcalls, I gotta say: “My bad.”