CALL ME SNAKE

I have not been able to log in, or post, for the past week, as BLOG.COM had been rejecting my password and saying my email address was not registered. Today, however, my usual way of signing in worked and I’m “back in the saddle,” as it were. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that I have absolutely nothing to say. But now, at least, I can say nothing to the whole blogosphere. That’s a tribute to today’s impressive technology. As well as to my personal “clout.”

I’ve lived in Cambridge a long time and after awhile you make some connections. After some decades in this fair city, I am now on a first-name basis with the assistant to a City Councillor (NOT an assistant City Councillor). I have not yet exploited that connection; I’m still waiting for the most opportune time. Incidentally, I just learned that the wife of a guy I’ve started chatted with at the Cambridge Y is an assistant to a different City Councillor, so I have yet another avenue to tap into down the road. But I’m going to hold onto that card until I really need it. That’s clout.

Having a friend who’s single can be a great thing. Because you know there’s always one person who’s up for a movie or up for grabbing a slice of pizza or watching some sports or whatever. Until he gets hitched up with a new girlfriend or new wife. Suddenly he has his life back, which is good for him. (Couldn’t be happier  for the guy.) But it’s bad for you.

I just got a call from my collaborator who works half a mile away at Harvard. I can never get a decent line with him. There are always echoes which make it really hard for me to talk. Today when he called he came in clear as a bell. He was calling from China.

I got an email a few days ago, after our spring soccer season concluded, from the friend with whom I coached the team for the past two years. He was responding to an email I’d sent on March 30, 2009 about our first team practice of the spring, which he had just received in mid-June (MORE THAN 6 WEEKS LATER!). Steve, he chided me, have you been playing with wormholes again?

This came in yesterday at Call Me Snake’s head office: “Hoping you can help me in regards to spookyworld archive info. I have spooky world brochure when it was in Berln MA. It’s no dated but it has to be during the 90’s. It is what they handed out in the park with all the info such as prices include and celebrity visitors. It is autographed by Gunnar Hansen “Leatherface” and the actor at the time who played Jason but I cannot make out the name. I searched for actors who have played Jason but none seem to match this autograph. Could you lead me in right direction or provide answer.”

Once again, Call Me Snake was unable to assist this person. I could not lead him/her “in right direction,” nor could I “provide answer.” Nevertheless, we are still glad the individual thought of asking the question here. I never have seen a Jason movie and, generally speaking, I am not big on hockey masks. But the important thing is that we’ve always intended to make Call Me Snake your number one source of news and information. And to the erstwhile Jason fan I say: Thanks for asking.

Sometimes the story doesn’t work out the way you figure. The numerous missives I’d been receiving from the NIH PR person made me feel as if I was about to be blown off. Everything told me things were headed that way. Instead, this afternoon I heard that I was supposed to interview the head of a major institute. One of our national  institutes of health. On Thursday morning, no less.  I hadn’t counted on that at all. Instead I saw this whole thing going down. Now I’ve got to figure out what in the heck we’re going to talk about.

P.S. I seem to recall that some reader recently had a problem with my use of the word “missive.” Now I see it crept into the above post, so I’m going to apologize for that in advance.

I’m working on a minor story for a major science magazine and, as part of that, I need to interview somebody at NIH–and hopefully somebody of importance. A P.R. person at NIH has sent me several email reminders letting me know that she has not forgotten my request and is still working on it. Nevertheless, I have the feeling that eventually I’m going to stop getting those reminders that I’ve been enjoying so much. At that point, I’ll know that she really has forgotten my request.

I enjoyed this line [an exact paraphrase] from the movie, COUCH TRIP. During a lecture, Dan Ackroyd, the bogus shrink, says: “Some may ask, why must therapy take such a long time? To them I say there is nothing that can be done in a short time that can’t be done just as well in a long time.”

Paul De Lancey, the ruler of the funny blog, Lords of Fun (see link on left!), has generously offered the following author’s bios for my unrestricted use. Since I am asked for an author bio so rarely these days, I believe that with this list I should be covered for life:

“… divides his time between being awake and being asleep.”
“. . . divides his time between inhaling and exhaling.”
“His favorite memories are from his past.”
“He lives at his home.”
“Is not on any milk carton.”

I gave a half hour talk today to a bunch of 3rd and 4th graders at my daughter’s school, and I have to say it was a tough crowd. The subject was (what else?) the universe. The class had studied the solar system so I told them about things they might not have heard of before or didn’t know much about: dwarf planets and asteroids; galaxies, black holes, and event horizons; and dark matter and dark energy. (My daughter was unimpressed with the pie chart I hastily drew up showing that luminous matter accounts for just 1% of the universe’s mass.) Several of the kids listened politely; some were clearly not paying  attention; a few had their own theories to share. The only person who I am sure enjoyed it was the teacher who had a half hour (35 minutes actually) where she was off the hook, allowing me to lead the class in my fumbling way.

I recently received a letter from the coauthor of The Ark of Millions of Years trilogy (which I have not read and had not, until receiving the letter, known about). The author of the letter, and coauthor of the book, was writing in response to an article I wrote about our universe being a bubble that might someday collide with another bubble universe. She offers a variation on that theory that is, in her opinion, better in many respects. If I were to read her books (available through Barnes and Noble), she said, I would then “have a better understanding of how the cosmos is constructed.”

It appears the great rapprochement has occurred in Southern California on the basis of  this TV guide listing for Tuesday, June 9: “Gangs of the Dead: Latino and black gangs battle zombies in L.A. (with Ethan Ednee).”

I’d just turned in my humor column the other day when the editor asked if I wanted to include a funny bio, which I normally do. I had to be somewhere in a few minutes, which didn’t give me much time to think. So I instantly sent back something that is pretty funny: “Columnist ____ ____ divides his time between being awake and being asleep.” The trouble was, I didn’t invent that line. It was written by another blogger <http://www.lordsoffun.com/> whose brother is a good friend of mine. I told the author I might steal his line someday,  and since he didn’t object, I figured it was OK.

But as soon as I turned that in, I started worrying. What if the real author sent a comment about the bio? Or, worse yet, what if someone else sent a comment about my column saying the funniest thing in it was the bio? Either way I’d lose. So I played it safe, jettisoning that line for something more prosaic–something, in other words, that’s more my style.

A realtor I tend to see on Sunday mornings at the Cambridge Y has a theory that home sales in the area are tied to David Ortiz’s hitting. Once he breaks out of the slump, the industry as a whole will rebound. He was encouraged by Ortiz’s two-hit performance yesterday and is hoping that translates into a big day for him today. I’m hoping, however, that this theory does not put any more pressure on the Big Guy, who is already pressing enough.      

After our soccer games, the kids do a cheer. Then they line up and shake hands with the opposing team. Only yesterday the coach on the other team said the board of health recommends against the traditional hand shake. One should opt for the “soul shake”–or fist tap–instead.

We’ve been told that one should always be polite. If someone goes out of their way to do  you a good turn, you should thank them. Yet I’m sure that Sal DiMasi–who’s now facing a battery of public corruption charges–and his friends wish that maybe this time the Cognos executive who wrote that email (“Please be sure to thank Dick and Sal for getting the contract closed.”) hadn’t been so polite.

Seeing as it’s Thursday, it’s time for–you guessed it–Freaky Friday. The starting point for this discourse relates to the fact that someone I know had heart surgery the other day, checking in the night before to get ready for the procedure. His daughter came to our house after school that day, which made me think about the time I had major surgery almost 20 years ago.

The night before I was nervous, which is understandable, and was given something to help me sleep but the drug didn’t agree with me and kept me up instead. In a half daze, I recall seeing a show on TV late at night in which Richard Masur starred. He had symptoms similar to the symptoms I had and went through the same battery of tests that I’d gone through. The parallels were so uncanny that years later, I wondered whether I’d dreamt up the whole thing in my medicated state.

But I looked it up on the web today and found that there was indeed a show that premiered in that year (1990). Evidently I had seen the show’s pilot that night–or actually a rebroadcast thereof–which portrayed some of what I’d already gone through, as well as what was to come.

A friend, who works in public health in Mozambique (on contract for the CDC), had dinner at our house tonight. He talked about his work and his backyard,which has avocado, coconut, mango, and papaya trees growing in it. “You lead an interesting life,” my 7-year-old girl told him.

And that’s certainly true. Not to compete with my friend, because I can’t (nor would I want to, as we’re not supposed to compete with our friends, right?), but I can say I have a pretty interesting job for someone who doesn’t have to set foot outside his house.

Marilyn vos Savant, the high IQ record holder of PARADE Magazine fame, offered some good advice yesterday about not being a know-it-all: 1. Never correct anybody else unless absolutely necessary. 2. Don’t offer advice unless asked to.

I personally have been guilty of both these sins and will try to toe the line. If you’ve committed any transgressions of this sort, I’d like to tell you now that there’s a better way to behave. I’d also like to advise you to follow Marilyn’s recommendations. She’s smarter than any of us and knows of which she speaks.