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April 4, 2008

For a long time I’ve wanted a place where everybody knows my name. You know, a little neighborhood place where I can go in and everyone will yell, "Chris!" and be happy to see me. Well, actually, I do have a place like that, except I always used to imagine it would be a bar and not a sushi bar. Not that I have anything against sushi, or sushi bars. In fact the reason everybody there knows my name is because I’m such a regular customer. Sometimes I can call up to place a carry-out order and they know what I want as soon as I say, "Hello." Thanks to the magic of caller-ID they probably don’t even have to answer. They always do, mainly because they never know when I’m going to throw a curve ball and ask for the Hedorah Roll instead of the Godzilla Roll, but still if it weren’t rude I could probably call, let it ring once, hang up, and show up fifteen minutes later and have dinner ready and waiting.

But why is it called a "sushi bar"? That’s what I really want to know. Let’s face it, a bar is a dark room separated by a long wooden table that you sit at and someone on the other side pours drinks. I’m not knocking bartenders. I’m just saying that anybody can pour liquid into a glass. Bartenders are incredibly talented because they have to deal with drunks, and that doesn’t just take skill; it takes the patience of a saint, and the courage of a…well, of someone who’s really courageous. Circus clowns, or firefighters, maybe. But mostly a "bar" is where they serve either beer poured from a tap or liquor poured straight from a bottle into a glass. A place where some guy juggles bottles while balancing a glass on his head and slicing pineapples with his feet as he puts together a twenty-dollar drink that tastes like alcoholic bubblegum is a "nightclub". Nightclubs are not bars. Nightclubs are clubs you go to at night and when you’re an adult. I’m not sure if there’s a dayclub, or what it would look like. Maybe dayclubs are what you had when you were a kid, which was basically you and your best friend in a cardboard box in the woods, but we just called those clubs. Maybe a dayclub is what snooty English guys go to so they can sit around in smoking jackets and brag about how one of their servants shot a tiger in the Afrikaaner once, but then they call those clubs too. When I first heard a snooty English guy talk about going to his club my first thought was, Why would someone like that go hang out in a cardboard box in the woods? But it actually made sense. I’m sure being a snooty English guy can be very stressful. They might like to have a cardboard box in the woods to go to so they can get away from the world for a while. It’s possible that the horrible class divisions of Victorian England were a misunderstanding because the upper classes had the notion that squalor and abject poverty were in fact tremendously liberating. But I digress. I think the sushi bar deserves to be called something other than a bar. After all, the guys making the sushi are, like bartenders or bottle jugglers, extremely skilled individuals, but it’s a different set of skills. It takes years to learn to prepare sushi, especially fugu, which can kill you. There’s something that really makes you think: a supremely tasty dish that you can savor until your heart stops beating and you fall face-down in your wasabi. I’ve actually never had fugu, but I could imagine whoever served it to me would say, "Enjoy this meal. It could be your last." Believe me, when the guy preparing your food has that kind of power you never want to hang up on him.

March 28, 2008

It’s not that I hate mowing the yard. It can actually be pretty enjoyable to be out there in the sunshine, spending hours and hours getting plenty of fresh air and exercise and building up a good sweat and then finally getting the motor started. The thing that really bothers me is that, as I’m moving along, getting into a really good rhythm, driving hundreds of small creatures before me like Genghis Khan and his hordes and circling around the yard until I have a large plot of uncut grass in the middle of my yard in the exact shape of Sri Lanka, some small insect almost always has to fly up in my face. Usually it’s something harmless like a butterfly or a grasshopper, and I know they’re just being friendly. They’re just saying, "Hey, hi! How’s it going? What are you doing? Need some help? Hey, check out these wings! Just got ’em this morning when I came out the chrysalis!"

What they don’t realize is that I just want to get the grass cut down to an eighth of an inch above the dirt–unlike my neighbor who goes over his lawn with a pair of scissors and comes running out with a hand held vacuum cleaner as soon as a leaf falls–and go back inside. They’re like those co-workers who mean well but seem to spend most of their time searching for funny videos and filling your e-mail box with them while you’re trying to work on the third quarter layoff projections. And then, because they’re not content with clogging up your e-mail box to the point that you can’t get work related e-mails anymore and you start to worry that you’re going to end up being one of the third quarter layoffs, they have to come to your office and stand over your shoulder and watch at least half an hours’ worth of videos of a cat doing somersaults onto the back of a chicken while a guy in the background puts Mentos in a soft drink can, causing it to explode–all set to the tune of "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits. And you feel bad saying anything because, really, they mean well. I certainly feel bad when I smack away the insects, unless they’re wasps.

Wasps are completely different. They don’t want to tell me anything. They’re like micro-managing supervisors who, under the pretense of watching everything you’re doing, are actually trying to prevent you from getting anything done. When a wasp flies up in my face I don’t smack it away, I get as far away from it and the lawn mower as I possibly can. I’m terrified of wasps, mainly because they’re evil, monstrous, mean-spirited little beasts who only live to kill spiders and sting innocent people. When wasps come at me I’m liable to do something incredibly stupid, like drive the lawn mower right through my wife’s flower bed. I think the business equivalent would be an accounting error that costs the company six billion dollars, although I know a lot of guys who would rather tell the boss they’ve just lost six billion dollars than tell their wife they just drove the lawn mower through the flower bed. I know Freud says there’s no such thing as an accident, but I also know there aren’t a lot of wasps in downtown Vienna. And there’s just nothing to do when you’ve had that kind of accident but face the music. Fortunately now I’m an adult and have a wife who’s very kind and forgiving and understands that sometimes accidents happen, and who won’t put me in the third quarter layoffs, although she might make me go out and work in the garden with the wasps.

March 21, 2008

This morning I reached for the shampoo and realized that, on the back of the bottle, they had a big question mark and the question, "Can you tell the difference between this brand and a more expensive one?" The first thing I thought was, is this a quiz? It was way too early in the morning to even be asking myself questions, never mind being interrogated by the shampoo bottle. And what if I got the answer wrong? Would they break into my house and replace my shampoo, and maybe take my television set to cover the price difference? And how would they know? I don’t care what time of the morning it is, it’s always too early to think about someone secretly quizzing you in the shower. This is the sort of thing that makes me think I should take a shower at night. And I hate these product comparisons. I remember back when soft drink companies used to spend millions on a card table and a shoebox and someone would offer you two cups of liquid and say, "Which of these tastes more like battery acid?" And if you picked the wrong one they’d make you feel really bad and say, "No, sorry, what you drank really WAS battery acid." And it’s bad enough that just a few days ago my wife mentioned that I was losing my hair. It’s kind of hard for me to see the back my head usually, but I took her word for it.

Actually I’m not losing my hair. When I lose something, like my sunglasses, it’s because I put them down somewhere and forgot where they were. Or maybe someone even took them. That might be happening with my hair–it could be the same people who are quizzing me about the shampoo–but I think what’s really happening is that I know exactly where my hair is going. It’s going down the drain, or sometimes when I comb it big clumps of it come out. I’m trying not to get too depressed about this. If my hair wants to go live with someone else or maybe join the circus, well, I’m not going to stop it. I could try using some of those fancy hair growth drugs, although between the acne and the impotence I think letting my hair go might be the best choice. Heck, I could even try that hair replacement surgery because, honestly, I can’t imagine anything I’d enjoy more than having someone drill holes in my scalp and weave big nylon threads through it so I could go around looking like a porcupine with mange. Why should I work so hard at hanging on to my hair? Bald is beautiful, right? Think of all the positive things associated with being bald: there’s the bald eagle, and…Admittedly not even the bald eagle is really bald. He’s just got white feathers on top of his head. The only birds I know of that are really bald are buzzards and vultures, and I’m pretty sure they’re the same bird. The only difference is, really, a buzzard is bald, while a vulture is just losing his hair.

March 14, 2008

The saying is, March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. I’m not sure about that, at least not the lion part. I think March comes in like a ferret, and I’m not just saying that because I hate ferrets. Seriously, I love snakes, but there’s something about the idea of taking a snake and giving it little pink feet and fur that just gives me the creeps. I see ferrets in pet stores and I’m scared to death they’re going to escape and come after me and crawl up my pants. I think I developed this phobia after I read about a Scottish comedian whose shtick was putting ferrets down his pants. I guess since he was Scottish it’s wrong to call it his "shtick". They probably call it his "o’shenarlaghie". Admittedly you have to admire a guy who can stand up on stage and say, "Take m’bonny wee lass–please!" while a couple of giant furry worms are rotting around in his sporran.

But I digress. Why does March come in like a ferret? First there’s the time change which means I now have to get up in the dark and ferrets really like dark places, like Scottish comedians’ pants. It’s so nice after the solstice to wake up to the sun rising earlier and earlier each morning and then, suddenly, everything’s cranked back an hour. It would be almost worth it to move to Guam. Then there’s the weather. A week ago there was a foot of snow on the ground, and now it’s starting to feel like summer. The difference between the morning and the afternoon is the worst, though, because the mornings are really cold and I wear my heavy coat in to work. Then in the afternoons it’s bright and sunny and people are out wearing t-shirts and tank tops and tube tops and halter tops and harness tops and spinning tops and Levi Stubbs of The Four Tops and shorts and thongs and they’re throwing frisbees back and forth and I’m walking to the car in my heavy coat looking like your friendly neighborhood serial killer. Yeah, I could take off my coat and carry it, but it’s March and as soon as I do the temperature’s going to drop fifty degrees. Besides it’s not easy to carry a winter coat. They’re not made to be easy to carry. They’re made to be bulky and heavy and make you look like the friendly neighborhood serial killer. I’ve been trying to figure out some alternative, something that would be light and easy to carry and also keep me warm when I need it. So far the best thing I’ve come up with is a portable force field, like the kind they use in science fiction movies. The problem is, for now anyway, force fields are still science fiction, but as soon as they’re real I’ll be the first to get one. And I can imagine all kinds of applications beyond keeping me warm even without a heavy coat. A portable force field would allow me to push those idiots who get in the elevator first and then stand right in front of the door back into the corner where they’re supposed to go. I could push aside people who get in front of me on the sidewalk and walk as slowly as they can while weaving back and forth. And in any crowded situation I could make people stay away from me. Of course I could probably do that already by just wearing a thong.

February 29, 2008

I have small ears. I know that’s a weird thing to say, especially since I had a friend back in grammar school who was very self-conscious about his big ears. At least he thought they were big. I never noticed them until he mentioned them, but I could sympathize because I was self-conscious about my big lips. This was years before Hollywood actresses started spending thousands of dollars to have fat taken out of their thighs and injected into their lips so they could go around looking like the incredible Mr.. Limpet–a trend which, unfortunately, hasn’t helped me any. I’ve got the lips, but if I wanted to be a Hollywood actress that would take much more extensive and even more expensive surgery. But I digress. I know I have small ears because I have a portable music device and the earphones pop out of my ears a lot, especially in cold weather when my ears just seem to tighten up even more. Okay, maybe it’s not, strictly speaking, my ears, but the ear-holes. Is there a special name for those? I know there’s an inner ear with three little bones named Shadrak, Meshak, and Abendigo, and that thing that looks like a snail which is called a "cochlea", from the Latin meaning "thing in your ear that looks like a snail". I know there’s an ear-drum. And the things that I used to listen to my music are called "ear buds", which I think is the worst name anybody ever came up with. We had ear buds when I was a kid, you know, and when we did our mothers would grab us and put our heads in a vise and dig around in our ears with cotton swabs until a lot of brown gunk came out. And if they’re really buds as in buddies they’d stay in my ears instead of popping out all the time. If they’re ear buddies maybe they could call them ear chums, although that’s even worse because chum is what you feed sharks. That’s because if you’re with your chum and you see a shark coming, you want the shark to take him and not you.

But I digress. The worst thing about my earphones is that I was exercising recently and some sweat got in one of them and shorted it out so only one of them works now. I’m sure there are some techno-nerds out there who will tell you that this couldn’t possibly happen, but then they’re the same guys who will tell you that when you get that, "Do you want to send an error report?" prompt on your computer it goes to someone who actually cares. And they’d probably also add a variation of the standard computer programmer’s "why would you want to do that?" when you ask if a computer program could do something different (for instance, if you’d like a word processing program to allow you to write letters). They’d probably say, "Why would you want to exercise and listen to music at the same time?" I might be able to stump them by calling it "multi-tasking", but what I’d really like to know is whether anyone else is having this same problem. I’m pretty sure it must be common because these earphones are "one size fits all", a phrase which most people don’t realize is standardly truncated. The full phrase is "one size fits all people except you." Maybe we’re all suffering with this problem and no one’s really caught on yet. Maybe it will become apparent in a few years when Hollywood fashions change and actresses start having special surgery to have skin taken off the soles of their feet and used to enlarge their ears. If that happens I’ll look up that old friend of mine and ask him how it’s working out for him–and if he’s given any thought to becoming a Hollywood actress.

February 8, 2008

So I heard on the news the other day that Swedish scientists have created a cell phone the size of two business cards. This raises an important question: since when did Swedes become scientists? I’m not saying that people from Sweden aren’t smart, but for a long time they seem to have been happy to give out awards to other smart people. Basically Sweden is famous for three things: Stockholm Syndrome, some kind of meatball, and ABBA. Maybe they’ve started becoming scientists because they were feeling a little insecure. Everybody comes to their country to pick up their Nobel Prizes and then they leave and Sweden gets stuck with the check. Heck, even the Danish have the Vikings, those pastries, and museums where you can smoke a bong, pick up a prostitute, and see some of Van Gogh’s best work.

But I digress. Remember the old days when technology was about making things really, really big instead of really small? I was born in the Cretaceous period so I remember when it was a status symbol to have a stereo system that took up your entire living room wall and several of my friends were crushed to death trying to carry really huge boom boxes. If you were really cool you had speakers the size of small apartment buildings. Now if you’re really cool you have speakers that are the size of a small coffee mug but can produce a shockwave of sound that will knock out all the windows of small apartment buildings. I almost said the speakers were smaller than a breadbox, but then I realized that I have no clue how big a breadbox is. When I was a kid people were always describing things as being either bigger or smaller than a breadbox, but I can’t remember ever actually seeing a breadbox. If they’d said a matchbox I might have gotten it, but then I’d have to wonder if it was one of the small matchboxes or one of the big ones. If they’d said a Matchbox car then I would have understood because I had a ton of those things. I’m not sure they are even still around, but that’s okay because most new hybrid cars are about the size of a Matchbox car.

But I digress. Now there’s even a laptop that’s so thin it will fit into an inter-office envelope, which raises the question, what bonehead would put a computer inside an inter-office envelope? If I spend a couple of thousand dollars on a computer the last thing I want to do is put it in something that will guarantee it will get tossed, dropped, folded, bent, spindled, mutilated, and trampled on by a rhinoceros. Send your new laptop via inter-office envelope to the guy in the cubicle next to you and you’ll discover a whole new meaning to the expression "some assembly required". Besides, why would I want a computer that small when I can already get a cell phone the size of two business cards? And I could probably watch movies on it, because there’s no better way to watch a movie than on a screen smaller than my hand. In a few years phones that can play movies will probably be so small that I could walk around with one hand over my eye. People will ask me, "Is there something wrong with your eye?" And I’ll say, "No, I’m just watching Forbidden Planet." Actually they won’t ask because they’ll be walking around with one hand over their eye too.

It’s amazing how quickly we get used to changes like that. It was only a few years ago that I first saw someone using a hands-free cell phone. She was a few feet away from me in an airport and for several minutes I thought she was crazy. You know the saying: talking to yourself is healthy; answering back is insane. Then she turned her head and I could see a little cord dangling from her ear, so I realized it was some newfangled kind of phone. Of course she was talking so much the person on the other end couldn’t possibly have a chance to answer back; they probably had the phone off the hook and were out mowing their yard while she talked. That’s when I realized that your actual importance and your need for that kind of technology are inversely proportional.

February 1, 2008

It seems like there’s a pill for everything now. If you’re too depressed, too happy, if you’re unsure about life’s purpose, if your plants start talking to you, there’s a pill you can take that will even everything out so you can stop being concerned. There’s a pill to help people overcome shyness. How do the people who really need this pill get it in the first place, since they’re probably to shy to tell their doctor they have a problem? Someone who’s really shy isn’t going to say, in a regular checkup, "By the way, Doc, I’m really shy and it’s affecting my work. The other day my boss asked me to give a presentation and I was so upset I threw up all over him." The worst part is the doctor would see this as an excuse to whip out his prescription pad and say, "I’m going to give you a pill for that, and also you need to lose some weight, so I’ll give you a pill for that too. And just in case you get a toenail fungus, here’s a prescription made by a company that just bought me a new car." How did they find out that the pill that helps you overcome shyness worked, anyway? I know they do experiments on laboratory mice. Did they notice that one of the mice which spent most of its time in the corner had, after being injected with a new chemical, suddenly move up to the position of vice president of water bottle control and get a huge bonus in food pellets?

But I digress. The worst part is the advertising, because commercials make people start thinking that maybe they need medications they really don’t. I haven’t thrown up over anyone lately, but I was a little nervous the other day when I had to get up and speak during a meeting, so maybe I need that pill to overcome shyness. And every night while watching television I see a commercial for eye drops. It’s always the same thing: a soothing voice says, "Are your eyes tired, itchy, or red?" And immediately my eyes start itching and, when I think about it, yeah, they do feel kind of tired. Maybe I shouldn’t be watching so much television. Or maybe I need some of those eye drops even though for all I know they’re made from a leftover liquid that was used to process salmon eyeballs for export to third world countries. And the eyedrops are over-the-counter medications, or "OTC" as they’re cleverly called now because "Doctors weren’t handing out enough prescriptions for this crap so we decided to put it on the shelves" doesn’t fit well on a box, even if you reduce it to an acronym. Some pills even add "OTC" to their names even though eventually every pill will be available over the counter. That’s going to cause some confusion, though, so maybe they’ll start coming up with acronyms to describe the conditions the pills treat. For instance, pills made to treat psychosis could have names like Loonien NAF (Nutty As Fruitcake) or OOYT (Out Of Your Tree). I know none of this is new, but somehow I always manage to be behind the times, under the curve, between a rock and a hard place, neither here nor there, a day late and a dollar short. It’s a serious problem for me. I wonder if there’s a pill for it.

January 25, 2008

So the other day I saw in one of those free weekly living-decorating-entertainment-ditch digging newspapers that tequila is the liquor of the moment. Really? When did this happen? I don’t hang out with a lot of either heavy drinkers or fashion-conscious people, although if I hung out with fashion-conscious people I’m pretty sure I’d become a heavy drinker.

But I digress. It seems like tequila has been the "liquor of the moment" for at least the last six years. Yes, every once in a while single-malt whiskey (or whisky) will pop up and a few guys in turtleneck sweaters will stand at the bar talking about essence of peat and bitumen, and I can’t turn on the television any more without seeing an artsy commercial for some kind of vodka called Antimony that’s made from gooseberries that only grow in a single square mile of Siberian tundra and are harvested under a full moon, or an even more annoying commercial for some corporate brand of rum that apparently makes the entire planet jump into a conga line whenever a bartender throws it and a couple of limes into a glass. All these commercials tell me, actually, is that men shouldn’t wear miniskirts.

But I digress. Why is tequila suddenly the fashionable thing to drink and, more importantly, shouldn’t we be worried about this? If you want to drink a Margarita with your chips and salsa and a big bowl of menudos that’s one thing, but, just between us, I’ve never known anyone who didn’t turn into a mean drunk under the effects of straight tequila. It’s true that some people are mean drunks no matter what they drink, even non-alcoholic beer. These people should stay away from alcohol entirely, especially since they’re the idiots who insist that they’re okay to drive even after downing two six-packs and a fifth of gin. But there’s something about pure tequila, with or without the added annoyance of having to lick salt from your wrist and squirt a lemon in your mouth because the taste is so bloody awful, that it turns even the sweetest, gentlest souls into raging lunatics. I’m pretty sure if Gandhi ever tried tequila he would have been getting up in the grills of British officers, or maybe random British people, or possibly even just anyone who happened to be around and screaming, "You wanna piece of me? Huh? Do ya?" And he’d be making phone calls at three am and saying, "You know what, Nehru? You better watch your back." And when the person on the other end of line tried to explain that he’d misdialed and called Brussels by mistake, he’d get even angrier and start screaming, "You sayin’ I don’t know how to use a phone? Huh? I don’t know who you are, buddy, but you’re on my list!" In fact I’m pretty sure cultures that have a prohibition against alcohol have that solely because of tequila and that, deep down, they’d probably be okay with beer or wine or whisky or cleaning fluid as long as these things were consumed in moderation. I once tried to decide whether other varieties of alcohol actually had such specific effects–if, for instance, vodka made drinkers depressed existential philosophers, or if whiskey made people great storytellers who were completely unable to dance, or if rum drinkers became convinced they looked good in a thong, but so far evidence is slim. I only know with complete certainty that tequila is bad so I’ll stay away from it. You got a problem with that? Huh? Do ya?

January 18, 2008

Welcome to another exciting installment of Fun With Science! This week we’ll be looking at static electricity. Specifically we’ll be looking at it by putting on wool sweaters, dragging our feet across the carpet, and then touching someone else’s elbow or the back of their neck or their eyeball. And we’ll be exploring why this is funnier if you do it to someone who’s not expecting it and is instead watching television or performing cardio-thoracic surgery. The term “static” means “still”, and “still” means “a thing people used to use to make whiskey in the old days”. (To learn more about stills and how to build one, check out our previous installment, Brewing Up Trouble).

Sometimes static electricity makes things stick to each other. For instance when you’ve got an important business meeting you can bet that there will be a sock stuck to the back of your shirt that you won’t find out about until after the meeting is over. Later on we’ll be exploring uses for static electricity by rubbing balloons on the backs of cats and then seeing if the cats will stick to the wall. Sometimes you can see static electricity as a bright spark that you mostly see during the winter. We’re not sure why you mostly see static electricity during the winter, but it may be because there aren’t as many thunderstorms in the winter as there are during the summer. Maybe static electricity is related to lightning. (For more about lightning, take an old TV antenna out in the back yard during a thunderstorm. For best results climb up on an aluminum ladder and wave the antenna above your head.) You may have read in a science book that you can generate static electricity by rubbing a plastic bar with a piece of fur. This raises some very interesting questions. If you get a big enough plastic bar and enough fur could you generate enough static electricity to power your house? And what sort of person owns plastic bars and fur? That guy you see hanging out down by the bus stop—the one who’s always wearing a trench coat even in August and who has a really greasy-looking combover—looks like he’d be the sort who’d have a plastic bar and some fur and probably a lot of other weird things too. And is static electricity good for anything other than making your friends jump, or hurting your ears when it comes through your headphones while you’re trying to listen to the radio at work? These are all very good questions, and science is all about answering questions. Fun With Science, on the other hand, is only about answering really interesting questions. Next time we’ll be looking at earthworms and electrical outlets, and asking, Can they be friends?

January 11, 2008

It doesn’t snow any more like it did when I was a kid. In fact lately it hasn’t been snowing at all, mainly because, even though it’s January, it’s been about eighty degrees. We should be getting snow but instead we’ve been getting rain. There’s something distinctly wrong with this. The only place it should be eighty degrees in January is at the equator, or maybe some place like Australia where they don’t have the good sense to get their seasons in the right order. I don’t need a blizzard, or even enough snow to completely shut down the city for three weeks, although in the Southern United States where I live it that only takes about half an inch of snow, and even if it melts by noon the city is still shut down because everybody’s so busy walking around saying, “Wow, that was some snow. But you know, it doesn’t snow like it did when I was a kid.”

I’d like enough snow to at least turn the ground white, or at least enough snow that, once I get home and turn on the news, I’ll hear that schools are closed. Even though it’s been years since I had to go to school it still makes me happy to hear that schools are closed. I think this is because it was hardwired into my system when I was very young because it was the greatest thing to be able to wake up in the morning to eight feet of snow outside my window—which was amazing because my room was on the second storey—and know that there would be no school but my mother would still turn on the news to make absolutely certain that school buses weren’t equipped with plows, salt dispensers, and flame-throwers. The best thing was waking up to snow. If it started snowing during the day and I was at home my mother wouldn’t let me go out until it stopped snowing. I never could figure out why this was. Did she think I was going to be attacked by giant catfish that only came out when snow was falling?

But I digress. The second best thing, of course, was when it started snowing at school because then the teachers would just scrap whatever lesson plan they had because we were all going to be staring out the window anyway. Sometimes we’d have a cool teacher who would let us go in the snow we were waiting for the buses to warm up their flame-throwers so we could start going home. I’ll never forget one year when we waited several hours for the buses to show up and start taking us home. The snow started falling pretty early in the day, but the weather reporters, who were broadcasting from Australia , kept insisting that everything was warm and sunny. Our teacher, who wasn’t cool enough to let us go out in the snow, instead pulled out this newfangled thing called a “television” and we sat around and watched about seven and a half hours of educational programming. Every half hour or so one lucky kid would get to go out and measure the snow. I didn’t get to, but I remember when one of my friends went out with a rule and yelled back to us that it was up to half an inch. And then he was attacked by a giant catfish. Finally some dogsleds arrived to take us to the buses. Our regular bus route took us around Deadman’s Curve, over Kill Hill, and down Exploding Carburetor Alley, but a little snow made it just too dangerous, so our bus driver took us in the opposite direction, apparently deciding that the fastest way to get us home was to go as far away from our houses as possible. With the snow coming down it wasn’t long before she was able to put the pedal to the metal and push the bus up to about half an inch an hour. Einstein’s Law of Relativity says that the faster you’re traveling the slower time goes, and, also, that time goes really slow when your relatives are staying with you, especially if one of them is Uncle Harry who spends at least an hour and a half in the bathroom every morning.

But I digress. I’m convinced Einstein never had to spend six hours on a school bus with a bunch of fifth graders. If he had he would have realized that there are worse things than having Uncle Harry come and stay for a week, or a month, or maybe three years. Now of course all the kids would have cell phones and video games so they’d be able to call their parents and keep themselves entertained on the bus, but we had to sit around and actually talk to each other to amuse ourselves. And we were the lucky ones. Some kids had to spend the night at school. It was bad enough having to stay at school during the day and watch the snow coming down. I had to walk up the steep hill to my house, but the bus driver took down my phone number and the phone numbers of every kid on the bus and, when she finally got home, she called every parent to make sure we all got home safe. If there were a Nobel Prize for bus driving she would have won it. I guess it’s fortunate that we haven’t had a situation like that again, and I wouldn’t wish having to spend six hours on a school bus on anyone, but I still can’t figure out why we don’t get snow anymore. I blame the Australians.