Me: "Emma, what is the name of the language that you speak?"
Emma: "Um... Regular?"
Emma (age 5):
At school today, they had a thing where you put on goggles, and there was a nail you hit with a hammer, and there were dinosaurs underneath, and it let you be a Scientologist.
True Story:
On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President of a crumbling nation. Amidst the torrent of changes in his recovery plan—his New Deal—he oversaw a strange reversal. Alcohol, long stigmatized and outlawed under Prohibition, was suddenly legal again. And gold, with which Dollars were supposedly interchangeable, became an illegal substance.
This is how it happened.
The other day Lucy (who is now 3) said
Tuesday plus Tuesday is Foursday!
I've been reading one of my H.P. Lovecraft books lately (The Tomb and Other Tales), and it seems to be one I haven't read before. I was surprised to see that Lovecraft ghost-wrote Imprisoned with the Pharaohs for Harry Houdini, who published it in his own name in Weird Tales. It's a lovely story. I also liked The Horror at Red Hook. (New York Detective Thomas Malone investigates the sinister underworld activities of one Robert Suydam, who seems to be involved in illegal immigrant trafficking and, as you might guess, Untold Terrors as well.)
Like the story He (which precedes it in this collection), Red Hook takes place in turn-of-the-century New York and treats cities in general as malevolent forces, not to be trusted, what with all their creepy tall buildings and--as illustrated in both stories--the tendency of buildings to collapse, floor by floor, at or around the denouement. Apparently this was a period when Lovecraft considered metropolitan areas to be scarier than, say, gargantuan tentacled underwater creatures. I wonder what he'd think of today's urban sprawl.
I learned from Julian of a wacky ego game: Erdös-Bacon Numbers. Your Bacon Number is how far you are from actor Kevin Bacon, in terms of co-starring chains. Your Erdös Number is how far you are from mathematician Paul Erdös in terms of co-authoring chains. Add the two together, and you get your super-elite Erdös-Bacon Number.
My one publication gives me a legitimate Erdös number of 4 (E. Veach, P. Agarwal, N. Alon, P. Erdös). If film crew could claim Bacon Numbers (doubtful), my Bacon Number would be 2. (Me and Tom Hanks in Toy Story 2, he and Kevin Bacon in Apollo 13).
Hence, a dubious Erdös-Bacon number of 6! The current record holders are at 5, so I rule! Or I would, if my Bacon Number weren't actually infinity.
I am now, more than ever, a big fan of redundancy on aircraft.
On November 22 my wife and kids and I flew for a family thanksgiving in Pennsylvania. Nonstop from San Francisco to Newark on a Continental 757.
Somewhere in the middle, at 35,000 feet, I heard a strange revving of the engines, but I did my best to ignore it. Flying for me is a constant process of rationalization to deal with the thinly masked undercurrent of fear. I'm not a big fan of flying.
But moments later, the LCD screens on the ceiling folded up. Everyone glanced around, confused, because this had interrupted the inflight movie, and it was not accompanied by an explanation.
Then the seatbelt light came on, and somebody said over the loudspeaker, "Fasten your seatbelts." Not, in itself, unusual, but it was barked more tersely than usual.
A flight attendant walked by my aisle and whispered, blank-faced, to another: "Were you listening?" The second shook her head, and they walked silently to back of the plane together. This caused some concern among those of us within earshot.
Finally, the captain came on: "Ladies and gentlemen, we've lost all of the oil in our left engine, forcing us to shut it off. We've been flying for five minutes on the remaining engine. We're forty miles from Denver, so we're being diverted there."
I like the symbolism--heck, it's not symbolism, it's just cause and effect--of my last post, about Lucy being born, followed by most of a year without a single post.
Having kids is hard. But I think I'll start posting again, for what it's worth.
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