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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
(If she ‘blinded you with science’, chances are it wasn’t Secondhand SCIENCE. That’s never hurt anyone’s eyes. Much.
This week, the topic is gravity. How does it work, what is it made of, why is it so weird? And what does it have to do with microwave burritos?
Probably nothing. But go see for yourself.)
Yesterday, I attended a baby shower. This was my first — and, if the rest of life goes as planned, my last. I’m not sure I “enjoyed” the experience, exactly. But I did learn a lot.
First, it was a brunch. I don’t do a lot of brunching, personally, but I gather the concept was dreamed up just as an excuse to eat eggs at two in the afternoon. I can get behind that — and I did. Some of the ladies there ordered salads. Amateurs.
“I went in expecting Oshkosk B’Gosh, and instead found Willy Wonka.”
Also, while “baby” is in the name, there wasn’t a lot of talk about the actual baby itself. The event seemed, more than anything, to be a forum for discussions of breastfeeding. For three solid hours, at least half the conversations between the eight people present concerned women’s boobs and what might come out of them. I haven’t heard that much constant chatter about breasts since…
Well. I was in a fraternity. So it’s not like it’s never happened. But it’s been a while. And it never involved spinach omelets.
I also learned that the brunchtime eggs — or salad; I mean, who does that? — are really just a prelude to the main baby shower consumable: sugar. This party had everything — chocolates, cupcakes, regular cake, you name it. I went in expecting Oshkosk B’Gosh, and instead found Willy Wonka.
I think I figured out what all the sweets are for. If the social function of a baby shower is to roundtable all things boob milk, then maybe the practical goal is to dump enough sugar down the pregnant lady’s throat to shoot the baby out the other end.
Unfortunately in this case, the lady had already had the baby a few weeks early. Happily, the baby is fine — and we had a lot of leftover desserts. So everybody’s happy. And full of energy. And possibly diabetic.
How did I wind up in the middle of this maelstrom of maternity? My wife is a longtime friend of the new mother, and we two couples often do things together. Sometimes those are fun and enjoyable things — and sometimes, they’re things that the ladies have picked out. Like ballets. Or recitals. Or holiday chorales.
I know, right? We love our wives, like, a lot. Obviously.
Given these occasional atrocities, the husband and I have made a pact: “no man left behind”. If the wives are attending some artsy something-or-other, and one of us guys gets roped in, then the other will tag along, too. For moral support. And to sneak beer in. Possibly to help plan an escape. Whatever’s necessary.
So when the new dad committed to attending the baby soiree, I got called in, too. And thank goodness. Even together, way at the end of the table, we were awash in a sea of estrogen, breast milk and cream cheese icing.
Some of that was figurative. And some of that was literal. I don’t want to talk about it.
I can’t imagine how one of us alone would have fared. So I’m glad I went — and I did learn a lot about these mysterious and troubling events.
Also, I ate eggs after lunchtime. Which is nice.
Permalink | No Comments(Soak up some science! This week’s ridiculous barely-explanation of scientifical somethings over at Secondhand SCIENCE is all about ubiquitin.
It’s the almost-everywhere molecule you probably never knew you were pumping out all the time. Give it a gander.)
Back to the recent trip my wife and I took to Greece: we had two extremely harrowing experiences in the back of the same taxi cab. One psychological, the other social. And neither involved weaving through heavy traffic at insane rates of speed.
“If we’d been going to the Souvlaki Hotel in Tzatzikitown, we might have been able to understand each other properly.”
(Which is odd. Because all of our other harrowing experiences in Greek cabs involved that. A lot.)
This was not that, though. This was a case on our last full day of vacation where we needed a place to sleep before the long flight home the next day. We were flying into the Athens airport that night after a short side trip, and flying out from the same airport in the morning. We had no more time for sightseeing, so we’d booked a room in a hotel advertised as being close to the airport. Easy in, easy out, with a few hours’ shuteye in the middle. Perfect.
We collected our bags after the flight in and hopped a taxi outside. Our cabbie spoke very little English, and we spoke even less Greek. If we’d been going to the Souvlaki Hotel in Tzatzikitown, we might have been able to understand each other properly. But we weren’t. And we didn’t.
Instead, we called out our destination, the cabbie nodded, and we took off into the night.
A few minutes later, we approached a nice big hotel in the middle of nowhere, obviously built to support people coming and going to the airport.
We passed that hotel. We didn’t even slow down.
Over the next fifteen minutes, we wound into and out of several neighborhoods. Many of these featured hotels, motels, hideaways, stopovers, lodges, sleeping huts or hostels.
We passed them all. And we began to worry. The hotel was supposed to be just a mile or two from the airport, and the cabbie showed no signs of slowing down any time soon. So we struck up a friendly conversation:
“Um… we’re going to the Metro Hotel, right?”
“Yah, yah. Metro. Is little while.”
That seemed wrong. We should have been there already; this was supposed to be a quick jaunt to the closest suitable room. Now it seemed like this guy was whisking us all over the Pelopennese. I decided to say something to this effect to my wife:
“It seems like this guy is whisking us all over the Pelopennese.”
“Actually, I think it’s a woman.”
I spent another ten minutes trying to figure out whether she was right. To this day, I honestly don’t know. Apparently, we were riding with the “Pat” of the Athenian taxicab crew.
Meanwhile, we’d cruised another ten miles from the airport, and all sorts of thoughts ran through our minds — and got fiercely whispered back and forth across the back seat of the cab. Were we being run around the block for money? Was there a different Metro Hotel in Bulgaria we were speeding toward? Was this man/woman kidnapping us, for nefarious madman/madwoman purposes?
We tried again to exchange information with the driver, with limited success. He (or she) insisted we were heading for the Metro Hotel. We were firm that it should be only a couple of miles from the airport, while the cabbie estimated it at around six kilometers.
Wait. Six kilometers? We’re way further than that already.
No. Sixty kilometers. Another fifteen minutes, maybe. Sit tight, tourists.
As ignorant Americans, my wife and I conferred for a bit and decided that no, sixty kilometers was not the same distance as one or two miles, probably. Neither of us are metricologists. But it seemed unlikely.
So we were pretty worried. At best, we were in for another half hour ride — and who knows how many Euros — to get back to the airport neighborhood and a warm bed. At worst… well, I don’t know what they put in moussaka, exactly. But I was starting to wonder whether it could conceivably be us.
For another tense couple of minutes, we quibbled back and forth with the cabbie, who insisted we were heading where we’d said we wanted to go. Meanwhile, we worried that “Metro Hotel” was some local code word for gullible tourists, or maybe the nickname for some foreign slave trader’s holding pen. Truly, we were fully harrowed.
Finally, we found a number and my wife called the hotel. She explained we were in a cab, and — so far as we knew — careening fast toward the border with Albania, destined for who knew what grisly fate. So we checked our facts. You’re near the Athens airport, right?
“Yes, indeed. Very close.”
Great. So how far should the cab ride be from the terminal?
“Oh, around sixty kilometers.”
Ah.
So the real issue here was the loose — meaning loooooose — interpretation of “close to the airport” provided by a hotel probably desperately looking for customers three weeks after high season. And the issue was not, in fact, the perfectly honest, helpful and reasonable cabbie who we’d basically accused of us-napping for the last fifteen minutes.
Also harrowing. The final ten minutes of that trip were spent in embarrassed silence in the back seat — while the driver probably tried to come up with ways to crash just the back half of the cab, and leave us bleeding in the street. Awkward.
I don’t remember what we tipped for that cab ride, exactly. But it was huge. I was just happy the guy/lady didn’t punch me in the groin when we got out, soon after, outside the lobby of the very nice, but very much not “close to the airport” Metro Hotel.
So yeah. I can be an idiot in pretty much any country on the planet. I’m pretty sure I knew that already.
Permalink | No Comments(Hey, you know what’s a science thing? The exosphere, that’s what’s a science thing.
And as of this week, it’s also a Secondhand SCIENCE thing. So that’s nice. Have a looksee.)
I’m not a good picture taker.
Usually, that means that I’m not good at remembering to take pictures. It just doesn’t occur to me, in the face of some awe-inspiring spectacle, to yank out a camera and start snapping. In a lot of ways, this makes me a terrible tourist.
It makes me a tremendous candidate to be visited by a UFO, probably. Those things don’t like any sort of photographic evidence. But as a tourist, I don’t often bring back any slideshow-worthy pics.
Come to think of it, that probably makes me an excellent tourist. But my family does complain when I go somewhere interesting that they don’t get to see any of it.
So when my wife and I left for Greece two weeks ago, I promised to come back with actual photographs of the places we was visiting. And indeed, I took nearly two hundred pictures — more than a dozen per day, on average. Now that I’ve returned, I’ve uploaded them all to Google pictures. And I’ve discovered something:
“My pictures are worth approximately two words apiece. And one of them is ‘meh‘”
I’m not a good picture taker.
I mean, I’m not a terrible picture taker. I don’t portrait when I ought to be landscaping. My thumb and other body parts are usually — usually — not hanging over the lens when I shoot. I don’t own, use, or condone the existence of a selfie pole.
(Seriously. Your souvlaki belongs on a stick, people. Not your Sony Cyber-Shot. Get your shit together already.)
Anyway, I thought maybe I had taken some decent photos. Then I uploaded, and the sentient robot overlords at Google turned on some sort of “auto-edit” feature, and adjusted every single snapshot on the server. This digital doohickey fiddled with contrast and colors and all sorts of other photographical things I don’t understand very well. It all felt sort of… violate-y, frankly. Like Google shoved its F-stop right up my aperture. Or something.
But worse? Every single picture it futzed with, which was every single one of them? Better.
Compared to the Googlified versions, all my pics are dull and flat and gray. Yawn, the Parthenon. Ancient Mycenean ruins, snore. Oh, the whitewashed rooftops of Santorini, ho hum. My pictures are worth approximately two words apiece. And one of them is “meh“.
Meanwhile, the magic Google ones are postcard-perfect. They pop. They’re cropped. I’ve been airbrushed out of most of them, somehow, and they’re ridiculously attractive. It’s infuriating.
Just don’t tell my family. They don’t need to know Google is the one taking all the good vacation pics.
For that matter, don’t tell my wife. Or next time she’ll take Google on vacation and leave me at home, sitting in my underpants on the couch for two weeks,
And nobody is taking pictures of that. Thank goodness.
Permalink | No Comments(Science marches on — even when it’s Secondhand SCIENCE. Stop over and learn all about gene drives.
Or scarves. Or astronaut fashion. Or raining men. It gets a little weird. Check it out.)
I’m a week into a two-week trip to Greece, about which I’m sure I’ll have more to say later. For the moment, though, there are six thousand years’ worth of ruins that aren’t going to trudge through themselves, and a spanakopita calling to me from a taverna down the street.
Of course, it’s calling to me in Greek, which I don’t understand, so maybe it’s saying “Don’t eat me! Don’t eat me!“. That would be truly unfortunate for it when I finally get over there. I hope its tears are delicious.
Anyway, in lieu of actual writing, here’s an ecard — just like the ones we used to know. Stin ygeia mas!
(Which is the bestest quantum mechanical exclusion principle?
That’s right! The Pauli exclusion principle. Read all about it, and other scientifical oddities, over at Secondhand SCIENCE. It’s a pip.)
Working in a small company is kind of weird sometimes.
I’ve always avoided big companies, because it seems too easy to get lost in the shuffle. If you’ve got nine thousand people doing the same thing, then I figure you either end up redundant or way, way specialized. Neither of those seem good.
“I don’t want to build some application fourteen other people already built, probably better. And cheaper. And with a coordinated color scheme more pleasing to the eye.”
For instance, I’m a programmer. I don’t want to build some application fourteen other people already built, probably better. And cheaper. And with a coordinated color scheme more pleasing to the eye. Also, I don’t want to be stuck at my desk, only allowed to use the ‘J’ and ‘Z’ keys on the keyboard, because the good coders have all the other ones covered already.
I’m pretty sure that’s how big companies work. Also, in my world, all the business travel is done on those old galley ships where the slaves row everyone back and forth. I’d be in the back. And probably only allowed to use the downstroke. Big companies suck.
Still, there are tradeoffs to small groups. I learned that in college. My school had less than a thousand people enrolled, and less people in my class than I graduated with in high school. On top of that, I picked a wildly unpopular major, so by senior year I was taking most classes with the same six people.
That’s a recipe for disaster, right there. With six people, you can’t hide. You can’t skip a class and hope nobody notices. You can’t sit in the back and nap through the boring crap. There’s six people — there is no back. We could’ve had class at a freaking booth at an Outback Steakhouse.
Given what they usually served in the school cafeteria, I almost wish we had. Lunch Lady Clara does not understand what a “blooming onion” entails. Trust me.
A small company is a little like those tiny classes. There’s no fading into the background or napping the afternoon away in a stall in the mens’ room. People would notice.
Also, there’s only one stall in the mens’ room. So people would also form a very long line. And possibly make an extremely unfortunate mess.
The point is, in a small place everybody knows pretty much what everyone else is doing — and what they’re about to do. I don’t talk to a lot of people on a daily basis — usually, I’m too busy banging on my ‘J’ and ‘Z’ keys and waiting in line for the bathroom stall. But I told a couple of people I’d be on vacation for the next couple of weeks. And today, everyone seemed to know about it.
That’s not a bad thing. It’s kind of nice to be told “bon voyage” by the boss. And the boss’ boss. And the boss’ boss’ boss. And the HR lady and the CEO and the comptroller and the security guard. And maybe the lady who comes in to clean in the evenings. It’s possible she said “barf in the garage”, instead. We have a complicated relationship.
So anyway, I’ll be out of the country for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, I’ll be updating things around here, but either way I should return with plenty of stories about a remote and exotic foreign land. And maybe an island. Maybe some mens’ rooms. Who knows?
In the meantime: bon voyage. And happy weekend. From me — and everyone in my office. Probably.
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