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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
(Science marches on — even when it’s Secondhand SCIENCE. This week, the big scientific deal is swarm robotics. Go check it out — or I’ll send a horde of Roombas to your house and make you.
Not really. Plus if you live upstairs, Roomba goons are sort of useless as enforcers.
Meanwhile, if you dig East Coast sketch comedy, you can catch me with:
Whew!)
My wife’s boss is on vacation. For some people, this might be a chance to slack off a bit. “When the cat’s away”, and so on.
But that’s not how it worked out. Not by a long shot. With her boss out of town, not only is my wife doing more work — but so am I. This is because when the boss left, she also left something with us: her pet parakeet.
That means we’re birdsitting. My wife and I are sitting. A bird.
Now, I said it was work — and it is, but not in the way I expected. I’ve never sat a bird before, so I had no idea. There’s almost nothing to do. It doesn’t eat much; it only needs water once a day or so. And it’s got a bunch of toys and mirrors and swings in its cage to peck at. So there’s nothing physical to do, really.
No. With birdsitting — with this bird, at least — all the work is emotional. Because I want the damned bird to be happy. And I have no idea what the hell it wants.
I’m not entirely dumb when it comes to animals. We had a dog for years, and I feel like I was pretty tuned in to her constant wild-assed whims. I could tell when she wanted to go for a walk (all the time). I could detect when she wanted to nap on the couch (all the time). And I clued in right away when she wanted a treat (all the goddamned time, and twice on Tuesdays).
“I also know when cats are pissy, when spiders are feeling hairy and disgusting, and when hamsters are in the mood to snurfle their noses and poop on newspaper.”
And it’s not just dogs. I also know when cats are pissy, when spiders are feeling hairy and disgusting, and when hamsters are in the mood to snurfle their noses and poop on newspaper. You could say I’m something of an animal whisperer.
But not when it comes to this freaking bird.
It’s a nice bird; don’t get me wrong. It chirps sometimes when I walk past its cage. If I stick my finger between the bars of the cage, it often hops over and bites it.
Lovingly, it bites it. Not viciously. When my wife’s boss and her daughters brought the parakeet over, they told us that this “beaking” is a sign of affection — and not, say, anger or hunger. Or rabies.
Then they showed us how it works. Because we didn’t especially believe them.
But it does work, and the bird hasn’t drawn blood yet, so I’d say we’re marginally accepted into its flock. But that doesn’t change my initial issue, namely: I don’t know what the damned thing wants.
I’d like to be nice to the bird. It’s been nice — in its own way, apparently — to me, so I want to return the favor. But short of pecking at its toes or regurgitating a nice worm into its beak, I’m stumped as to how that gets accomplished.
Sometimes the bird chirps when I’m not in the room, which I take as an invitation to investigate. When I do, it sometimes pecks — lovingly! — at my finger, and it sometimes shimmies across its perch to the very far side of the cage, as if I have the budgie cooties. I don’t know what any of this means.
Other times, it’ll peep when I’m in the room, and I’ll peep back. Purely to be polite, mind you. Nobody likes to be ignored. And the bird’s response is to keep peeping. Or to shut up. Or to climb to the swing at the top of its cage and turn its back in what I take to be a meaningful and less-than-pleased way. Maybe my peeps are incompatible. I don’t know. None of this makes sense.
Whenever I can, I try letting the bird out of the cage. And once or twice, it’s hopped onto my hand, up my arm through the open cage door and sat on my shoulder. And, probably, pooped on my shoulder, just to be confusing. But it’s come out.
Mostly, though, it doesn’t even acknowledge an open cage. I swing the door wide, exclaiming “be free!” But it just sits there, becaged. Or pecks at my hand. Or pokes savagely at a toy mirror in a way that’s both highly meaningful and impossible for me to interpret.
Fine. I don’t know bird behavior. Outside Tweety and Big Bird, I’ve never really had any experience with avian preferences, so it’s to be expected. But all animals like treats, I figured. The dog did. I do. Probably Snuffleupagus does. It’s unanimous. So I tried bonding with the bird through food.
That meant finding something it especially likes. Which so far, appears to be nothing.
Raisins? No. Lettuce? Nope. Sunflower seeds? Pshaw. Blueberries? As if. Cool Ranch Doritos?
(Okay, I didn’t actually offer the bird Cool Ranch Doritos. Those can’t possibly be good for it.
Also, I ate them all on the way out of the kitchen. Carting all that other food back and forth made me hungry. What, am I made of stone?)
So we’ve got the bird for another ten days or so. I hope it’s happy, but how the hell can you tell? It’s got birdseed and water and it pecks randomly at various appendages it can reach — lovingly, always lovingly! — but I still don’t know what it wants. Or where it wants it. Or whether it’s secretly planning to peck out my eyes at the earliest opportunity.
My conclusion? Birds are hard, man. The dog was a slobbery little need-hog, but at least you knew where you stood. Cats hate everybody, and most other little critters are dumb-as-rocks little furry food-pellet-to-shit-pellet converters.
This bird is different. It doesn’t love. It doesn’t hate. It doesn’t seem to do anything for more than twelve seconds at a time, and then its mood has changed to something else entirely. It’s like watching a teeny little feathered schizophrenic, and wondering if your soft tissues are safe and what the hell you’re going to do with that big-ass box of raisins you bought for it.
So yeah. Work. This bird had better open up soon, or I’m gonna resort to Snausages and chew toys to make the damned thing love us. It’s worked before, you know. Get with the program, birdbrain.
Permalink | No Comments(It’s nearly time for another round of Secondhand SCIENCE, but there’s still time to see last Sunday’s scintillating take on sublimation.
Okay, technically there’s always time to see it, assuming the internet continues to exist and the checks to my bandwidth provider don’t bounce. Still.
Also, if such things interest you, my contributions for Apartments.com are in full swing. If you love renting, or Boston, or both, or neither, you should totally check it out.)
“Like how everyone finishes New Years’ resolutions before the calendar rolls again, or how we always poop between grande burritos.”
This week’s check-in is a little on the late side, because I wanted to include a link to the video of our sketch comedy group Always on Deck’s performance at the Magnet Theater in New York last month.
That’s because we have another show coming up next weekend, and it seemed like a good idea to wrap up everything to do with the last set before making another trip. Like how everyone finishes New Years’ resolutions before the calendar rolls again, or how we always poop between grande burritos.
The analogies, they can be uncomfortably appropriate.
At any rate, I managed to find some software to finagle the original video file. And then I spent a bunch of brain cells learning how to perform said finagling. And a bit of time uploading copies in various formats to six different places before remembering that YouTube is a thing that exists to make interwebbing easier for vidiots like me.
But most importantly, I resisted the urge to add transition effects with star wipes. It was close. But you’re welcome.
Anyway, here’s the video. A few of us went and got rather silly in Manhattan on July 6th, and we’re looking forward to doing it again — where “it” is still silly, but entirely new material — on August 24th. Come see. I promise I won’t star wipe you.
Unless you really ask me nicely.
(For those in search of additional silly words of mine:
The Secondhand SCIENCE topic this week is telomeres.
Those are little dangly bits hanging off the ends of your chromosomes. There’s no need to be embarrassed — everyone’s got ’em, and you can’t get rid of them. Until you do, and then you’re probably dead. Check ’em out.
Also, for Boston-area types, I wrote some stuff about local comedy and whackadoodle pizza. One is delicious and the other is hilarious — but I’m not saying which is which.)
Speaking (parenthetically, above) of Secondhand SCIENCE, writing over there for the past few months has really taught me something.
Not about science. Obviously. The whole point of that train wreck is that I don’t understand anything I’m talking about, but I’m happy to pass that muddled confusion on to you. Because science.
Also, I clearly haven’t learned anything about writing. Even with a serious, adult-face thing like science for a topic, I still mostly wind up talking about Star Wars and Food Network idiots and the existential conundrum of Frosted Mini-Wheats.
(I should note here that I’m available to deliver commencement speeches and eulogies. Because who wouldn’t want that, amirite?)
Instead, what I’ve learned is that I’m terrible at Photoshop. Or more accurately, at “GIMP”, which is a free piece of software that does some of the things that the terribly expensive Photoshop does, but is made for people who are terrible at Photoshop.
Which is me. So I GIMP — terribly.
The thing is, I thought it would be nice to have images illustrating the nonsense I write over there tangentially about science. And sometimes, what I’m writing isn’t exactly covered, quite, by an image already existing on the interwebs. So I make up a new one.
Terribly.
Still, I’ve accumulated a fair number of these nightmares now. And with the theory that dragging them out into the light of day will make them less agonizing, I’ve decided to share them with you here. With essentially no context whatsoever. Because what fun would that be?
So without further ado, here are my favorite dozen of the poorly-manipulated images I’ve Frankensteined together since spring. Because SCIENCE!:
From Black Holes:
Galactic Bieber
From Hydrogen Bonding:
Jabba the Deen
The Orphanses of Species
From Neutrinos:
The Batabomber
From Absolute Zero:
MIndyjuice! Mindyjuice! Mindyjuice!
Julia Labcoat-Dreyfuss
From Transactinides:
Atomic Decay of PB&J
From Synthetic Genomics:
Porky and the Voice
From Australopithecus:
Rachael Ape
From Mycoplasma:
Itsy Bitsy Schneiders
From Electric Bacteria:
Napalm Cooties
From Heliosphere:
Interstellar Fieri
(You like the sun? Of course you like the sun! Who doesn’t like the sun?
Then you may be interested in all the sunshine I blew up the sun’s butt over at Secondhand SCIENCE this week, when I wrote about the heliosphere.
That’s a sun thing. For real. Go check it out, sunshine.)
I had plans for posting here this week. I did.
First, I was going to show off a bunch of pictures I’ve made. Really silly, jagged-edged, no-excuse-for pictures — mostly to support the ridiculous words I’ve written over at SS in the past six months.
(And to prove that I have the Photoshop skillz of a one-armed colorblind hyena.)
But I didn’t have time to get it together. Maybe next week. Or, I don’t know, October. Something.
Then, I thought I’d share a video of a sketch show I was in down in New York City.
“That’s geekery with a ‘y’, Rusty!”
(“NEW YORK CITY?!”)
(Sorry. The Good Eats geekery is strong in this one.)
(That’s geekery with a ‘y’, Rusty!
All right. I’ll stop.)
Anyway. We performed a couple of weeks ago at the Magnet Theater in Manhattan. And it was a fantastically enjoyable, hilarious, fantastic show.
At least, if you were in it. And a little drunk. From the audience, who knows?
But I got a copy of the tape, and was going to plop it down here — no muss, little effort — but then the format is a little weird. And it’s the whole show, and I thought I’d snip it down to our bits. And the file is fourteen kajiggabytes or something, so it takes forever to download, and I didn’t have time to do that, either. So no video this time. Maybe next week.
Or November. It’s a technical thing. Computers are involved. You know how it goes.
So that left nothing, except maybe pointing to some other stuff I’m doing. I can do that. For one, there’s the show tomorrow night we’re doing at ImprovBoston.
It’s a show — all written this week about current events. It’s called “Current Eventuals” — because when you’re writing sketches every waking hour for a week, you don’t leave time for clever show titles. And it should be a lot of fun, and entertaining to boot.
If you’re going to be in it. And a little drunk. Which we are.
The other bit of news is that I’m now writing a couple of pieces a week for Apartments.com on their “Renters Resources” site. In my articles, I’m pointing out fun and interesting things to do around the Boston area.
Which mostly entails describing the places where you might find me sitting on a bar stool. Or falling off one. Depends on whether there’s a comedy show that night.
So that’s sort of it. Not a lot in the way of story-telling or ridiculous goofery this time. But now you’re up to date. And you have a good idea which shows — and bars — to find me in. (Or to avoid, if that’s how you choose to play it.)
Meanwhile, I’ll work on getting myself together and getting something substantial here to make up for the lull. Should be in the next couple of days. Or next week.
Or December. These things take time. And I’ve got a lot of bars to get through. Research is hard.
Permalink | No Comments(Need some science in your life? Of course you do!
This week, the science fix over at Secondhand SCIENCE is all about electric bacteria.
No, it’s not a disease you catch from watching too many ’80s breakdancing movies. I promise. Check it out.)
I’m a tad OCD. Just a tad. I take even numbers of steps, eat French fries in pairs and dutifully eat every scrap of food on my plate. Don’t always want it. Didn’t always put it there. But by god, I eat it. Because I’m broken.
But just a tad broken.
This is why I didn’t realize what hell I was unleashing a few weeks ago when I decided to get my wife a FitBit as an anniversary present.
It may seem that one thing has nothing to do with the other. And that’s probably true. For unbroken people.
My first mistake was trying to anticipate my wife’s wishes. We’ve been married for eighteen years; you’d think I’d recognize the futility of that exercise by now. But no. I’m stubborn.
Anyway, it seemed like a good idea at the time. She’s taken up jogging in recent months, and I thought a step/fitness tracker might make a good accessory. Only I didn’t know whether she’d want a wrist-strappy kind of doodad, or a pocket-clippy kind of doodad. So I bought both, wrapped them in Christmas paper — because who buys anniversary-themed wrapping paper and can remember where the shit it’s buried in the storage closet? — and gave them both to my wife on our anniversary.
“Our ‘official’ choices were something like bismuth or ponchos made from the hides of African yaks.”
(Which technically constituted my second mistake, because it violated the tenets of the anniversary gift code.
Hey, I stuck with the list as long as I could — year one is paper, year two is china, year three is, like, lace tea cozies. We’re in year fricking eighteen now. All the good shit has been bought already. Our “official” choices were something like bismuth or ponchos made from the hides of African yaks. I went with FitBits. Emily Post can suck it.)
My wife picked the wristy tracker, which left the clippy one hanging out, sitting in the box. Just a backup. In case of emergency. No immediate plans for use.
So I took it.
And that was my worst mistake. Because I’m a tad broken, and I like nice even numbers and clean finished plates — and now there’s an evil little device in my pocket telling me I’ve only walked seven flights of stairs today, and I need twenty-two hundred more steps to reach ten thousand.
(Warm, comforting, right 10,000.
Not icky, jagged, wrong 7,809.
God. I can’t even look at that. I need a shower.)
Needless to say, I’ve walked literally everywhere since our anniversary.
I’ve walked to work. I’ve walked for lunch. I’ve walked to rehearsals. I’ve walked to class. You name it, and put it within reach of my Reebok sneaks, and I’ve walked there.
Because I had to.
My only solace is this: I may be crazy, and effectively enslaved by an inch-long strip of plastic that periodically eggs me on with messages like “ATTABOY CHARLIE” or “HOPTOIT CHARLIE” or “HEYFATASSWHYARENTYOUWALKINGTOVERMONTRIGHTNOW CHARLIE” (the last of which may have been a fatigue-induced hallucination).
But at least I’m not the craziest person with a FitBit in my pants. That title appears to belong to writer David Sedaris, who wrote a New Yorker piece a few weeks ago about his own FitBit experience. And how he walks sixty thousand steps a day.
That’s serious shit right there. I know people who haven’t taken that many steps since Y2K. The man is out of his head. And probably out of shoes. I’d like to think, with just a smidge of smugness, that at least David Sedaris is more OCD than me.
Like to, but can’t.
The truth is, he’s a better writer. Which has allowed him to write for a living, take up residence in England and spend nine hours a day of his wealth of leisure time walking around his neighborhood.
(And picking up trash, apparently, because community responsibility, fuck yeah.)
Given the same opportunity, would I do any differently? With nine hours to kill and a FitBit plugged into my brain via the pocket of my jeans, would I do aught but walk? Can I really be sure, without strolling a marathon a day — technically only twenty-five and a half, but who’s counting? — in his shoes?
The evidence is grim. For my own sake, I think I’ll just keep writing nonsense, munching fries two-by-two and shooting for 10k a day, whether I feel like stepping them or not. On the bright side, at least I’m getting exercise. Which means I’m looking fabulous in my yak poncho. So there’s that.
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