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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
(Two things first.
Thing first the first: check out this week’s Secondhand SCIENCE lowdown on Turing tests. It’s all timely and shit. For trues.
Thing first the second — or second the first, or whatever: the Summer of Sketch is heating up! At least, mine is — and yours can, too. If you’d like to see me on stage, saying silly words — some of which I wrote! — come check out one (or all!) of the following shows:
Saturday, June 14, 11pm: Current Eventuals at ImprovBoston
Thursday, June 26, 9pm: Always on Deck in SketchHaus at ImprovBoston
Thursday July 3, 8pm: Always on Deck in Awkward Compliment Presents… at Somerville Theatre
Sunday, July 6, 9pm: Always on Deck in Test Drive at Magnet Theater, NYC
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Well, the tip, and then some of the ice under the water, and a lot of the floaty bits that have chipped off. But it’s not the whole iceberg! Stay tuned for updates, more shows, schedule adjustments, venue changes, emergency substitutions and everything else you might expect when bearing down hard on an iceberg. In summer. Ahoy.)
Now. About pens.
I have exactly two pens in my office at work. Here are those pens:
Now, I don’t want to be culturally pen-insensitive here, but those two pens look the same to me. Twin pens. Pen and penner. Two pens in a pen-pod.
I’m sure one of them is a big jazz fan, and the other has some interesting ideas about fiscal responsibility, and if I just got to know them, it would be clear that all pens are unique and special, like inky widdle snowflakes. But I don’t care. I want one thing out of pens — to write.
(For that matter, I don’t much care what sort of different-from-each-other rich inner lives snowflakes have, either. All I want from them is to smoosh together into a neat little ball and smack the neighbor who doesn’t clean up his dog turds in the back of the head.)
(I think I just tore some infinitives a new one, there. Grammatically, that snowflake thing was a mess.
Much like that asshole’s poodleshit on the sidewalk. Youknowwhatimeant, dammit.)
Again, back to pens.
The point is, I can’t tell these two pens apart. Not by looking. What I can tell you is this: one of these pens, I’ve been taking notes and scribbling Post-Its with for the past two years. It’s reliable, smooth-writing, and has never given me one inksquirt of trouble,
The other pen, I grabbed an hour ago on the way to a meeting — because the first one was hidden under a taco wrapper or shoved under a stack of half-baked sketch idea printouts or something.
My desk is an adventure. I won’t apologize for that.
This second pen doesn’t behave quite like the first, despite the striking resemblance. In fact, I spent the first twenty minutes of the meeting I was in furiously scribbling with it on the back of my notebook, trying to get a usable stream of ink to emerge.
I’ve had problem pens before, and I’ve learned a few tricks along the way. I tried all of those tricks. The sweeping circles to engage all parts of the ballpoint — or whatever the hell’s at the tips of those things these days. The savage back-and-forth to build up friction. The wetting of the tip in the mouth — which, naturally, I always try immediately after the friction thing, so as to burn my tongue in the process, because WHY SHOULD ANY PART OF LIFE BE COMFORTABLE ANY MORE?
None of these things worked. Tiny drips of black would slip out here and there, the merest arcs and segments of the circles and lines etching inklessly into the cardboard. After twenty minutes of trying to take notes, I gave up. And immediately forgot whatever it was I was supposed to be taking notes about.
Then I fumed about the pen for the next twenty minutes. So I forgot those notes, too.
The last twenty minutes, I fantasized about torturing the people at Bic who made these pens — one working, and the other some cruel pranking facsimile of the useful one, like a birthday candle that can’t be blown out, or Stephen Baldwin.
So basically, I don’t remember anything at all from this meeting. I hope it was about buying new pens. Because that would be nice.
When I got back to my desk, I searched out the good pen, and made sure it still worked. And I resolved to never lose it — or get it mixed up with its apparently brain-damaged brother — ever again.
And then I put the two side by side, to take that picture above. And now I have no idea which stupid pen is which. And I have another meeting coming up.
Screw it. I’m taking a magic marker in there and writing notes on the wall. Frick these Bics, Jick.
Permalink | No Comments(Heyo! The news over at Secondhand SCIENCE this week is all about mycoplasma. They’re the littlest bacteria.
Just don’t mention it to them. They’re kind of sensitive.)
Now, I have a question.
I’m a fairly coordinated guy.
Not “wardrobe coordinated”, of course. I’ve never in my life matched my socks to my belt or chosen a tie to complement the hue of the elastic band of my underpants. This is not the “coordinated” we’re talking about. Clearly.
“I can type sixty words a minute — even more, if they’re all ‘a’ and ‘I’ and ‘ooo’.”
What I mean is, I’m not entirely undextrous. I’ve done jumping jacks without giving myself a hernia. I can type sixty words a minute — even more, if they’re all ‘a’ and ‘I’ and ‘ooo’. I can even juggle three balls at one time.
Well, not all balls. Not basketballs, for instance. Or bowling balls. Or wrecking balls with weird naked toothy chicks riding them. Those are all above my clown college pay grade.
The point being, I’m pretty good with my hands. There are all sorts of things my fingers can do, some of them better than most people, and not once have my digits broken, fallen off or tied themselves into a cartoonish knot.
So why the hell can’t I wrap a goddamned package?
Yesterday was my wedding anniversary. Like a good husband, I bought my wife a present. And like a smart husband, I put a lot of thought into the gift.
Oh, not about whether it was something she wanted. Or needed. Or had asked for, emailed about or possibly taped a note to my sock drawer to “hint” that I should buy her. No. I put an enormous amount of thought into this gift to make absolutely sure it was… rectangular.
And it was. Whatever the hell I ended up buying her, it came in a nice rigid cardboard box, squared off, flat on all sides. It may have been a clock radio, or a case of birdseed or a do-it-yourself home vasectomy kit. I don’t remember. I just know it was the ideal shape for wrapping.
And then I horked it all up.
It’s not hard to wrap. I know this. My wife — who fumbles her phone more often than I do, can’t hit a softball as far, and loses at least seventy percent of our thumb-wrestling matches — gives me presents that look like the wrapping paper was airbrushed on. Not a crease or a rip or an unsightly scrap of plain backing showing on the outside. You’d think she had one of Santa’s elves chained to a shoe tree in her closet, gussying up gifts in exchange for candy cane scraps or ten minutes with a snow globe.
Then there are my gifts, like the one I gave her yesterday. I gave myself every opportunity in the world. The box wasn’t too big, it wasn’t tiny, and there were no angles greater or less than ninety degrees to deal with.
And by the time I handed it to her, it looked like a one-armed chimpanzee with a methamphetamine habit had wrapped it. And then run it through a laundry dryer, and dragged it through a parking lot behind a car.
(No, I don’t know how the chimp got a driver’s license, or who loaned him the car. For that matter, it’s unclear how he lost an arm, and what kind of monster would get him hooked on meth.
Sadly, it appears that animals were indeed harmed in the making of this analogy. Our apologies to proverbial PETA.)
I think it’s finally time to give up. I admit that gift wrapping is something I’ll never be good at, no matter how little sense that makes, and so I’m just not going to attempt it any more. I’ll feel better about myself, I can buy gifts again based on criteria other than geometric shape, and I can give presents to my wife in brown paper bags or swaddled in old newspaper.
Which sounds ghetto, I know. But trust me — it’s an improvement.
So forget my question, I guess. I’ll just be happy with all the other things my hands can do, and I’ll forget about trying to wrap presents. It doesn’t make me less of a man. And it doesn’t mean that my wife has one up on me now.
But I swear, I am going to kick her butt at thumb wrestling for a few months. Just on principle. You can stick a bow on that, sunshine.
Permalink | No Comments(Hi-ho, science fans! This week’s entry over at Secondhand SCIENCE is all about Australopithecus. Because once you go hominid, you never go… uh… bominid?
I don’t know. I thought I had a real head of steam there, and then it all fell apart. Just like it did for Australopithecus!
Yeah? You see what I did there? I brought it back around. That’s not just a save. That’s science. Go check it out.)
Speaking of science-y sorts of things, I’d like to devote the rest of tonight’s space to a sketch I’ve been thinking about concerning scientist-about-town Neil deGrasse Tyson. Cosmos only has a couple of episodes left, and it got me thinking:
What’s an astrophysicist with a taste of television stardom likely to do next?
“Yeah, that’s right. Science folk.”
Here’s a first draft of my idea, which I hope to work into a show I’ll be performing in at ImprovBoston in June.
(Technically, this is cheating a little, since the show is about current events and we write it all the week before.
I don’t care. The Cosmos finale lines up nicely with our show date, so I know it’s coming. And dammit, I’d like to have at least one script with a development time longer than 48 hours. So here it is. Have at it.)
Smarter Than Neil?
[NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON stands to one side of three game show contestants: CARL, VICKI and STEPHEN HAWKING.]
NEIL
Hello, I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson. With my popular show Cosmos wrapping up, I wanted another vehicle to bring science to the masses. So I worked with Fox to come up with the next hit game show: Are You Smarter Than a Famous Astrophysicist? Let’s meet our contestants.
CARL
I’m Carl. I’m from Wichita, Kansas, and we don’t much like your kind ’round those parts.
NEIL
Surely you don’t mean…
CARL
Yeah, that’s right. Science folk.
VICKI
I’m Vicki from Chattanooga, and I’m just here to save your heathen viewers’ souls from eternal damnation. Move along.
STEPHEN
(in robotic voice, without moving)
Hello. I’m Stephen Hawking. Pop culture space science was my thing first. Step off, poser.
NEIL
All right, this should be interesting. The first question is for Carl. Would you describe humanity’s contribution to climate change as a big blunder for our species, or as our hugest blunder in all of history?
CARL
Pffftt. There you go, making crap piles out of cowpies. Mister, the earth has warmed up and cooled down before. It’s the natural order of things, and our e-missions ain’t nothin’ to blame for it.
NEIL
I see. Say, Carl, have you ever had a nosebleed before, out of the blue?
CARL
Well, sure. Once or twice, I guess.
NEIL
Right, it’s happened before. So if I were to punch you in the nose, any blood wouldn’t be my fault. It’s just the natural order of things, right?
[Carl sputters, confused. When Neil starts to walk past him, Carl flinches and covers his nose.]
NEIL
Fool, please.
[Neil walks past Carl to Vicki.]
NEIL
Hi, Vicki. Here’s your question: after the last mass extinction event 66 million years ago-
VICKI
Now just hold it right there. I don’t want to hear any more of that nonsense. All right-thinking people know the last global disaster — the _only_ global disaster — was the great flood four thousand years ago. So I don’t believe in any of your… science.
NEIL
Fair enough. Do you believe in salmon?
VICKI
Salmon? Like, the fish?
NEIL
Precisely. If there was a planet-wide flood — and one wooden boat with nine hundred thousand pairs of insects, plus a few lizards and cats — where were the salmon?
VICKI
Well, in the water. Obviously.
NEIL
The oceans are full of salt; salmon spawn in fresh water. Where’s the salmon love, Vicki?
[Vicki opens and closes her mouth, but can’t find the words.]
NEIL
Well, that’s really more of a goldfish face. But keep trying.
[Neil moves on to Stephen Hawking.]
STEPHEN
Oh, Neil. You might have the brain to best these yokels, but now you’ve met your match. Ask me anything, cowboy. I’m here to school you on national TV, punk.
NEIL
Stephen, it’s an honor. Actually, I wanted to invite you to duke it out with me on the next show I’ve decided to do.
STEPHEN
You’re on, mister. Where shall I embarrass you? Nova? Mythbusters? The Big Bang Theory?
NEIL
Actually, it’s Dancing with the Stars.
STEPHEN
You bastard. Get bent.
NEIL
That’s the plan, Stephen. That’s the plan.
[Neil walks back to his spot beside the contestants.]
NEIL
That’s all the time we have for now. But tune in next week, when I ask a flat-earther, a crystal healer and a “medium” who “channels” the “ghost” of Carl Sagan: are you smarter than a famous astrophysicist?
[Beat. The contestants look expectantly at Neil, who confidently shakes his head.]
NEIL
No. No, you are not.
[Contestants protest. Neil smiles. Fade to BLACK.]
Permalink | No Comments(Who has two thumbs and wrote five hundred words about Brownian motion without making a single poop joke? This guy!
I know. I can hardly believe it, either. But head over to Secondhand SCIENCE and see for yourself. For true.)
I have a theory. It’s about food. Specifically, it’s about food that may or may no longer be food, strictly speaking.
It sounds complicated. But the theory is simple. Here’s the gist:
I hate wasting food. Sometime in my youth — and my parents swear this wasn’t beaten into me — I became a permanent member of the “Clean Plate Club”. But it’s not about plates. And it’s sure as hell not about cleanliness. It’s not even about the poor starving kids in China — which my parents assure me they never held over my head with half a serving of canned peas at stake.
Rather, it’s about responsibility. If I order a burger, it should be because I want a burger. Not because I want half a burger, or a third of a burger, or just to lick one pickle and smell the bun to feel I’ve had the experience of a burger.
(Or whatever experience you might personally feel, if you’d just sniffed some buns and tongued a random pickle. Your mileage may vary, freakshow.)
The point is, if I ask for it, it’s my responsibility to chow it down. I can take it home, as a last resort — but one way or another, that food that I decided to want has to be eaten. It cannot go to waste. Other people could have had it, but I ordered first and snatched it from the realm of possibility and onto a plate. Possibly with curly fries. And now it’s my bed to lie in. And to consume. With every mealtime comes soul-crushing responsibility.
This goes double, or maybe even threeple, for food at home. Not only was that food whisked out of rotation, so others couldn’t have it, now it’s sitting in my house. I can’t even leave it or throw a napkin on top, and wait for someone to come and clear it away. If food goes to waste in my kitchen, I have to physically throw it in the garbage myself.
“Alas, poor yogurt, I hardly knew ye.”
And that’s harrowing. I feel like I’m taunting the food, dangling it over the trash can by its wilted stalk or the lip of its expired can before dropping it into the abyss forever. You could have been a sandwich, month-old bread heels! Alas, poor yogurt, I hardly knew ye. I will avenge you, cottage cheese container from the Clinton administration!
I don’t have the nerves for that. So I regularly make scavenging runs through the kitchen, seeking out vittles that are alllllllmost not good any more, to be sure to eat them before it’s too late. Often, I get to them in time.
But sometimes, I don’t. Occasionally, I’ll find something on maybe the wrong side of stale. An orange with more squish than I find comforting. Rice leftover from that Chinese takeout order from… was it Friday? Wednesday? March? Chicken defrosting in the fridge for an extra day, or two, or… hmmm.
What to do with this possibly-still-food? The stuff that looks too normal to throw away — that isn’t “wrong”, exactly, but maybe isn’t quite as right as it previously was? How to handle these things?
That’s where my theory comes in.
If you’re going to throw it out, do it quick and get it over with. Admit defeat, say a rosary to… I don’t know, Jacque Pepin or the ghost of Julia Child’s wine glass or something, donate ten bucks to a food bank and try harder next time.
But if you decide to eat it, this questionable maybe-food, preferably while no one’s looking?
Eat ALL of it. And dump more iffy stuff on top, if you find some in the pantry.
The way I look at it, you’re playing roulette with your digestive system here. And the odds of winning are, let’s face it, not that great. But attitude will get you through a lot in life. So you convince yourself this food is fine, and there’s no reason not to eat it, or to be cautious about it, and dammit, now you’re wicked hungry. So have at it.
And while you’re in the right frame of mind, grab anything else heading south in a hurry — because you really don’t want to play roulette every day. Go all in today, and if you crap out — gambling term, people, gambling term! — then you’ll only crap out once.
Though possibly explosively. (Not a gambling term any more. Ew.)
If you can convince yourself to smother everything in hot sauce — not because it would kill some of those germs you’re certain aren’t there, but because you like it! — and wash your meal down with as high-proof an alcohol as you can stand, then surely you’ll be in good shape.
And if not, well maybe you’ll get a day off work while you’re having your stomach pumped or writhing on the bathroom floor because you took terrible advice from an idiot with a website. It’s win-win, more or less.
Why do I mention this? Well, I had to do a bit of scrounging for dinner tonight, and there was that chicken in the fridge from… sometime. Plus those potatoes with the stalky things growing out of the bottom. And that corn past the date on the can, but it looked okay. It was still yellow. Mostly.
What I’m saying is, all that food was fine. And delicious, if you stretch the dictionary definition of the word a little. Who could taste it, anyway, swimming in all that sriracha? The point is, everything’s going to be just peachy.
But if not, I regret nothing. Except the chicken, and the potatoes and the corn. Avenge me, cottage cheese container!!
Permalink | 1 Comment(This week’s Secondhand SCIENCE piece was quite timely, as synthetic genomics has been buzzing in the news recently.
That doesn’t mean it was accurate. Or helpful. Or plausible. Or free of beloved Warner Brothers cartoon characters poorly photoshopped into marketing stills for awful cable TV dreck.
But it was timely, dammit. I’m counting that as ‘baby steps’. Check it out.)
Now here’s a science — like most of them, really — that I don’t know much about: climate change.
“Whur’s yer global wermin’ NOW, smertypents?”
(Actually, I don’t even know if that’s the current term for it. The scientific community has to keep changing the label, because occasionally some undereducated foot-stamping literalist will proclaim that flurries in Florida means “Whur’s yer global wermin’ NOW, smertypents?” and everybody has to agree on a new name.
Frankly, I think they should just call it “climate grow-a-pair-of-gills-before-your-double-wide-trailer-sinks-into-the-Arkansas-sea, dumbass” and get it over with. But maybe that doesn’t fit on the tote bags.)
Details (like “RUN FOR THE ROCKIES; THE ANTARCTIC IS MELTING LIKE A GODDAMNED OTTER POP“, for instance) aside, here’s something I perceive as happening in my local area — the weather is becoming more unpredictable.
I can’t say whether this is true ’round the globe. Are there floods beleaguering the Gobi? A plague of summer streakers in Greenland? Non-ornamental woolen scarves being worn in San Diego? To know, I’d have to watch the Weather Channel. And seeing how I’m not currently in the direct path of an approaching typhoon or over the age of seventy, I’m not going to watch the Weather Channel. So I don’t know.
But around Boston, the weather’s feeling wilder. Certainly at this time of year, the conditions are always highly variable. Add to that the trend over the past few years — where the highs get higher, the lows get lower and the baromet gets barometer — and it’s a crapshoot every time you leave the house. Case in point — I was told yesterday afternoon that it was 87 degrees outside, with not a cloud in the sky. At lunchtime today: dreary and 50, with a wind chill pinging 40.
A complete flip-flop in the space of eighteen hours; that is bona fide crazy shit. If Mother Nature were your girlfriend, you’d break up with her and hope she didn’t chain herself naked to your porch to show her love. And even if she didn’t, you’d still make an anonymous call to the local mental health line — because you can’t deal with the roller coaster any more, man, but you still care about her. You want her to get help. Mother Nature needs a professional — and probably a wheelbarrow filled with Xanax.
This whiparound weather is a particular nuisance to a guy like me. I’m lazy, so I don’t put a lot of thought into what I’m going to wear. I’m ill-informed about the weather — see “under seventy, not living in trailer park in Tornado Alley” above. Finally, I’m stubborn — and I decided a long time ago that once it’s warm enough in the spring to wear short sleeves, then that’s what I’m doing until fall. When I make the transition, I don’t want to be doing a lot of day-by-day flip-flopping, studying prevailing winds and low pressure systems and isobars of mercury or whatever.
That’s my rule. One day, it’s winter. The next, it’s not. End of season. No looking back. Lazy, ignorant and stubborn is totally my way to go through life, son.
When the weather behaves, this isn’t a big deal. I can wait out a few weeks of 60ish balm in my long sleeves, until I’m sure that spring has sprung. Or suffer the odd evening of mid-50s chill wearing a T-shirt and shorts. It’s all the same ballpark, and Mother Nature’s moodiness passes pretty quickly, once the flowers bloom and the birds sing and her new doctor gets her various meds tweaked just so.
At least, that’s how it used to be. Lately, Ms. Nature’s gone off the plan entirely. She canceled her shrink appointments, flushed her pills and now she’s standing ominously in your driveway, wearing nothing but your old sweatshirt and half a pair of handcuffs.
And I found myself in practically a Nor’Easter on the way to work today, wearing basically beachwear because it was practically ninety fricking degrees when I went to bed last night.
So I don’t know much about climate change in general. But I can tell you this: Mother Nature be crazy. I’d just like to know who it was that broke up with her. If we can’t get her on a morphine drip, stat, maybe we can talk those kids into seeing a relationship counselor.
Hell, I’d pay for the sessions. They don’t have to reconcile for long; June ought to do it. Anything beats going back to full sleeves.
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