Something short of Skynet

I have seen the future, and its name is Marty.

Before you start your usual presumptuous misgendering, be aware that Marty isn’t a “he.” Marty is a wheeled robot, about the size and shape of a grandfather clock with ears and a unibrow, that has been deployed in 325 Stop & Shop (and 172 Giant) supermarkets in the Northeast.

Its mission? To perform a job no human, no matter how intensive the training, could ever hope to do: holler for a mop when a shopper breaks a jar or bottle.

That’s right. Marty was designed to roam up and down supermarket aisles, looking for spills to report. When it finds one, it takes pictures and relays them to the store’s courtesy desk, prompting an emulated female voice to announce, for instance, “Cleanup in Aisle 8.”

Skynet, it isn’t.

Marty’s designers apparently ruled out making the robot resemble a person. Besides the potential to unsettle adults, a human-like droid on wheels would probably frighten small children half to death—resulting in, um, further spills.

But these august thinkers unfortunately went too far in the other direction.

For starters, Marty has googly eyes resembling how some Downton Abbey fans mercilessly describe poor Lady Edith. Then there’s the robot’s perpetual smile-shaped label, which, were Marty flesh and blood, would tempt most of us (me, anyway) to smack it upside its head till the smile faded.

To be fair, it was perhaps inevitable that these supermarkets’ staffers would resent a machine that, for all its electronic wizardry, merely advises that there’s a spill. Heaven forbid it deign to actually clean up the mess. It doesn’t help that in an age of increased automation, every pricey soldier sent forth in this 500-strong robot legion invariably means less money to pay staffers to work the mops. And Marty needs no sick days.

Elena, my wife, witnessed how adroitly Marty has made a lasting home in staffers’ hearts. The robot, it seems, had reported a spill in an aisle she was shopping one day. One young store employee was nearby, and he came upon the robot—and the “spill” it had urgently reported. “Oh, you’re riiight,” he said with a withering sneer, “there’s a coupon on the floor. Sixty thousand dollars to find a coupon!”

But Marty isn’t merely superfluous. Besides the myriad chips populating its circuit boards, there’s one more chip—on its shoulder. In short, it can be a real jerk.

I learned this two weeks ago while I was picking up a few items at our local Stop & Shop. Marty, dead ahead, was heading down the center of the aisle so slowly that I supposed it had wheeled over a puddle of molasses. Carrying only a basket that day, I had room to pass Marty on the left. But I wasn’t the one with the problem. That description belonged to a college-age stockwoman who was steering a platform truck stacked with boxes into the aisle, and saw ample room to pass on Marty’s other side. One glance told me she’d have just enough room to squeeze past.

She indeed would...but Marty had other ideas. I stared incredulously as the robot paused, then shifted right to effectively close the space and force the staffer to halt the cart and wait for Its Highness to pass. The way she rolled her eyes told me this wasn’t the first time.

Then there’s the reality that robots need maintenance, and if its sensors get somehow covered in, say, Nutella, it might not do its job as well. I suspect that giving Marty verbal warnings, with or without its union rep present, won’t be very effective.

Elena tells me, time and again, that I don’t need to take every crisis into my own hands. (Well, maybe she doesn’t, but she ought to.) After several times I’ve had to slow down because Little Lord Fauntlerobot has to go first, though, I’ve decided it’s time we had it out.

Margaret Atwood, the renowned military strategist, wrote that “War is what happens when language fails,” and she could have been talking about Marty. Any wheeled robot that doesn’t understand a basic, first-grade English command such as “Get out of my way, you insolent mishmosh of ineffectual detritus” needs a few teachable dents from a low-tech crowbar.

I don’t expect to lose against a machine with no arms, little wheels for feet and a ground speed of a quarter-mile an hour. It doesn’t even know how to call for help, so it should be a fair fight. I’m guessing that if I can flip the big galoot over, it will even learn its first word: “Mommmmmmy!”

But for all I know, it might actually have some sort of laser defenses. If I fail in my duty, I might not utter a cry. All the same, you’ll hear about it throughout the store.

“Cleanup in Aisle 5.”

Who says you can't count on sleeping?

Everyone I speak to lately is learning how I’ve resolved my long-time sleep problems. I relate in detail about my CPAP machine—short for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. I explain how sleep apnea closes the airway in the back of one’s throat. And I hold forth about how often the apnea was waking me up before I began to strap a snorkel-like mask to my face at bedtime, and how it hardly does now. The best part of these conversations: My CPAP’s benefits seem to be contagious. By the time I’m done, I’ve solved my listeners’ sleep problems, too.

You don’t need sleep issues, though, to agree that some nights you can just forget about getting some rest. Apnea sufferers keep score by the Apnea/Hypopnea Index, or AHI, which averages out how many times per hour they stop breathing and briefly awaken. Knowing your AHI is dandy if you’ve got apnea. But the many people who have trouble sleeping without any apnea should be allowed to keep score, too. After some careful thought, I’ve apparently caught the sleep-medicine community snoozing, for I’ve come up with sleep scores for everyone else.

DBI. If you have a dog, chances are you were a sucker for those doleful eyes from the first and only time they pleaded with you to say, “Come on up, boy.” And having allowed it once while the dog was 12 pounds, you now have an 80-pound anchor with bad breath and gas sandwiched between you and your spouse. The DBI, for Dog Breath Index, is how often per hour you come face-to-face with Rex and wake up from a royal blast of halitosis.

HCI. You don’t need a pet to keep track of your HCI: You just need to live with someone. Family members talk about all sorts of things in the course of the day, and if they’re all equally committed to good sleep, late-night conversation stays light. But if you think family life is that easy, you’re dreaming. The Heavy Conversation Index (HCI) measures how many of the first hours of bedtime you’re staring at the ceiling because one of you brought up something that couldn’t wait till morning, such as life, the universe and everything.

SDI. Most common in October’s run-up to Halloween, the Scary Dream Index (SDI) tracks how many times during the night you wake up in a cold sweat because you’re being chased by vampires, zombies, or something original plumbed from the depths of your very soul. If something’s after you, you’re not asleep and it’s not tax season, never mind trying to keep score…you won’t be sleeping anyway.

FIFI. Some adults, we hear, toss and turn in their nightlong quest to find that perfect sleep position. Unfortunately, that prime spot could mean the other person in the bed is out of luck. The Foot in Face Index (FIFI) counts how many times per night one sleep partner’s rotation in the bed means the other wakes up with toes up her nostrils.

PDII. Occurring for a few months every four years, the PDI might be the most pervasive. (It’s like MLBI, a score related to watching too much late-night baseball, but on steroids.) Whatever else you plan to do the night of a political debate, chances are that you’ll still end up in front of the TV and stay there till it’s over. Just try to fall asleep then. The PDII, for Post-Debate Incredulity Index, measures how many times you wake up from sleep, fists clenched, over something this one or that one said. Or should have said. Either way, just remember that you elected to watch the thing.

With only one score to keep, which the CPAP machine calculates for me, I’m sleeping just fine these days. Or at least I was sleeping. After years of needing to fall asleep using the traditional SCI (Sheep Counted Index), I now have myriad sheep grazing on the property with nothing to do. Some friends of ours wouldn’t sleep till they’d contacted the nearest government agency. They’d ensure that every member of the herd was counted—and would feel proud that it still mattered in the world.

Me? I lie awake, wondering where on earth we could ever find enough mint jelly.

Sorry, I’ve never riesled

He is always in black, which matches his long, flowing hair, goatee and baritone voice. In a ’70s horror flick, he would have played the coven’s high priest—one who does not understand the director’s order of Cuuuut! Or that he is acting in a movie. “But the sacrifice is not yet complete! It is Walpurgis Night!”

Today, he sells wine at my neighborhood liquor store.

His gaze is penetrating as he describes the personality of any wine, and he probably knows all the spirits, too. (They’re the tenured faculty of the Wiccan seminary.) And he is coldly serious as he holds forth about each wine’s complexity, acidity, aromas and other characteristics. I learned this after my wife, Elena, stopped in to ask him to recommend a wine we could serve with a given dish to company. For some reason I cannot fathom, she added this challenge: “My husband won’t be happy if I come home with the wrong wine.” She later reported that he began to stare. Very intently.

All of which meant that when she brought me to him, a few days later, his spigot was open all the way. “I find this one très elegante, a full-bodied bouquet of blackberry, cherry and currant, with an intense yet delicate aroma of oak.” As he spoke, one hand was gesturing; in the other, he seemed to be holding and staring wistfully into a glass of the stuff.

“Uh huh,” I said with a nod, trying to play along. Elena wasn’t doing much better, but she wasn’t the one granted the imprimatur of expertise.

“Or perhaps this Chianti, medium-bodied yet full-flavored,” he added as if recalling the company of a long-ago friend. “The delicate nose speaks of berry jam with floral hints and country nuances.”

I thought to ask how that worked anatomically but decided to take instead what, for me, was the high road. “Which one costs less?”

To the country-club set living all around us, he must seem a high priest of wine. The trouble is that such pretensions are wasted on the likes of me. I enjoy a good glass of wine, but if I wanted to pretend I knew the difference between Chablis and Riesling I’d have applied to work at Wine Enthusiast magazine, which is walking distance from the house. Mostly I make fun of the seriousness of it all and, now and then, pick some random wine myself just to see his expression.

And though I’d never act on it, I’ve been plotting to ask him, with all seriousness, whether a Merlot or a Pinot noir would go better with Dinty Moore Beef Stew. Or in what proportions I should mix red and white wine to make rosé. If I ever indulge this fantasy, I’d better have someone hold the door open: He’s certain to be a good shot with a dagger.

On days I truly feel too intimidated to meet his withering gaze, I remind myself I have an alternative. Even closer to home is another liquor store where I can pick up a wine of some vague hue without feeling I’ll say the wrong thing and end up manacled to a wall in the basement. So I haven’t exactly been worrying about the guy.

To tell the truth—for once—something came over me one day that I passed the store, on the way to the supermarket. I hadn’t realized I was habitually looking in to see if he was there, as if I believed I would one day spot him doing something completely out of character, such as laughing or doing anything whatsoever with a cellphone. He would invariably be there, whatever the day or time, as long as the liquor store was open. But this time I saw someone else. The next time, too. Was the high priest gone?

Whatever his name was, I realized I had misjudged this fellow and decided the world needed more people like him. If everyone felt such pride on the job and strove for excellence, the world would be a better place.

I was still wishing him a job as a sommelier at some exclusive Manhattan restaurant when I learned that he didn’t need a new job at all. My revelation came when we decided to drive to a local restaurant for dinner, and neither car would start—and not just because they’re old. Their distributor wires were missing.

Strung to the front door were a lifeless bird and a sprig of woodbine.

And under the door was an invitation. A limousine would soon arrive to take me, alone, to an unspecified event at our local cemetery. Since I would be guest of honor, I suspect I know who sent the invitation.

I daresay he’s taught me a bit about wine, but I guess I’ve taught him something, too. I’m no virginal, nubile female, the usual candidate for human sacrifice. But as with wine, sometimes anyone will do.

Check out my spare tire while you’re at it

Enjoying those long wait times in doctors’ waiting rooms? It’s looking like we’ll be some 90,000 doctors short by the time the last baby boomers skid toward retirement. But no worries: Soon we won’t need any doctors. Thanks to an uptick in laparoscopic surgery guided by people looking at computer screens, yet actually performed using robots, soon you won’t need a physician to operate or even do routine checkups. Nevertheless, you can’t have just anybody. So my vote goes to people with similar qualifications. Like Joe.

Joe is our mechanic, the guy who has kept two Toyotas running through the rough equivalent of 16 times around the earth. With such cred, he’s clearly meant for better things, which start with keeping two separate rag bins. What’s a physical but an inspection? Like any capable doctor, he’ll check that you start and idle properly, that you accelerate and cruise smoothly and work well in the clutch. By the time Joe is done, you’ll even run without jerkiness; he’s apparently a management consultant, too.

Take those creaky bones and sore muscles. To an orthopedist, they mean pain meds, cortisone shots, weeks of physical therapy and maybe surgery. Instead, we can call Joe the afternoon before and tell him the problem, which to him are a few hours and maybe new struts and shocks—suspension without the suspense. Spinal issues? It’s just another drive axle. “Come in by eight,” he says.

Digestive issues are no problem, either. Colon surgery, once a lengthy procedure requiring weeks of recovery, takes an afternoon—as long as he has the parts. The colon, of course, is mainly there to process the body’s waste products. “That’s a catalytic converter,” Joe tells me with a shrug. You’ll be happy to know he puts his rubber mallet to some good use before he fires up the welding torch. Hopefully, when you wake up you won’t roll over; you’ll be face-up on the lift.

And when the situation gets truly critical, such as heart surgery, Joe breaks out the lanolin hand cleaner. What’s a heart, after all, but a more elaborate internal-combustion engine? He’s done lots of valve jobs, and he’ll have your blood oxygen’s intake and exhaust as rhythmic as a Mazda Miata’s.

Unlike a doctor, Joe will charge nothing if we take in one of the cars for a perceived problem that turns out to need no attention. But when it comes to fixing people, it won’t long before insurance policies catch up—along with all those medical examiners. Repairs of all kinds, human or automotive, will require high-premium policies, thousand-dollar deductibles, and exclusions. And we’ll need weeks before an appointment, enough to blow your mind.

Not to worry, though. Joe replaces head gaskets, too.

To sleep, perchance to scream

The very notion of a sleep clinic suggests a peaceful sanctuary, a sound-proofed facility with temperature and humidity control, a comfy bed, and absolutely no distractions—not even from the various professionals who would somehow, from behind the scenes, monitor my sleep. You might think of it as a hotel with the additional amenity of a sleep spa.

In your dreams.

As I recalled in my second visit to the sleep clinic, the only way to tell that I’m not sleeping properly is for someone to hook various electrical wires up to me. The attached machine records how I breathe, how often I wake up, roll over, play dead—oh sorry, that’s doggie obedience school—and collects other data.

Anyone who read about my previous overnight at the local sleep clinic would know I expected the worst. The same sleep center, last time around, seemed infested with Asian beetles. More orange than red, they’re as cute as the ladybugs they resemble but with a couple of minor differences: They’re larger, swarm by the thousands and prefer to raise their offspring indoors. Oh, and they bite—which did wonders for my anticipation of blissful sleep. At my last sleep study, I could hear their little feet on the lampshades and the acoustical tile of the ceiling. I didn’t see a single one this time. But just in case they planned to show up after lights out, I brought earplugs.

But of course, the noise wasn’t the greatest distraction. Neither were the two wide straps wrapped tightly around my torso. No, it was those wires, about twenty in all. Two pairs, attached to each leg, were barely noticeable. The rest? They led to my head, face and the vicinity, with electrical leads covered with a gob of conductive paste, which solidifies when pressed. Little pieces of bandage covered every gob so that I looked like I had been wearing an oversized deep-sea-diver helmet…with a ferret trapped inside.

All in all, there were enough wires tangled around my head that I resembled a male Medusa. I knew that if I had to use the bathroom, all I needed was to call out the technician’s name; hearing me on the intercom, he’d come to temporarily unplug the device to which the wires were connected. What I didn’t know was whether glancing at the mirror even once, in the bathroom, would turn me to stone.

Among other updates to the sleep center since my last visit was the mode of observation. My room last time had a window with two technicians behind, staring at me all night for my comfort. How times change. Now there’s an infrared camera that watches my every move—as if I could move given the attached imbroglio of wires. Since today’s remote cameras typically relay high-definition video to a smartphone or computer, I fully expect the video to emerge amid my 2024 run for President. “He uplinks to his Alpha Centurian masters at night!” my opponent will charge.

I was plainly too wired to sleep, so I thought I’d pretend I really were at a hotel. Three other patients—er, guests—were here tonight also, and the technician asked if I wanted water or fruit juice. (What, no cabernet?) So there was sort of room service. But the next morning, I found no complimentary breakfast. And while the bathroom had a towel or two, I found no little shampoos, soaps or moisturizers. Just wait till I hit TripAdvisor.

No matter what results I get, I already know my prognosis will be good. With two sleep-clinic visits under my belt, I know just how to go to sleep—and stay asleep till the morning. I merely have to remind myself how comfortable I feel when I’m not bound tightly in straps and wires, barely able to turn over, like at the sleep clinic. I’ll be afraid to open my eyes till dawn.

A germ of grievance

Read the news, and you can’t help but learn about the unrest at many college campuses over myriad offenses…some perfectly justified, some contrived. I can sympathize. There’s much to complain, after all, about an insular institution where the cost of room, board, and other essentials is borne by others, and most activities are set according to a schedule—oh wait, that’s jail.

But because protests at Yale, Princeton, and other top colleges seem trivial compared with, oh, ISIS chopping off Christians’ heads, the collective term for students’ beefs has come to be known as “microaggressions.” Oops! Even my use of the word “beefs” in the previous sentence could classify as microaggression to a vegetarian. Ah, for my salad days. (Better?) You should know you’re overdoing things when even the President says to grow up.

All this thought about everything I could never again say in once-casual conversation made me seek out one place I’d be safe: the living-room sofa. I would just lie down for a few minutes and clear my head. Soon after I did, though, I heard high-pitched, staccato sounds from the kitchen. Elena was working in the other room, so it wasn’t anything she was doing. Nobody else was home.

I couldn’t see anything, but the sound was coming from the trashcan. I opened it and saw nothing inside the liner but a sponge we’d tossed out. Picking up the sponge—from which the sound was coming—I put it close to my ear. Yep, that was it. I dropped the sponge back into the can, deciding that what I’d heard was the sound of air escaping from the sponge. Then I decided to wash my hands.

Once in the bathroom, I opened the vanity door to get another bar of soap. And heard the sound again, only louder. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it sounded like the tiniest of people chanting something over and over. The sound came from near the can of scouring powder, the one with bleach. I grabbed a bar of soap, closed the little cabinet and washed my hands. But behind me, once I shut off the water, I heard the sound again. I opened the shower curtain and leaned in. This time, it was coming from a little shelf on which was a bottle of body wash. Anti-bacterial body wash. I could almost see what I was hearing.

It took a few minutes to find the old microscope from my elementary-school days, but before long I’d rubbed off some sort of specimen from around the base of the bottle. I prepped a slide, clipped it down, and look a good look:

You’d never guess that bacteria had language skills, but there they were on display. I still couldn’t make out what they were saying, let alone how they spoke at all. But their little signs—apparently ultra-nanofine markers exist—decried our various offenses, such as tossing a sponge, cleaning with bleach and committing the ultimate sin: murder by triclosan. By further adjusting the focus, I could read the largest signs. The spelling wasn’t perfect (whattaya want from one-celled organisms?), but the messages were clear:

NO MOORE EMINENT DOMAIN ABUSE
STOPP THE COMET GENNOCIDE
ANTII BACTEERIA, ANTI LYFE

In other words, we multicellular imperialists needed to apologize, remove the hateful cleaning products from the premises and preserve their ancestry (formerly known as “icky kitchen sponges”) in the utensil drawer.

I had met the microaggressors, and they were us.

With a shake of my head, I realized that I’d fallen asleep, and all those little protests were but a dream. Still, I thought as I sat up, there was no point in taking chances. “Hey, Hon,” I called out to Elena. “Let’s eat out tonight. I’ve just the place! Chipotle’s….”

With apologies to Wynken, Blynken and Nod

“If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.” Mark Twain, of course, was talking about the weather. But if you enjoy coffee, eggs, wine, red meat and the occasional tuna sandwich, you know that the above witticism—in the reverse—applies to nearly everything you like. In other words, if you like a food, enjoy it without guilt…while you can.

We could blame the media for how every new medical study on a given topic concludes the exact opposite of whatever the previous study found. Whoever’s at fault, this notion has been keeping me awake nights—though I’m not sure it should. I’m wondering, you see, whether the traditional advice about how to get to sleep could itself be due for a flip of the medical-research spatula. With this in mind, here are a few tips we might expect to see should a new study reverse everything we already know about sleep:

Screens rule the day—all 24 hours. Doctors have long warned that staring into TVs, computers and various mobile doodads are a no-no at nighttime, and that we should shut them down early and relax before hitting the sack. The approaching new advice: Get the biggest TV you can get and watch it till your eyes slam shut—you wouldn’t want Samsung, after all, to waste the millions it spent to sponsor the latest sleep research. Better yet, install that TV on your bedroom ceiling and watch the same old reruns in style.

When the chips are down, break out the pretzels. We’ve been told that munching in the hours after dinner could result in trouble sleeping, but that’s before the coming research refutes all that. Tomorrow’s news flash: When your digestive system is working overtime, it lets the brain relax. At least you’ll hope you feel relaxed as you stare upward, wondering whether hiring the cheapest installer to secure the TV to the ceiling was your wisest move.

Exercise till you drop, if at all. Any sleep specialist will tell you not to exercise in the last hours before bedtime. But given tomorrow’s research, you can take that with a grain of salt. (What’s a little more salt after all those pretzels?) And besides, you’ll need to be in shape for all that vigorous tossing and turning, not to mention the thumb-muscle strength required to write texts all night to friends who’ve seen and followed the same research.

You can so make up all that sleep. And you’ve probably heard for years about how you should give yourself a good eight hours in bed per night, for lost sleep is lost for good. Sure…at least until the next studies publish. Next we’ll be catching a few winks here, a few winks there, and waking up just in time for the next office meeting. Or at least the end of it, when you awaken from the bright flashes of your colleagues’ smartphone cameras as they shoot video of your snooze. Ah, virality!

Worried that tomorrow’s sleep regimen is the stuff that nightmares are made of? Take heart. If you don’t like the research, just wait a few weeks.

We know you’re home…pick up

Anyone who keeps up with the news—other than on pay TV—has probably heard that the pay-TV industry is losing customers in droves. How many droves exactly, no one will admit. But in the past six months, cable and satellite have lost 887,000 customers. Of course, say the pundits, we’ve gone on our laptops and tablets and phones (oh, my!) to watch programming there instead.

I, though, say they’re wrong. Elena and I have a source of programming that’s full of intrigue, deception and even suspense. And it’s as accessible as that most primitive of devices, our landline telephone.

Yes, it’s the Caller-ID box.

Around since the ’80s, Caller ID wasn’t invented to be a source of merriment. Earlier Caller-ID boxes showed only a phone number, usually fake, and you’d never have given a thought to sitting down with some fresh popcorn. But today’s ordinary Caller-ID boxes display a second line—for text—that keeps us at the edge of our seats. A few examples, with our responses, from calls that come in:

• “UNAVAILABLE”: What a coincidence! So are we.
• “Free VtRSRCH”: Oh, yes, we always pick up the phone when the caller’s name is gibberish. Just tack on the word “free."
• “PRIVATE CALL”: My mother’s maiden name was Call, but last I checked, no one from her side of the family is in the Army.

Of course, we also get the official-sounding ones:

• “Loan Department”: All loans made on this planet originate from the same very wealthy one-percenter, boss of a single department. Get him!
• “Bank Card Services”: Since you sound so legitimate, hold on while I get together all my credit-card numbers to give you.
• “Power Center”: I want to work there.

And then we get the scaremongers:

• “Alert Srvc”: With our frantic routines, we’re always on the lookout for the next chance to raise our blood pressure.
• “Help Center”: Yes, tell me where I left my hammer.
• “Your Appointment”: One of us, at any given time, must have some appointment scheduled with some doctor. So this must be genuine.
• “URGENT”: Of course, whenever I call someone in an emergency, my name on the phone number’s account always changes to “Urgent.” Would the caller’s name, in non-emergency situations, be “Trivial”?

And what about when the Caller-ID box merely displays the name of a state? With 50,000 Yankee fans chanting “Who’s your Daddy?” to then-Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez in 2004, we who were listening could tell what they were saying. But sometimes the box displays “Connecticut,” “Vermont” or (even worse) “California.” I’m imagining that all residents of that state—almost 39 million people, in the case of California—are dropping what they’re doing and gathering around a single telephone to call us and speak in unison.

It could be worse. What if China called? But if it were Mexico calling, we’d pick up. Other than the language barrier, we’d be listening to only a few dozen people; the rest seem to be elsewhere.

Given government’s incessant efforts to make our lives easier, I’m waiting for the next generation of Caller-ID boxes. Telemarketers will be required to stop giving phony names and numbers and start stating their true intentions. Landline customers, all ten of us, will need to buy new boxes with screens the size of an iPad’s. One sample message, displayed as the phone is ringing: “Marketing survey, for products you’d never buy in a million years, whose polltaker says takes only three minutes but will actually take 20…if you’re lucky.”

I’m going to hold out for the boxes with digital recording.

The Higgs Boson and what really needs finding

Let me apologize in advance for interrupting your musings over important matters—you know, things like why J.Lo and Steven Tyler have left American Idol and what their exit means for the future of mankind. But the scientific community recently celebrated an important breakthrough. Sure, the Higgs Boson can’t compete with even the watered-down, post-Simonic remnant of that show. But what its discovery represents is hope for us all.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, let me tell you what the Higgs Boson is. I don’t know. And I’m in good company. Journalists are already champions at writing their stories before doing their research. Who has time for facts? In the case of the Higgs Boson, though, they had to make the effort to do more than sound smart. Still, the resulting attempts at the subject had poor Peter Higgs, the Boson’s namesake, rolling in his grave. Which was a pretty mean feat considering that Higgs is still alive.

So being a true journalist, I’m going to break from tradition and look out for you instead of my editor. In other words, forget about what the Higgs Boson is. That it’s the smallest particle now known to man, what gives everything on earth its mass, doesn’t matter to you. Or to me. Let’s instead do a search for…all those socks.

Yes, you heard me right, socks. It shouldn’t take a $10-billion particle accelerator to find what seemingly travels to another dimension—or perhaps, since the voyage of these garments begins in a washing machine, to a planet orbiting the luminous Energy Star. Yet you can’t sort laundry after a wash without noticing at least one sock is gone.

In our house, socks are only the warm-up act. True, the TV’s remote hasn’t dissolved into particles since the kids hit middle school. And it’s hardly high technology to phone a misplaced cell phone to listen for its ring, except that before losing my phone I pride myself in turning it off. But Elena’s glasses? Our keys? My credit-card bills, which sit plainly in view for weeks till it comes time for me to pay them?

The scientists found the Higgs Boson using a machine called the Large Hadron Collider, which sounds like a shopping cart that strikes fear in the heart of anyone who parks his shiny new car, a Porsche Hadron, outside the supermarket. If it takes one of these to find all the things that get lost in this house, I want one for Christmas. It shouldn’t cost much now that it’s used. And because physicists are finished using it to find the Higgs Boson, it’s just going to sit around, right?

What most needs finding around here, though, is the result of a certifiable good deed. A friend of son Andrew was, for a time, selling Cutco Cutlery. Sure, they’re fine products, but they’re very expensive. And when you’ve been married for 25-plus years without throwing knives at one another even once, you still have the ones you got a quarter-century ago. So we ordered a few things, including a pair of pruners.

They’re great pruners. The 18-year-old sales rep said they’ll last for years. They will, too. Wouldn’t you agree, since they’re wrapped up carefully in the box they came in? Sure, I know exactly where they are—in that little box. Just don’t ask me where that box is.

The Higgs Boson might tell us how keys, glasses, bills and even those pruners have mass. But someday, I’ll discover where all these things are. When I do, I will be lauded the world over. I can already envision, in fact, the day I go to Oslo to accept my Nobel Prize. My name will be called, and I will stride up the aisle to thunderous applause.

The ordinarily reserved crowd in the seats will be all abuzz. So much so that after I receive my award and all those cameras and phones start clicking away, the award’s presenter will announce that, however unusual, he’d like to ask me a question before I step any farther from the stage.

“Would you kindly tell us why you have a sock stuck to your back?”

Because Ayatollah you so

Reading the news these days can be very depressing. I myself, though, have been finding some of it very instructive. For instance, I can’t help but notice how a country called Iran has been throwing its weight around, making demands and making other countries step lightly in negotiations. How can this country, the 18th in size in the world, ever get its way? Simple: Its rulers say they have nuclear weapons—and we believe them.

I don’t happen to have a nuclear weapon. (Amazon doesn’t sell them with Free Super Saver shipping.) But neither do I dangle almosts and maybes in the faces of my various nemeses. Since my last birthday, I have something else that I consider far more personal than a nuclear bomb, which wouldn’t fit in the trunk of the Corolla anyway. And now that keeping up with the news has taught me I don’t even have to show a weapon to get my way, I realize it’s time to make my quiet declaration and take some control in my life.

Just think of the potential. Of course, my plan would work anytime I’m on a line in a store and the cashier decides to wait on his friend, who’s just walked in, before me. But that’s the easy stuff. I’m thinking more about our regular health-care provider, teamed up as usual with our insurance carrier. Do you recall the schoolyard game of salugi, in which two kids play catch with a hat, throwing it back and forth above the reach of the hat’s helpless owner? That’s what provider and carrier play today, only it isn’t a hat; it’s my wallet. Unrecorded co-pays, coverage allowed or disallowed depending on the mood of the agent…the list goes on.

Today, when we have a problem, Elena contacts them, tells them where they screwed up and sends receipts to back up what should be obvious. On rare occasion, I’ve called them. How much more productive I could be if, at the first sign of bureaucratic obstruction, I made a simple statement: “You don’t understand. You see, I have a chainsaw.” Call it my contribution to the health-care crisis. You’re welcome.

In my twisted mind, nearly everyone in the world has seen some version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or, at the very least, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series. So by uttering those simple words, without even having to fire up the machine, I could benefit on a personal level from a strategy unfolding, so far successfully, on the international stage.

With son Andrew’s college years quickly approaching, I’m weighing my options—with a look back five years, to when daughter Katie was accepted at NYU.  Hoping to talk our way into the school’s raising her amount of financial aid to the level another school had offered, we walked up to what looked like a teller window. An officious young man, probably a grad student, looked down his nose at our handful of papers and flatly suggested that our firstborn go to that other school instead.

Were that exchange to occur today, we would not bring that handful of papers. I would only take along a photo of the chainsaw. I’d have shot it outdoors, with a ray of sunlight reflecting off a few sharpened teeth of its hungry blades. “Maybe this will change your mind,” I’d say. The temptation would be, if it were the same agent, to follow through on my threat whether or not we got the money.

Alas, there are limitations to this strategy. A chainsaw might not have its intended effect were I to announce it during, say, an IRS audit or a similar dispute with a government entity. People with real nuclear bombs, along with drones, F-22 Raptors and other instruments of death aren’t folks to threaten unless you’ve got comparable firepower.

There’s another limitation that I’ve saved for my most devoted readers who are reading to the end. My chainsaw is not one you’d have seen in those horror classics, or one with which you could compete in Maine’s Lumberjack Show. In fact, it’s a rather modest plug-in model from a brand better known for electric razors. Remember Victor Kiam? And if I were chasing you with it, anyone with legs could easily run out of reach of the extension cord. If you didn’t have legs, well, there’d be no point.

I know I can count on you. We’ll keep this to ourselves, won’t we? No putting my secret on the Internet or anything. But if you do, just remember one thing. I have…

Oh, never mind.

‘And the fries are simply to die for…’

The Perratore household is all abuzz this month with the news that Andrew has made Vassar. I’ve so much to say to my son, so much wisdom to impart. Of course, being a normal, 21st-century 18-year-old, he’ll have to take off his headphones to hear it. Ignore the buzzing of texts on his cellphone, too, and put down that chicken parm and penne ala vodka sandwich for a minute…breakfast can wait.

Once I do get his attention, my first piece of sage advice applies to whatever he does during and after his college years: “To thine own self be true.” You know, one of those droll parental platitudes.

Not that it’s advice I followed from the get-go. Before I even open my mouth, I recall a column to which a few staffers of the Ridgewood Times contributed while I worked there as a college student. It was called “Feinschmecker,” a word the largely German population of that part of Queens knew to mean “gourmet” or “epicure.” It was a restaurant-review column…though one with a secret.

To anyone who understands the usual weekly newspaper, it was business as usual. The restaurants the column featured were advertisers. In exchange for a freebie meal for two—pretty cheap rates for a 500-word ad—the newspaper would run a review of the restaurant. And as that part of Queens is renowned the world over for its culinary fare, we at the paper knew before reading a word that the review would be glowing.

The first place I covered, my then-girlfriend Elena at my side (no jokes about cheap dates, please), was a local German haunt. We were served food I was having for the first time, such as Goulash Soup, Leberkäse a la Holstein and Kieler Rollmops, and I was expected to write about its quality with, ahem, authority. This from a kid who, given his druthers, was most likely to be found in the nearest McDonald’s or pizza place when it came time to chow down.

Anyway, I muddled through so with indecipherable gems such as “Yours is a virtual free-for-all of caviar atop Russian dressing over hard-boiled eggs on a bed of lettuce and tomato, all of which make fast friends when forked into your mouth.” To tell you the truth, I was very proud of myself for a different reason: When writing about the caviar, not once did I use the phrase “trout bait.”

My second assignment, at a more mainstream establishment on busy Queens Boulevard, took me to less charted waters. The owner himself seated us. And, as we looked at the menus—I “studied” it—he sat down at our table. “So…” our host began in a German accent that seemed to have thickened over the past minute, “you are der feinschmecker!”

I suddenly found myself in a surreal scene reminiscent of those World War II movies in which an American must bluff his way past a suspicious guard. Through a long silence, during which he wonders where he will be tortured and shot or merely shot, he holds his breath. But unlike those movies, I could not get away with merely chuckling and replying “Ja, ja!” To which he would laugh and reply, “Ja!” Followed by five minutes of back-and-forth “ja-ing,” with knowing smiles and nods—the meaning of which would mercifully escape me.

What I mostly wondered, though, was whether this man truly didn’t have the same wink-wink-nod-nod understanding of this food-for-praise arrangement. If I said the wrong thing, why, I could envision what came next—the owner throwing a napkin to the rustic stone floor, gauntlet-like, and hissing through clenched teeth, “You…are…no…feinschmecker. Get out of here, get out!”

So I winged it. “I guess so!” To which he told us the specials, recommended an entrée or two and went away.

After that escapade, I was only too happy to do a pizza place and restaurant for my third and last venture as a restaurant reviewer. Here, at least, I had genuine opinions.

We just took Andrew on another trip to his new college, and I couldn’t help but pick up a copy of the campus newspaper. I opened it randomly—to see a restaurant review. And I almost opened my mouth to utter the second piece of sage advice: Write restaurant reviews and get lots of free food!

But considering that he’s never truly had to pay for his own food, I don’t think that advice would go over well, either.

So many meals, so little time

It has taken some soul-searching, but I have come to a realization: I am a dismal failure. The first warning came more than a week ago, when I hit the buffet restaurant Golden Corral, my favorite feed trough, on the first night of a recent business trip. I’d paid homage to it once before.

What, you haven’t heard of Golden Corral? It’s where you stride in for a bounteous, all-you-can-eat meal at low cost—and afterward wonder how you’ll get back out to your car. If the song “Rawhide” (with its chorus, “Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’….”) isn’t being blasted from speakers above the exit door, it should be.

But to the hush of the cooks, the wait staff and my fellow patrons, I ate my dinner and left the restaurant without the aid of a wheelbarrow. In disgrace, I trudged the mile and a quarter back to my hotel.

It happened again the other day, when Elena and I dined at a local Italian restaurant. I’d ordered my favorite dish, veal parmigiana, which came with pasta and a small salad. But near the end of the meal, as my wife asked the waiter to wrap up what she couldn’t finish, I found myself pointing to my own plate with a trembling finger I recognized as my own. A voice croaked the words, “M-mine, too.”

Understand something about me: I have not been one to take prisoners. More than 70 percent of American men are overweight, and it would hardly be me to leave food uneaten and shame such a…um…sizable portion of the population. And sorry, Michelle, but I’ve considered it my duty as a natural-born citizen of Earth’s sole superpower to super-size a few meals a year.

Best of all, I could always get away with it. As a child, I fully expected to grow up to be Mac, the skinny guy who gets sand kicked in his face in those Charles Atlas comic-book ads. (I didn’t care as much to become the Hero of the Beach as much as attract a loyal girlfriend.) Even if I couldn’t beat up bullies, those early years taught me a lasting lesson: No matter how much I ate, my speedy metabolism would keep even a forkful of fat from sticking to my scrawny frame.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, when eating has come to represent my complete reward system. It isn’t exactly impeccable timing, for cheap junk food since my teen years has permeated the shelves of stores across the nation. And alas, I’ve discovered a device, called a bathroom scale, that apparently responds to my eating habits. A friend at work, Kimberly, tells me I’m lucky to have gotten away for so long without having to worry about gaining weight. I have a different perspective: Those decades left me totally unprepared. I’m a babe in the woods, and a chubby little one at that.

You’ll be happy to know I’ve already come up with a solution. It’s so easy, in fact, that it’s a wonder anyone is overweight. All I have to do is eat as little as possible in between those unavoidable occasions, during which I allow myself an extra calorie or two.

I’m talking about those major holidays, plus Super Bowl Sunday. And Valentine’s Day. The birthday celebrations of all family members, friends and colleagues. Add in meals away from home: business trips and office lunches, dining out with the family, meals during vacations and visits to friends and family. Barbecues at home. Ballgames, including at the stadium. Samples at supermarkets, country fairs and farmers’ markets. Snacks my coworkers put out. Movie-theater treats. Italian dinners at home, too. Not to mention pizza—no matter when or where it calls me by name. And did I forget Saturday breakfast?

In between those occasions, don’t even think about offering me food.

And we adapt so well to captivity

You get to a certain age, and you start thinking you’ve seen much of what life has to offer—at least at the mall. But there it was, no bigger than my hand, and the furry critter was crawling all over the sales rep who insisted that a sugar bear was just what our household needed.

Last I’d heard, Sugar Bear was a cartoon bear that adorned boxes of Super Sugar Crisp, wearing a preppy blue turtleneck sweater. Related to koalas and kangaroos and also called “sugar gliders,” these have appeared on Animal Planet and are billed as the perfect ‘pocket-pets.’” They’re well behaved and appropriate for young children. They bond to their human “families,” they get along with non-slithering pets, they’re loyal, and they love to play. When you have one, in fact, you’ll think of yourself in a whole new way: as a set of monkey bars.

Other people aren’t so complimentary. Sugar bears bite. They love to play so much that you can just forget about anything else you like to do, like read things online. Cats and dogs love them…the way women love chocolate. And they can’t be potty trained, though they tend to pee and poop on members of their human “families,” especially in their pockets. What do you expect? They’re marsupials—they know pockets from birth. Oh, and you don’t spend hundreds on just one; it needs a friend. So you should get a second, of the opposite sex. Of course, you know what comes next.

I’m sure the truth, other than their curious aversion to snakes, lies somewhere in between. But I have a bigger problem with a creature that’s captured in the rainforests of Australia or Indonesia and transported ten thousand miles to press me into servitude. Really now: If I so wanted something in my pocket that required incessant attention, a smart phone is all I’d need.

When Katie and Andrew were much younger, they received Tamagotchis in a birthday-party goody bag, and I considered it a credit to their intelligence that within scant weeks they left the beeping slave drivers for dead, virtually doomed to starvation. I have no doubt the kids would do the same if they played Farmville—and on the scale of Tyson Foods. It makes a father proud.

Yet today’s web-enabled handhelds have become today’s Tamagotchis, and there’s no condemning these critters. They text us, they comment on our status, they play music and videos, and do myriad other things with all the apps—little software programs, for the uninitiated—you can download to them. (Alas, there’s no virtual sugar-bear app.) They never shut up. And they’re creating a race of sub-human beings who walk while looking downward, banging into one another and into the path of cars—whose drivers are also checking their little screens instead of the road.

I know…because I’m trying not to become one. With my new iPod Touch, occasionally a very handy doodad, I’m still trying to find all the settings I need to set so it stops calling me with every IM, email and social-network comment someone sends my way. It doesn’t yet feel like a sugar bear in my pocket.

But the day it does, I’ll just have to download a Pampers app.

Dial 00:00:00 for murder

“…'Cause if my baby don't love me no more,
I know her…sister will!”

It’s a safe bet that Jimi Hendrix wrote “Red House” about a far more shapely subject than a stainless-steel kitchen timer. But sadly for the Perratore household, the closing lines of this ’60s song have taken on a whole new meaning since we opened our Christmas gifts.

Regular readers of this blog will remember well that during the fall, a shadow lay over our family. Its name was OXO, a three-event timer that took on a personality and took to devilry whenever I was within her—yes, her—vicinity. Even placing my hand inches away was all it took for her to reset her clock to noon or shrieking like a banshee.

Shortly after she got what she wanted, publication of her story for a worldwide audience, OXO promptly expired. But she didn’t exactly go to meet her maker, which would probably have meant being shipped back to some Chinese labor camp. The next day, her lifeless shell showed up into the backpack I take to the office. She resides on my bookcase, where she can sit in judgment for eternity—not counting evenings and weekends—on my every deadline.

End of story, right? I thought so, and so did Elena. Until she reached into her stocking on Christmas morning, our favorite Bing Crosby LP playing softly on the stereo, and pulled out…Sister.

Despite our experience with OXO, I alone knew that my wife still wanted to have a kitchen timer she could use to time a few parts of a dinner at once. But don’t look at me; I was as surprised as Elena. What we quickly dubbed Sister was soon situated at the same post her fallen twin once manned.

From several feet away, I regarded the newcomer with suspicion. I drew closer, staring, and finally had the nerve to reach over and nudge the timer. That alone would have produced, from her predecessor, the polyphonic screams of feigned injury. From Sister, it resulted in nary a sound; I might as well have poked the toaster.

Next, I picked her up and unceremoniously held down her Clock button to reset the time. OXO would already have been livid—and let us know it by resetting her clock faster than I could set it. But Sister, a cooler character indeed, was not about to show her hand so easily. I reset the clock, pressed the Clock button again, and set her back down. My hands were shaking.

This morning, Elena asked me how I’d slept. The answer was easy: hardly. For the realization hasn’t escaped me that Sister has the same number of built-in timers as this household currently has people. With no weapons but a countdown—isn’t that, in the end, what we all face?—I suspect Sister’s first buzzer is for me. And my time draws nigh.

The day they find me at home, an expression of horror betraying my last moments alive, a cleaning attendant at my office will hear tones from a bookshelf in my office. From a device that hasn’t known batteries in weeks, midnight will flash…and flash…and flash….

One way to have a white Christmas

Anyone who pays attention knows that one job often spawns another—or, more typically, a Duggar-sized family of nagging little tasks. That’s what we learned when we tried to fit back into the basement, following our springtime waterproofing, most of what had been there before. And to get rid of items ruined in our past floods, such as unused paint. It surely had us longing for the past.

No, not the past of pet rocks, invisible dogs and mood rings. I mean the days when you could leave unneeded paint cans, even full, at the curb with your garbage. The truck would come once a week. And the cans would go away…somewhere.

By contrast, our little town has issued very specific instructions for disposing of all these cans. First, we have to dry out the paint in those cans on our own. (Our green-minded county wants the poisonous paint fumes to go away…somewhere.) They suggest kitty litter, preferably unused, to dry out the liquid portion of the paint. Once solid, the paint can go out in the garbage bags; the empty cans, alongside the garbage.

Sounds easy, right? Not when you have twelve full cans holding court in the garage. No matter how much you stir it, kitty litter tends to solidify the paint in the upper half of a full can, meaning lots of splashing paint when you crack the top layer apart. There has to be a better way, I thought…which was when I came up with my scheme. I could get a few pieces of scrap wood and paint them repeatedly, two or three times a day on weekends. Once I’m all done, I can throw away the scrap wood with the empty cans.

Who, again, was that idiot who just said one job spawns another? I learned quickly that since I have a house, not a wood shop, there just isn’t much scrap wood around. And at this rate, I’d never get the car back into the garage.

It was time to explore my possibilities. Surely there was something else that needed to be another color! Elena quickly took the house off the list; for some reason, she didn’t want a coating of multi-colored paint laden with rust specks. Ditto for the deck, cars and driveway. The lawn, too. So, like any dutiful husband, I blame her for what ensued.

I was considering my very options when a Greenpeace activist came to the door to talk about fracking. Sorry, yes, I admit: It is indeed inappropriate to sign a petition with a paint roller. The young lady left our doorstep a Beigepeace activist. Didn’t her mother teach her not to talk to strangers?

Next, I walked into the backyard to have a talk with the neighbors’ dogs. I reasoned that the mongrels would better hear their masters’ voice if they had, um, a communications upgrade. It took a few minutes, but I now live next door to the world’s first Bluetooth-enabled Chihuahua. Especially after the four-legged doofus got the bright idea to run off with a brush dripping with Cobalt Blue paint in his mouth.

Apparently, during that exchange I’d also painted over the glass of my moral compass—which, considering the circumstances, pointed me in just the right direction. It was high time for a drive. I loaded up the car with all eight cans and an armful of brushes.

The Redbox DVD-rental kiosk, at least in our local supermarket, is now Graybox. Some kids outside who were wearing Red Sox hats are now White-Sox fans—not that it’s an improvement. The nearest White Castle burger joint is now Olive-Green Castle. (It matches the hue of the customers’ faces.) And although I realized I had the wrong colors to paint the town red, I could do wonders across the river in Orange County.

My plans were going fine till I had too close a brush with the boys in blue—er, marigold. I’d now had only a half-gallon left, though I realized it would now take some doing to paint anything with handcuffs on. A big van pulled up, and some fellows in white walked toward me. Hmmm, they’d look much better in—

I’ve solved our problem, but in the process spawned another. It’s now my turn to go away…somewhere. I’ve already been told the walls are soothing pastels. They like them just fine.

Shop till they drop

Zero hundred hours was quickly approaching, but we were ready. Still, we had a few moments for one last check. Flak jackets were a given, but we needed plenty more. Weapons, ammo, optics, navigational equipment, first-aid kit…. Elena glanced at me and nodded with a faint smile just visible from beneath her helmet. It seemed that was everything. Oh, one more thing: The credit cards.

We emerged from the side of the building in our new mine-resistant, ambush-protected all-terrain vehicle. Its V-shaped hull and independent suspension were just the ticket for such operations, though the ATV cost most of the money we were saving for Andrew’s college tuition. Especially the requirement that its specs match those intended for use in Afghanistan. But hey—we couldn’t mess around. In 30 seconds, 29, 28…we were heading in. With all our preparation plus a little bit of luck, we’d make that back and more with all the savings that lay in wait for the survivors.

It’s not called Black Friday for nothing.

With me as the driver, Elena was gunner. She peered through her scope as a line, blocks-long, came into view beneath the appropriately designed Target logo. “This is it!” she shouted over the rumbling of the engine. Fifteen seconds till the store opened. The shoppers took cover and cocked their weapons. One had an RPG, but Elena spotted her before she could load a grenade. “Nice going!” I shouted.

“She always illegally parks in Handicapped, so she’s had it coming,” my darling replied.

From the rest of the line, nothing they had was a match for our vehicle. Gunfire erupted from every crevice and landscaped hedge, but nothing penetrated our armor. Three, two, one…the doors opened. But instead of the wave of shoppers, in we went with a crash of flying glass and twisted metal. I steered right toward our first stop—where the real danger would begin. We’d eventually, after all, have to leave the safety of the ATV.

The store was already filling with smoke, so we’d have to use Bluetooth-enabled GPS at the ear to guide us to the right aisle. The red uniforms were friendly, we knew; still, we wouldn’t put it past the enemy to wear the same colors and, through the smoke, offer help as they aimed their heat-seeking automatics. I tapped Elena’s shoulder, for it was time. We exited the vehicle.

We knew our targets and ran down different sides of the lengthwise aisle toward our respective shelves. Ah…I’d found my first item already. It wasn’t every day I found a 6-ounce tube of Colgate Total Whitening toothpaste for $1.29! My second stop, at the next aisle over: Suave Professionals Shampoo Plus Conditioner, $2.09 for a 32-ounce container. It lay dead ahead, nobody else in the aisle, but therein lay the trap. I almost blundered right over a mine—a COD, for Customer Obliteration Device—that someone had painted the same color scheme as the vinyl floor tiles. I grabbed the heaviest thing handy, a big bottle of mouthwash, and threw it toward the detonator. The explosion was deafening.

“Eddie...are you okay?” Elena was calling. Still dizzy, I grabbed the last shampoo standing and yelled back. Time to regroup. Along the way I snatched my third goal, a 12-pack of twin-blade razor cartridges for $6.99, and we almost ran into one another.

“I got the white-cotton shoelaces—49 cents,” Elena reported above the blaring of the fire alarm, “and a box of six handkerchiefs for $1.99.” We had time for a quick high-five.

“Did you….”

“Affirmative!” she said, producing a Totes automatic umbrella, with case, that was selling for $5.99. “We might need it sooner if the sprinklers go off, so I got two.”

“Good thinking.”

The next five minutes were crucial, for the shoppers we hadn’t flatted beneath our continuous-track wheels now took positions behind us. Worse, they headed for the same aisles with a vengeance—and reloaded weapons. It was time for some smoke, so my bride and I together lobbed a few M-18 smoke grenades. “Let’s go!” I shouted.

A 28-ounce bottle of ketchup for a buck twenty-nine, a 12-ounce Starbucks Pike Place ground coffee for $4.99 and the best prize of all: eight-ounce yogurts, three for a dollar. The list went on, but it was too soon to claim victory. We were at the opposite corner of the building from the ATV, and that smoke wasn’t going to hang around till we returned. I sighed—we would have to leave without the 99-cent LED Christmas lights and the $2.99 angel slated for the top of the tree.

Gunfire erupted through the smoke, but it was nowhere near us. We’d taken another route to the registers, past the electronics department manned by one idle, gum-chewing clerk. Who wanted any of that? A few more steps, and we peered around to spot the registers. One was free! Elena emptied our pouches onto the counter as I watched our backs. One sniper was a little too obvious in his perch atop the greeting-card aisle.

“Would you like to donate a dollar to Operation Gratitude?” the cashier recited from behind her gas mask. Elena nodded, and swiped her credit card. We grabbed our bags, hurled two more smoke grenades and, moments later, were safely back in the ATV without too much further bloodshed.

Later that evening, our vehicle stowed safely in hiding, we celebrated our triumph with grim acknowledgment of the weeks to come. We’d made it alive through another Black Friday. Still, we’d barely get an hour of sleep before our next objective: Small-Business Saturday. So many bargains, so little time.

Say hello to my little friends

Last week’s freak storm saw our family, by the third night without power, clearing out for warmer climes. Which was probably a-okay with two of our next-door neighbors.

To this particular duo, what we might once have considered an old-fashioned polite disagreement about property lines has devolved into, two or three times a week, a shouting match. Not that we’re the ones doing the shouting; we’d look pretty stupid.

Then again, the subject never seems to come up when I’ve fired up the leaf blower.

A little clarification is in order. On one side, we’ve had the wonderful family we’ve known since the mid-nineties, when we bought the house. On the other, to the rear behind the shed, are much newer neighbors that, we've learned, prefer to keep to themselves. The humans, that is.

The Chihuahuas are quite another matter.

There are two. The one I’ll call "Tony" is actually the only Chihuahua; his sidekick, “Manny,” is another toy breed (alas, no off switch there, either) but might as well be a Chihuahua for the similar pitch and volume of his bark—not to mention his enduring reverence for borders. And, of course, there’s his penchant for following Tony out to bark at me each and every time I even open the back door. And once while I was in the kitchen with doors and windows closed.

You wouldn’t know from this situation how well I get along with most dogs—including “Omar,” ironically another Chihuahua, across the street. In one of our few conversations with Neighbor Father, he was holding Tony. The dog was shivering from the January cold and also in pain from a soccer ball that, said Neighbor Father, had hit him by accident. Without having been there (honest!) I knew there’d been no accident. I let Tony sniff me, which with most dogs meant the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Tony sniffed.

Tony growled.

The relationship has only gone down from there, mostly because Tony and sidekick Manny like to do to our yard what a few folks in the OWS crowd have been doing to Zuccotti Park. Silly me. Why walk your dogs in the rain or snow when you can let them out the door to roam the neighbor’s yard? For that matter, why wait for the rain or snow?

To be fair, I have to give Neighbors Mother and Father some credit. Once I began to chase those rodents—er, dogs—back to their yard swinging whatever yard implement was handy, Neighbor Father and Neighbor Mother took notice.

An invisible fence went up…or so they said. The dogs trotted right past the little white flags in defiance. Eventually, a metal chain-link fence followed. It’s four feet high; the dogs couldn’t jump over it no matter how hard they tried. Not that they’d need to try. Even small-brained dogs, after all, quickly deduce when a fence borders a rectangular property on only three sides.

Now that I think about it, the backyard has been strangely quiet since last week’s nor’easter. This past weekend, Elena and I picked up leaves for at least two hours with nary a yip from next door. Now I’m wondering. Could…could the storm’s high winds have carried the poor little things away?

Well, you know, it’s hardly my place to tell God where to aim His leaf blower.

Time to reset relations

I don’t play many tricks on my wife, but this one was a doozy. In the early days of PCs (and our marriage), we owned a Leading Edge computer that I apparently spent a little too much time using for Elena. “Leda,” as Elena dubbed her, was her competition, the “other woman.” And one day, Leda spoke her mind.

These pre-Windows machines ran a text-based operating system that fogies-in-training will recall as DOS, and when the computer was done booting up it would say so by displaying what was called a prompt; “C/:>” was the usual one. But geeks like me knew you could change the prompt to whatever you wanted. So one morning I asked Elena to turn on the computer while I was shaving, and—to keep her at the screen—to launch a certain program. This time the prompt read: “GET AWAY FROM ME I WANT MY EDDIE:>”

That behavior could be explained. Today, we’re ready to call in an exorcist.

The letters “O” and “X” stand for hug and kiss, so I guess her name is Hug Kiss Hug. In retrospect, that alone should have raised a flag for Elena, but it’s not like a kitchen timer could name itself. It was electronic and could time three events at once, with a different alarm for each timer. And we found the five-ounce doodad (here’s a picture) at Williams-Sonoma, Elena’s fantasyland. What could go wrong?

Plenty, we were to learn. It wasn’t that it was complicated to set up or use. Once its clock was set, once whenever we replaced the battery, all we needed was to press a button for which timer we wanted to set, use the numerical keypad to set the duration and press stop/start. It seemed simple enough.

One day, though, we noticed something peculiar—the timer’s clock had reset. No big deal, we thought. You didn’t even need the clock at the right time in order to use the timers. But OXO seemed to notice one certain geek who couldn’t stand to have a digital clock suddenly displaying “12:00.”

Things at home were never quite the same. OXO began resetting her clock several times a day, each time with a four-beep announcement we took to mean “Me! Me! Me! Me!” It would often happen when we set something too close by on the counter. But over time we could be on the other side of the house, several steps from the kitchen, when we’d get the call: “Me! Me! Me! Me!” She knew, after all, that I’d soon appear to reset her clock. To make things worse, OXO would not reset if Elena was out of the house or in another room while I was alone (with her) in the kitchen.

Eventually, we couldn’t even set the timers for anything whatsoever. Whether I noticed her clock wrong and tried to reset the clock, she would cry out with all three timer frequencies simultaneously, show unfamiliar symbols (Babylonian pictograms, maybe?) on her little LCD screen, and screech multiple sets of her four-tone cry. Elena has stopped asking why I use the pronoun “she,” for she knows I will keep resetting the clock, over and over, giving her the attention she demands until I can walk away quietly.

This very moment, in fact, I have her sitting quite complacently beside me as I write. No clock-resetting, no shrieking. She has what she wants. For now.

Okay, a little correction. That day everything began…it wasn’t quite an accident. Daughter Katie was over, and it seems she’s inherited a smidgen of my geekdom. At the same instant, we wondered aloud: “What would happen if we set all three timers to go off at exactly the same time?” Apparently it was too existential a question for OXO’s little Chinese-made processor.

Her time may be coming. Resetting her clock and distorting her display, we can deal with. Polyphonic screeching, okay during daytime. But the night she starts levitating or speaking in tongues other than tones, out she goes.

Unless Elena gets her with the sledgehammer first.

When apartment life was a project

There’s lots of yapping these days about owning one’s home as a way toward grasping the American Dream. I can relate to that, all right. Just the thought that every bit of mowing, raking, tightening, replacing, fixing, painting, weeding, planting, cleaning, watering, drying, trimming, oiling, and myriad other ings is solely ours to do is surely the stuff that dreams are made of. Nightmares, too.

Still, as someone who grew up in one of “the projects,” those New York City-subsidized apartment buildings sprinkled throughout the boroughs in the ’50s through the ’70s, I often think back fondly to my youth. Apartment living, I must admit, is something I never fully appreciated.

Even in the apartments Elena and I once called home, we learned early that we’d always have company besides one another. Almost like gated communities, both had sentries at the entrances. We certainly felt secure from the day we moved into our first apartment, when one accompanied us in to check the condition of the cabinets that had just been put in—but not into hers. (She was so, let us say, congratulatory.) In our second apartment, the other sentry cared so much about making us feel safe that we could bring nothing into the building without, all the way to our door, explaining where we’d gone and what we were carrying. You can’t get that kind of security just anywhere.

Once it was just the two of us, apartment life was only looking up; they were the first years of our marriage, after all. But in my earliest years, in the New York City-subsidized apartment I lived in with my parents and five older siblings, life was better described as a series of ups and downs. What else could it be since I lived on the 10^th floor and needed the elevator just to check the mail?

After the kindness of most of our neighbors—I’ll get to the others shortly—the next-best part of the projects was the elevator. Regular readers of this blog will recall my everlasting appreciation for riding up with the next-door neighbor we affectionately called Mouth. But he clearly didn’t make that big a splash in my early years. No, the big splash is what seemed to hit the elevator floor, several times a day, moments before I stepped in to use the elevator for its intended function. Every apartment in the building, I was to learn, really did have a bathroom.

But I clearly benefited. Riding the elevator after such routine generosity taught me how to stand on my toes, a skill I’ll recall the day I take up ballet. It taught me to hold my breath for a whole minute, longer if the previous occupant had thought to press all the buttons before getting off. That will help when I become a deep-sea diver. And from the occasional instance when the entire elevator floor was awash, I exercised my biceps by pressing the opposite elevator walls while holding my feet aloft. Trust me…I’ll come in very handy the day we’re together pushed down a narrow, watery pit of snakes.

In my late teen years before I entered the military, I trained for boot camp by habitually going both up and down the stairs. For that, I have neither Mouth nor the wayward weer to thank. My true inspiration? The rampant practice of “stucking.”

Before you decide I’ve lost my grip on the English language—and welcome me at last to the Internet community—let me explain stucking. Most elevators today have inside and outside doors that open in unison, either from one side or from the middle. Our elevators instead had an inside door that opened by itself, plus a hinged outside door that required a person on the floor to open it.

Here’s where it got interesting. Once the inside door closed all the way, the outside door locked. But in the instant before the outer door locked, if you pulled it open only, oh, about an eighth of an inch and held it, the elevator’s passengers (typically me) would be stuck with the inner door closed tight and the elevator going absolutely nowhere. To these kindest of neighbors, I owe thousands of dollars of therapy for curing me, in advance, of any claustrophobia I’d been planning to develop.

As an adult visiting my parents, I’d sometimes run into some of the same kids, now grown with kids of their own, who’d delighted in stucking me. The obvious temptation, nice fellow that I am, would be to ask their thoughts on how life had stucked them from rising out of public housing. But it never was to come up: All smiles, they treated me almost like family.

Still, I’m still taking no chances. Someday, keeping up a house will get to be too much for us. That’s when we’ll downsize to a smaller place. But if it’s an apartment, I’ve just a couple of preferences. A first-floor unit…a secret entrance….

A little too much for women to swallow

You might think that after 26 years of marriage, a woman would feel she knows her man. Elena certainly would. And she did…until she walked in and saw me watching that show again.

I guess I know what you’re thinking. Browse your own TV channels, and you never know what is suddenly there before your eyes—never mind if you’ve got young, impressionable kids. It’s there. And I got caught dead to rights. Even worse, it’s time I admitted…I’m a fan.

Of Man V. Food.

“You’re watching that again?” she inquires. As a matter of fact, I am.

In case you haven’t seen this Travel Channel show or the successor show Man V. Food Nation, I’ll spoon-feed the details: A fellow named Adam Richman tours the country, taking on the challenge to eat whatever humongous entrée some bar or restaurant says nobody can eat. That nobody should eat it somehow never enters into it, which is part of the fun. And it looks nothing like the new food portions the government has begun recommending—to replace a food pyramid that turned out, for a populace growing in girth, to be merely the tip of an iceberg.

During the show, he leads up to the actual meal by describing the restaurant, interviewing its cooks and showing how the dish in question is prepared (make that “piled”) and, in the process, building what passes for suspense. His experience? Besides having eaten food every day of his life, he has a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale. No, I don’t know how that explains things, either. Maybe more food in my stomach would help.

“It would be a better show if they didn’t always have the same stupid guy.”

When I first heard of Man V. Food, I was attending a trade show in Las Vegas. As it turned out, the Nascar Café in the very hotel I stayed at served a dish that was featured on Man V. Food. The Big Badass Burrito (B3 for short) is an 18-inch, six-pound missile aimed at your heart, not to mention your ego. The good news? You can have one for free. The bad? You have to finish your whole meal to dodge the bill. And those rules. You have only 90 minutes to finish the burrito, and you can just forget about going to the bathroom—or even standing up—till you're done or the clock runs out. I have a feeling most of every B3 served stays in Vegas.

Fail to finish the B3, as one foolish guy did as I dined nearby, and your photo joins those of many others before you on the “B3 Weenies Hall of Shame.” And you pay $20 plus the cost of whatever drinks you foolishly thought would provide lubrication. Alas, the B3 itself might be doomed—the Sahara Hotel, which included the Nascar Café, closed this spring. Guess somebody was eating up the profits.

“I can’t believe you watch that show. Every single one is the same.”

No, I explain, they’re not all the same. Sometimes Adam finishes the dish and, well, sometimes he doesn’t. And there’s another part I must explain. I myself am trying to eat less these days, barring the occasional buffet on the road. And pizza. Pulled pork. Okay, okay, those Drake’s Apple Pies, too. But besides all that, I’m watching portions more than I ever used to. I scan labels for the sodium, the high-fructose corn syrup and those dastardly trans-fats. What I won’t eat, though, I ingest through my eyes—which were always bigger than my stomach. What better escapism than to watch a guy stuff himself silly on meals prepared contrary to all medical advice…before a cheering crowd?

The more I think about it, the more I realize Elena has a point. In fact, I’ve conceptualized a better spin-off to Man V. Food than the unimaginative Man V. Food Nation. The new show I envision wouldn’t just give a truer challenge to our hungry friend Adam. It would also keep my wife glued to her seat. Somehow, though, I’m not sure I myself would watch Man V. Dishes.