DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My 4-month-old son has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for two massive, head-jerking, whiplash-inducing double takes. Before old age takes over and my brain finishes ossifying, I’ll commit the stories to the global digital archive, which unlike my memory has a decent chance of lasting more than 15 minutes.

Last Fall, my forward-thinking (and still-pregnant) wife retrieved an infant doll from the toy bin at her office, with the idea that we could practice diapering without the added stress of a wailing baby, flailing limbs, or fresh warm feces. I wasn’t particularly motivated to play papa with the doll, so I ignored it, and like anything that sits in one place in the house awaiting attention for a couple days, it became invisible. I forgot about it.

Then one day, in a rush to shower and dress for some event or other, I dashed into the bedroom. Out of the corner of one eye, I spied what appeared to be a newborn baby laying naked on its back on my side of the bed, arms reaching up as if to say, “Just because I was born a couple weeks early doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like a diaper right about now.”

It’s totally unreasonable to believe that (a) my wife would give birth without my knowing or (b) even if she had, that she’d leave the baby unattended and naked in the bedroom, on my side of the bed no less. Just tell that to my visual cortex. Or my heart, which stopped.

The second neck-wrencher happened just a couple weeks ago. It, too, regards diapers, but then what about newborn babies does not? Raphael was in the middle of a diaper change when I noticed, glancing sideways from one eye, what appeared to be a clump of gray pubic hair on his testicles. The juxtaposition of old-man-pubic-hair with hairless-newborn-infant was too much to process rationally. Had my head spun any faster I might have knocked the house off its foundation.

The hair turned out to be a piece of fuzz from the lamb’s wool playmat, which I’ve now taken to shaving daily as preventive maintenance for my cervical spine.

We lost the most recent* ANWR vote, but apparently it’s still not too late to prevent oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

Check out the Earth Day Virtual March. Sign up today; have your signature delivered to your senators on Earth Day (April 22).

The Virtual March is a joint project of Care2.com and Defenders of Wildlife. So far, over 15,000 people have signed up.

(See: Talking Points on ANWR)

*Remember that Bush’s desire to drill for oil in the wildlife preserve has been beaten numerous times before. He won the most recent vote, but that’s only one of many. Common sense may yet prevail.

Steve Heimoff of Wine Enthusiast Magazine wrote a puzzling story for the weekend Chronicle magazine: a tale of forgotten reservations at a high-end restaurant. It’s a quick read, and worth a couple minutes: Without Reservation: The price one pays for a world-class dining experience

Anyone familiar with the Northern California culinary scene will recognize in less time than it takes to smoke the saute oil that Heimoff is writing about The French Laundry. Yountville becomes “Yondertown,” The French Laundry becomes “La Lavanderie du Paris.” The famously elusive reservation agent, the long drive, the months-long wait for a table all stay the same.

Two things about this story fascinate me. One is that Heimoff got away with $300 worth of the best food in the country, for free. Sure, he had to eat it in his car. I’ll admit that even Thomas Keller’s star would shine a bit less brightly if he was working at a drive-through. But still.

The second thing is the transparency of Heimoff’s fiction. Maybe the whole story is a ruse, a poke at the ridiculous over-the-topness of the entire French Laundry experience. Or maybe Heimoff has a bitter pill to grind, to remix a metaphor, as would anybody who drove for two hours in a suit, anticipating three hours of culinary pampering, only to be turned away at the door.

But if it really happened, why not write about it? Why disguise it?

Curiously, Heimoff’s “Yondertown” morphs to “Yonderville” by the middle of his story, rending a hole in the thin gauze of fiction.

Plastination is in the news.

A plastinated 13-week-old fetus was stolen from the California Science Center in Los Angeles on March 26. It appears from a surveillance camera that two women simply opened an unlocked display case and grabbed it. No motive has been determined.

The AP report, Two Women Sought in Theft of Fetus, ends with a quote I found mildly ironic: The director of the Institute for Plastination said, “How can somebody do this … it’s such a disrespect.”

In related news, SF Chronicle columnist Adair Lara interviewed some of the people behind The Universe Within, in a piece called Seeing Dead People (a curious play on a line from The Sixth Sense, in which, as far as I can remember, nobody was plastinated, although Bruce Willis’ emotive skills can occasionally be described as such).

Lara reveals that Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of plastination (which loyal readers of debris.com already know), has taken in a billion dollars through his traveling Body Worlds exhibit. Small wonder he has competition.

I met a number of people at Etech whose work I’d seen before. Invariably one of my initial reactions was to think, you’re much shorter than I would have guessed. But I suppose this is to be expected, considering that I’m eight-foot-seven.

Steven Levy was at the conference. His 1986 book, Hackers had a huge influence on me in college. It was the first time I’d seen the expression, “Information should be free.” I have vivid memories of writing a paper about the Hacker Ethic for a philosophy class approximately 100 years ago. I spoke with Steven briefly, until he gave me a look like “I’ve gotta sit down in the lobby and wait for the limo,” and I reluctantly let him go, pretending, too, that I had a really important meeting in my hotel room with the stained carpet and bacteria.

Another famous (not particularly tall) author, James Surowiecki, whose name caused everyone who attempted to pronounce it to stumble, gave a presentation on concepts from his recent book The Wisdom of Crowds. The book’s premise would have you believe that polling the approximately 500 conference attendees about the correct pronounciation of “Surowiecki” would, assuming you could filter and refine the answers through some sort of market function, result in the precisely correct pronounciation.

There’s a great transcript of Surowiecki’s Etech talk on Wade Roush’s weblog.