The Travels of a Real-Life Sheldon

Our friend's son is doing post-doctoral research in bio-chemistry in France and hopes to be the first to

publish his findings on a particular protein, the name of which his parents can't pronounce.  If you've ever watched "The Big Bang" on television, take Sheldon's smarts and height and add a few pounds and a shock of auburn hair.

When Jed was ten, his mother would call him but he wouldn't respond.  He was solving something in the outer galaxies somewhere. Finally his father would yell, "Earth calling Jed, earth calling Jed."

Jed eventually answered with, "I can't process that disc right now.  Give me a few more minutes."

Jed recently traveled from France to Boston to visit his family.  He didn't fly from a large Paris airport, but used a smaller one outside the city to connect in Belgium for his final leg home. The small airport had no amenities except toilets and a coffee machine.

Typicallly, he arrived late - fifty minutes before departure - with a hockey bag of belongings and his computer.

"Sorry, we've closed the baggage intake," the agent said.  "You have two options. You can buy a ticket for the next flight in two days and check your bag then or fly without the bag."

"Where can I leave it?" Jed asked.

"You could destroy it," the French agent said.

"Don't you have any trash bags?" Jed asked in a soprano voice.

"Sorry, sir, we don't."

Without time to think of another alternative, Jed hurried outside the terminal. He found a large bush with loose gravel underneath and......buried the bag.  He made his flight before the ramp closed, computer slung over his shoulder.  Mom and Dad would have to provide a toothbrush and some clothes.

In Brussels, he was escorted off the plane by security.  "Come this way, sir," two guards said. They led him to a detention room because he'd been flagged by the agent at the counter.  After an hour searching his computer, they decided he was safe to board to Boston.




Following his visit, his parents drove Jed to Logan International Airport for the return flight.  Halfway there, Jed discovered he'd forgotten his papers stating he was employed in France. They were back at the house and there was no time to turn around if he wanted to make the flight.

Without work papers, Jed was again forced to wait till he cleared security.  Since he was flying without luggage, work papers, or a round-trip ticket back to the States, his parents had no alternative. They bought a refundable one-way ticket back to Boston - for $3,000 - and were told that if his work visa was found, they could get reimbursed.

Which they did, eventually.

Jed's duffel bag was never found.

Video of a Losing Coach's Inspiring Words

As former residents of Cumberland, Rhode Island, for twenty-three years, it is with pride I share this link.  The Cumberland Little League  team, ages nine through twelve, won the New England Regionals this year but lost in the Little League World Series last night in double-elimination.

My husband, Charley, coached one of the Little League teams in Cumberland between 1979 and 1983. Both our sons played on his team and won the town championship.

Fast forward thirty-one years, as we watched our sons' assistant hockey coach, Dave Belisle, on television at the helm of the Cumberland Little Leaguers!

Please click on the link below to watch and hear Dave's words for the team last night after their loss. They serve as a reminder how to motivate and encourage children, while underscoring the benefits of team sports.

www.providencejournal.com/sports/content/20140818-donaldson-dave-belisles-wonderful-words-to-his-cumberland-little-leaguers.ece

The Alien Baby

In a recent article in The Providence Journal titled, "Baby's Brains Rehearsing Speech" (July 28, 2004), Katherine Long reported that even seven-month-old babies are "mentally working out the mechanics of how to form words with their mouths, well before they're able to utter their first recognizable syllable."

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, emphasize the importance of speaking to babies from the minute they're born.  They also reinforce a longstanding observation of scientists:  that babies get the most out of one-on-one human interactions, such as speech or games, which can't be replaced by high-tech toys.

Which led me to think about the comic genius our nation lost this week - Robin McLaurin Williams.

How did he learn to take our common language and reshape the sounds, mimic it, recreate its rhythms, or semantically take it on a flight to elongate a story?  Did his mother talk to her toddler in dialogue with different characters' voices?  Reported to be shy in high school, did he learn his rubbery versatility at Julliard or was he coiled with manic energy as a child?

His impersonations as sometimes troubled lunatics or offbeat authority figures showcased his gifts in movies like "Dead Poets Society," "The World According to Garp," "Good Will Hunting," and "Mrs. Doubtfire."  But the role I most remember was in "Good Morning Vietnam."  It was there his feverish free associations reigned supreme.

However his brain reshaped his mother's words into loose-knit spontaneity, he remained an alien we understood.  When he used pure sound in an octave higher (or lower) than his own speaking voice, somehow we understood (like a woodpecker's "rat-a-tat-tat-tat").  His imitation of dialects and his mumbled asides took us on free associations, but somehow we followed. His routines stretched stories out to the planets, then brought us back with a snap, like Mork's rainbow-colored suspenders.

Yet he remained an alien.  His ability to play disturbing characters ("Insomnia," "One Hour Photo"), gave his genius the freedom to expand and grow inside characters we couldn't like.  He was tormented with interior demons, we know, living in a universe most of us will never inhabit, like his disturbing characters.  But unlike them, he will always be loved.

If only we had a clue as to the sounds he heard as an infant, we might begin to understand the development of his creative powers. They might have been the same sounds we heard in his stand-up routines, sounds that, like his genius, couldn't be contained.

Robin McLaurin Williams   1951-2014

Two Plane Stories

I recently read a post on Peter Greenberg's blog (Out of the Office) titled, "The Crazy Things We'll Do to Get on a Plane."  Peter is the Travel Editor for CBS News and says he travels 300 days a year around the globe.  I will be paraphrasing two stories from his blog here.

A friend of Peter's was booked from Lagos, Nigeria, to London on a 727. He received a hand-written boarding pass two hours before flight time.  When the flight was called, the crowd bolted onto the tarmac and ascended the stairs to the plane.  It crushed past the lone gate agent and one timid policeman.

Within two minutes, according to Peter, there were fifty people stranded on the stairs and tarmac who had boarding passes but no seats.  Punches were thrown and the army was called in.  A lone colonel arrived.  He shot his weapon into the air and the mayhem stopped.

"Everyone off the plane," he ordered.  "No exceptions!  Drop your carry-on bags under the fuselage." He lined up all the passengers under the left wing.  "Stay here till you hear me fire my gun again," he said.  "Then run completely around the plane once, grab your bag, run back under this wing and up the stairs.  The first 125 will get seats."

Which they did, even the little old ladies.  After 125 passengers boarded, huffing and puffing, the colonel barred the doorway, firearm ready.  The 50 "losers" had to wait two days for the next flight, when the colonel showed up again, just in case.

That story doesn't sound so crazy now, with the Ebola outbreak there!

In his second story, Peter tells of a flight scheduled to leave Beijing at 10:00 a.m. for Hong Kong.  The year was 1999.  Peter waited from 8:00 till 10:00 without any call to board.  AT 10:20 a.m. a Chinese gate agent announced, trembling, "Plane is very sick.  Please walk to next gate and we take that plane."

However there was no plane at the next gate.  Around 11:30 a.m., an aircraft landed and taxied to that gate. At 1:15 p.m. the same gate agent stuttered, "Very, very sorry again.  This plane more sick than other plane...so we take...other plane."

All the passengers, including Peter, boarded the first "sick" plane...and took off. "Why in the world did I do that?" Peter is still asking himself.

Which reminds me of a a flight Charley and I were taking from LaGuardia to Florida on Delta.  We had boarded and sat on the runway in a queue of twelve to take off. Half-asleep, we heard, "Sorry folks, we have to turn around."  That was it?  In the dark and in pouring rain we disembarked in some remote corner of the airport to take buses back to the terminal.  Dogs sniffed our luggage, strewn on the tarmac. Ambulances and fire trucks surrounded the plane. A phone call had threatened to blow up our flight!

We waited...and waited.  When no bomb was found, we were given the option to wait for a flight the next morning or re-board and proceed south.

We landed that night in Florida without incident but to this day we wonder, What were we thinking??

Link to Newspaper Article on "Fist Bumps"

Here is the link to the complete article on the study of hygienic fist bumps vs handshakes and high-fives:

www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/fist-bumps-hygienic-handshakes-scientists-article-1.1884534

Fist Bumps

Charley has been trying for at least two years to get me to stop shaking hands after tennis matches. He claimed that I was picking up germs during a handshake of even moderate strength that lasted for just a few seconds.

I watched the men doing their fist bumps after matches and told him I thought it would be insulting to finish a match and approach someone across the net as though I were going to punch her. The ladies give firm handshakes to be polite, win or lose. We don't want to be viewed as poor sports, and certainly not competitors with a wimpy grasp, even if wet and slimy. In fact, I seem to remember a rule in the Palm Beach County Women's Tennis Association handbook about the necessity of handshakes after matches.   There's a rule for everything else, so that must be covered, too.

"Suit yourself," Charley said.

Turns out he was right.

According to a study at the Institute of Biological, Environmental, and Rural Sciences at Aberystwyth University in Wales, fist bumps are 20 times more hygienic than handshakes and 10 times more hygienic than high-fives.  It's because the fists have a smaller area that touch each other during the bump.  Handshakes, on the other hand (ha ha), have an average of 24.4 square inches of contact and last an average of three seconds, longer than high-fives and fist bumps. An average of 124 million colony-forming units of E.coli were transferred during the three-second handshake in the tests.

That's right, researchers at the Institute actually donned sterile gloves and dunked their hands in "a soup of de-fanged Escherichia coli bacteria, then shook hands, high-fived, or fist-bumped with one another."
In addition, they used an instrument to measure the grip strength of various handshakes and found strong handshakes transferred the most bacteria.

Imagine a researcher coming home from work and the wife asks, "Did you have a rough day, dear?"

"Oh, it was lethal."

I'm still not convinced I could approach someone with my fist after a match.  So I have another solution.  Why not do the butt bump?  It would be a lot more fun and wouldn't transfer any germs.  I know I'd enjoy seeing NFL players doing the butt bump instead of handshakes!

Link to NY TIMES article about robot caregiving

Here's the link to Louise Aronson's article in the NY Times on Sunday, July 20, 2014, titled,
"The Future of Robot Caregivers."  It also links to her other publications on healthcare.

http://www.louisearonson.com/news