This morning I threw caution to the wind and listened to
The Greg Kihn Show
instead of NPR, like a responsible fiber-eating person. Greg Kihn is
sometimes pretty funny, despite what Pat says,
and he has this great grizzled old rock star voice.
Anyway, during the show, Kihn mentioned that at his last Niners game, he and the
crowd chanted, “Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball!
Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball!”
Kind of like
“Fight Fiercely Harvard!“,
I guess.
Kihn, in true Dave Barry form, swears he is not making this up.
“The really cool thing,” he said,
“was that we did repel them and they did relinquish the ball.”

Hard to believe we’re 12-4.

Sunday pretty much stunk. I was trying to finish a story, but I had decided that
not only was I going to have an accelerating relativistic rocketship, but that the
timing of all the messages from earth were going to arrive at the correct times,
as opposed to merely sorta plausible times.

I had some initial successes in deriving some of the
equations
I needed, but then I got bogged down. My final answers were
were nonsense. I soon became obsessed, and wasted pretty much the whole day.

It was probably the inital success that sucked me in. If I had utterly failed
from the start, I would have been frustrated, but I would have given
up a lot sooner. And then I would have spent my time actually writing the story,
instead of indulging in physics snobbery. (“Ha! all those other rocketships move
at constant velocity! Mine accelerate at 1g!”) Sheesh.

Not only did I forget what was important about the story, but I also forgot
to eat, somehow. And so I was feeling pretty crummy around dinner time, when
I realized that not only did I have a ton of other stuff to do, but I was
supposed to be at my old roommate’s wife’s birthday dinner at 8:30 in
San Francisco. I just couldn’t handle staying up late and socializing on a worknight.
So I called them up and flaked. Then I felt bad about that, so the only
thing left to do was to drive over to my parents’ house and have them feed me homemade
vegetable stew.

It did the trick.