Ahab had his whale -- I have a hedge

When I was a child, TV commercials came with advisories like, "Professional test pilot. Do not attempt at home with Radio Flyer."

I always found these warnings useful, and many times I know I was dissuaded from attempting to fly in my little red wagon, eating fire, or jumping the Grand Canyon in a specially modified motorcycle because of these warnings.

Now that I'm older, I wish certain pastimes came with similar advisories. Who wouldn't benefit from caveats like, "Mr. McCandless is a professional landscaper -- do not attempt this by yourself."

I know I would benefit.

I say this because my struggle with the Ugliest Hedge in the World has extended into its fourth month. More than six feet tall when I moved in, the hedge now looms even larger in my mind.

By day, it dances tantalizingly before me, as ugly as the girl who put paste in my hair in kindergarten. By night, it robs me of my sleep and fills my dreams with horrible visions until at last I awake, screaming, "The clippers! Get me the clippers!"

For the first time since I read "Moby Dick" in sixth grade, I understand Captain Ahab. I, too, have a white whale to chase.

I hate the hedge. I want it gone. I'd chase it round the maelstrom and through Perdition's flame just to get rid of it. If it could walk, that is.

I'm not sure why I hate hedges so much, but I've always considered them to be among the ugliest plants known to the front yards of mankind. If I had my choice of having a hedge, the living disembodied head of Richard Nixon or a queen-size mattress in my front yard, I would pick the mattress every time.

As it happens, I do have the mattress, but Natasha and I keep that on the side of the house, completely out of sight. We briefly considered getting Nixon's head, but we decided that after "Futurama," that just wasn't original enough.

I'm stuck with the hedge, but I want to be rid of it.

Burning it out would do the trick, and could even reinvigorate the yard, just as the 1987 fires out West took Yellowstone National Park to previously unknown heights of glory. The problem is those fires first had to burn a third of the park to a crisp. I'm not yet ready to risk losing the house.

Because the hedge has grown up along the edge of my property, I feel compelled to chat with my neighbor and sound him out before I avenge myself upon this monstrosity.

I've dropped by time and again, but my neighbor is never around. I finally decided the hedge has to go anyway. Last week I took my hedge clippers outside and, as a blue corona of energy illuminated them, not unlike St. Elmo's Fire as it lit Ahab’s harpoon, I swore I would bring the hedge down or die trying.

Last month, I had trimmed off everything the hedge had grown during the summer, and a little bit more. This week, I cut off an entire foot.

That's my strategy. The hedge will grow new leaves to replace the canopy it just lost, and eventually, it will look fine, only shorter than it used to be, and then it will be time to strike again. Right now it looks shorter than it used to be and -- hard as this is to believe -- uglier. All the cut and leafless branches stick out on top.

I figure if I can maintain a subtle pace, my neighbor eventually will look over at my house, think to himself, "Didn't there used to be a hedge over there?" and, unable to remember a clear delineation between hedge and no hedge, will simply scratch his head in confusion and go back inside.

It may sound implausible, but it's worked for a number of my friends with their hairlines, particularly the aforementioned Mr. McCandless.

My struggle this past week was arduous. Previous trimmings have left the hedge armed with pointy sticks to poke me with, and its branches in many places are too thick to trim effortlessly and too dense to trim quickly. By the time I finished, I had spent more than two hours on the job.

"No, you can't get away," I gasped as I tried to cut one particularly troublesome stalk at the base. My breath was coming in rasps, and the trimmers grappled ineffectively with the thick stem. I had to add my left hand to my right to find the strength to squeeze the trimmers through the wood.

"From hell's heart, I stab at thee." The blade cut into the thick branch. "For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee." With one last squeeze, the blades cut the hedge trunk right through.
I watched in great delight as the harpoon sank into the flesh of my personal white whale and left a rather satisfying scar. With a crash, it fell.

Unlike the good captain, I've survived my ordeal. Moby Dick dragged Ahab to his death. All I have is a few dozen scratches on my arm and a sore hand. I'm a winner.

Of course, there are still about five feet of hedge left to go.

Crises in leadership today's politicians should face

There are two things that disappoint me every election cycle, without fail.

The first is that we still haven't initiated a hunting season to thin out the ranks. Anyone familiar with the ongoing political process at the federal level has to agree that some thinning is needed. The herd has become so large that politicians are foraging for voters earlier and earlier each year. Some of the most promising candidates are getting bumped off because they can't compete with the less interesting, albeit more powerful, ones. Hunting season is definitely in order.

The second thing that annoys me about elections is that no one tackles the really important issues, the ones everyone really cares about. Most politicians discuss programs and projects that are more involved than quantum physics and less comprehensible than tax laws.

Saving Social Security, paying back dues to the United Nations and gun control are all important issues in their own right, but none of them are issues that really get masses of people up in arms.

Any politician who steps forward with a commitment to tackle these issues is going to get my vote:

1. Stupid holidays. Most holidays serve some purpose, at least originally. Memorial Day has been demeaned to merely the first barbecue of summer, but at least its stated purpose is to remember all the fallen in our nation's wars. What's the story with Columbus Day, anyway?

The whole point of Columbus' trans-Atlantic trips wasn't to seek out new lands and new civilizations or to embark on an age of discovery. All he was after was finding a new way to get to India to avoid the bandits along the established trade routes, and he couldn't even get that right.

Off course by more than an entire hemisphere, Columbus still refused to admit to the queen or to his crew that he was lost.

"I know it's around here somewhere," he'd say in typical-guy fashion, bumping into one Caribbean island after another.

If Columbus at least had taken his wife with him, she would have made him stop at a gas station and ask for directions. Then he could have discovered the alternate trade route and done something worthy of history.

2. Check-out lanes. Maybe I'm missing the point, but I thought the whole idea of an express lane was that it was supposed to go fast. At this point, I'd be happy if "express" meant the same thing in a supermarket that it means to express mail delivery; i.e., it takes less than 24 hours.

3. Tailgaters. In the 13 years I've been driving, I have seen exactly one driver respond to the recommended practice of taking one's foot off the gas and coasting.

Much more frequently, these goobers actually have continued to tailgate me, even when there are other lanes they can move into and pass me to their hearts' content.

4. Police who just want to give out tickets. Most of the men and women in blue I've met are decent folks, but it seems like there's one Constable Elbow in every department.

These are the officers who follow you for 30 miles, just waiting for you to do a California stop or for you to go one mile faster than the speed limit.

One time, I was pulled over in Bridgewater, N.J., for speeding, even though I had already had slowed down to the established limit. Officer Elbow pulled me over anyway, and hit me with three tickets.

If the police are that hungry for excitement, maybe they should help thin out the political herd or pull over some tailgaters.

5. Parents who give their children common names. There ought to be some sort of running tally somewhere in Washington, D.C., that monitors name use, similar to the way e-mail providers keep track of user IDs.

If too many people have the same first name, hospitals would have to tell new parents, "Sorry, that name is already in use. Can we suggest Dave3124?"

6. English measurements. There is nothing more frustrating than trying again and again to find the right ratchet socket, only to discover the car manufacturer is still using an outdated measurement system. It's even worse when other parts of the car are in metric.

Nothing tops the recent fiasco around the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million spacecraft of NASA's, paid for with our tax dollars, that burned up in the Martian atmosphere.

Lockheed Martin Co., the contractor for the project, used English measurements instead of the metric ones employed by every other member of the scientific community in the world.

As a result, our tax money is a slagged monument on Mars to the lack of intelligent life here on Earth.

My wife and I have a couple friends who work for Lockheed. The next time I see either Astro or Dan, I plan to hit them on the head with my metric ratchet set until they get the idea.

7. People who complain too much. Enough said.

I should add that I used to be bothered by political posters that say "Vote Drake, Quince and Elwood for Township Council" and put the party mascot on the sign as if that were all that matters.

Such signs say absolutely nothing about who these jokers are or what they hope to accomplish if they get elected. It does, however, say that they frivolously spend money on shallow campaigning efforts that do nothing to educate the public, in keeping with standard practice for upper levels of government.

This no longer annoys me, however, since I've decided to look at the entire issue from a new perspective. They're investing in the local economy, which means the people who put up the most and gaudiest election signs care the most for local business.

Now if we could just get them to do something about those checkout lines.

When scientific inquiry brings Armageddon to your doorstep

Somehow I always assumed that if it weren't the politicians and lawyers who would destroy the world, it would be the used-car salesmen.

Or the newspapers. I never could decide.

Instead, to my horror, I discovered recently that it will be none of those. For once, this is a calamity we can't blame on the lawyers, the godless liberal media or the guy who sold me that maroon Chevrolet Celebrity that always had something wrong with it.

A group of nuclear physicists associated with Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island may be setting in motion events that could end the world sometime this autumn.

I can't help feeling disappointed by this discovery. If the world ends in mid-November, I'll have done my Christmas shopping for nothing, I won't get to see if Y2K is as bad as some people say it will be, and I probably won't even get to eat the drumstick at our annual Thanksgiving dinner.

The biggest disappointment, of course, is that I wouldn't be able to cover the end of the world because it would have happened outside my coverage area.

Lest you think that I've been reading too much bad sci-fi, I must assert that I base my statements on news reports disseminated by several notable media, including The Times of London, Scientific American and ABCNews.com, all fairly respectable news outlets, despite their shortcomings.

See, the folks at Brookhaven, who have more degrees than my kitchen thermometer, hope to smash atoms together at high speeds -- much higher speeds than the traffic goes on the Garden State Parkway when there are no police about to enforce speed limits -- in a relativistic heavy ion collider.

The purpose of this experiment, besides gaining an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for "largest electricity bill," is to play a game of chicken with two gold nuclei and see which nucleus veers off first to avoid being smashed into quarks and gluons, which in scientific parlance means "itsy-bitsy pieces of matter."

The experiment promises to be interesting, even if the world doesn't end, since its stated goal is to recreate the conditions that theoretically existed in the universe a few milliseconds after the Big Bang. Scientists hope to get a better idea about the origins of the universe.

It sounds interesting, and even I can't wait to see what sort of complicated ways they'll find to say, "There were lots of little thingies flying around at high speeds and it was very hot."

The downside of this experiment is that some physicists -- particularly Stephen Hawking -- have theorized that a few milliseconds after the Big Bang is about when the universe's first black holes burst onto the scene.

Black holes, to the scientifically unaware, are nature's equivalent of vacuum cleaners, the chief difference being that you don't get to change the bag when it fills up. As soon as you get too close, the vacuum grabs onto the bunny slippers you do your housework in -- the ones you secretly enjoy wearing, even though you tell everyone that you wouldn't be caught dead in them -- and pulls them in.

Before you know it, you've been sucked right up the vacuum -- bunny slippers, ugly bathrobe and all -- and stuffed into a bag with all the dust and even those annoying pieces of string that ordinary vacuums can't seem to suck.

You, of course, really don't notice this very much because by this point the vacuum has smashed you and your precious bunny slippers to the thickness of ant's left molar or the number of people still reading this column, whichever is smaller. (Don't ask me. I'm not even sure ants have teeth.)
According to Stephen Hawking, black holes formed by colliding nuclei would fizzle out pretty quickly -- unless they happened to be located near a sufficiently large mass like, oh, say, a planet. Let's call it "Earth."

In other words, forming a black hole on the surface of the earth -- even if it is on Long Island -- is what physicists, in their highly technical, scientific jargon, call A Bad Idea.

How bad? I quote Walter L. Wagner, in his letter to Scientific American, which I found on that magazine's Web site:

"If this happened on the earth, the mini black hole would be drawn by gravity toward the center of the planet, absorbing matter along the way and devouring the entire planet within minutes," writes Wagner.

"My calculations indicate that the Brookhaven collider does not obtain sufficient energies to produce a mini black hole," he writes, to my considerable relief. But then he adds: "However, my calculations might be wrong."

I don't know about you, but I know I'm greatly comforted by that display of confidence.
Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., responded to Wagner's letter in that same issue of Scientific American.

"In the case of the Brookhaven RHIC, dangerous surprises seem extremely unlikely," Wilczek wrote.

He went on to explain in layman's terms -- which is good, because my knowledge of math never advanced beyond engineering calculus and my grasp of physics never progressed further than "Green Lantern" -- that Brookhaven is using less energy in its atomic collisions than hits the earth's atmosphere in the form of cosmic radiation. In other words, if a black hole were going to form under such conditions, it would have done so by now.

Still, I can't help but notice that Wilczek carefully specified "extremely unlikely" rather than "impossible," so that in the event the world is destroyed we'll have no grounds for suing him. I suppose in a society as litigious as ours, you can't be too careful.

I have to admit that given the knowledge and intelligence backing his and similar statements, I'm not too worried about the end of the world coming from experiments at Brookhaven.

After all, if the scientists fail to deliver Armageddon, we still have the politicians.

At Princeton U, they're building a better mouse

Like a number of other people around the nation, I read with great interest news accounts of the recently announced gene-splicing success at Princeton University.

A team of researchers, including Princeton University neurobiologist Joe Tsien, announced Sept. 1 they had engineered a super-intelligent mouse they named Doogie, after the teenager on the TV show "Doogie Howser MD," the rationale being that the character was an annoying little pipsqueak too (The Princeton Packet, Sept. 3).

This announcement immediately raises a number of questions among thoughtful folk. For starters, why on earth would an Ivy League institution pick a name with the initials PU? Even the University of Pittsburgh had the sense to put the U before the P so that the worst students at rival schools can say is only "Boy, your school is a real Pitt."

Why on earth would someone want to make a better mouse? With the sort of brains Princeton University attracts, you would think they could put their effort into something more useful, like designing a better mousetrap and dumber mice.

My first year living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, we developed a serious mouse problem. The tracking ball kept getting stuck, so it was next to impossible for me to get a high score on our laptop computer's copy of Solitaire during the relatively brief periods that we had electricity and I could turn the thing on.

But besides that, for a couple months we had problems with little brown furry creatures sneaking in and making off with food, including food in airtight packages. Haitian cats, of course, often are used for human consumption, with the result they're not easy to find, and we were forced to rely on mouse traps and our guard dog Gideon.

Gideon's own brush with rodent control came during my second year in Haiti, when a large rat climbed in the window while we were eating dinner. For half an hour, three of us chased the rat through the living room, trying to hit the rat with a sauce pan, a baseball bat and a can of Raid (kills rats dead?).

Gideon was the only one to connect with the rat, although Dan and I both beat a chair senseless trying to flush it out of hiding. Gideon grabbed the rat in his jaws for about three seconds, until it scratched him on the nose and got away.

The rodent problem persisted, even after we introduced a variety of poisons and rat and mouse traps. All we succeeded at was increasing the intelligence level of the average mouse in our home.

At first the smarter mouse -- no doubt also engineered by Dr. Tsien and his fellow researchers -- would convince his companion to run across the trap and see if it was armed. After this had gone on a few months, the surviving mice, born from the intelligent mice, had wised up to this trick, and formed a union to protest their unsafe work conditions.

As time went on, the mice would find ways to get the bait without getting caught, and find all sorts of escape routes from a trap that would keep even James Bond in maximum security.
Ever since "Tom and Jerry" debuted, mice have been getting uppity. Believe me, they don't need any extra help from Dr. Tsien.

My whole point, of course, is that mice are a pain in the neck to get rid of as it is. By adding the gene NR2B, Dr. Tsien allowed mice to learn faster and double their SAT scores with only a few extra hours of study. The experiment succeeded so well that two of the mice plan to take a full class load at Princeton University in the Class of 2004 if they can get enough financial aid.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking these recent discoveries and what they mean for the human race years down the road. With more research, the work Dr. Tsien and his colleagues have done could become the foundation for treating Alzheimer's disease, a few mental disabilities and generally making people smarter.

Who knows? One day gene therapy might even make a scientist smart enough to invent a better mousetrap.

Mattresses, maintenance and guests: the downside to home ownership

There are many stops on the passage from boyhood to manhood that we all know and celebrate: attending college, choosing a career, getting married and starting a family, and earning the Arrow of Light in Cub Scouts.

Another important step is home ownership. It's not hard to buy a home -- anyone can buy one who doesn't mind slaving away for 30 years to get out of debt -- but home ownership is rife with responsibilities.

There are obvious ones common to homeowners: set up the baby's room, cut the grass, water the garden after the lettuce dies, replace the basement stairs before they collapse, add a banister to the main stairs before someone falls, remove the world's ugliest hedge and hire an exorcist to drive out the ghosts that torment guests and do weird things to the toilet.

The work is never-ending, but I am proud to say that Natasha and I finally are making some headway. The baby's furniture has been arranged, we have plans for the banister and basement stairs, and the hedge, while still in our front yard has been trimmed and is not quite as ugly as before.

Natasha and I don't live in Amityville, so we don't have any ghosts to deal with; instead, we have a queen-size mattress. The mattress doesn't drag chains across the floor, it doesn't give me nightmares, and it hasn't ever gone to the bathroom and forgotten to flush the toilet, but in its own way it's just as disconcerting.

When we moved in, the mattress was leaning against the fence in the back yard. Natasha and I left it there, under the impression that someone was coming by to pick it up. That was three months and one hurricane ago.

The mattress now sits out of view on the side of our house, covered with leaves, cobwebs and other indescribables. If the owners wait much longer, it won't be useful for a bed anymore.

We could get the trash collectors to pick it up, except we don't want to pay the extra pick-up fee. We could ignore it, except there's probably some obscure law on the books in New Jersey that says mattresses must be kept inside the house.

Our best hope for disposing of it appears to be saving it for kindling at our Y2K "Collapse of Civilization" extravaganza this coming Jan. 1.

The mattress lingers on my list of "Things we must get rid of," along with that hedge and the collection of branches, brambles and other yard debris stacked up in the back yard. My mind dwells on that unholy triune with all the obsession a dog gives a well-gnawed bone.

"Maybe we could bury it in the back yard," I told Natasha. "We could dig a shallow hole, toss the mattress in and cover it up. After the grass goes to seed, no one would ever know it's there."

If you think about it, it makes sense. In "Arsenic and Old Lace," Teddy buried 12 bodies in the basement at the behest of his aunts, and no one objected. Compared to that, a mattress in the back yard is nothing.

Natasha wouldn't go for it. She put her foot down immediately. If she had been on the basement steps at the time, they would have collapsed.

"You're not going to bury a mattress in the back yard, and that's final!"

This is in keeping with my track record on other holes in the back yard. Longtime readers may remember that earlier this summer I dug a compost pit for the garden out of a sense of family tradition; that is to say, my father had a compost pit when I was growing up, and by gum, I wanted to have one too.

Well, I did. For about four weeks.

The compost pit was filling nicely with corn cobs, potato peels and other sundry organic matter, except for what the squirrels stole. I was thinking there might be hope next year for our garden, which this year produced about $1.25 worth of tomatoes before the bugs ate them.

(According to one school of thought, the value of those tomatoes should be equated with the cost of the house since the tomatoes are all we've received from our investment so far. In that case, we had more than $100,000 worth of tomatoes this year, far more than my father harvested the first year of his garden.)

The Monday before Labor Day, Natasha and I had some friends up for dinner. My friends, who I won't identify here, except as "Dan" and "Kathy," brought along their three children, whom I'll call "Tim," "Tyler" and "Anna" to protect their privacy.

While Dan and I barbecued chicken on my grill, Tim, Tyler and Anna gave me a dramatic lesson on childproofing homes. Their lesson took the form of a game that involved kicking Natasha's basketball around the back yard and bouncing it off various stationary objects and the odd person or two.

The only complete write-off was a flower I had planted by the patio. My hosta plants, sufficiently large to withstand the judgment of the flying basketball.

I was secretly disappointed when the basketball plowed into garden, not because it killed anything, but because it didn't. If they had aimed a little more to the left, Natasha and I would have lost our entire crop of brussels sprouts. Now we have to eat them.

(I tried to get the kids to kick the basketball into the hedge and mattress, but my attempts were unsuccessful.)

The compost pit became a magnet, first for the ball and then for the children. I don't think any of the trips into the hole were accidental, but just to be safe I filled the pit that week.

With the compost pit filled, there are no more jokes about the grave in my back yard. All that's buried there are half-rotted vegetables, and if a mad scientist stitches old potato peels together and reanimates them, just give me a deep-fryer. I'll have Frenchenfries eaten out of my hand in a matter of minutes.

But that mattress won't go away. At least, it hasn't yet. Nor have the sticks and fallen branches.

"I wish we had a wood-chipper," I said one day, my imagination filled with images of mulch I could put on the flower bed out front.

"You're not going to mulch a mattress!" Natasha protested.

"I was talking about the sticks," I explained, but immediately I began to warm to Natasha's suggestion. "That's not a bad idea. The wood-chipper could grind up the stuffing in the mattress, as well as the fabric and we could mix it in with the rest of the mulch, or blend it in with the garden. It'll biodegrade eventually."

And so it continues. The hedge remains. The mattress is slowly growing a crop of mildew on the side of the house. The pile of sticks in our back yard is growing steadily larger, and other chores are starting to pile up as well. There's no escape.

I have only one regret: I wish I had finished my Arrow of Light while I was still in Webelos.

The perils and perpetual appeal of ponytails

I've always felt that if a superhero is allowed to do something, I should be allowed to do it too.

Now that I'm 29 years old, some people think I should have put comic books behind me, But who wouldn't get swept up into Mark Waid's coming-of-age story "The Return of Barry Allen," in which Wally West, the Flash, grows out of the shadow of his predecessor? Who could ever forget the psychological problems of Alan Moore's heroes in "Watchmen?" And who wouldn't want a ponytail like Superman had in the mid-1990s?

Back in the 1950s, Superman fought for Truth, Justice and the American Way, all with capital letters and George Reeves' potbelly, and that meant he had his hair cut short like a good Marine. But after Superman died in 1992, the man from Krypton came back in 1993 with long hair. As a means of concealing his secret identity from his arch-enemies, he wore it as a ponytail as Clark Kent.

Ponytails make a statement about their wearers. On a large hairy man who rides a motorcycle and has the word "Ma" tattooed on his bicep, a ponytail says, "Call me a sissy and I'll break every bone in your body."

A ponytail on the head of a business executive, on the other hand, says, "Don't even think of calling me a sissy or I'll get my dad to fire you. He's chairman of the board, you know."

In the case of Clark Kent, the ponytail clearly said, "OK, so I have rippling muscles, disappear whenever there's a crisis and just before Superman appears; and maybe I do survive the most incredible accidents, but I'm obviously just a investigative journalist."

Who wouldn't want a ponytail like that? Heck, forget the ponytail. Just give me super hearing like Superman's, and I'll start getting better stories than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Pulitizer-winning coverage of Watergate.

It can be hard to grow a decent ponytail, even without the benefit of Superman's invulnerable hair. (I have an old issue of Action Comics in which Lois breaks a pair of scissors on Clark's mop.) For the past two years, I've been engaged in an on-again/off-again struggle for a tail that gets regularly thwarted just before the moment of triumph.

For me, I have to admit that the appeal in ponytails lies in their "hippiness" and the noncomformist approach they help to project. I don't like to be like everyone else, and one of the ways I can express that is through my hair length.

Ponytails on men have become somewhat acceptable socially since the 60s, but they still convey more than a hint of that nonconformist image. So I've long wanted to grow a ponytail, perhaps for the same reason I've grown a beard.

Back in 1998, I was off to a good start. After nearly eight months without a trip to the barber's, it was getting long enough that even the mayor of Montgomery Township remarked that it was starting to become a decent ponytail.

As luck would have it, that was in May, and Natasha and I had set our wedding date for June 13. If my hair had been another inch or two longer, I could have tied it all back and kept it. But it wasn't, and the progress of eight months was undone by a single trip to the barber's.

The committeewomen, who had hated the tail from day one, cheered. Natasha was indifferent. I was crushed, but I resolved to try again.

Slowly my hair got longer, and inch by painstaking inch, it reached first my collar and then beyond. In front, my hair grew longer and longer, making it hard for me to see when it fell down my face. There was no doubt in my mind. I was going to make it.

Less than a month before my hair would have been long enough to tie the front hairs back into a tail, the managing editor position for the Hillsborough Beacon and The Manville News opened. It meant a raise, more control over a newspaper than I had as a mere reporter, a chauffeured limo and a personal trainer, all at company expense.

Well, I made up the bit about the limo and trainer, but this is a position of some local importance. I tied my hair back one final time, and made the fateful trip to the barber one cold morning.
Snip snip.

That was six months ago, but I've given up. My hair was getting long again, so this week I made a trip down to the Hillsborough Barber Shop, paid my $14 and got it whacked off again.

I just wish I'd get X-ray vision to compensate.

Baby names redux

About a month ago, I asked readers to send me their suggestions for baby names. The response was, shall we say, memorable.

My wife and I are expecting our first around the end of October -- right around the time, I might add, that the United Nations expects the world population to reach 6 billion.

Never let it be said that I don't have any readers. I have received more than 100 suggestions for baby names, and I assure you Natasha and I gave each one the individual attention it deserved.

As expected, several people suggested their own names for the baby. Kimberly may be "a lovely name," as noted by Kimberly Brooks; and Minx may be "the best name ever," as stated by free-lancer Minx McCloud; but neither of those names is what I really wanted.

Surprisingly, only one reader submitted a name that was a play on the baby's last name. That reader was Lynn Winters Mineo, and in an e-mail, she asked me, "How about Olivia Anne Learn? Her nickname would be Liv Anne Learn."

Ba-boom-cha. I won't ask Ms. Mineo what names she picked for her own children, but you can rest assured my heart goes out to them.

That was it for the common names. Among the more unusual names suggested were Latrine and Garage Door, again suggested by Minx McCloud.

"These names are good because they are nongender-specific," she wrote.

Thankfully, Minx doesn't have any children, so we don't have to worry about how she might have warped her own progeny with sobriquets like Encephalitis McCloud and Cholera McCloud.

Several people suggested themes. John Harris, in addition to suggesting names from the recent -- i.e., later than 1970 -- Star Trek TV shows, suggested a few guidelines based on the "Dragonriders of Pern" fantasy novels by Anne McCaffrey.

"Use variations of more traditional names, varying the spelling or pronunciation, or inserting an apostrophe in unconventional places," he said. That would present suggest like B'Lair, or Jahn.

Another theme was suggested by Sam Clover:

"The novelist Nicholson Baker, author of 'Room Temperature,' called his baby girl in that novel 'the bug,'" he wrote. "You could follow suit on the insect theme with 'beetle' or 'butterfly.'"

My big fear with having a daughter named Butterfly Learn is that some demented entomologist will try to collect her, or if we go with Cockroach Learn, that someone will step on her. But Musca Domestica Learn does have a certain appeal, and the first two names even end in A, which makes it an automatic girl's name.

Andrew Yoder suggests the following:

"A good masculine name would be Atilla the Learn. For that matter, you could always try for Feminine Learn or Estrogina Learn and Masculine Learn or Testosterone Learn."

Other names on his list include: Bar Bell Learn, Southern Belle Learn; geographical names like Newark Learn, Easton Learn, and Egg Harbor Learn; and cartoon names like Shaggy, Velma, Bugs, Daffy, Goggles, Ricochet and (of course) Bullwinkle Learn.

The scary thing is, I know this guy, and he does have children.

A few people suggested Star Wars-type names, ranging from Ewok Learn to Jar Jar Binks Learn. My favorite suggestion along these lines came, again, from Sam Clover, who suggested a combination of letters and numbers, a la R2D2 and C3PO.

All things considered, the single most impressive list of names came from someone identified only as Ted. (Well, I have his e-mail address too, but it really would be rude to print that here.) Ted included a list of fonts that he took from Microsoft Word 97, complete with what these names would suggest about the baby.

A partial list: Arial, if the child appears to be overtly attentive; Bookman, a studious child; Braggadocio, a boisterous, overconfident child; Colonna, a fibrous child; Lucinda, a clairvoyant child; and Webdings, a scatterbrained Internet-ensconced child.

And of course, Helvetica. "Don't know what kind of child would have a name like Helvetica, but what a great name!" Ted writes. "Perhaps her middle name could be '12.'"

I'd like to thank everyone who suggested names for us; at this point, I think Natasha and I are stocked up on names for at least 50 more children, and neither one of us is anxious to have that large a family.

There was one final contributor worth noting. Michelle Graham, an old friend of Natasha's, sent me a list of unusual words from the dictionary, and also included this note:

"When I was in elementary school, I wanted to have fraternal twins (a boy and a girl) and name them Oreo and Orea. Hmmm ... maybe you shouldn't ask me for advice in the area of nomenclature."

It's always an adventure, living with psoriasis

Something about a medical condition brings out the nascent expert in everyone. It doesn't matter if you have the hiccups or acute appendicitis; once people see you have a problem, they're all over you with advice.

This is not my back. But it could be.

I know this because I have psoriasis, a stress-related condition that produces dry skin flakes that rain from my scalp and arms like the dandruff from hell. The flakes themselves leave behind unsightly raw patches of skin, which attract questions and sometimes concern over what happened to me.

I prefer the questions to come from children, who assume I have some sort of "booboos." No adult would ever believe me that an airplane hit my head, or that my wife rubs my arms with sandpaper every night to leave them all rough and crusty.

One boy at church to whom I've told the latter story several times recently wised up to my fallaciousness. He wants to know what my wife really does to me.

Adults usually assume I have poison ivy. Now I'm aware people can get poison ivy in unusual places, particularly when they're out in the woods without toilet paper, but don't you think it would be a little odd to rub poison ivy all over your scalp, back, arms and legs?

I'll admit I do some weird things, but having a poison ivy fetish just isn't one of them.

To my knowledge, the only real cure for psoriasis is ultraviolet light; everything else -- like coal tar, topical steroids or whatever else -- simply makes the affected skin more sensitive to that light. But that doesn't stop all sorts of other remedies from hitting me on all sides.

"Yessir, I once had psoriasis, but then I found by rubbing a quart of 10W30 motor oil into it and wrapping it in a fresh boneless chicken breast every day, I was able to clear it right up," said one fellow. "If you like, I can get a chicken poultice for you right now."

Um ... no thanks.

"There must be some sort of antibiotics they can give you," another person said.

Not really. Antibiotics fight infections, not genetic conditions, and I don't want someone rewriting my DNA. That's too "Gattaca." Unless they give me some sort of superpowers. If they help me grow a nice rack of antlers, or give me the superhuman ability to read road maps, gene splicing would be okay.

"Maybe they could irradiate your skin to get rid of the psoriasis," another person once suggested.

Psoriasis is bad enough; I don't want skin cancer too.

"Skin grafts."

Puh-lease!

Despite the homegrown quacks, there are some people with legitimate success stories I want to look into, usually involving one topical cream or another. Phil Murphy, a fellow missionary I knew in Haiti, had something that worked just fine for his wife.

"Lonnie used to have psoriasis like you," Phil said. "But it all cleared up when she gave birth to Michelle."

That would be really handy in another two months if I were the one pregnant, but since my wife is carrying the baby, somehow I doubt it will help me much at all. If anything, the increased responsibility will just make my psoriasis flare up even more.

My experiences with psoriasis go back 12 years, when I was an exchange student in Rotorua, New Zealand. The first patch I ever grew was located on my lower back and was about the size of a silver dollar. It finally cleared up when I was in college, but not before my scalp had erupted in it.

Since college, work-related stress has caused the psoriasis to flare up again and again. It's all over my scalp, where it's mostly covered by my hair, except on the top of my forehead and behind my ears.

I have other spots the size of small pancakes on my arms and legs, a particularly large one Natasha refers to as "the goose egg" and enough smaller ones on my arms, legs, sides, back and stomach that I look like a living connect-the-dots puzzle.

Once or twice we've tried looking for shapes like people often do with clouds.

"Does that look like a camel to you?"

"No, it looks more like Mount Rushmore. See? Here's Washington's head, and Lincoln's ..."

In biblical times, people with psoriasis were considered lepers and consigned to leper colonies, where they would spend their lives as social outcasts, and eventually get the real thing. Today, that's true only of a little less than one person in three.

My wife is a traditionalist, however, and wants me to ring a bell as I walk about, and shout "Leper outcast unclean," the treatment the Bible prescribes for lepers in Leviticus 13.

In the end, I'm told it will all become moot. Psoriasis fades away with age, so by the time I'm 80, I'll just have to worry about liver spots instead.

Living with the curse of the family garden

Recently I have come to feel the full weight of an ancient curse God once levied upon humanity.

It's worse than the curse of Tutankhamen, worse than the mummy's curse that legend credits with the fate of the Titanic. This one's a real doozy: Children are destined to do the same thing their parents did.

Now you should understand that at my parents' home in Saunders Station, Pa., my father has a huge garden, easily 40 feet wide and 25 feet deep if it's an inch. Dad loves that garden, and spends several hours in it every weekend, pulling weeds, watering the plants and generally avoiding any housecleaning.

One summer in the mid-1980s, dad planted three rows of Swiss chard. For the entire summer those bitter leaves showed up in everything we ate. We had Swiss chard salad, Swiss chard sandwiches, Swiss chard casserole, Swiss chard on our hamburgers, Swiss chard with our cereal, and Swiss chard in our pancakes.

Dinner became a screaming match as the four of us would shout in unison, "No! Not Swiss chard again!" and Dad would say, "It's good for you; have a no-thank-you helping." (No-thank-you helpings were my parents' way of making us eat things they knew we hated. I once tried to outsmart Dad by asking for a thank-you helping, and regretted it immediately. To this day, I insist on serving myself lest I make the mistake again.)

Relief finally came that summer when we offered to help Dad weed the garden. First we weeded out the actual offender, followed shortly afterward by anything that looked remotely like it. Many innocent plants were martyred for the great cause before we felt safe.

"Carrots?"

"Dunno. Could be related. Rip 'em out."

"Tomatoes?"

"Don't take any chances."

Dad still plants the stuff, but only half a row, and he never serves it to our mother or to us when we visit. He's probably afraid that if he tries, we'll soak his garden in gasoline and burn the whole thing down.

Now one of the other things I should note about my father's garden is that it's made entirely of red clay. Red clay, to the horticulturally challenged, is really bad for growing things. It has virtually none of the nutrients plants need to grow up healthy.

Dad's solution was to conscript my two older brothers, and later my younger brother and myself, to dig a compost pit. Into that pit went pulled weeds; old litter from our menagerie of rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs and gerbils (they themselves eventually were composted separately in small cardboard boxes buried throughout the back yard); raked leaves; bad produce and other organic waste.

The result of 20 years of composting is that Dad's garden now rises noticeably above the surrounding yard. This is handy in the spring, when rain turns the yard into a swamp, but it makes life difficult for the local topographers, who have to update their maps every couple years to show the steady increase in elevation.

The irony is this: Even with all the composted leaves, egg shells, potato peels and God knows what else, Dad's garden is still made of clay. It's almost black now, and he gets better produce than some farmers -- but it's still clay, as he found last summer when the sun dried it up and nearly killed the entire garden.

Despite my childhood travails in Dad's garden, I was thrilled to discover when Natasha and I moved into our new house that the previous owners had planted a garden in the back yard themselves. There are a few things in there I could do without -- like the brussels sprouts -- but there also are tomatoes, onions and a few herbs I'd never heard of.

As I was saying, the curse is coming to fulfillment and I am following in old dad's footsteps, albeit without the benefit of forced labor.

This past weekend I dug my very own compost pit. It's not as big as the pits we dug for dad since our yard is smaller and since he's not here to make me dig it any deeper, but it should be big enough.

"It looks like you're digging a grave," Natasha said as she stood over me in the hole.

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "Hey, could you do me a favor and lie down in this for a minute? I want to see if it's long enough."

She muttered something inarticulate and walked away.

I was feeling proud of myself for having done something so useful, so I called my younger brother Ward, who said I'd have been better off with some above-ground palettes. Such a set-up helps aerate the compost, encouraging actual decay instead of just putrefaction.

"You only dug one because dad had them when we were kids," he said. To his credit, Ward not only was right, but also tried to share my pride. "Well, how big is it?" he asked.

"Probably about 5 feet long, about 2½ feet deep and about as wide," said I.

"That's it?" he said, and started laughing like a howler monkey. "I thought you dug a big hole or something, the way you were talking about how long it took you!"

I thought of getting even somehow, but it's all right. Ward is two years younger than me, and I figure it's just a matter of time before the Curse of the Garden catches up with him. And when that happens, I'll be ready to help him out. You see, I know where I can some seeds for Swiss chard ...

baby names

My wife and I are in a sort of baby-name hell right now. It's been virtually impossible to find one we like.

We've chosen baby names twice so far, but we still keep searching for anything that might be better than what we already have selected. It's only natural. We'll be out at the movies, shopping for groceries or reading a book, and a chance association will suggest a name to one of us.

"What about Natasha?" my wife asks.

"No."

"What's wrong with Natasha?"

"Nothing," I say. "Except it makes me think of Boris and Natasha from 'Bullwinkle,' and besides, as Jeff Holton pointed out back in college, Natasha spelled backward is 'Ah, Satan!' and I don't want my daughter to have to live with that stigma."

And so it goes with name after name. We've rejected names from Ozymandius and Sennecharib to Zachary and Nicholas, and from Lilith and Hester Prynne to Helen and Kinsey. With only three months to go, there's a growing chance the baby will be born with no other handle than "Hey, you with the diaper."

The hell we're in is quite real. It's located within the Eighth Circle, sandwiched between the simoniacs and the grafters, with all the other futurists.

Everyone knows that unusual first names have the power to ruin a child's school years, and a child with a truly cartoonish name could plunge down The Dark Side faster than Anakin Skywalker and become U.S. secretary of defense, like Caspar "the friendly ghost" Weinberger did in 1981.

Natasha and I have to be especially careful in this regard since, in my experience, the last name Learn can be bad enough on its own. In fifth grade, one girl loved to call me "David Learn About Words," after the vocabulary section in our reading class, and other children were quick with jokes about David "has a lot to" Learn. (Actually, some people still do that.)

My fellow students weren't the only ones keen to start an early career in comedy. Just about every teacher of mine thought it was clever and original to say on the first day, "Well, Mr. Learn, with a name like that, I don't think you'll have any trouble in this class."

So if the pressure isn't great enough already to come up with a good baby name, a group called the Society of Kabalarians has determined an exact mathematical formula for determining how your first name will shape your personality, personal relationships and physical health, as well your personal and business success.

I'm not quite sure how this is supposed to work, but they have all sorts of impressive-sounding babble and 60 years of experience of cultish thinking to back themselves up.

"Your name is your life! It is how you identify yourself. It is how others identify you," says their Web site. "The more insight you have into the powerful influence of your name, the greater opportunity to enjoy the success you are capable of achieving."

For only $60, they'll furnish the expectant parents with an in-depth name analysis that considers the baby's first name, last name and birthdate, as well as any lawn ornaments the baby may resemble in appearance.

I have to admit: I'm impressed. I thought only astrologers were this whacked-up.

But just to be sporting, I punched in the name Orpheus. I received a 255-word analysis that said a child with the name Orpheus would develop a quick, active mind, a desire to associate with people and a love of artistic expression, just like the mythological Orpheus.

The downside is a lack of organization and perseverance, a tendency to overeat, and a strong likelihood to get ripped to pieces by the bacchante after a failed bid at rescuing someone from the Underworld. So the name's not as great as it sounds.

In my search for good names, I've scoured great literature ranging from the Bible and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, to the Berenstein Bears' "The Spooky Old Tree" and "Uncanny X-Men," issues 99-142.

Natasha summarily rejected the names Lucio, Ma Bear and Cyclops, but I wasn't daunted. I have other irons in the fire. As soon as I learned we were pregnant, I asked friends and co-workers for help.

One person, with a clear love of "Popeye," has suggested names like "Sweet Pea" and "Bluto." Other co-workers, evidently the sort of people who made middle school so awful for the rest of us, suggested "Ubetta Learn," "Univer Learn" and "Livand Learn."

Even colleagues I have little direct contact with have suggested their ideas.

"I have always thought that 'Gordo' makes a lovely name for either a boy or a girl," said one fellow, whose nickname -- by purest coincidence, he assures me -- happens to be Gordo.

So I give up. If I can't come up with a show-stopping name myself, I'm sure my readers can do the job for me. What would you name my baby, if you had the chance?

Send me your thoughts, and I'll print the best responses here on a future date. Make sure you include your name so I can be sure to give credit where it's due.

It might not get me out of the Eighth Circle of Hell, but I'm sure it will make the stay a bit more pleasant.

senior moments

You have not lived until you have tried to keep step with a senior citizen on the dance floor, and failed.

Now it's not that I expected to be able to hold my own at ballroom dancing, or at any of those other formal-type dances that have been beyond my ken as long as I can remember. But I would have liked to think that as a 28-year-old, I would be able to hold my own on "The Electric Slide."

No such luck. My wife and I attended a dinner this Sunday to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Hydesborough Senior Citizens, and I was thoroughly put to shame. Disgraced. And not just on "The Electric Slide," but on "YMCA" as well. I held out fairly well on "The Twister," but by that time the damage was done.

I'm not sure what I expected when Lou Possemato, president of Hydesborough Senior Citizens Chapter A, invited me to attend the anniversary dinner. I don't recall ever seeing either of my grandmothers dance, but if I had, I'm sure it would have been done to the music of Bing Crosby or someone else truly sleep-inspiring at 16 RPM.

My maternal grandmother did enjoy listening to music. One of her favorite songs was "Why can't the English learn to speak?", the song Henry Higgins performs in "My Fair Lady." When my grandfather was alive, she would play that song on their gramophone so loudly that Queen Elizabeth II once sent her a letter asking her to turn it down or risk an international incident.

I credit my grandmother with my love of the English language and my decision to enter first teaching and now journalism. As a writer, I get to break with impunity all those rules she guarded so zealously, on the grounds that I'm doing it "for effect."

The bulk of my remembered activities with my grandmothers involves stories. A question about what there was for breakfast usually elicited fond memories of Uncle Webster, who in 1927 bought a boat for $50 -- which in those days was quite a lot of money, you know -- and took it south from Rhode Island to Florida with his one-armed nephew Cyrus, my second cousin, three times removed, as his only crew.

I usually enjoyed listening to those stories, and even when I didn't, I was too polite to leave. By the time she finished, four hours would have passed, and it would be lunchtime.

I rarely ever actually got to eat breakfast when we visited Grandma Ergood.

Somehow I never expected a senior event would be so, well, active. When I decided to attend the dinner, I think I expected to have a good meal since, in my experience, senior citizens nearly always eat well. After eating, I would be subjected to some boring speeches and more stories of Uncle Webster and Cousin Cyrus.

After that, there would be some rousing games of Scrabble or Bingo, and of course the regularly scheduled organ concerts. ("Oh, my heart"; "Oh, my liver"; "Oh, my kidneys" ...) Any dancing would be something suitably old-fashioned, like a waltz.

The last time I tried to waltz, I was an exchange student in New Zealand attending a dance run by a seniors group in Rotorua. Three different girls tried to show me to do it. I was in heaven with that much female attention, but I remained a miserable failure at the waltz.

Worst of all, the music was ballroom arrangements of songs like "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?" with extra verses thrown in for the seniors in attendance. Every time I started to get the hang of the steps, the little old lady at the piano would croon, "How much is that kidney in the window?" and I would lose my ability to concentrate.

In all, I was quite surprised with the dinner Sunday afternoon. The food was good, as expected, but most of the speeches were short, and Possemato lightened his comments with amusing stories that had nothing to do with Uncle Webster's rock band or Cousin Cyrus' wooden prosthetic arm eaten by termites after they reached Florida.

There was some traditional dancing, as expected, but after most of the honored political guests had left, about 30 seniors ran up front to do "The Macarena." I joined them on "The Electric Slide," and I'm embarrassed to say that they know the steps much better than I do.

I'm not sure I really was at a seniors dinner on Sunday. They seemed too young. Either everyone there was dressed up in elaborate costumes to make them look older than they were, or getting old is going to be a lot more fun than I thought.

summer frost

Now that July is here, I've decided it's time to break out my sweatshirts and other heavy clothing. I'm worried about getting frostbite.

This might seem odd, considering that the temperature for the past week has rarely dipped below 100 degrees, but I stand by my statement. For some reason, Americans have a fascination with air conditioning that drives us to get the temperature inside as cold as it is hot outside.

Maybe I don't mind the heat so much because I grew up without air conditioning. Maybe my blood is still thin from living in Haiti from 1992 to 1993. Or maybe everyone else has thyroid problems.

I just don't understand why we feel the need to freeze ourselves during the hottest season of the year. Humanity lived without air conditioning or fans for at least five years before they were invented. At least 3 percent of the world survives without those things today, even in the tropics, but you would never know it by visiting most public places around here.

The advantages to over-air conditioning are pretty clear for restaurants, since they can increase their freezer space by the size of the dining room, but it still boggles my mind.

One restaurant Natasha and I visited awhile ago had the air conditioning turned up full-blast before the season's heat had even begun in earnest. It might have been 80 degrees outside, warm enough to wear shorts, but not necessarily warm enough to go shirtless.

Inside, it was so cold that the hair on my arms and legs stood on end. I shivered uncontrollably. Hanging on the wall next to me was a frozen side of beef.

"Could you turn the air conditioning down?" I asked the waiter when he came to get our drink orders. I had to repeat myself twice because my teeth were chattering. "It's freezing in here."

The waiter looked down his nose at me, out of a fur-lined parka that looked like it had once been an Arctic seal.

"You're the only who thinks so," he said coldly. His breath misted in the air in front of him.

"Fine," I snapped, wondering if it would be bad form to chop the table up for firewood. "Leave it alone. But bring me a cup of hot chocolate."

Natasha grew up in the desert, so she's usually even more affected by the cold than I. This spring, when everyone else in our church was wearing shorts and light shirts, Natasha was still wearing her long johns under her jeans, and had a T-shirt and a flannel shirt under a heavy sweatshirt she's had since college.

"I have a high surface area-to-volume ratio," is her most common defense.

The members of our church have been running a pool since April on when Natasha finally would be hot and come to church in shorts and a T-shirt. Now that she's five months pregnant, Natasha finally did just that, much to the delight of the elderly woman who won the pool, which passed the $5,000 mark in late June.

Natasha impressed even me with how hot she's been feeling lately. When we moved into our new house, the previous owner told me he was leaving behind a some functional air conditioning units in the basement.

Since air conditioning units are great at driving up the electric bill, I figured at the time that we wouldn't use them.

Wrong. Last week Natasha said she'd really like to have one in the bedroom so she can sleep. Who am I to tell her no?

At least we got some extra freezer space out of the deal.

house shopping

There are times in life when madness overtakes the best of us.

The first time I had a brush with insanity was when I decided between my junior and senior years of college to write an honor’s thesis on the religious themes of classic Star Trek. It cost me the respect of all three of my friends, but fortunately Mr. Spock appeared to me in a vision and showed me the Vulcan way to peace.

Then there was the time I asked Natasha to marry me, even though I knew there was a risk that she might squeeze her toothpaste in the middle of the tube. (Actually, I’m so in love with her that I still pop the Question on a regular basis, especially since she uses her own toothpaste, but she tells me she's already married me once, and that was enough.)

The most recent dance around the fringes has been with buying a house. I’m not sure why we thought we needed to buy a house, but we closed recently, and so we are now the proud owners of a 30-year adjustable-rate mortgage.

The first step we had to go through was deciding whether we really wanted to buy one. Conventional wisdom has it that buying a houses is better than renting an apartment.

When you rent, you pay large sums of money on a monthly basis to some megarich cementhead with no idea what life is like for ordinary people on a tight budget. With a house, you have to pay money on a monthly basis to some megarich lending institution with no idea what life is like for ordinary people on a tight budget.

It’s a remarkable improvement.

Additionally, houses come with a lot of extra responsibility. As a new homeowner, it is my responsibility to procrastinate fixing the basement stairs and cutting the grass. When I rented an apartment, it was always the landlord’s job to put off that sort of maintenance.

Once we decided to buy a house, we had to find a good Realtor. A Realtor’s job as a superfluous middleman is to complicate unnecessarily what might otherwise be the rather simple task of finding and buying an affordable house.

Our Realtor took us on a wild searching spree all over Middlesex and Somerset counties at breakneck speeds to look at houses that cost $20,000 more than we could afford.

"You need to tighten your belt a little to get a good place," April told me when I objected to the cost of some of the houses she wanted to show us.

"I don’t mind tightening my belt a little," I said. "I just want to have a waist after it’s all over."

(I’m willing to bet April does squeeze her toothpaste in the middle.)

I soon learned that finding the right house is more difficult even than finding the right spouse. Before I met Natasha, I dated at most a half-dozen women, and went steady with none of them. During the week April was running us ragged, we must have looked at close to 20 houses. We saw townhouses, condos, tool sheds, caves with doors on them -- you name it, we saw it.

Some of the houses were downright frightening. One in North Brunswick was a two-story house selling for something like $120,000. That’s not so bad, but the second floor was really a converted attic, and every room was built on an angle -- a different angle. Oddest of all, the only way to the second floor was the staircase that was built in the bathroom.

"What were they thinking?" I asked once we made that discovery. I pictured our child bursting through the bathroom door to go upstairs or down while I sat there reading a magazine.

"They’d have to lower the price to $60,000 first, and I still wouldn’t take it," Natasha said, after we finished touring the place.

Fortunately, Mr. Spock appeared to me in a second vision, and showed us the only logical course of action. We settled on a two-story Colonial less than a mile from the apartment we had been renting.

The next step was easily the hardest. In a civilized arrangement, we would have called the sellers, dickered over the price and some minor repairs, settled everything, and then been able to close after a few weeks.

But I live in New Jersey, and civilized arrangements are usually against the law. Both the sellers and we had to hire attorneys to represent us during the discussions over how to handle minor repairs -- there was no railing on the stairs -- and major ones -- the roof wasn’t capped correctly.

Imagine coordinating a discussion with one middle party. Now picture two. Now picture four -- two attorneys and two Realtors. Then for good measure toss in a home insurance company, a mortgage lender, an entire religious order, a woman named Edith, and 27 gallons of tapioca pudding. That should give you a rough idea what we endured.

Somehow -- I still don’t understand how -- Natasha and I managed to close. Most frightening of all, we’ll probably have to do this again in the next five years as our family grows.

I’ve stopped flirting with madness. Mr. Spock is here to stay. But at least he assures me that Vulcans squeeze their toothpaste at the end of their tubes.

life as a movie

Life would be a lot simpler if it were like the movies.

Think of the angst that could be prevented just by adding a musical score. The minute someone walks into the room, you would know if the newcomer were an evil intruder because of the foreboding music. If there's romance in the air, the slow violin music would be a dead giveaway every time. It would have saved me a lot of trouble back in junior high.

If life were like movies, all problems could be solved within two hours, women would all be drop-dead gorgeous, men would be muscle-bound, and justice would prevail every time. (Women also would be inexplicably attracted to men three times their age, but I digress.)

Best of all, having a high-quality life wouldn't be a prerequisite for success. Just look at the most recent Star Wars offering.

(Not that I can afford to pay George Lucas $112 million to upgrade my life with computer enhancements. I would be more popular - except possibly for the Jar Jar Binks factor - but I'd hate to compromise my artistic integrity for Dave Learn action figures and Lego sets.)

There have to be ways to compensate for this deficiency. One idea that occurred to me recently was that stores and restaurants could distribute flare guns to their customers as they walk in the door.

See, my wife and I recently went on a quest to buy a toaster oven, which we finally found at a Target store -- sort of. They had a floor model with everything we wanted, but none of the boxes on the shelves corresponded to it.

In a movie, the camera would pull out to a wide-lens shot, and it would have been obvious to the entire store that something was wrong.

Instead, I had to work hard to get the attention of store employees. I marched up and down the aisles calling "Bartender! Bartender!" like a demented Daffy Duck, and still no one came to our assistance.

After a fruitless search, I grabbed the display model and carried it around the store until an employee stopped chatting long enough to scowl at me and see if I needed help. (I wonder what gave it away.)

The whole melodrama and spectacle could have been skipped if the store had given us a flare gun. Picture this: We reach the toaster section and find they're all out. Before panic sets in, Natasha pulls out the flare gun and fires a blue flare up into the ceiling. The light show alerts a manager, who grabs a walkie-talkie and sends help at once.

"Francine, this is Freddie at the customer-service desk. We have a mayday over in Aisle 12. The fat guy and his wife can't find the Iridium Pyew-39 Explosive Space Toaster."

Suddenly the time lost hunting for a toaster oven that they won't sell me - they don't sell floor models -- is cut from an hour to just under a few minutes. Department store owners, take note: Provide shoppers with something simple like flare guns, and customer satisfaction will go through the roof -- literally.

The other advantage to making life more like the movies is that you get unconventional solutions to problems, especially if you watch some of the same movies I do.

That would have come in handy last Thursday, when Natasha and I went to get our first ultrasound done of the baby at St. Peter's in New Brunswick. Darth Grappler -- our working name for a baby boy -- was every bit as reluctant as me to be captured on film, and so steadfastly looked down at Niki's spine.

The doctor, whom I will identify as Dr. Goosehead, decided the best solution was to shake Natasha's abdomen vigorously with the sensor like he was stirring a bowl of chocolate pudding. I won't print Natasha's thoughts about this here, since this is a family newspaper.

Had this been a movie, all sorts of sci-fi solutions would have been possible. We could have got Geordi to back up the toilets into the warp drive, couple the deflector dish to the impulse couplings, and plug in the Pac Man cartridge on Deck C. With all that done, Dr. Goosehead could have pressed the button on his command console, and Darth Grappler would have rolled around.

Another possibility was suggested by "The Phantom Menace." With a high enough concentration of midichlorians in his cells, Dr. Goosehead could use the Force to rock Darth Grappler gently in the womb. Alternatively, if Darth Grappler had a high concentration of the double-speak critters instead, he could have rocked Dr. Goosehead and not so gently. Actually, that would have been a lot more satisfying, ultimately.

And just think: If life were like a western, touchy confrontations would be great occasions for deadpan comments, like the immortal "Yep. Nothing like a good piece of hickory" from "Pale Rider."

After the ultrasound, Natasha and I made an appointment for a second one to pinpoint the baby's development more clearly. Dr. Goosehead walked over and told the receptionist, "I want them to come in for genetic counseling," without telling us what that was or why he wanted us to come in for it.

"Hello," I wanted to shout. "We're the parents; you can talk to us."

A much better solution comes from "A Fistful of Dollars." I can see myself standing before Dr. Goosehead in a Clint Eastwood posture.

"I don't mind a doctor who's rude," I could tell him. "But my horse is sensitive, and you hurt his feelings. I think you ought to apologize to my horse before someone gets hurt."

Ah, the drama we miss out on. Still, it's just as well life isn't more like the movies. With my luck, I'd be played by Jim Carrey.

it's a conspiracy

There is nothing quite like a good conspiracy theory, and even they have nothing on the really far-out ones.

Bad or cheesy conspiracy theories are easy to come up with -- just ask the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy. During the 1950s, he was able to whip up enough hysteria over communism to create dozens of rabid theories.

During the McCarthy era, everything was a Red plot. The decision to put fluorides in our drinking water was a communist attempt to alter our precious bodily fluids. The invention of margarine was a Red plot to undermine the dairy industry.

Actually, even good conspiracy theories are easy to come up with. Just find something or someone you don't like, find a few unrelated coincidences -- only two or three are necessary, but friends and family enjoy it more if you can list a couple dozen -- and then use some logic too sketchy to find fault with.

If coincidences aren't readily available and you can't make any up, a cover-up is always a good defensive posture to take since critics are reluctant to engage in further discussion at this point.

An example of a conspiracy at this point could be:

"The federal government is covering up UFO activity in the Northeast because it has an arrangement with the aliens to sell the citizens of Rhode Island for mind-control experiments, in exchange for technology. I had some evidence but it was all destroyed."

I can't argue with that one, can you? Just as a side note, my oldest brother once bought our father a $1 million insurance policy against abduction by aliens, payable in annual increments of $1. It's too bad Dad lives in Pennsylvania; we'll never get to collect now.

Aliens and government make for some of the best conspiracy theories -- and remember, there really is no conspiracy afoot among our elected officials, they just want us to think there is -- but my personal favorite has to be the media conspiracy. I don't know why; I guess I just get a kick out of hearing how powerful I am. The news media supposedly are engaged in an all-out assault on, well, everything.

If you believe the conspiracy buffs, we're out to see Bill Clinton appointed president for life, wipe out the Republican Party, cover up murders at area movie theaters, eradicate traditional morals and religious beliefs, and back business interests in New Jersey at the expense of the common man.

Oddly enough, we're also working hard to get President Clinton removed from office, wipe out all the third parties, undermine local businesses, enforce a harsh moral code that makes the Inquisition look like a day in the park, and smear all the businesses in New Jersey so they can't function any more.

Apparently there are a couple high-level conspiracies and I haven't been initiated into either one. (Actually I have, but when they hired me I had to swear in blood not to tell.)

Truth to tell, there aren't enough truly soulless people to manage any one of these large-scale conspiracies, not even in the federal government. Sooner or later, someone would feel bad for all the people in Rhode Island and would crack, and the whole thing would come out unless it were an episode of "X-Files."

I used to get annoyed by people who accuse the federal government of blowing up buildings in Oklahoma City, who feel the news media are the Great Satan for not obsessing as much as they do, or who are afraid to admire the beauty of the stars because of the little bug-eyed aliens in their minds.

But after a while, it occurred to me that they're only like that because of the satellites broadcasting microwave signals directly into their minds from Rhode Island that we in the media have refused to cover, and so I figure it's OK if they're like that.

voice of destruction

As I've grown older, I've started hearing voices. These voices aren't the sort that lead people to commit horrific crimes and make the news after a three-state police hunt, but I sometimes wonder if they don’t come from a different office in the same abyss.

What I'm talking about is the sort of voice that innocently asks, "Remember when you ...?" and sends people on a trip down memory lane.

It's a voice that makes people spend $15 to buy a videotape of an old "Speed Racer" episode they didn't like anyway. It's a voice that makes us go on wild roller coasters when we're told to keep our lunch down afterward. It's a voice that compels us to revisit childhood haunts and activities while making us forget how awful we thought they were at the time.

It's the voice of Satan, and it should be ignored at all costs. I know this because I recently let myself listen to this voice, and am still paying the price three weeks later.

On this particular occasion, the voice was all excited about bicycling. Investing a couple hundred dollars in a nice bike would give me the chance to spend more time outside, and if I rode the bike to work instead of driving, it would save us gas money and leave me a healthier man by summer’s end.

Despite the fond memories of riding my bike that the voice manufactured for me, I've never had a good relationship with bicycles. I used to ride one five miles every day on my paper route for The Pittsburgh Press, and in my 10 years as a paperboy, I had all the problems young boys have with bikes at that age.

The most frequent problem was getting my pants caught in the bike chain. For some reason, my first bike never had a chain guard, and my jeans -- I hate to admit it, but they probably had to be bell bottoms for this to happen -- would get stuck in the chain. The first time this happened, I fell over and was trapped under the bike for twenty minutes until a customer came out and saw what had happened.

My oldest brother, with his inimitable fashion sense, suggested wrapping my socks around the bottom of my pants to keep them from becoming stuck. Instead, I let my pants get caught a few more times, and finally just installed a chain guard.

On top of my paper-delivery spills and wrecks, I had a few more spectacular bike mishaps on my own time. I wiped out once on a gravel road one time and had to walk home with a red, raw leg. Another time, I took a trip over the handlebars that taught me the fear of God, steep hills, unseen potholes, and broken asphalt. Especially broken asphalt.

Fifteen years later, my forehead still has a few marks from one, and probably a few embedded bits of asphalt too.

But somehow that sweet-talking voice made me forget all that, and I ended up buying a 21-speed trail bike that I can use for my commute on slow days and ride off-road on the weekend on the area's wooded bike paths.

Commuting by bike has been an enlightening experience about New Jersey drivers I never would have received in a car. This has to be the only state in the union where motorists give bicyclists the finger for riding on the shoulder of the road. Nowhere else, I am sure do, drivers tailgate a bicyclist who's not moving 40 mph, even when there are other lanes to change to.

I take Route 514 for several miles during my commute, and even as a motorist I'm aware that it's a busy road, with cars and trucks whizzing by at 50 mph in some portions. And while traffic hardly flies on Route 206, with its perpetual gridlock, there are more than enough cars to make you feel vulnerable when all you have is a helmet to protect you.

With this in mind, it's easy to see what could have happened a few weeks ago, when I was riding my bike to work on a Thursday morning. I had forgotten to eat breakfast that morning, and was hypoglycemic about halfway through the trip. Despite this, I managed Route 514 all right, and even Route 206 was no problem.

The office parking lot was a killer.

I was literally about 100 yards from the office. I was going around a corner a little too fast, taking it a little too wide, and I saw a car coming. I didn't need to, but I put the brakes on ... a little too hard.

As the driver and his passenger watched, my bike screeched to a halt, and I flew over the handlebars onto the asphalt. I scraped my chest and legs on the ground, banged up both legs, and sprained my wrist and little finger so badly I couldn't use my right hand much for a week. I must have lost consciousness too, because I remember waking up to see people all around me.

"You klutz," my wife later said. "How can you have an accident in the parking lot?"

My co-workers were more sympathetic, but I think freelancer Minx McCloud summed it up for everyone when she came in and found me limping around the office.

"I feel badly about you being hurt in your accident, but I can't help but laugh at the thought of you flying over the handlebars," she said. "If only I had been in a bit earlier. I was having a lousy day and needed to laugh at the misfortune of others."

I'm not sure, but I think that voice of Satan might have been hers all along.

have a productive memorial day

Monday, Memorial Day, is a time for us to remember those who have fallen in battle during the service of our nation. It is a time for sober reflection on the cost of freedom and for remembering those who have died.

During the Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln reminded his audience, "We cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract...

"It is for us the living, rather, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

The task President Lincoln set before the people gathered on the Gettysburg battlefield is one no generation has yet completed. It is a task that awaits us as surely as it awaited the Founding Fathers, President Lincoln, and every other citizen of this nation. It is a task we dare not shun, because we have presumed to include it in the very foundation of the country. Many claim that America is the greatest country in the world. That is a bold claim, but it is matched by a bold dream of equality for all people, regardless of their differences. Historically, that dream has gone unrealized as we oppressed blacks long after the end of slavery, stole land from the American Indians despite endless treaties, and denied women a voice outside the home. As dreamers, we have made progress, but we still have a long way to go before the dream becomes reality.

Consider:

• In October last year Matthew Shepard was killed for being gay. Many were horrified at that crime, but others used his death to speed their hate campaign against homosexuals, complete with a Web site that counts off the days "Matthew Shepard has been in hell."
• Last fall, a group of white men chained James Byrd Jr. to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to his death in Jasper, Texas. Byrd's offense? He was black.
• In April 1993, the entire Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was destroyed after federal agents from the ATF closed in. In the ensuing blaze nearly everyone inside died. The group had had licenses for its firearms, and from the reports of survivors had been about to surrender when the attack occurred.

And while we experience the longest economic boom in history, poverty remains a problem, and not just in major cities. Even in towns in the Princeton area, people live below the poverty line and need assistance just to get by.

Some say the American Dream has failed; others, with a touch of melodramatic cynicism, claim it has come true. The truth is, the dream is waiting for the dreamers to catch up.

On Memorial Day, we remember the fallen. Their sacrifice reminds us of the task still undone: not to die for our country, but to live. This generation, like every generation before it, contains the architects of tomorrow's America. It is for us to make America a land of individual freedom for everyone, a land where parents and children can live without the sting of bigotry, a land where we truly celebrate our differences instead of forcing others to be like us.

The American Dream is a good one, and the dead we will remember on Monday gave everything they had for it. As the beneficiaries of their sacrifice, we can do no less.

battle of the bulge

About three months ago, I decided this was the year to get back in shape.

Weight problems run in my family; actually, they run in our country. I read recently that something like a third of the country is considered "seriously overweight." Although I don't have my own ZIP code, I've been forced to admit that my gut hangs out farther than it should.

"Look dear," my wife told me recently. "Your belly is larger than mine!"

Ordinarily, that would not mean much since Natasha's stomach has been as flat as a washboard since the day I met her. But since she's four months pregnant, it really drove the point home. She drove it home even further when she started playing games like "See how far we can put a finger into Dave's belly button."

The F word has become one of her favorites. "You're fat," she teased me.

"I'm not fat, I'm big-boned," I lied.

"In the belly?"

So, much to my dismay, I have to admit that I have a weight problem again. The last time I was this overweight was back in college. After graduation, I moved to Haiti for two years and dropped more than 40 pounds, putting me at the lightest I had been since high school.

Of course, a good part of that weight loss came from things like dengue fever, amebic dysentery and tapeworms. I want to lose the weight again, but not that badly.

The chief culprit here is my eating habits. I love food, but unfortunately I don't have the metabolism I did as a teenager to burn it all off.

It's frustrating to watch my wife, who does have a high metabolism, eat and not gain a pound. It's even worse now that she's pregnant, because her appetite is increasing and so she's eating all the time. At least in a few months her belly (I hope) will be larger than mine.

As every weight-loss expert will tell you, proper diet is important to any weight-loss program. Nutritionists consider a balanced diet to come from the food groups.

My middle school health teacher defined those groups as dairy, bread, meat, and fruits and vegetables. In the past few years, I personally have redefined the food groups as soft drinks, french fries, pizza and cookies, preferably with chocolate chips.

So the first step of reducing my weight theoretically is to improve my eating habits. Just cut the junk and get back to those fruits and vegetables, and I'll be fine, a voice from middle school tells me.

If only it were that simple.

As fate would have it, there is a Pizza Brothers restaurant within walking distance of the Hillsborough Beacon's office. It would be easier to resist if their pizza were bad or overpriced, but it's not. It's cheaper than the national chains, I don't need to tip since I walk over there, and I like it.

"You go to Pizza Brothers a lot," Natasha said two weeks ago as she looked over our credit-card bill.

Even in the office there is no escape. Mary Stulack, the newspaper's office manager, keeps a tin on her desk filled with candy for us to eat. On a good day, when I demonstrate self-control, I'm out in the reception area three or four times to check the mail, and decide as long as I'm out there, I might as well take a few pieces of candy.

Two weeks ago, the tin was filled with gum drops, which I don't like. As a matter of fact, only one person in the office does like them, and it took forever for the gum drops to disappear.

It was hell. After waiting in vain for a week for Jack to eat all the gum drops, I drove to the ShopRite and bought a bag of bite-size Three Musketeers for the tin.

So here I am, fighting the losing battle I have fought since I became a journalist. How do you stay in shape at a job that keeps you at a desk? At least as a teacher, I walked around the room constantly to help students, keep their attention and stop them from cheating.

Whatever the answer is, I have to find it fast. The postmaster general recently called to let me know they have a few five-digit numbers that are still available if I want one.

world's end

A little more than two months ago, the world was knocked out of orbit and flung into uncharted space.

My wife and I are expecting. A baby. Our first one.

This is a big event for me, bigger even than finishing my first novel, or when I discovered Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" series of trade paperbacks. It even tops the time a stampeding goat ran over my brother at the petting zoo.

"How did this happen?" I asked Natasha recently. "I don't remember filling out an application to have children."

She tried to explain it to me, but I'm afraid I didn't quite understand it all. What kind of sicko entrusts babies to people who haven't even taken a qualifying exam? I'm still a tender young lad of 28 myself. Who decided I was cut out for being a father?

My pastor tried to reassure me during a recent panic attack that becoming a father really isn't the end of the world.

"People have been having babies for a long time, at least 20 years," he told me. "So far, they've managed to survive the experience."

Of course, if the people who have been having children for the past 20 years were having this one, I wouldn't be alarmed. They obviously know what they are doing by now. But Natasha and I are complete novices.

A baby. The thought makes my mind reel. This is an even bigger responsibility than the time I was asked to cut Mr. Schatz's grass for my brother 17 years ago. I blew that one so badly that Mr. Schatz never asked Herb to mow the lawn again. What's Mr. Schatz going to do to Herb if I blow this one?

I never realized how involved having a baby would be. For starters, everyone keeps asking us if we have found a name yet. One friend of mine -- let's call him "Brian Tarantino" -- observed during his own wife's pregnancy that you can tell people you’ve settled on a name like Quagmyra, and even though they think it's an ugly name, they'll lie and say how lovely it is, especially if you tell them that Quagmyra is your mother's name.

So far I've found that's true. The only disapproval Natasha and I have encountered for the girl's name we've settled on has come from family members who know my mother's name is Ellie, and not Quagmyra.

On top of the whole name struggle is the matter of preparation. A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law hit us with the question of a theme for the nursery. I usually leave such details to the last minute -- my wedding party had to appoint a best man for me, for example -- but Rhonda won't let us off the hook so easily. She insisted we select a theme.

"Rabid moose," I wrote her in an e-mail. "I want nursery decorations that show wild moose foaming at the mouth."

"I'm not going to buy my niece or nephew clothes and toys with rabid moose on them!" Rhonda wrote back, even after Natasha suggested a wild-animal theme, complete with birds, frogs and moose.

I suppose eventually my world will stop spinning and settle into a new orbit, perhaps a stabler one than I've been accustomed to before now. A friend of mine with two sons has observed, "Marriage is the tie that binds; children are the stakes that hold it in the ground."

That's undoubtedly true. But I still wish someone would give me the instruction manual.

y2k

I got a call recently from someone who was distraught by what she has heard about the Y2K computer bug. Like many other people, this person was wondering what the Y2K bug would mean for her personally and what she could do about it.

In case you don’t know what Y2K is, you’re obviously from an Amish community in Pennsylvania or Ohio, and therefore have nothing to worry about, so you can skip the next paragraph.

The Y2K bug stems from a programming shortcut that makes computers look only at the last two digits in the year. On Jan. 1, 2000, so the story goes, computers will think it’s 1900 and the IRS mainframe immediately will begin issuing refunds for all the taxes collected during the last 100 years. Well, maybe not, but I can dream.

The truth is, for all the furor over it the past few years, Y2K has caught absolutely nobody by surprise. My younger brother Ward figured it out when he was 8 because all the deposit slips at Dollar Savings Bank had 19__ for the year, and even he could tell that 2000 wouldn’t fit into that little space, and even if it could, it would say 192000.

So if an 8-year-old who hadn’t even seen a computer could figure it out, why couldn’t all the computer programmers figure a way around it? Actually, they did, but they decided they could make more money by waiting 20 years for people to start panicking and then rolling out the Y2K-compliant merchandise at inflated prices.

A few self-labeled computer experts have predicted the computer problems will result in incredible disaster worldwide, from airplanes crashing and fax machines not working right to the entire eastern seaboard sinking beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

As a result, a lot of people have been buying property in Ohio for the real-estate appreciation when it becomes beachfront property, once they have made sure the land isn’t under any major airplane routes.

Other impressionable people have equated Y2K with the End of the World, especially because -- as everyone knows -- round numbers make God very angry, so he goes around smiting people with greater frequency than normal.

Some people, like doomsday prophet Gary North, have even offered to help God with the smiting business, and have drawn up lists of people to smite. (We can be sure newspaper editors are high on that list.)

Otherwise normal people have been buying houses in the woods and stockpiling ammunition and toilet paper. My advice for the rest of us is, if you have a house in the woods, sell it immediately and buy property in Ohio.

With your leftover money, invest heavily in the firearms and toilet-paper industries, and remember to buy some 24-packs of Charmin yourself. There will be no toilet paper production after civilization collapses in January, so those two-ply sheets will be worth their weight in gold.

My Uncle Dave Coates recently declared that the bulk of the Y2K craze is media-driven. Are you kidding me? Of course it is. This is the best thing that’s happened to newspapers since Watergate.

Which story would you rather read: "New Jersey will perish in flames on Jan. 1" or "Bob Oaks considers run for school board?" I would too, but unfortunately Bob missed the filing deadline to run this year.

So we’ve been milking Y2K for all we can. So far, I’ve been able to get a three-part series, a couple letters, two cartoons and a column out of it in just this newspaper.

My big problem next January won’t be how to live in a house without running water or electricity, it’s going to be what to write about.

by no other name

It happened again the other day. I got a letter addressed to David Learned.

It was a letter from some company I had never heard of, even though they claimed to value my years as a customer. Some noodlehead somewhere in the corporate world typed my name into a database somewhere, and -- bless the noodlehead's heart -- typed it in wrong.

Maybe the noodlehead thought he was doing me a favor by "fixing" my name (a problem my brother Brian regularly has had with both his first and last names), or maybe the noodlehead simply knows someone named Learned, and unintentionally transposed the name onto mine. Worse gaffes than that happened at Ellis Island, I'm told.

I try to take these things philosophically. Learned is a common name, and the Learneds probably are related to the Learns somewhere back there.

Learned is one of the milder screw-ups I've seen of my name. In my time, I've seen my last name spelled Lern, Lear, Lean, Loorn, Leorn and once, even Warren. It does make it easier to tell which companies sell my name to mailing lists, but still ...

My name has been David Learn since 1970. It might not be much of a name, but it's mine. It's one of the few things I was born with, and it's one of the few things I'll have my whole life and take to the grave with me.

It's frustrating to see someone get your name wrong, and even after 28 years, it can still get my goat.

I could understand the confusion if my name were a fairly difficult one like "Beowulf Rosencrantz-Oppenheimer III," but how much simpler does a last name get than Learn? That was one of my spelling words in third grade.

Because I sometimes have to spell my name 50 times in one week, I try to make it as simple as possible. "It's David Learn," I say when people ask me my name. "L-E-A-R-N, like in school." Most people appreciate the extra effort, but I was tempted to give it up one day when someone returned my call and asked for "David School."

Beowulf Rosencrantz-Oppenheimer III looks better all the time.

At least I know I'm not alone in this mess. Everyone I know has some horror story about a named that was misspelled or mispronounced once, and how it irked them no end.

My wife's maiden name is Hanson. Back before we started dating, she told me people sometimes asked her if she was related to Jim Henson, the man who brought us Cookie Monster, Count von Count and the other Muppets.

I told her the proper response was to start crying and explain that her father had died a few years ago, and that, despite a will clearly stating the family business was to be split, her brother Brian had taken control of the entire Muppet empire and left her penniless.

While the Hanson-Henson issue no longer applies, Natasha still has name issues to contend with. People regularly misspell her name, and now she's fighting the never-ending battle to get her new surname spelled correctly.

"Learn!" she fairly shouts sometimes. "Like the verb."

It's just a matter of time until someone sends her a letter addressed to Natasha Henson Verb.


Copyright © 1999 by David Learn. Used with permission.