Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

This could have been avoided if Segways weren’t so darn annoying:

Wild turkeys went after Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory technician recently as he rode his Segway to the office.
They chased him and pecked at him according to a local television reporter who witnessed the entire incident.

You have to admire how Burson-Marsteller or somebody very like them has kept this from being a Segway story and turned it instead into a local LBL story.

ThinkGeek’s Annoy-a-tron might sound funny or cute–but what do you think of this email they quote from a “satisfied customer” who planted one on a co-worker?

I have watched this simple device transform an (until-now) mild-mannered colleague into a spitting, cussing, paranoid lunatic.
He has ordered all of the staff he supervises (not a small number) to locate the source of the dread beeping before doing anything else (but since they are in on the prank, they haven’t been much help). So he waits, white-knuckles gripping the edge of his desk, anticipating the next beep…nearly bursting that vein on his temple as he shouted it: “That beep has been F***ING with me for HOURS now.”
He has called the facilities department to schedule a maintenance worker to investigate. He speculates that “they” might be doing air-quality testing in the building. This beep must be some device in the ducts detecting dangerous levels of asbestos in the air. Or worse. Radon? Aerosolized mercury? Legionella spores?
The beep means something. What does the beep mean? Is it a warning? It sounds urgent, doesn’t it? It’s telling us to do something. But what? … I imagine that soon he will begin to take things apart. He will methodically dismantle all of the electrical devices in his office, creating an unusually precise metaphor for what is happening in his psyche.
I am reminded what a thin and fragile thread keeps us attached to sanity. Today, this tiny little device helped me break a co-worker’s mind, and I thank you for the sinfully pleasurable schadenfreude.

Sinful pleasure in other people’s pain is increasingly marketed to young men. Marketers vie for some bad-boy demographic that gets a charge out of guys insulting their girlfriends or a bunch of guys teaming up for hours of sport humiliating some coworker.
OK, let me be really old here and give some advice. Marketers want to sell stuff, not to make your life better. Making your life better requires teaming up with other people, some of whom sometimes will really annoy you. When you hurt people who thought you were on their team, you risk turning friends into enemies or at least skeptics. You damage the team, which was your team.
I’m a fan of ThinkGeek, but this time I don’t like what they’re selling.

Cary Tennis, you might think, writes advice columns for Salon–not poetry.

But some of his writing–all it needs to be blank verse is chopping a few line breaks into its punctuation:

You take your place at the table and you do your part.
You do your part in the ancient chain of being and history and fathering,
of war and redemption and wounding,
of burdens too heavy to carry and roofs too old to keep the rain out,
of hardy shrubs aspiring to be trees and old warriors wandering lost among their medals.
You take your place at the table and you do your part.

That fragment was part of Cary’s advice to an adult son unsure how to help his increasingly troubled Vietnam-veteran father.

Only part of what makes Cary Tennis “poetic” is his use of wording and cadence. His work runs in the old (Old-Testament old) tradition of poet as prophet and healer, poet as expositor of the Big Picture.

• A young couple kvetches about their nightmare cat–Cary says that the really big issue here isn’t a cat but “whether you cringe with shame or beam with pride when you think of this years from now.”
• An anxious mother wonders how to explain to her already-troubled eight-year daughter that Dad plans a sex change? Stop with the verbal reassurance and throw a party, says Cory–let the family celebrate that Dad can be happier being who he really is.
• A young woman agonizes over being guilt-tripped toward inviting difficult but pushy friends to her in-laws’ lake house. Cory’s advice helps her figure out how to say no “..in the traditional sense of its meaning no. Or, as Albert Einstein replied when asked if he wanted some coffee: no.”

If some of the problems above seem a bit exotic, not to say borderline twee, here is Cory’s response (expurgating one word you won’t find in my blog) to the modern but heart-breaking question “How long will it take me to get over my divorce?” Cory says healing arrives, but not on schedule, only…

… in due time,
and you will receive it as a gift;
you will see that this was not
some .. accident on the way to an appointment with life
but life itself,
your life, your fate,
with bloody scratches from your own fingernails dragged heavily across its back.

Frank and Betsy and a bit of CMS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This giant particle detector being built at CERN represents much more than a giant step for physics.

Scientific groups building it came from India and Pakistan –from the US and Iran — from China and Taiwan — in a collaboration of 37 countries and 2,000 scientists, including about 400 students.

The world could learn a lot more than physics here.

…though I was a cheap date at Harvard Square’s Border Cafe, drinking nothing stronger than Diet Coke.

Yes, 24 hours travel from Geneva hotel to Cambridge, MA hotspot will give anybody a three-Margarita buzz–

with no alcohol–

and no next-morning hangover!

We are home. We are home! I love my dear old bed! My very own pillow! My washing machine!

OK, not that informative, but I thought at least some of you might want to know.

Finnish engineer in pink overalls underpins ATLAS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

I spent today way down under the earth near Geneva, visiting CERN’s big particle detectors (still being built but expecting data in 2008.)

I’m told the engineer in charge of the scaffolding that helps other engineers clamber around building the big ATLAS detector is this woman, said to be from Finland.

Today deep in the earth, tomorrow up in the sky again, headed for home. So much good stuff, no time to blog anything more tonight–our taxi arrives at 7 a.m., groan, groan!