Or they won't. Because that's the whole point of Faraday cages. Just go see, would ya?)

I have a new lady in my life.

Well, technically it's not a lady, I suppose. It's a small cylinder made of plastic and metal. But I think of it as a lady.

I should probably start over, before this gets weird.

How about this: I have an Echo.

If you've never heard of the Echo, it's a gadgety sort of thing from Amazon that sits in your house and plays music and answers questions in a gentle, sweet, probably totally not even condescending tone, even when you ask something any idiot would know.

This is nice, because that's not a thing people do. When I ask actual people my questions, they're generally less patient:

"How many ounces of butter in a stick? Look it up yourself, dairyboy."

Echo -- or, as she prefers to be addressed, Alexa -- doesn't do that. Not out loud, anyway. Maybe she's cursing me under her transistors, but it's not in an audio range humans can hear. So that's nice.

The Echo has been out for a few months now, but Amazon has a waiting list to get one and I don't know any important people -- none who don't curse me audibly under their breath, anyway -- so it took me a while to get my grubby voice activations on one.

But now I do. Alexa arrived this week, and I put her in the kitchen.

No, not because she's a lady. Gah.

Actually, it's because... well, let's face it. There are some rooms in my condo I understand a lot better than others. Like the living room -- most of the time I'm in the living room, I have a pretty good handle on what's happening. At least, since Lost went off the air a few years ago. Also, Game of Thrones gets pretty confusing.

(And while we're at it, who can follow Blue's Clues? You think it's, like, some gritty CSI show with all the clues, then suddenly the guy goes and sits in a "thinking chair". What is that? Horatio Caine never needed a thinking chair. When Morpheus was on there solving crimes, he didn't have any cogitating furniture.

And don't even get me started on this "baby paprika" character. Again.)

Okay, so I have a lot of living room questions, actually. But they mostly involve TV shows I'm not paying close enough attention to, and if I asked Alexa every two minutes "hey, who's that guy?" or "wasn't she just with the bad guys?", I'm certain she'd bludgeon me to death before the first commercial break.

Probably with herself. That Echo hardware is heavy.

"Alexa can't help me in the office. No one can help me in the office."

The same goes for the rest of my living space. The dining room confuses me, so I just don't go in there. The office brings up all sorts of questions, but they're mostly existential:

"What the hell am I doing in here on a Saturday?"

"Why haven't I given up banging on this keyboard already?"

"If there's any meaning in the universe, why have I spent the last ninety minutes fighting with goddamned Microsoft Office?"

These are valid questions. But unanswerable. Alexa can't help me in the office. No one can help me in the office.

The bathroom is pretty question-free, at least. Mostly. And any questions I have there, I'm not going to ask some tender-voiced lady-sounding person, anyway. That's what Ask Jeeves is for. Because screw that guy.

So the only real options for placing Alexa were the kitchen and the bedroom. And I figured if I still have bedroom questions forty-plus years into this thing, then that's between me and natural selection and possibly a very well-compensated psychiatrist. So Alexa's in the kitchen, where I can -- more or less safely -- ask kitchen questions.

Which is good. I have a lot of kitchen questions.

So far, Alexa's doing a pretty good job of sorting me out. Now I have answers at my fingertips -- or really, at my tongue-tip -- when I run into some ingredient I don't understand. Like "garam masala" or "Brussels sprouts" or "non-fat". What is a "non-fat", and why would you grow one? Does it sprout on a fat-free tree? Who would even eat such a thing? And are the fat-frees free-range?

These are the questions I have. Alexa answers them all, without so much as a disapproving click.

Of course, she's not perfect. Alexa can't -- can't, or won't, lady? -- tell me which spatula would make the best back scratcher. And when I asked her to sniff the milk and tell me if it was bad, she just sat there on the counter. I don't think she smelled it at all, frankly. That's a little rude.

But overall, an Alexa in the kitchen is pretty cool. I'm learning a lot, and the voice activated interactions are very entertaining.

Now I just need her to explain what the hell is happening on The Americans. Seriously, this season is one big ball of "what?" It's like that Powerpuff Girls movie all over again.

As always, that's Secondhand SCIENCE. This week, come and meet mitochondrial Eve. And be cool to her; she's, like, your mom. I don't care who you are -- she's basically your mom. Seriously.)

So I'm thinking of taking a page out of the Chinese government playbook.

No, really. Hear me out here. I know they've had some crazy ideas in the past. And the present. And most every alternative universe anyone's ever imagined.

And sure, Chinese policies like government-sanctioned censorship -- very bad. Oppression and discrimination of citizens via polcies like the Hukou system -- reprehensible. Rigged political processes, sham labor organizations, picking on Tibet, naming a puppet Lama, widespread use of capital punishment, repressing critical discourse and alleged dissident organ harvesting -- all of these are pretty awful practices, and not the sort of things I'd want to implement around my own neighborhood.

(Though I bet that loudmouth asshole across the street has a nice healthy liver. I could make an exception.)

"Even I don't want to live in a nation where everyone wears rugby shirts and listens to weird music and doesn't know what to do with their hands at dinner parties."

Still. It's not like the Chinese government is always off base. Take that "one child" policy they've been rocking the past few decades. That's not so bad. Yes, the implementation is horrendous -- rampant strong-arming and gender-selecting and human rights violations -- but the idea could work. One child per couple; a nation of only children. I'm an only child -- just imagine a whole country full of me.

Okay, scratch that. That's a terrible idea. Even I don't want to live in a nation where everyone wears rugby shirts and listens to weird music and doesn't know what to do with their hands at dinner parties. We'd be terrible at national security. And we'd have the most awkward parades on the planet.

So that doesn't build confidence in adopting a Chinese government policy, either, really, but I have high hopes for this other one. You may be aware -- as it's been going on for years -- that China is in a territorial dispute with... well, pretty much everyone on their side of the planet.

(No, but seriously. It's been going on for years. The timeline in that linked Wikipedia article about it goes back to the third century B.C..

Seriously, who holds a grudge over fighting that started twenty-four hundred years ago? Back then, even the Christians, Jews and Muslims were getting along, I bet.)

(Yes, I'm aware. Move along.)

Currently, most countries bordering the South China Sea -- Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, you name it -- claim a modest swath of ocean off their respective land borders as their territory. There's some international maritime acronym-or-another who says that 200 miles out from your coastline should be yours, and generally speaking, these countries are cool with the rule.

But not China. No, China basically says:

"if it's not a wave you can physically surf onto your beach, then it belongs to us."

China's made a claim -- a dubious, greedy, Scrooge McDuckesque claim -- on pretty much the entire South China Sea, and any lands, islands, peninsulii, isthmuseses, archipelageese or post-apocalyptic Waterworld-style floating cities that might be found there.

(I'm sure Kevin Costner will be happy to know somebody is finally interested in that nightmare.)

But lately, China hasn't even worried about claiming the islands that are there. Instead, they've gone and made some new ones.

It's a total dick move. A resource grab. A bullying, brazen, "my naval dick is bigger than your naval dick" play for all the marbles they can get.

And it's genius. I'm totally getting me some of that.

Not in the South China Sea, of course. China's naval dick is way bigger than mine. They've got a fleet of warships, probably. I have a rubber ducky and a pool raft that sinks if you don't blow enough air into it. So I'm not expanding my borders there.

But around my neighborhood? Why not?

I figure the first step is claim all the "common area" in my condo building. Hallways, porches, the basement, any interesting parts of the rooftop -- those are mine. Nobody else is using them, so I'm staking a claim.

Of course, I might have to physically mark my new territory. I can move an armoire outside the upstairs neighbors' door to let them know. Maybe some desk lamps through the main hallway -- nothing too obstructive. All the foot traffic can still move through. If they pay the tolls, of course.

But that's just the start. None of the neighbors on the block are using their yards; they're just littered with plants and bushes and nonsense. I'll take those over, too -- everything right up to their doorsteps. Or maybe their front walks; some of the actual doorsteps around here are pretty ugly. I don't really have the furniture to stake out those claims, so I'll just do what China's doing: I'll truck in a bunch of dirt and dump it on their lawns.

Sure, they'll be pissed. But it's my lawn now. And my dirt. Take it up with the U.N., sporto. Yo shit's been annexed.

I figure I can get at least to the next block before I run out of lamps and dressers and money for claim dirt. That's not quite a whole "south sea", but it's a start. You might think I don't have the military force to keep all these extra lands -- but I've got that covered.

This is the Boston suburbs we're talking about here, not some gulf in the Asian Pacific. Remember that ducky and the pool float I mentioned? In this neighborhood, brother, I'm navally hung.

But let's assume not, and form a single-file line to click over for this week's discussion, all about orbital decay. It's the only science article you'll read this week that mentions the Hubble telescope, Paula Deen and a hockey mask-wearing horror movie murderer. No foolin'.)

I'm not really a trash talker. Mostly, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I mean, first of all, most trash talk people do is about something they have no control over in the first place. "My dad could beat up your dad," for instance. That's ridiculous. Nobody's fathers are going to go at it in a cage match because their nine-year-olds got in an argument over whose Pokemon would win on Jeopardy or whatever.

(And anyway, my dad's got a bad knee. He can still jab, probably, but his footwork's not what it used to be. I can't take that risk.)

But worse, the kids have no say in whose dad would come out of that tussle on top. And most trash talk is like that -- not only are you bragging out your ass, it's someone's else's ass you're bragging about. The red sports team I like is better than the blue one you cheer for. My Miss America favorite eats your favorite's lunch -- or would, if either of them consumed solid food in the six months before the swimsuit competition. And my base-pandering, corporate-sponsored double-talking politician of choice is twice the man/woman/programmable talking robot your base-pandering, corporate-sponsored, double-talking politician will ever be.

Frankly, I don't see the point. You might as well whip your wangs out to measure over who can predict a coin flip.

(Don't do this, by the way. Besides being poor etiquette in general, you don't want to be whacked in the willie by a tumbling coin. Especially a quarter. Trust me.)

Of course, some (tiny) percentage of trash talking is done to back up something personal. Whether it's a race or a bet or a challenge over who can stuff the most live lobsters down their pants, before some people do it, they want to talk about it. How fast they're going to run. How much money they'll win. Their special secret underpants, which are way more crustacean-friendly than yours. Yak yak yak.

It all seems pretty exhausting to me, and I steer clear for two reasons. First, it's an awful lot of extra energy going to waste that I could be using on winning whatever nonsense we're doing. Stretching my calves or planning a strategy or supergluing a lot of lobster claws shut, for instance.

But also, I don't trash talk because I'm pretty uniformly bad at everything. And when you run your mouth and lose, it's a great deal worse than losing without running your mouth at all. Do your talking with your poor performance and pouty demeanor afterward, I say. Take the high road. Relatively speaking.

(Also, make excuses. Did I mention my father's knee? I probably inherited that, so that's why I lost any speed-related thing. Also, the sun was in my eyes. And I'm wearing those Fruit of the Lobster boxers, which can't possibly help.)

It is for these reasons -- and the doubtless ensuing shame and ridicule I'd likely endure -- that I don't engage in trash talk, as a rule.

"It was a big bug, though skinny -- like Andre the mosquito giant, or a wasp that's really into cardio, maybe."

However. I do make one exception, and it happened this morning.

When I climb into the shower and there's a bug inside -- insect, spider, any-kind-of-crawly-pede -- then shit is ON, brother. And I'm going to talk about it. Trashily.

When I stepped in this morning, I caught a glimpse of some winged something-or-other buzzing the shower head. It was a big bug, though skinny -- like Andre the mosquito giant, or a wasp that's really into cardio, maybe. But size doesn't matter, in this situation.

(I mean, under moth size, obviously. Let's not go overboard. I'm not Batman over here, for crissakes.)

I knew I could take this buzzing bozo -- but I was going to let him hear about it while I did. So I yapped. I barked a bunch of stuff that ended with "MY house" and a waggly no-no finger. And I postured for effect.

As well as one can posture while standing naked with one foot in the shower and a bottle of Pert Plus in the non-finger-waggling hand. Which, if I'm honest, is not a lot.

Still, I trash-talked that bug, and I trash-talked him good. I don't get a lot of practice -- which is good, because otherwise it would mean a parade of crawly assholes were setting up shop in my showering spot -- but I came through. It's like riding a bike.

Or like berating a bike with "yo momma" jokes, maybe. I'm actually not sure how bicycles apply here, exactly.

Anyway, I told this waspy-legged interloper what for, and then I turned the water on and washed him onto the shower wall. He wiggled for a while, but I hosed him again -- and talked some more trash, natch -- and he mostly stopped. So I washed him down, into the shower and down by the drain, talking at him all the way. Like, in his face. Only from the other end of the shower, because ew.

I don't know whether the bug made it down the drain all the way. It was pretty big, and I wasn't going over there to look. I've seen horror movies -- and especially ones where somebody trash talks the big ugly monster out to get everyone. If you go looking at it when it's dead, then it's definitely not dead, and that's when it stings you or barfs acid on you or lays eggs up your nose while it slaps you around with a thorax or something.

So obviously, I didn't take a shower today. And maybe won't tomorrow, just to be safe. But I gave that bug a piece of my mind, and washed it onto, maybe down-maybe not, the drain. Where I trash talked it, but good. Like it was someone else's favorite base-pandering, corporate-sponsored, double-talking politician, right before the swimsuit competition.

Aw, yeah.

Hop on over to learn all about glial cells, and what they have to do with Scooby Doo, training gyms and everyone's favorite mushmouthed Hollywood boxer. It's a champ!)

Friends. Family members. Former coworkers.

(Also, random Googling internet weirdos. In fact, probably mostly that.)

Lend me your ears.

(Actually, don't lend them to me, because I won't be the one talking.

Or rather, I will. But I'm not the one in charge. Of your ears. Or the talking into them.

Look, this has gone sort of sideways here. Let me start over.)

What are you planning on doing tomorrow (Thursday the 26th) at noon?

Uh huh. Okay. Gotcha. Yep, that sounds great.

Now, don't do any of those things you just said.

Instead, tune into BreakThru Radio online and DJ Jess' Biology of the Blog show.

Every week, Jess showcases a weblog and chats with the wild-eyed lunatic behind it -- and this week, that wild-eyed lunatic is me!

"I just wanted to feel better about the ridiculous nonsense I spouted in a public forum, is all."

(I can't actually speak to the lunacy or eye-wilderness of the previous guests. In the shows I've listened to, they've seemed pretty sane and composed. I just wanted to feel better about the ridiculous nonsense I spouted in a public forum, is all.)

The link above may not work until the show actually airs, I think. Which maybe I should have told you somewhere before the link, in case you clicked it right away. But how would that work, anyway? If I put a warning up there, like:

HERE COMES A LINK, BUT FOR THE LOVE OF UNBROKEN ANIMAL CRACKERS, DON'T CLICK ON IT YET!

Then you're totally going to click on it. Probably twice. I know how this works.

Also, I'm not entirely positive that the show airs at noon. But you should maybe cancel all of your plans starting at noon, just to be safe. I know I will. And that's a lot of afternoon sleeping to give up. I'm just saying.

That pretty much covers it. Tomorrow, noonish (probably). Check out DJ Jess for some great tunes and a little Q & A with me on Biology of the Blog.

(Full disclosure: we didn't actually talk about biology; that's just the name of the show. Although we did chat a bit about colonizing Mars.

I mean, not us colonizing Mars, obviously. We're both way too busy for that. She's got radio shows to do every week, and I... well. Those forty-three episodes of the Simpsons sitting on my TiVo aren't going to watch themselves.)

So this has been a mess. But if you thought this post was rambling and tangential and awkward... oh, there's plenty more where that came from. Tune in tomorrow.

There's a troubling development at my office recently. It would seem I've become "the guy" for a thing.

Now, to a point, I'm okay with that. I've been "the guy" for things before. I scrap together little bits of software for people, and cram numbers into databases sometimes. So when one of those stops working or catches someone on fire, then sure -- I'm "the guy" who has to fix it and clean up the mess and rub aloe vera on some poor users' ruined fingers. That's part of the job.

But this is different. This is not my thing, nor a thing I know much of anything about. It's a big scary set of interlocking systems, all talking to each other -- in Swahili, for all I know -- and a couple of other guys built it and babysat it and kept scripts and monitors and pipelines full of aloe running for when things went haywire. For years, they did this, and nobody really knew -- or wanted to know, frankly -- exactly how those particular sausages were being prepared.

Which was fine.

Except now those guys are gone.

(Cost-cutting thing, from what I understand. You could keep the system or keep the people taking care of it. And since the people couldn't remember as much data as the databases or spit pretty numbers into a spreadsheet, the people got the boot. And the system sputters on.

Sometimes.)

With the people who had any practical knowledge of this thing gone, the company turned to the next best thing: someone with no earthly idea how the thing works or which bits of string are glued to which other bits, but who sat down with one of the guys who built it for five minutes before he left to learn one very specific instruction for one tiny corner of the system, in case that bit looks like it's going to crack and fall off some day.

In other words, me. "The guy".

In fairness, I'm not the only "guy". Other people learned little snippets of this monster from the builders, and they're "the guys" and "the girls" for those pieces, and probably all sorts of surrounding bits they have no idea about. But not being alone in this really doesn't help that much.

Basically, this is like that old parable where a bunch of blind people -- or blindfolded, maybe, if this particular parable author was uncharacteristically generous about infirmities in the story -- wander around feeling up an elephant.

"The tusk-toucher is magically the resident expert on tusks, horns, fangs, spikes, ivory, ebony, piano tuning and Beethoven's Fifth."

(I'm noting here that if you're unfamiliar with this parable, the above description probably gives you a way kinkier impression of it than is really warranted.

Noting it, but not changing it. Because some Bollywood skin flick director will be all over that, and I want credit for the idea. But if you need the actual elephant story details, Wikipedia's your huckleberry.)

Only our situation is a little different. Whoever touched the tail is now assumed to have encyclopedic knowledge of all things elephant ass. The tusk-toucher is magically the resident expert on tusks, horns, fangs, spikes, ivory, ebony, piano tuning and Beethoven's Fifth.

I don't have it the worst. I only brushed a wrinkly leg, figuratively speaking, but now I'm fielding questions about pants pressing, Oil of Olay and grandma gams.

Again, figuratively.

Still, these are questions I can't answer. I'm looking at one corner of a giant black box covered in buttons and switches, and I know the one I can push to make a gumball come out. If you want a jelly bean, I can't help you. If you're looking for surf and turf, you'll be sorely disappointed with what I know. And if you need your hair extinguished and a nice aloe vera shampoo, then I'm probably no help at all.

So it's unfortunate. The only thing worse than being "the guy" for a thing is being "the guy" for a thing you really aren't especially "the guy" for. And the people coming to me for help aren't getting anywhere, either. Because I can only give them the same answer:

"Go ask elephant-ass guy. Maybe he knows something."

But probably not. Dude's blind, so Dumbo's probably sat on him by now. I'm just saying, it's a mess.

This week's nonsense dives into Alu elements. It'll get you ready for a genetics test -- and spring training. Play science!)

I'm being driven into the arms of a monster.

And not a fun monster, either. Like Grover or Mojo Jojo or Kang.

(In fairness, I never found Kang all that appealing.)

No, in this case I'm being driven -- thrust, really -- into the hairy, wartified arms of one of modern society's most hideous and notorious monsters:

Comcast

For the entire lifespan of this site -- nearly twelve years now; and boy, it doesn't seem like a day more than eleven and a half -- the internet onramp via which I fling nonsense onto it has been provided by DSL.

Antiquated technology, I know. Slow. Copper line-limited. Quaint. But at the time I had it set up -- we're talking year 2000 ancient history here, people -- it was fully state of the art.

Way back then, it was all the shit to have in-home DSL. We privileged few would trade notes on our Beanie Babies on Usenet groups by the glow of our gaslight lamps and GIT OFFA MY LAWN ALREADY!

Anyway.

At the time, cable and DSL interwebbery were fairly comparable, speedwise. As in, both were punk-ass slow, like a snail on Valium with a charley horse. But DSL was yours -- all yours! -- while cable connections were shared with your bandwidth-hogging, vid-pirating, porn-grubbing filthy neighbors.

I don't know if my neighbors at the time did all that stuff, mind you. I'm just quoting the DSL ads.

I tried getting DSL installed through Verizon. But they turned out to be a bunch of incompetent syphilitic donkey-humping lying jackholes -- no ads here; this one's from experience -- and they jerked me around in not-the-fun-way for three months and got me nowhere. As Verizons do.

So I turned to a company called Speakeasy. They weren't a monolithic mega-corporate utilityco; just a medium-sized ISP on the West Coast that offered services in my area. Good reviews. Snazzy name. I gave them a shot. And I had DSL installed in less than three days.

God, I hate Verizon. Did I mention they cut service on my regular phone line, while they were Abbott-and-Costello-ing their way through not installing the DSL line? Assholes.

(And yes, at the time we also had a landline. Because it was the Middle Ages, we all wore sabertooth tiger skins and worked on discovering fire in the basements of our caves, and I've already told you: My lawn. Git offa it.)

For ten years, Speakeasy treated me right. I moved -- twice -- and the second call I made each time was to my trusty ISP to have a line run and service moved over.

(The first call is for pizza. Always. You've got to have pizza on moving day.)

Five years ago, I got a scare. Speakeasy was being taken over by some big company with a name right out of Office Space: MegaPath. I didn't know these people. I don't like my bytes and packets being manhandled by strangers. I even looked into cable packages for internet -- but not FiOS, because in all honesty, screw Verizon with a grappling hook backwards, please.

"From the reviews I've read online, the only thing keeping angry mobs of townspeople from storming Comcast's offices is the high price of pitchforks at Home Depot."

But I got some emails, from the Speakeasy people. They said it was okay. MegaPath is cool, they're friends of ours, and everything's going to work out. So I stuck around, and for the most part, they were right. People around me had faster connections, maybe. But I had a dedicated line running into my living room, shared with no one, it nearly always worked -- and on the rare occasion I had to call for something, it was quick, painless and instantly resolved.

I hear the same isn't quite universally true of Comcast. From the reviews I've read online, the only thing keeping angry mobs of townspeople from storming Comcast's offices is the high price of pitchforks at Home Depot.

But I didn't have to worry about that with Speakeasy, or with MegaPath. A little bandwidth always is better than more bandwidth sometimes, I told myself.

(Also, with SpeakPath or whatever they started calling themselves, I got a static IP address. That means I could run a server of my own, from my very own home office.

I never actually did that, really. Once or twice, to move some files around pre-Google Drive. And I might have spent six hours once figuring out how to demo a homemade web site for a half-hour meeting.

The point is, I could have run my own server, any time I wanted. I had the power. Not the need, perhaps. Nor the patience. Nor the resolve, adequate infrastructure nor adequate hardware. But the power, you see. The power is what matters. For twelve idle years. Apparently.

Shaddup.)

So when MegaEasy passed my account along again this winter to yet a third company, I wasn't concerned. My DSL would now be served by a shadowy Orwellian entity known as Global Capacity, which sounds much more like a marketing bullet point than a company in its own right. But I assumed things would chug along, more or less the same. And MegaPath's emails assured me it would be so; the friend of my friend said his friend would be all right.

He lied. The friend of my friend's friend is an idiot.

(Which is not a saying you hear too often, but I suspect it's true an awful lot of the time.)

Global Capacity officially took over -- meaning accepted my money for their services -- in late February. And to be fair, I didn't really notice anything different.

Until this Wednesday morning, when the connection crapped out.

I called Wednesday evening, and the tech rep said there was some sort of failure in an office in New York, which was apparently affecting their whole New England operation. Everyone in New York and Massachusetts, at least, was out of luck, but the problem would be fixed the next day. Sometime.

Not exactly "scrambling" to get the issue solved, it seemed. But I assumed there were other factors at work. They're Global Capacity, after all. Maybe all of their technical staff were busy fighting network outages on the Iberian peninsula, or snaking transcontinental cables to the Pacific Rim.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and patiently waited Thursday for service to return.

On Friday, I waited less patiently.

Today, I gave up, cancelled service -- or lack thereof -- and called the evil-but-not-as-evil-in-my-eyes-as-Verizon empire of Comcast and told them to come and extract my soul activate cable internet. Because more bandwidth sometimes is better than less bandwidth not at all for four days. I hope.

In the meantime, I learned what I could about this "Global Capacity" I'd been foisted off on, and given the two words in their company name, I'm fairly convinced they're neither -- at least when it comes to residential networking.

For one thing, the tech guy told me on the phone that around 150 people -- that's less than 200, in at least two states -- were affected by this outage. I don't know what sort of "capacity" that suggests, but it's probably less than the number of active Bronies in the same square mileage. That's not a pretty picture.

And maybe the company is "global", in some respect. But the info I could find suggests they employ maybe a couple hundred people in total -- fewer than one for every country a truly "global" company would serve. Maybe they put sent one guy over the border to Canada with a walkie-talkie to qualify as international, but otherwise I'm not seeing it.

Likewise, I've retracted my optimistic views on where their technical resources might be spending their time during this outage. I'm less convinced they're solving other problems; it's more likely they just couldn't afford overnight shipping for the new networking part at Amazon.

So within a week or so, this site's going Comcast. You shouldn't notice any difference -- apart from more bitching, possibly, over the state of my local internet connection. But it's possible any "soul" present in these pages is soon to be sucked out. Probably during a three-hour phone call on hold with Comcast tech support.

It's been a good run. But the internet's a bitch, yo.

I've never been drugged in my sleep, kidnapped and whisked off to another location that's a near-exact replica of my home.

Well. Not so far as I know, anyway. Though I have wondered who keeps getting crumbs all over my couch, which I usually notice soon after I've eaten dinner on it.

I'll keep an eye on that.

In the meantime, I assume my kidnap-slash-disorient scenario hasn't ever happened. To me. Probably.

But I did buy a new refrigerator recently. And it's pretty much the same thing. Everything seems normal, but something's a little... off.

It wasn't that way right away with the new fridge. No, at first, it was waaaaay the hell off, because it sat, half-dismantled, in my living room for three weeks. Because math. Or hinges. Or narrower-than-regulation Victorian era doorways or some shit like that. I don't know. And I don't really care.

What I do know is that one day some large men from the appliance store came back and, for all I know, opened a goddamned wormhole in my living room and shoved the fridge through it into the kitchen. Or maybe they miniaturized it with a shrink ray and recombobulated it in the next room.

Or they learned how to measure a doorway.

Something. But when they left, the new refrigerator was sitting nice and neat in a cozy corner of the kitchen. And no rifts in the fabric of spacetime near my crumb-covered sofa have opened up in the meantime, so it counts as a "win".

So now there's a fridge back in place, and restocked with milk and beer and sandwich pickles and a three year old nearly-full jar of capers that no one remembers using or buying, but don't throw those out because as soon as you do, you'll need a bunch of capers for something.

"It's an odd feeling, like accidentally using someone else's phone or discovering your underpants are on backward."

Like, I don't know, inducing vomiting, maybe. Or playing a game of tiny soft marbles. How should I know what you do in your kitchen?

The point is, everything is back where it should be, and things are back to almost-normal. But they're also... different. It's an odd feeling, like accidentally using someone else's phone or discovering your underpants are on backward. All the regular stuff is in the fridge, and the fridge is more or less where a fridge used to be. But nothing is exactly right.

Take the sodas, for instance. Two liter bottles go on the door. They've always been on the door. I've lived in this condo for six years, and it's been exclusively a sodas-on-the-fridge-door experience. But no. The sodas don't fit in this fridge door. Now sodas are middle shelf. You reach for a fridge-door bottle of soda in this fridge, and you get a handful of Newman's Own Italian dressing. You don't want a glass of that with your pizza. Or with your anything else.

For that matter, the whole orientation is different. The old fridge, a built-in that came with the place -- because there was no good way to get it out, I'm guessing -- was a righty-fridge, lefty-freezer model. All the coldest stuff was in the left hand door. Ice cream. Microwave burritos. Vodka. Penguins. Anything you wanted to keep extra-cold.

But no more. New fridge isn't lefty-righty; it's uppy-downy. The freezer is a big-ass drawer on the bottom you pull out, like from some kind of bedroom dresser. Only instead of old sweaters and backup swimsuits, you pull frozen peas and Otter Pops out of it.

Maybe that's not odd to you. Maybe you've gone uppy-downy with your fridge for years. Or maybe you keep your bathing suits in the freezer. Again, your kitchen. How am I to know?

For me, it's weird. And oddly, weirder than when I'm somewhere completely different. When I'm in someone else's house, rummaging through their fridge -- as one does -- I just assume things are going to be in odd places. That's half the fun of it. You put your butter there? Why is the jelly on the condiment shelf? What kind of monster are you, anyway?

But in my kitchen, I should know what to expect. And let's face it, I need to know what to expect. Most of the time I open the thing, I'm half-asleep because it's:

a. three in the morning, because I've stayed up doing something stupid like complaining about refrigerators for fourteen hundred words, and I need a glass of water before bed -- or milk, or Hidden Valley Ranch Low-Fat Thousand Island, thank you very much; or

2. seven in the morning, because I'm up for some godforsaken early meeting at work, and I need a dozen eggs or a wheel of cheese or one of those delicious frozen penguins in me to make it through the nightmare.

If I can't autopilot my way through these scenarios, then I'm in big trouble. And I'm in big trouble over here. I went for ice cubes yesterday, and wound up with three squirts of mustard in my glass. What I thought was jelly for my toast was actually sriracha for my sinuses -- and don't even ask me what I just sucked on that was in no way an Otter Pop. I threw it in the trash before I could make a positive I.D.

Eventually, I'll get used to the new fridge layout -- the wacky spot where the tall bottles go, the basement chest of frozen drawers and the weirdo cubbyhole just big enough for a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, like that's a thing you'd bother to designate a special place for. Honestly, this fridge. I don't even.

So yeah, I'll adapt. If I make it that long. In the meantime, there's a fair chance I'll chug something gnarly that was in an unexpected spot, or chew through a glass jar because it's sitting where we used to keep the leftover pizza. What I'm saying is, if I die in the next few weeks, I'm sure I know who the murderer is, and I can give you a clue up front:

It was the refrigerator. In the kitchen. And probably with that stupid-ass jar of capers.

Unless you have a phobia about metal-binding proteins. Or frogs. Or formalwear made from garbage. Then you're on your own.)

I can be socially awkward. This should come as no surprise to anyone who's ever been within thirty-five feet of me in public. It can be a burden, and embarrassing -- but I've finally figured out my problem. And better, how to solve it.

You see, I've discovered my particular brand of awkwardness doesn't stem from having nothing to say. Some people have that; a loss for words -- blanking out in conversation, or shying away entirely -- but that's not exactly my pathology.

Because I have things to say. Oh, I've got plenty of things to say.

They're just not socially appropriate things to say.

And that's the crux of it. I'm a smartass, I don't like small talk and I take most things people say at face value. And the problem with that -- insofar as there's a "problem" with being totally efficient and awesome in conversation -- is that nobody wants to hear the reactions that come most naturally to me.

Okay, I suppose that is a "problem". Assuming I ever want to interview for a job or meet new friends or order a cone at the local ice cream shop. Which I do.

(Wellll. Two out of three. In the summer. At best.)

"Statements like these are the conversational equivalent of rice cakes."

Anyway, where I falter is when some friendly socially-forward goober wanders over for a conversation and says something like:

"Sure is cold today."

Or:

"Thank god it's Friday, amirite?"

Or my favorite:

"You got a haircut."

I have responses for all of these statements. Not that they require responses, semantically, because two of them aren't questions and the middle one is really rhetorical, but I've tried not responding to these sorts of things, and the speakers tend to look at me expectantly, with raised brows and drooly chins, until one of us breaks the impasse and walks away.

(It's always me. They never walk away. Why do they never walk away?)

(Don't answer that; it's rhetorical. Which I'll tell you up front, because that's what people ought to do; what the hell is wrong with society?)

Ahem. Sorry. I got a little caught up in my pathology. Please forgive.

The point is this: Statements like these are the conversational equivalent of rice cakes. If you want to have them in private, that's your self-hating prerogative -- but don't drag other people into your nightmare. Munch your semantically null sentiments off in a corner somewhere, and come back when there's something substantial to say.

That's the dream. It's never going to happen. And I'm the dick for dreaming it. Fine.

It turns out, I'm also the dick for responding in the way that comes naturally. Like to the "cold today" quip, what I'd like to reply is:

"Actually, it's much colder on the surface of Neptune, where your flapping lips would freeze together and shatter and we wouldn't have to have this inane conversation. So no. It's actually not quite cold enough."

Or to "TGIF":

"According to most religious texts, the various gods seem to favor either Saturday or Sunday as holy days, so you'd get the most out of thanking your deity of choice for one of those. Also, since Friday is not the weekend, I'm stuck here at work listening to you regurgitate slogans you read off a coffee mug, so whatever deity you worship, I hope he, she, it or they cast you into the abyss, snake pit or lake of fire that's used by your magic sky person, animal totem or transcendent pot-bellied vagrant to eternally torment the souls of unbelievers, heretics, baby slappers and people who turn left from an optional turn lane without using their signals."

Those sorts of responses, I've come to learn, are "not appropriate".

I disagree, of course. The responses are completely appropriate to the statements; they're just not conducive to remaining an employed, married, non-incarcerated, (marginally) respected member of society. Which is also kind of important.

So I can't say the things I want to say, a lot of the time. I also can't say the things that I'm supposed to say -- "it's dang chilly, brutha!" or "all them hairs got cut!" or "only thing better'n Friday is Huuuuuump Day, baby!" -- because I just can't.

For one thing, it kills me a little bit on the inside. And also the outside, where I'm sure my look of abject horror shines through like an endoscopy scope peeking up out the throat of Edvard Munch's Scream.

But mostly, replying in the usual way never seems to end the conversation. It just encourages more of the same -- "was it hot enough fer ya yesterday?" -- and nobody wants that, particularly if there are any sharp pointy objects in the vicinity.

Hence my awkwardness for four-plus decades. My instincts are wrong. Social convention is way wrong. So I've always been stuck.

Until now.

Now I've figured it out. I don't have to be a jerk (other peoples' label; not mine), nor do I have to be a soulless slave to societal convention lacking creative gumption enough to try to share genuine personal thoughts and feelings (okay, that label's mine). I can choose a third way:

Word of the day.

That's my new plan. Every day, I'll pick a word. A fun word. Nothing mean or meaningful or relevant; just something fun to say. Like "persimmon". Or "Sasquatch". Or "mumbletypeg". And when I'm in one of those stuck moments, caught between expectation and excoriation, I'll say the word.

Nothing else. Just "peccadilloes". Or "alabaster". Or "lollygag".

And then I'll nod, as though I've said something perfectly reasonable, and see what happens next. Probably a "what?" Or a frown. Or more small talk, since that seems to be the "go-to" for a lot of people. And that's okay. Any of those will simply get a smile and a repeat of the day's word. Whether it's "applejack". Or "dirigible". Or "onomatopoeia".

And that'll keep me sane. (-Er.) Also married, non-incarcerated, and slightly-but-maybe-not-completely-less respected.

Employed, I'm not so sure about. Maybe it's best I don't unveil my new plan on a Friday. Because TGIF, baby. T. G. I. F. Apparently.

* Don't go having fun without an electron, kids. What would your grandmother think? Lord.)

With a winter like ours in New England -- relentless blizzards, subzero wind chills, snowdrifts the size of albino brontosauruses -- you eventually start asking yourself some important questions. Questions like:

Will the yard ever thaw again, or should I start charging neighborhood kids two bucks a pop to ice skate on it?

Can I claim snow blindness on workers' comp, to get out of trudging through waist-high Siberian slop to the office every day?

If I trip face-first into a snowbank and play it off as though I'm making a snow angel, will anyone actually believe me? And will the bus I'm waiting for leave without me in disgust?

Important questions, all. But the most pressing one I've found is not one I expected. It's more of a wardrobe query, and it's this:

When does a thing stop being "clean", exactly?

Let me preface my thoughts on this by saying it's not a question that usually comes up. A worn garment is a dirty garment -- a filthy, unclean, shameful lump of cloth to be hidden away from polite society until such time as it's been laundered, fluffed and, depending on your fabric softener brand, made to smell like a thousand old ladies buried in a rose garden.

"The rule is clear. I might bend it occasionally, when push comes to salsa stain, but I've never questioned the rule."

In other words, worn equals dirty -- with a few exceptions. Weekend sweatpants, for instance. A hoodie slipped on just to make a beer run. Gently lived-in jeans on a desperate Friday morning, when the only clean options are tuxedo pants and a neon pair of Speedos.

The rule is clear. I might bend it occasionally, when push comes to salsa stain, but I've never questioned the rule. It's the rule.

That was before the four snowmen of the Blizzapocalypse blew through, shitting sleet on our heads like New England had collectively signed up for some sort of climatological ice bucket challenge. Now the rule isn't so clear. For instance:

All week, I wore four shirts. The average forecast was fourteen degrees below absolute zero, or something equally ridiculous, with a seventy percent chance of slipping on icy sidewalks and falling ass-backwards into a snow bank. So I layered. I started with a T-shirt, then a long-sleeved T, then a heavier long-sleever and then a sweatshirt or rugby or whatever I thought I could get away with wearing to the office that wasn't lined with fur or the cozy warming blubber of baby seals.

These shirts were all different, every day. But by mid-week, I started asking: are some of these things still "clean", by some reasonable definition?

Like, clearly, not the T-shirt. That thing is rubbing up against pits and hair and tucked into pants and became dirty -- really, truly dirty -- roughly three seconds after I put it on. The T is not clean. Nobody's saying that.

Ditto the outer shirt. While its experience is perhaps less... suffocated, it's out there in the elements, sleeves flapping, touching people and walls and probably rogue globs of salsa, so it's definitely not clean, either. It's seen things, man. And it's probably filthy.

But what about the shirt under that? Existentially speaking, is it clean? It's not exposed to the world. It's not touching me. It's got a two-shirt buffer from me, to soak up any scents or liquids or anything else a disgusting human might ooze throughout the day. So, what's its status? Clean? Dirty? Can I wear it again without washing it? If I do, can I tell anyone? Is this even a sane question? And if it is, should I write about it in a public place, exposing my madness to the world at large?

Clearly, the answer to at least one of those questions is "yes". Sadly for us all. But that doesn't answer my original question, which is whether some of those "sandwich" shirts in the in-between layers are clean. Or "clean", which would be close enough, because I lived in a dorm room for four years and heaven knows we didn't come anywhere close to "clean" -- or even ""clean"" -- the entire time.

It's not just the shirts, though. Oh, no. We're not in "layer your torso and be done with it" territory here. This is time to gird all the body parts, which means extra insulation all over -- which means further conundrums vis a vis personal hygiene and doing fourteen loads of laundry every week.

Seriously. Sandwich shirts are easy, by the time you start asking yourself whether you can recycle the middle pair of three socks into your wardrobe. Or whether any of four pairs of boxers were safe enough from your junk to make it back into rotation.

So yeah, this winter is tough. The shoveling we can handle, and the driving and the freezing and the roofs collapsing under two tons of white stuff. But the wardrobe planning?

Shit. Make it spring already, would ya?

Also cannibals, chipmunk nuts and some chick in a bologna suit. As all good science should. Check it out.)

I was never all that good at math. I mean, I can add, and multiply smallish numbers together and convert inches to millimeters, if you give me a few minutes. And a quiet room to think about it. Also, a calculator.

Basically, I'm cool with any sort of math you might need to do to calculate baseball statistics -- because honestly, what other point is there of learning math at all? Sure, astronauts should know a little trig, and math teachers should maybe watch Good Will Hunting at some point, but otherwise it's just piling on. The final college math exam should just be figuring out the batting averages and ERAs for every schmo on the Minnesota Twins, and congratulations, you're ready for an office job.

(This has the added benefit of getting someone, anyone, to pay attention to the Twins for a couple of hours. Those guys are like the Cleveland Indians, without the Major League love.)

I say all of this to admit that I'm no Benoit Mandelbrot when it comes to mathematicals, but I've recently learned that I'm also not the worst when it comes to numbers, either. Because that trophy belongs to home appliance installers.

"We scoped out brands and features and which in-door ice makers would make cubes in naughty shapes for parties."

My wife and I recently bought a new refrigerator. We scoped out brands and features and which in-door ice makers would make cubes in naughty shapes for parties.

(Answer: none of them. You're missing an market here, fridge peddlers.)

Once we had our favorite models in mind, we moved on to the very most important spec of all: width. Because you can pick out the most spectacular refrigerator of all -- it can deep-freeze your Ben and Jerry's, email when you're low on milk and squeeze boob cubes into your Tom Collinses all day. But if it won't fit in the kitchen, you're shit outta luck. And also outta milk, and that appears to be Cherry Garcia dripping all over your linoleum. Aw.

We didn't make that mistake. There are a couple of ways into our kitchen -- the condo layout is sort of a Mobius strip -- but the biggest available doorway is thirty inches wide. That's thirty. Three. Oh.

Like I said, I'm not much with the maths. But I got out an abacus and a few sheets of paper, and I figured out that to get through a thirty-inch doorway, we'd need to buy a fridge that had a maximum width of less than thirty inches.

(I know, I know -- nobody came here expecting word problems. This isn't the SAT. But bear with me. There's only one more bit of math. Promise.)

So we did just that. We picked out a model that claimed to be, minus the removable door and brackets, less than thirty inches wide. Not by a lot. Let's face it -- a six-inch wide fridge isn't helping much of anyone. You could store uncooked spaghetti in there -- standing up, not longways, obviously -- and that's about it. Maybe pencils. Or a single row of hot dogs.

Clearly, we wanted something wider. So the fridge we selected was on the higher end of what's feasible: twenty-nine and one-half inches. A tight fit, to be sure. But physically possible. Shoved through on a dolly, there'd be a whole gaping quarter-inch chasm on each side as buffer. Easy. Like tossing those hot dogs down a hallway. Or something.

So we ordered the refrigerator, set up a delivery and on the date a couple of guys came and wheeled it into our living room, next to that thirty-inch doorway. They removed the door and some other fiddly equipment, dollied it over and said...

"Uh oh."

Turns out, there are flanges -- or flangey-type metalish things; my applied engineering is about as good as my math -- sticking out of the fridge cavity, by about an inch. Which, added to the twenty-nine and one-half inches advertised in width, is apparently too big to fit through the door. Or so the guys told me. And then showed me on a calculator. And Texas Instruments don't lie.

We then dipped into a fascinating discussion on semantics, and whether the "bracketless" designation in the spec sheet also implied "flangeless" -- or "flangey-type metalish thingless". Also, we debated the nature of the phrase "less than thirty inches", and found our philosophies on the matter to be, shall we say, less than compatible.

Which is odd, because that's pretty basic math. I know it's math, because there are numbers involved. And I'm sure it's basic, because it's something I've actually learned. If it were rocket science, it would involve Greek letters and derivatives of things, and I'd get a headache thinking about it. But I don't. Until I talked to the installers.

So. Now we have a second appointment with the home appliance people, who maybe this time will send a mathematician on the crew. Or at least, someone armed with a goddamned flange remover. In the meantime, we have a perfectly lovely, full-featured, doorless and flange-protruding refrigerator disassembled next to our living room couch. It's not keeping our Chunky Monkey frozen, and my hot dogs and spaghetti are scandalously room temperature.

All I know is, when this thing gets in there, it had better make the naughtiest ice cubes the world has ever seen. Somebody owes me.

Does compute, baby. Does compute.)

There's a trick to spending the winter in Boston. It's the same trick I imagine would be needed to spend a winter in Minneapolis, or Vancouver, or, say, the ice planet Hoth:

Park your car in a garage.

It took me several winters in Boston to learn this lesson, because I'm not all that bright. Also, I was busy shoveling snow during most of those winters, so I didn't have a lot of free time for reflection. But eventually, slowly, I learned.

That's half the battle.

The rest of the battle, presumably, is actually owning or renting a garage spot in which to park, and I haven't exactly figured that part out yet.

(I suppose the other alternative would be to ditch the car. But that's not exactly practical for people in my situation.

Like, honestly, what if you had to bring groceries home from the store on Hoth without a car? It's not like they make hatchback tuantuans.)

That puts me in a bit of a pickle, automotively. I do have a parking spot -- but it's not in a garage; it's in the great outdoors. By which I mean, it's at the end of an overcrowded behind-a-brownstone parking lot accessed via a narrow snaking eighty-foot driveway across the street.

"I just want to park, and to not wind up like Jack Nicholson at the end of the Shining when I need to drive somewhere."

So not "great outdoors" in the "Grand Canyon" or "Swiss Alps" sort of way. But it sure as hell ain't a garage.

In the best of conditions, it's not even much of a parking lot, what with all the vehicles crammed in together and the angled-parking angles jutting all willy nilly. What it is, after a blizzard, is a fantastic snow receptacle. You can store tons of the stuff in there. On top of cars. Between cars. All down the driveway. It's fantastic, if you're in the snow hoarding business.

And best of all, even if someone comes in to rob you, they can't get any of that snow out without an industrial bulldozer. You could be the Scrooge McDuck of snow.

That's not really my thing. I just want to park, and to not wind up like Jack Nicholson at the end of the Shining when I need to drive somewhere. Like South America. Where it's warm.

This year, I've finally made progress. That parking spot of mine has had two feet of snow dumped on it in the last two weeks -- and another foot coming this weekend, it's rumored -- but there's one key difference between this season and the winters of back-breaking shoveling past: my car's not in it.

You see, I've failed in fifteen Boston years to find a garage spot near where I live. But I have managed to weasel into a job that gives me a parking spot beneath a shopping mall three blocks from where I work.

I'm not saying that's ideal, either. This is the life I'm working with, is all.

So whenever a new storm's on the way -- like yesterday -- I leave my car at work, in the mall garage. Sometimes I walk three miles home, for the privilege. Sometimes, it's a white-knuckle cab ride through the hordes of people desperately stocking up on bread and milk and non-edible sidewalk salt. But the best way through this Arcticifaction of New England -- perhaps the only way, judging by the thousands of street-parked cars that haven't been dug out in three weeks -- is this remote-parking, garage-borrowing nonsense I've adopted.

Now. If I can just swap my sidewalk for some nice clean warehouse hallway. That would be sweet.

This time, we're talking tumor suppressors -- the genes that do important and necessary things, but are only really appreciated after they're gone. Like Vincent Van Gogh, or orthodontic braces. Or a veggie burrito. You get the idea.)

I'm thinking about looking into home automation, or the "internet of things" or "casa Futurama" or whatever the hell people are calling it these days. I haven't taken a serious look yet. I just know that it sounds terribly cool, and that if you don't have the gross national product of a small second-world nation to throw at it, it's going to be disappointing.

Still. It does sound cool.

Take "smart appliances", for instance. We were in the market for a new refrigerator recently, and one of the models that caught my eye was a "smart" model from Samsung.

(Which begged the obvious question: are all of their other models somehow "stupid"? Calling only one "smart" out of a product line of six or whatever doesn't speak very highly of those other fridges. Do they get distracted and unplug themselves when nobody's supervising? Will they boil the gallon of milk I put inside? If none of them can spell "freon", how can I expect them to use it properly?)

(Maybe that's just me. I've always argued that when companies put out a product that's "new and improved", they should have to relabel the remaining stock of original product "old-ass and craptastic".

It's possible I'm a little over-sensitive to modern marketing strategies.)

Anyway, the idea of a smart refrigerator sounded amazing. And I've read in tech articles before where the technology is heading. Barcode readers installed on the doors. Automated sensors to tell you when your milk is expired, or you're nearly out of Cheetos.

(For the record, I don't routinely store my Cheetos in the refrigerator.

But if I had a smart fridge that would sound an alert when I'm almost out, then maybe I would. I'm just saying.)

"This is not the glimpse into the "home of tomorrow" I was hoping for."

Now, I haven't shopped for a refrigerator in several years. So I was eager to see what fantastic time- and effort-saving features had made it to the marketplace. And I went over that Samsung fridge's specs, top to bottom. Here's what I found:

1. It works like all of their other refrigerators, which is to say like pretty much every refrigerator made in the last five years.

2. In the front, instead of a little screen to show temperature or which kind of cube will come out the ice maker, there's a slightly bigger screen about the size of a cheap tablet. A cheap Samsung tablet.

3. The screen is basically a cheap Samsung tablet glued to the door, with several crucial differences. First, the only apps appear to be Pandora, a recipe viewer and a picture display. Second, you can't install any more apps on it. And third, when you compare features with the "stupid" fridges, the cheap tablet glued to the fridge door costs about three times as much as one that isn't glued to the door of a refrigerator.

(Presumably, Samsung sells a whole tier of these Frankenstein beasts, with the price escalating if the tablet is glued to, say, a toaster. Or a French coffee press.)

This is not the glimpse into the "home of tomorrow" I was hoping for. The "home of that day I taped my recipes to the fridge and bought a shitty Bluetooth speaker for the kitchen", maybe. But not "tomorrow", by a long shot.

I'm starting to get the feeling all these other home automation gizmos are in basically the same boat. They're not really "smart"; in fact, they're barely "savant" . Sure, I could get a front door lock that would open when my keychain comes within ten feet of it. But would it stay locked if it was a Sasquatch carrying my keys, and trying to get in to raid my delicious, possibly-past-the-date and maybe-refrigerator-boiled milk?

I don't think so.

Or how about lights that turn on when I enter the bedroom -- unless I'm sneaking in at three in the morning, and trying not to wake the missus? Also, some of those lights can change color. Will they turn green to remind me to take out the recycling? Or red, when I'm getting chewed out for waking up my wife at three in the morning? Or most important, orange when there's a sudden emergency because we're almost out of Cheetos?

Again, it's doubtful.

So I'll keep looking into this "smart-if-you-say-so" technology, but I'm not getting my hopes up. If all the rest of it is only as "smart" as the fridge, it's going to be a long, long time before my kitchen knows more about my kitchen than I do.

I'd better stock up on Cheetos. Just to be safe.

Well, almost. It's actually all about trans-Neptunian objects, which aren't quite "lost". But they are really, really far away. And there might be more of them than you think. Have a looksee.)

I'm not much for New Years' resolutions.

"New Years' resolutions are like assholes: everyone's got one, and nobody wants their face rubbed in someone else's."

Partly because they're a little too common. I tend to stay away from the conventions that everyone follows, because how interesting are those? To paraphrase a popular saying about opinions:

New Years' resolutions are like assholes: everyone's got one, and nobody wants their face rubbed in someone else's.

Wait. Maybe that was birthdays. Anyway, you get the point.

Also, I don't like New Years' resolutions because the tradition is completely arbitrary. A large fraction of the eastern hemisphere doesn't even recognize January first as the start of the new year. A few hundred years ago, various Europeans celebrated in spring, or September or December 25th. And between all the adjustments and gaps and tinkering with the Gregorian and Julian and other calendars over the centuries, who knows whether modern "January 1" is still the same "January 1" people were talking about through history, anyway?

What I'm saying is, if you simply must make an annual resolution, pick whatever day you like. It's fairly likely it was "New Years' Day" to someone, sometime, somewhere in history.

Mostly, of course, I'm just lazy. So I don't make New Years' resolutions. But this year, I am making a "Second-to-Last Week of January resolution".

Which is perfectly as good. See above, if you don't believe me.

What I'm resolving is to finally finish reformatting and re-releasing the Amazon prank review articles I wrote for ZuG.com a while back.

(A recap of the situation, for those of you -- okay, all of you, who can't be bothered to link through and catch up:

ZuG.com was a Boston-based humor site for around 15 years, featuring pranks, articles, message boards and some of the least uncomfortable talk about "pee tubes" you can imagine.

Also, some of the most uncomfortable talk about pretty much everything else. And yes, it was glorious.

I wrote two series of around fifty articles each there -- one involving Facebook post pranks on companies, and the other silly Amazon reviews. When ZuG closed up shop on April Fools Day 2013, I was able to grab the materials [and permission] to repost those articles here.

I got the Facebook posts cleaned up and reposted by April 2014. The Amazon articles, not so much. Like I said, I'm lazy.)

So, I'm making a late-January resolution to get these silly things live by April 1st, the second anniversary of ZuG riding the old flaming Viking funeral ship out to sea.

(Or choking on a cocktail wiener while sitting on the toilet. None of us has actually seen the medical examiner's report.)

To be honest, I'd nearly forgotten about those old Amazon reviews, but my memory was jogged when I found out two of them were hand-selected (by Amazon automated delivery drones, possibly) to appear in Did You Read That Review? It's a book chock full of odd and hilarious reviews of Amazon products, and I'm proud to be a part of it.

Also, now I want to get those articles up so I can read what the hell I was thinking when I wrote that nonsense.

So if you want a sneak peek of the Amazon-pranking goodness to come... again, by April... probably, unless it's really hard... then check out the book. Or just sit back and wait (like I've basically done for nearly two years), and perhaps the articles will magically reappear.

Either way, this is the best non-New Years' New Years' resolution I've ever heard of. Anybody can lose weight or quit smoking or get elected to Congress in the space of a year. But I'm taking laughs from the internet tomb in which they lie (and also, a book), and bringing them back to life -- the better to be ridiculed, mocked and vilified for creating them in the first place.

If that doesn't say "brave new year", I don't know what the hell else does.

This week, it's a look at DNA origami. Want to fold a pretty swan out of your genetic material? Well, that's kind of strange. But maybe you can. Have a look, weirdball.)

I'm not sure I'm on board with this whole "Boston hosting a Summer Olympics" thing.

Sure, it would be a fantastic cultural experience -- people from countries all over the world would mingle in the streets, sharing thoughts and cuisines and various exotic pathogens. It'd be like a United Nations meeting, with more javelins. Or Carnivale, without the boobs.

And maybe living here, I'd even be able to score tickets to a couple of the events. Nothing extravagant, of course. The popular sports would be way out of my price range. But maybe I could catch Cameroon and Laos in a cornhole semifinal, or whoever Russia hasn't re-absorbed in Eastern Europe playing a game of table soccer.

Are those exhibition sports? I don't really keep up.

Still, I can't see the advantages outweighing the significant and inevitable suckages. Logistics, for instance. Boston proper is approximately the size of a Denny's place mat, which means the venues for sports would either be outside the city and miles apart, or allcrammedupontopofeachother, which would lead to some terribly awkward moments around the Olympic village.

Just for instance:

Latvian athlete: Hey, bucko -- you got your sweaty handballs in my beach volleyball panties.

Norwegian athlete: To be pardoning, no -- you wrapped your beach volleyball panties around my sweaty handballs.

Both: They're two great tastes we can medal in together!

And then they'd run off to practice Greco-Roman wrestling in the dorms. Do you want that on your conscience?

"There's a reason people only bother going to Gillette Stadium for four games a year in December and January. I'm just saying."

Well, fine, maybe you do. Still, it seems kind of messy. And the point stands -- the plan as I've heard it is to use existing sporting venues all over the suburbs, which would mean an awful lot of zipping around on overtaxed roads and buses and subway cars to see them. There's a reason people only bother going to Gillette Stadium for four games a year in December and January. I'm just saying.

Speaking of which, that's another markdown for the Olympics: why would you host a sporting event that the local sports heroes wouldn't excel at?

That's just not the Boston way, frankly. When we've hosted the Stanley Cup in hockey, we made sure the Bruins got to play in it. Ditto the World Serieses at Fenway; the Red Sox were right in the middle of those. All the NBA playoffs in Boston have featured the Celtics, and the NFL post-season played here includes the Patriots, like clockwork. The local fans love those teams, and the players. But where in the world would any of them get into the Olympics?

Nowhere, is where. What's David Ortiz going to do, join a rowing team? They say Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski have a great rapport on the field -- but can they synchronize swim? And who wants to see Zdeno Chara in competitive horse jumping? Not the horses. I'll guarantee you that.

Besides all of that, the last few Olympics have been enormous money sinks for their host cities, costing billions of dollars to plan for, put on and clean up after. Neither Boston nor Massachusetts has that kind of money lying around; it's already earmarked for Harvard fundraisers and MIT startups. Also, I think we're probably still paying for the Big Dig. Also, Ted Kennedy's bar tab. And the Tea Party.

(No, not the loonybag recent one. The other one, back in Redcoat times.)

So personally, I think I'd prefer if the Olympics pass Boston by -- with one exception. These are the 2024 Olympics, I think, and that's still a few years off. Maybe by then, we'll have this virtual reality thing finally figured out, and all the games will be digital, with the athletes competing via joysticks from the comfort of their Olympic Village sleep pods, and the rest of us jacked into the Matrix to watch. It might not matter at that point what city the Olympics are "in", technically, but I'd be all for Boston hosting then.

Why? With all the fancy hacking and coding the kids can do these days, we can probably muster a way to make Big Papi a world-class (virtual) rhythmic gymnast. And that's a (digitally-enhanced) spectacle I'd pay (real money) to (fake) see.

It makes regular relativity look like remedial relativity. Check it out.)

Next week, I'll be venturing into new territory for me. New, somewhat troubling and highly judicial: I've been summoned for jury duty.

It's my first time, which seems to be unusual -- just about everyone I mention it to has been called for jury duty themselves. Which means they have stories. And lots of advice:

"Better take a tablet, so you can watch movies or something."

Evidently, watching the wheels of justice turn isn't as mesmerizing as the writers for Law and Order would want you to believe.

"If you get sequestered, make sure they give you the good takeout food."

This advice was sadly not followed up with tips on how to score the good takeout, or exactly what constituted "bad takeout". I've frankly never met a spicy eggroll I didn't like. But I've never had one in a courthouse, either.

"If you want out fast, just give 'em the crazy eyes. Say you're pro-arson or something."

This seems like good advice to get out of some things fast. A blind date, for instance. A PTA meeting. Volunteer firefighter training. But assuming there's a prosecutor in the vicinity, I think I'll stay away from confessing love for any sort of felony. Or misdemeanor, for that matter.

"If some suit is still yakking about evidence by noon, I'm just going to vote to fry the defendant for whatever disturbing the peace or litterbugging he's in for, so we can all get on with our lives."

But I am good with the crazy eyes. I'm totally doing that.

The main thing I don't want is to get sucked into some months-long affair that drags on forever. A couple of hours of criminal justice system is fine -- I've watched my share of L&O marathons on cable. But I'll lose interest soon enough. If some suit is still yakking about evidence by noon, I'm just going to vote to fry the defendant for whatever disturbing the peace or litterbugging he's in for, so we can all get on with our lives.

Well, okay. So the rest of us can get on with our lives. The perp should have thought of that before he dropped his gum wrapper on the ground, or whatever.

The scary thing -- other than everything about a courthouse, and being formally summoned to one at eight in the early-ass morning -- is that there are two hee-yuge trials around town just getting under way. The Boston Marathon bombing trial started picking jurors last week, and apparently the ex-Patriot Aaron Hernandez murder trial is doing the same now. Neither of those seems like a quick "in-and-out" kind of deal, somehow. Probably, there's some evidence to go over, and witnesses to call and such. The bad takeout could get really old for somebody sitting on one of those juries.

Of course, as a (sometimes) writer, maybe I should want to land on one of those high-profile cases. Some jurors get through those, wrangle some sort of legal rights or other, and pen bestselling books about the experience. I can't say that wouldn't be attractive. Except for all that writing that's probably involved. Still.

The bigger problem is that I'm really that kind of writer. You don't want deliberations about a cold-blooded murder, or a capital terrorism case, to sound hilarious -- but I'm not sure what else I could go for. Most everything I write -- including this nonsense -- is a swirl of iffy snark, self-deprecation and dick jokes.

(Psst. It was the "spicy eggroll" thing. Sometimes they're subtle.)

Anyway, I don't think that's a risk for me. Those are both federal cases, I think, and I'm not being called to a federal courthouse... I think. I don't really know how this works. Maybe I'll get traded for a sack of "good takeout" burritos, and wind up sequestered for months. Or I'll acquit a jaywalker after ten minutes of defense. Or I won't get called at all. That might be likeliest.

(I really do have the good crazy eyes. I'm just saying.)