The arms race has always been Exhibit A in the case against humanity, so it was nice to learn that some other species is doing it for a change. A coalition of nerds from Wake Forest and Colorado State has discovered that certain moths deploy a hi-tech defense system in their war against bats. The technology? Sonar jamming.

Bats have been using echolocation to stalk the night sky for like a billion years or something. Scanning their hapless prey at frequencies no organism can detect — it’s not even really all that fair, if you ask me. It’s like they can lick the air and taste fear. Well it turns out that these particular moths, a species of tiger moth called Bertholdia trigona, emit a series of ultrasonic clicks as they fly around at night. The clicks serve as auditory chaff, concealing the moths in a cloud of please-don’t-eat-me goodness. They are, in short, stealth moths. This leaves them free to drift into an open flame and burn to death.

Who knew moths had their own little version of Northrup Grumman? Do the bats even know they’re being outwitted? Have they any intelligence assets in place to find out?

One of these is Bertholdia trigona, the other is an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter. Can you even tell which is which?

BEGIN TRANSMISSION — CODE LEVEL: TOP SECRET
I shall be swift, for I do not know how much time I have before they find me. SIGINT was correct, the moths have using echostealth technology. Do you realize what this means? If other moth factions were to get their hands on the technology … well, you are too young to remember the Fruit Bat Famine of ‘79, and I shall spare you the gory details. The Colonel was right all along. What fools we were to have stripped him of his rank. I will try to get this out through the Prague station chief. I fear I shall not see you again. Also, I asked around, and the others like to hang upside-down in caves as well. Does everyone do this? I honestly thought I was the only one.

Sadly, history provides a road map for what will come next. The bats will use stronger echolocation, at higher frequencies. The moths will waterboard bat operatives to learn the new frequencies. The bats will develop infrared vision. The moths will cloak themselves in styrofoam to mask their heat signatures. The bats will deploy air-to-air missile systems. The moths will flood the sky with decoy drones. The bats will build an A-bomb. The moths will sneak their missiles into Cuba. Suddenly it’s October 1962 all over again, and the Doomsday Clock is hitting one minute to midnight.

This is just like what happened with the fire ants and their ICBMs.

Not actual death, of course. This isn’t a Spoon River tale from beyond the grave, and it’s not a Nikki Sixx “I was clinically dead for two minutes, man” sort of thing. No, this is just a heart-warming tale of friendship run amok that happens to involve me being dead.

Before we proceed, I have to establish a bit of background: I am what you might call “thoroughly punctual.” You might also go with “terrifyingly punctual.” “Slavishly robotic when it comes to the sway of time” wouldn’t be too far off the mark either. If you tell me to meet you somewhere at 8:30, odds are pretty good that I will wander through the door at 8:30. It isn’t even intentional, it just happens that way. For years I went without a watch or a cell phone, and still I magically arrived on the button. “You’re two minutes behind schedule,” a friend of mine once joked. “We were starting to worry.” One time I tried to show up late to a party, in an effort not to look like a dweeb — turns out I had read the Evite wrong and showed up extra-early.

The side effect is that I’m a real joy to be around if we’re running late for a movie, but that’s a conversation for another time. Let’s get to me dying.

This happened a few years ago, when I was working at an office in Chelsea. It was an hourly job, the kind where every movement is punctuated by the whine and screech and of a dot matrix punch card. For someone predisposed to chronic timeliness, having your whereabouts tracked to the exact minute is like going into rehab and finding a bag of needles and some Velvet Underground records. If anything, I got worse. Somehow I settled on eights, aiming for two minutes before any given shift. If I was working 10:00 to 6:00, the punch card read 9:58 to 5:58. Throw in lunch hours, and each day had four punch times. On a good week, I could get all twenty punches in alignment.

That really, really isn’t something I should brag about.

None of this escaped the notice of my coworkers, especially once we hired a few college friends of mine, who assured everyone that yes, I was like that in regular life. Eventually they got used to it, and hardly even seemed to notice anymore. Then, on an otherwise ordinary summer day, I made an otherwise ordinary dentist appointment.

Let me say in my defense that I dutifully informed my boss, Kevin. But when he passed around the weekly schedule, the appointment wasn’t on there. “Hey, don’t forget, I’m taking a half day Tuesday to go to the dentist,” I said as he browsed eBay for bowling shirts. “I’ll be in at 2:30.” He gave a thumbs-up. I never gave it a second thought — there were always little adjustments like that once the schedule was posted.

The dentist visit itself was uneventful.

Them: “What’s your insurance?”
Me: “Delta.”
Them: “DMO or PPO?”
Me: “I have no idea.”
Them: “We don’t take DMOs.”
Me: “Then it’s definitely PPO.”

Dr. Atlas, who was nowhere near as imposing as his name suggests, did the cleaning himself. He worked with brutal efficiency, finishing in around fifteen minutes. A Latina hygienist took X-rays, which I despise because I gag on those little square things you have to hold in your mouth, but she was sympathetic because she does, too. “Bite down on that, Papi. This will just take a second, Papi.” It remains the only time anyone has ever called me Papi.

Afterward I had some time to kill. I went to Pearl Paint in Soho to look at colors for my room, wandered back uptown, and poked around Barnes & Noble for a while. I stopped at a diner for some French toast. There was still some time left, but I was out of ideas, so I headed towards the office. My shift normally started at 10:00 AM. It was 2:15 PM. I had been absent for four hours and fifteen minutes.

Kevin forgot I was at the dentist.

(He pauses, letting the moment hang in the air like a dandelion seed.)

Bear in mind that the staff included people whom I have known since college, people I hang out with on a regular basis.

(The seed floats … floats … )

They had called my friends.
They had called my sister, who used to work at that office.
They had called my other sister, at her house in New Hampshire.
They had sent our buddy Tom, who worked from home a few blocks from my apartment, to shout at my open window and try to find my landlord.
They had formulated a plan to climb up my fire escape and break into my home if I had not surfaced by nightfall.

They had called every single person they could think of.

They had tried to call my Mom.

Four hours! Four fucking hours! I was gone barely long enough to watch “Lawrence of Arabia,” and they had done everything but put out an Amber Alert and send up the Bat-Signal. So accustomed were they to my rampant punctuality that at the slightest inference of tardiness, the only possible explanation was that I had died.

Ever been in a foul mood, and imagined something horrible happening to you to make yourself feel better? You trace the flow of imaginary news from friend to friend, gauging their reactions: What would happen if one day I simply vanished? Who would freak out? Who would go to the cops? Who would start photocopying my picture to hang on lamp posts? Who would talk to the news? It’s like a grown-up (yet somehow less mature) version of Ralphie’s blindness fantasy in “A Christmas Story.” Well, I actually got to see it. I failed to walk through the door on a Tuesday morning, and damn it all, my friends leaped into action.

Hey, that’s fantastic and what not, but Jesus Christ almighty, come on. Dead? Seriously? I had to be dead? There was no way something interesting had happened? It was completely out of the question that I could have just, I don’t know, skipped work? Gone to the beach? Won the lottery? Woken up in Atlantic City with a strange redhead and an empty bottle of Cristal? Nope. Dead, on my floor, probably in my underwear. And what bothered me most was the inescapable fact that, when you get right down to it, they had a point. There was absolutely no way something interesting had happened.

The next morning, I dropped my card into the machine. 9:58 AM, right on schedule.

For the record, I had no cavities.

(Brief follow-up note: Now that I no longer work an hourly gig, I don’t pay much attention to the precise time I arrive at the office.)

(Also, in case you’re wondering, this was before I had a cell phone, so they couldn’t just call me.)

(And yes, “chronic timeliness” is a pretty bad-ass pun.)

• On September 28, 1971, the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox was robbed of every last ounce of gold. The crime was never solved, and the facility has stood empty ever since. It is still rigorously guarded, to keep up appearances.

• On September 30, 1902, Cardinals rookie phenom Reginald Dixon mistakenly took the field wearing the wrong uniform pants. Until then, the twenty-year-old fireballer had been unbeaten in twelve career starts, and was touted as the savior of the franchise. Outfitted in pants that were the wrong color and several inches too short, Dixon was visibly flustered by the fans’ amusement and ribbing from his teammates. He gave up nine runs over two innings for his first loss, at one point beaning his own mother in the stands with a wild pitch. The St. Louis papers dubbed him “Pants,” and Dixon never regained his form.

I’ve had an unusual level of exposure to concert t-shirts over the past two nights, because a friend’s extra ticket put me at back to back rock events for the first time in quite a while. Last night in particular, ascending the concrete steps of Giants Stadium, I was surrounded by graphically imprinted pre-shrunk cotton. It was hard not to recall Jeremy Piven’s condemnation of such behavior in PCU: “You’re wearing the shirt of the band you’re going to see? Don’t be that guy.” However, I’ve always felt that to be too much of a blanket statement. There are many species of individual who wear concert t-shirts to a concert, and as I waited for the lights to dim, a field guide of sorts came into distinct focus.

Class I: Those with a t-shirt of the band from a previous tour
• The guy wearing a shirt from the last tour before this one. Shows interest in their recent material, and is the only way to establish street cred if you only recently started listening to them.
• The guy wearing a tour shirt from a perceived hey-day which we are to interpret as the wearer’s judgment of the band’s artistic peak. “This tour is alright, but Zoo TV in ‘91 was transcendent. You wouldn’t understand unless you were there.”
• The guy wearing a shirt from a tour that would have been mathematically impossible for him to attend. We appreciate your pluck, dude with the “Unforgettable Fire” shirt from before you were born, but you’re not fooling anyone.

Class II: Those with a t-shirt of the band from the current tour
• The guy who arrived in the shirt, having clearly got it at an earlier show. We’re happy that you have disposable income, but if you breathe a word about what’s on the set list, you will be kill-murdered.
• The guy who just bought the shirt and is wearing it over the t-shirt he was already wearing.
• The guy who just bought the shirt and is wearing it over a button-down shirt, with the button-down puffing out at the sleeves and waist.
• The girl who obviously went into the restroom and changed into the new shirt.
• The girl who coordinated ahead of time, wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt to the stadium and buying a shirt that goes well with it. Instant ensemble. There is an 85% chance that this girl owned three or more pairs of Doc Martens in high school, and saw the first Lollapalooza.
• The guy who got a shirt that’s clearly too large for him. Look, if they don’t have your size, walk away. It’s not your night.

Class III: Those with a t-shirt from another band entirely
• The guy in a shirt from a band that is connected in spirit to the one playing. This is the sweet spot. This communicates very clearly that you belong, but have other horizons.
• The guy in a shirt that is meant to convey how cool the wearer is, e.g. Sleater-Kinney, The Replacements, Wilco.
• The guy in a shirt that is meant to convey how current and hip the wearer is, e.g. Vampire Weekend, TV on the Radio, Fallout Boy.
• The guy in a shirt that is an overt attempt to win a contest, “Farthest away from the act playing here tonight.” Seeing Billy Joel? Wear Tupac. Seeing The Dresden Dolls? Wear Motörhead. (Motörhead shirt guy wins this contest fairly often.)
• The guy in a shirt that is deliberately meant as a middle finger to those in attendance, e.g. Celine Dion, NKOTB. Also a candidate to be kill-murdered.

Class IV: Those with a t-shirt from the opening band
• The guy who heard the opening band play and bought the shirt because he was blown away.
• The guy who showed up wearing the opening band’s shirt, a definitive “Hey look, I know who the opening band is” proclamation to all within ten yards radius.

Class V: Outliers
• The guy in a jersey for the sports team that plays at the stadium.
• The guy wearing a shirt that is somehow connected with the band’s origin, e.g. a Guinness shirt for U2.
• Anyone under the age of twelve with a brand new shirt that hangs off her/him like a tent, gawking around the stadium with eyes wide and mouth agape. Welcome to the show, kid.

As a consequence, there’s really nothing they can prescribe that will make us flinch. The 21st century patient is prepared for anything.

Doctor: You have hexamalephasia of the carotid lukeplantic ganglia.
You: Roger that.
Doctor: Eat plenty of beets, rub igneous rock on your thighs, and lift a saxophone over your head after every meal.
You: Sounds good.

For example, the last time I saw a doctor we had a brief conversation involving several words of fifteen letters or more, during which he effortlessly convinced me to hold my mouth open for half an hour so that he could jab the inside of my head with syringes and scalpels. Did I flinch? Nope. Well, I might have flinched once or twice from the actual scalpel jabbing, but not from the suggestion that it was a good idea.

It begs the question, is there a point at which we will flinch?

Here I would postulate that A) such a point does exist, and B) it occupies the place in space/time where doctors start telling us to eat robots.

This point may not have occurred yet, but it’s coming, and sooner than you might think. Say hello to Ares, the sort-of-but-not-really acronym that’s short for Assembling Reconfigurable Endoluminal Surgical System. The theory behind Ares is that invasive procedures increase risk, recovery time, and external scarring. If surgeons can do those same procedures without the cutting open the patient, it would save time, pain, money, kittens, you name it. That means building little robots to access our innards through existing orifices like the navel, and if that sentence didn’t make you nervous, you need to go watch “The Matrix” again.

Endoluminal: from the Greek, endo- “internal” or “within,” and luminal “droids in my lung”

In short, Ares is a series of botlings that the patient swallows one by one. Once inside, they combine to form some sort of Ph.D. Voltron (the cars, not the lions) and start assisting the surgeon. Different botlings have different tools, so the system can be reconfigured as needed. Oh, and the assembled system looks an awful lot like the face-hugger from “Alien.” So, good news there.

Ares was developed at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, which is either a university in Pisa or a restaurant in Park Slope. It may be both, I’d have to check Urbanspoon. Dr. Arianna Menciassi is one of the biomedical robotics experts heading up the research, and given that she’s an Italian scientist with a supervillain name, I can only assume that she is unspeakably sexy.

You can practically hear the accent: “We are working on the real possibility of building a robot inside the person, inside their abdomen or stomach and there would be several module which are very small like pills and that can combine together inside and the idea is to introduce these robots from the mouth or anus or the umbilical. This is the dream.”

Well, that’s … not quite as sexy as I was expecting. No offense, Dr. Menciassi, but your dream kind of sounds like the premise of “Saw IX.”

The article leaves one question eerily unanswered. What exactly happens to Ares when the surgery is complete? Does it stay in there? Does nature take its course? Do they send even smaller robots in after it? Who performs the robotomy? My guess is that the answer will involve rooster entrails.

• orang-utan carpal tunnel gunshot wound elbow “nancy drew”

• foam rubber rebecca de mornay “guitar pick” pancakes OR bacon OR windmills

• why are my hands so sweaty? guggenheim envelope heart attack audi 5000

• best place in london to get goat cheese pizza “two time grammy winner” my face hurts

• amalgamated battery shove bullhorn miracle whip basket full of kittens on fire

• there is a post office in my nightmare daisy chain galloping astronaut dogs with demure handprints

• california prom queen etiquette seven stitches cantilever arm hit by lightning site:.au

• bifocals soft serve couch of doom media jump rope bat OR wolf OR spider “drosophila melanogaster”

• generation spitball iceman george gervin “cattle prod” why do girls like Michael Bublé?

• borrowing sweaters from a japanese fishery worker “ladies and gentlemen, johnny cash”

• jack lemmon filmography angry midget swarm tankard of ale thrice daily filetype:pdf

• knives and babies knives and babies knives and babies knives and babies “knives and babies” site:.org

• sweet maria i simply cannot live another day “keep your fork there’s pie”

• open source gag order machiavelli -friendly -volcano whistle OR whittle OR “white castle” no seriously, basket full of kittens on fire

• On September 2, 1906, Reginald “Pants” Dixon mistakenly arrived in Pittsburgh for a game against Philadelphia. Dixon pitched five innings against the Pirates anyway, getting tagged for a 5-0 loss.

• On September 3, 1906, Reginald “Pants” Dixon attempted to steal first. The catcher was too confused to make a pick-off throw, but Dixon slipped and fell halfway to the base. After regaining his composure, he calmly walked back to the batter’s box, and struck out on the next pitch.

• On September 4, 1905, Reginald “Pants” Dixon lost track of a pop fly in the sun, and kept waving off his teammates to make the catch even after the ball was caught to end the inning. The opposing pitcher was too polite to say anything, so he took his warm-up tosses around him.

• On September 5, 1907, Reginald “Pants” Dixon broke both legs sliding into third base. (His slide left him nearly eight feet short of the bag.)

• On September 6, 1905, Reginald “Pants” Dixon made the lone start of his career — and by some accounts, of his entire life — behind the plate. Both of St. Louis’ catchers were out with food poisoning, so players drew straws in the clubhouse before the game. Dixon drew the short straw. In all, he was charged with 11 passed balls and struck by 23 pitches, at one point attempting to set up behind the umpire. Dixon was benched in the sixth, and in his absence the Cardinals rallied back to win 14-12.

• On September 7, 1907, after falling asleep in the bullpen, Reginald “Pants” Dixon mistook his seventh inning relief appearance for a start. When the game ended three innings later, Dixon assumed it was because of impending rain.

• On September 8, 1908, Reginald “Pants” Dixon complained of headaches throughout a 7-2 loss to the Giants. After the game it was determined that he was wearing the bat boy’s cap.

• On September 9, 1906, Reginald “Pants” Dixon admitted to the press his agonizing fear of dirigibles.

• On September 10, 1909, Reginald “Pants” Dixon stumbled on the third base chalk line while walking onto the field, hit his head, and lost consciousness. Eddie Higgins started in his place and shut down the Braves 6-0.

• On September 11, 1906, Reginald “Pants” Dixon beaned three consecutive home plate umpires, knocking out all three. Only one reserve umpire was on hand, so when the third base ump came in to call ball & strikes, the reserve ump had the whole field to himself. Dixon knocked him out with a line drive in his next at-bat.

• On September 12, 1908, the infamous “barrel incident” occurred in St. Louis. After Reginald “Pants” Dixon and Julian “Shrap” McGuiness were both shelled and yanked from the game by the second inning, the pitchers nearly got into a brawl outside the visitors’ clubhouse. Tensions boiled after the game when the two happened upon each other in a bar, and in the ensuing fight McGuiness stuffed Dixon into a barrel and rolled him down Vandeventer Avenue. Dixon finally crasheed to a halt in some bushes, and eventually walked home with the barrel still stuck over his head and torso.

• On September 13, 1909, Reginald “Pants” Dixon was attacked by a pelican while taking the mound for the bottom of the fifth. Dixon fled the field, and the bird received a standing ovation as it flew away.

• On September 14, 1913, Reginald “Pants” Dixon pitched his last game, taking on Julian “Schrap” McGuiness one more time. For his part, McGuiness never let a runner past second base. Dixon repeatedly tripped on the pitching rubber — and somehow bounces a pitch off the third base bag — but managed to take a perfect game two outs into the ninth inning. On the final pitch of his career, Dixon gave up a game-winning home run to the last hitter in the order: McGuiness. In the year following Dixon’s retirement, the Cardinals posted their first winning record of the 20th century.

The figure was uncovered in 2007. Bernard Gentry, head of the Spirit & Flare Committee at the National Council of Chain Restaurants, had long been convinced that member chains like Applebee’s and TGI Friday’s were losing time and money at the hands of those falsely claiming a birthday. Not only is dessert a high-margin menu item, but having the whole waitstaff sing to the perpetrator reduces the turn-around time of all tables. Gentry wanted the entire Council to adopt rules mandating that government-issued identification be produced for birthday celebrations, but was shot down on the grounds that A) such ID-verification would ruin the surprise for genuine birthday boys/girls, and B) it was mean.

Undaunted, Gentry commissioned an independent audit to determine exactly how many birthday celebrations are false. The eighteen-month study, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s School of Statistical Numbers, was based on a double-blind, cap-weighted survey of over 16,000 chain restaurant patrons. The results were unequivocal: More than half of all birthday dessert/song/clapping events were presented to patrons who were lying about their dates of birth.

Why do they do it? One key factor may be the spectacle itself. Cake fraud incidence is higher at restaurants that use sparklers on their cakes, and rises exponentially with the length and complexity of the waitstaff’s performance. Average amount of “flare” worn per server also plays an indirect role. Certain Hooters locations have cake fraud rates well over seventy percent, for obvious reasons.

Gentry himself acknowledges that the underlying reasons are not always cut and dry, but the effect on the bottom line is the same regardless of intention. “Some are trying to impress a date. Some want to play a joke on a friend, by having the whole restaurant turn to look while nine people in striped shirts blow slide whistles at them. Really though, most just want a free Apple-Cherry Mud Slinger Bomb® or Death By Chocolate Earthquake Landslide®. Bunch of greedy bastards, all of them.”

• On August 20, 1984, former president Jimmy Carter shattered all previous records for continuous breakdancing, collapsing after 23 hours and 17 minutes. In his book, “Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President,” Carter called it “the single achievement of which I am most proud, a feat of unadulterated substance that cannot be diluted by politics.”

• On August 21, 1905, Cardinals pitcher Reginald “Pants” Dixon was nearly killed by an errant fastball from his nemesis, Julian “Shrap” McGuiness. The pitch missed Dixon’s head by less than an inch, nearly instigating a brawl as a furious Dixon charged the mound and was met by every single one of McGuiness’ teammates. (The Cardinals remained quietly on the bench.) McGuiness insisted the pitch wasn’t intentional, but most believed it was in retaliation for Dixon calling him a “toe-cracklin’ stack o’ cornpone.” Dixon attempted to return the favor later in the game, but hit an elderly woman in the stands instead.