Three point one four one five nine two six five thr

Good afternoon. Happy Pi Day. This Gene Pool intro will be mostly about pi and its cherished day, which is today. March 14. 3.14, pi. Or close enough, they tell us, but they are lying to you. More on this soon.

Alert: We start an hour early for today and every day hence! Noon, not one. For highly technical related reasons I am postponing the application of new rules for questions and comments. You can do both, at least for the moment, without a paid-up subscription. More on this as it develops.

First, some intriging Gene Pool achievement in the annals of accountability journalism. You may recall a few days ago, we gleefully spanked Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist for The New York Times, for a column he wrote. He said that a new study proved that mask mandates had not only done nothing to affect the spread of Covid, but also — quoting comments made by the head author of the study — that masks themselves had been useless as well. This was a shocking claim from which Stephens concluded, in essence, that libs are snowflakes who stampeded us all into idiot overreaction.

Tom The Butcher and I read the study itself and concluded it showed no such thing. In an interview with me, Mr. Stephens harrumphed, quibbled, and doubled down. And that was that. Case closed. Just another he-said, she-said unanswerable Cons-Libs controversy! No clear truth here, just opinion. You be the judge, etc.

Ah, but now comes an article in the selfsame New York Times, under the byline of another writer, Zeynep Tufekci, who not only has an excellent name absolutely everyone misspells, but who also is a an expert on the pandemic, and who did solid backup reporting on this, and concluded, for most of the reasons The Gene Pool had (along with the L.A. Times and Daily Kos) … well, here’s the headline:

Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work.

(emphasis mine)

This story amounts to a complete nullification and retraction of Stephens’s column, though it never mentions him by name. (That is how retractions are handled by big, important newspapers: as though this was all new information, and not a big old beg-pardon for a previous gaffe. Being big means never having to say you’re sorry.) The story quotes another member of the medical committee that produced the report, who basically said the data was too flawed and skimpy to draw any solid conclusions, that they had no friggin’ idea what the head of their committee was babbling about to a reporter, but it wasn’t right, and it was dangerous to public health, and that’s that.

So, that’s that.

Okay, now we move to The Gene Pool’s Gene Poll, on a splinter subject. This poll is likely to spark some controversy and the intemperate ire of anti-vaxxers OR pro-vaxxers, depending on the results. Duly note: It’s not scientific, it’s merely anecdotal. But I love anecdotes. I’m a long-form feature writer!

Poll One:

Poll Two:

Poll Three:

Poll 4:

Okay, now on to pi. But first, two paragraphs of boring but necessary boilerplate:

After the intro (which you are reading now), there will be some early questions and answers  added on –  and then I'll keep adding them as the hour progresses and your fever for my opinions grows and multiplies and metastasizes.  To see those later Q&As,  just refresh your screen every once in a while. 

As always, you can also leave comments. They’ll congregate at the bottom of the post, and allow you to annoy and hector each other and talk mostly amongst yourselves. Though I will stop in from time to time.

Whew, we got through that.

Pi: When I was 39 — old enough to have more of a sense of proportion — the concept of Pi Day arose, and I was pissed. I was pissed because to me it was an unthinkable betrayal of pi, which is, more than anything else, a paean to the value of accuracy and precision against powerful forces, an endless search for truth, a noble quest of being accurate to a single yoctogram, which is an actual very tiny measurement indeed, scientifically. Pi cannot be a “day” merely because of a … gross approximation. Pi is not 3.14. Pi is 3.1415926536 … Devoting a single “day” to it based entirely on its first three digits would be an abominable surrender to stupidity, like announcing curry is a single spice.

So I decided we needed to find not a day, but the exactly approximate moment in the day that would henceforth become Pi Moment, correct to the limits of human thought, and still humanly searching for better. I did the math, taking the number of minutes in a day (1,440) and multiplying it by the ten fraction-digits of pi (beginning with 0.14 to ten digits down. That comes out to the 203.893th minute of the day, or 3 hours 22 minutes and 20.4 seconds after 3 a.m. on March 14. More or less. But I was dissatisfied. See, I’d been playing into the hands of The Man. I’d accepted their 3.14 date, but then acted as if that was not removed from the subsequent actions, which it had to be, since those digits were already accounted for in the final calculation. So I recalculated, starting with the 159 etc. that followed the 3.14, redid the math and established, to my satisfaction, that pi arrived and quickly fled at 3 hours 49 minutes and 22 point three seconds after 3 a.m., with endlessly infinitesimal variation remaining. Pi Moment.

You probably snored your way through it this morning, you nitwit.

Yes, I am obnoxious and contrarian and competitively arrogant without a sense of proportion. Just two days ago, I was playing cards with a guy named Max, and realized I was trying to annihilate him. Max is my 5-year-old grandson.

For the longest time I couldn’t have told you where this contrarian competitive obsessive arrogance comes from, but I recently found out. It’s imprinted in my genes. I got an emailed manuscript from someone who wanted me to help him place it in a major publication. It was from someone who’d never written for a major publication. It was about … pi. It was, I thought, brilliant and deranged in a particularly familiar competitive, obsessive. contrarian way. It was from my brother, Don, a 77-year-old retired computer expert and polymath.

Somehow, for mysterious reasons, once it hit my hands it never found its way to a big publication. He and I waited till Pi Day.

---

It's Pi Day.  Have a Slice.

By Don Weingarten 

In case you’re curious, the hundred billionth digit of Pi is 9.

I didn’t look it up, and I didn’t read it somewhere. I know it because recently, my computer, at my behest, found Pi to a hundred billion digits. It took 7.877 hours to do the necessary calculation and write out the answer; a 97 Gigabyte file.

You may ask: Why on Earth did you have your computer do that? Are you on the verge of some complex ballistic computation preparatory to, say, firing a laser beam across the width of the entire known universe, and seeking an accurate enough heading to have it strike its target with an error of less than the width of a proton? Well, no. One could accomplish that with a value of Pi of perhaps a few hundred digits. The fact of the matter is that, indisputably, there is absolutely no practical reason to know the value of Pi to greater than, perhaps, a thousand digits. 

I did it for the same reason many other people before me – Edmund Hillary, for example -- took on a seemingly insurmountable challenge: Because it was there.  Also, as a test of my computer’s ability. This is known as a benchmark. Let me be honest; I am bragging. Some men brag with muscle cars, some with actual muscles. I do it with computers. 

Thus, when I hear that a supercomputer has accomplished a feat of computational prowess, my first thought is “I can do that without a supercomputer.” If possible, with a calculator, or by counting on my fingers. I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a showoff. 

Pi -- the unchanging ratio of every circle's circumference to its diameter -- is a fascinating thing, as are all so-called transcendental numbers. Most numbers behave in staid and uninteresting ways, when we examine the decimal places. Some, such as 15, have none, or, viewed differently, have an unending string of zeros. Or contemplate one-third, which is an eternal string of 3s.  Then there are those which go on forever, although in a clearly understandable way, with endless repetitions of a single sequence, such as what happens when you have a fraction whose denominator is any prime number higher than five.  One-seventh, for instance, is 0.142857142857142857 and on and on. 

Pi, however, while it goes on perpetually, never repeats. This can be mathematically proven. No matter how far along in the endless stream of digits one proceeds, new and varying combinations of digits emerge. And the fact that this series is infinite has some interesting implications. For example, think of a series of random digits, say 123456789, to take something I have actually tried. After generating 100 billion digits of Pi, I proceeded to search for that string. Was it anywhere in the sequence? I found it. It begins at the 523,551,502nd digit. The point is this: pi is an infinitely long string, which means that even if you choose a group hundreds of digits long, you are guaranteed that that string will be found somewhere in pi. It may take millions of squidzillions of digits, but it will be there eventually. It’s like the Infinite Monkey Theorem, postulating that with a million monkeys sitting at typewriters for infinity, one will eventually type Hamlet.   Or, for that matter, Fifty Shades of Grey.

It is astonishing at first when one realizes some of the implications of infinite sequences of numbers.  As pi is truly infinite, any number of digits will occur somewhere in it: Write a thousand-page novel. Convert the text in the novel to what are called ASCII codes – the digits which represent letters, punctuation marks, and spaces in written text – and that sequence will appear somewhere in Pi. Every book that has ever been written is in pi…somewhere.

Infinity is a weird beast, and I find this fascinating. As did Carl Sagan, who, in his 1985 novel Contact, created a message from God embedded in pi. 

I was seeking no message. I did it to prove it could be done. 

No, I set no international record. The current record (it is always climbing) for precision in pi is 62 TRILLION some-odd digits. (Oh, very well: 62,831,853,071,796). That record was set on 19 August 2021, by a team from the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons. They used a computer with one Terabyte of RAM and 510 Terabytes of Disk Space, and it took them 108 days.

Here is what I have accomplished, in terms of an international record:  I have calculated the most digits of pi ever calculated in less than eight hours by an ordinary home computer, using under two Terabytes of free disk space, using less than 64 Gigabytes of RAM, in the city of San Leandro, California, so far as I am aware. 

My computer is powerful, but the one that set the record is a monster. I have one-sixteenth the RAM, and, I estimate, roughly one seventy-fifth of the disk space. That, oddly, is a good thing: It makes the challenge more exciting. That record called to me. When I first became aware of it, I was awed. I searched for, and downloaded, a professional-level program to calculate this sort of thing. It’s called y-cruncher. It is designed to be used in record-setting attempts, and even generates, in addition to its primary output, a file containing documentation of the achievement. It runs under Windows. I loaded it into my computer, learned how to use it, and kicked it off. Told it to generate pi.

 I tried a million digits. Trivial; it was finished almost immediately. A billion. A little over a minute.

Ten billion. Twelve minutes. Then I devoted eight hours one Saturday and achieved 100 billion. I was ecstatic. We were approaching supercomputer territory.

Where do I go from here? Let’s think it out: To break the record, I’d need to exceed 63 Trillion digits, which would, in the first place, take about eight hundred times as long as my current run. Eight hundred times 8 hours is 6400 hours, or 266 days of continuous run time. Almost 9 months. 

What if, in those added letters converted to digits via ASCII, at some point, we get  “Iscowlwithfrustration…” which is the beginning of Fifty Shades of Grey. How great would that be?

So why not try? Women have been known to do wonderful things in 9 months; my computer could do that. I’d have to hope like hell that no power failure during that period outlasted my uninterruptable power supply, but with a little luck….

Well, turns out there’s a problem, and it isn’t computing power, it’s disk space. Generating very large values of Pi uses one byte for each digit. Therefore, the expected disk usage is easy to calculate, as opposed to large values of Pi. For example, 100 billion digits of Pi makes a file exactly 100 billion bytes long, or in computer terms, almost 100 Gigabytes. You run out of space fast. Moreover, unless you have really ridiculous amounts of RAM, you need disk space for the calculations as well. I mean a lot.

In order for me to have a shot at the record, I would need, at a minimum, 140 trillion bytes of disk space, almost exactly ten times what my Andromeda does, in actual fact, have. Moreover, that would need to be usable disk space, which means it would not allow for any of the space currently occupied by the Operating System, copious amounts of software, and really absurd amounts of data. I have almost ten terabytes of data.  I would also have to use one of my other computers for ordinary tasks, such as email, because my computer would have to be solely devoted to The Quest.  

Even assuming I cleared it all out, except for the operating system and the y-cruncher software, I estimate I’d be limited to something on the order of ten trillion digits. That would take several months, not even come close to breaking the record, and be a ridiculous waste of time.

I’m considering it.

---

So, that’s the story. Chromosomes. (“Genes,” I might have said, but it woulda seemed confusing.)

There’s a postscript. For the last Gene Pool, we published the results of a contest to come up with pokes, poems re-telling old jokes. Pat made the first cut from roughly 500 entries, and winnowed it down to 50 or so. I had the next whack, and right near the end I cut a fine poem about, um, raping an animal, uncontrollable lust, and a moment of near fatal humiliation for a fine man. None of that bothered me: It was weird and disturbing, but well constructed! My problem was mostly that it was too long, but also a little dauntingly familiar. It survived till the last round. Before Pat edits, she has a computer shave off the names of the entrants, so she does not inadvertently show favoritism. So we had no idea who wrote that thing until she checked just a day or two ago. Yeah, my brother.

No, he’d never written a poem for publication since high school. And had never entered the Invitational, not once in 30 years. But something about this story appealed to his somewhat awry mind, and mine.

Don’s “The Colonel and the Camel”

A Foreign Legion Colonel, newly minted, grave and grand,
Rode out into the desert to assume his first command;
His post remote and distant, though it never brought him down,
Was full one hundred miles away from any sort of town.

This all occurred quite recently, he journeyed there by jeep,
The road he traveled over, it was rocky, rough and steep;
But when at last he got there, he blinked in his surprise,
For tied up by the Squad Room door, a Camel met his eyes.

Well, he called in the First Sergeant, then, a rough and ready sort,
And asked about the Camel which was tethered to his fort;
“Long past are days when beasts we rode, I find this very queer,
Explain, First Sergeant, what the hell this Camel’s doing here!” 

“You see, sir, with 400 men this desert fort is brimmin’,
The men are young and vibrant, and there aren’t any women,
And, well, sir, well, you see, he said while fiddling with his hat, 
The Camel’s kinda got something to do with all of that.”

The Colonel, now disgusted, nonetheless was quite aware,
That mutiny might follow if the Camel weren’t there.
And so he said, “First Sergeant, you must let the Camel be;
And whatever else you do make sure it’s NOT in front of me!”

Well, time went by, six months or more – the Colonel, young and spry,
Found that Camel looking better with each day which passed him by.
One night quite late, his patience spent, he brought the beast inside,
Dropped his drawers and went to work; the Camel played the bride.

And just as he was finished, to his rear he heard a sound,
A strangled gasp behind him, and the Colonel spun around;
The Sergeant stood behind him, with his grizzled jaws agape;
And the Colonel knew he’d caught him with no possible escape.

Now one further thing they’d taught him in Colonel School back then;
Was Never, Never Ever lose your cool before the men.
He straightened, pulled his pants up, hitched his belt quite tight and then
Said “Well, First Sergeant, is that roughly what is done by all the men?”

And the Sergeant said, “I’m sure you’ve done the best you could by far;
But I feel I must advise you that you’re not quite up to par;
The men, when they’re frustrated, yes, they set the camel free,
Then they ride it into town, ‘cause there are women there, you see!”

---

It was only after Pat told me about discovering the identity of the author that I plumbed Google and discovered this, one of the earliest pokes I wrote, 12 years ago. Don had had no knowledge of it. And I’d had no knowledge of his.

“The Camel”

in the style of an English heroic sonnet

An officer takes up his new command:
A desert outpost, lonely and austere.
He asks the sergeant how the men can stand
To be so long without a woman near.

The sergeant shyly shows his commandant
A tied-up female camel in a shed.
Whene’er the men are paralyzed by want,
They make good use of her, the sergeant said.

While horrified, the captain did not speak.
His feelings, though, were of extreme unease.
But after months he, too, was feeling weak
And very much in need of some release.

He found it in the way he’d so contemned;
But this the sergeant spied — the deed, unmasked!
Embarrassed now, the captain hawed and hemmed —
“That’s how the soldiers do it, then?” he asked.

“It’s not,” the sergeant said with measured frown —
“The soldiers ride the camel into town.”

---

Okay, we’re ready to start your questions and my answers. But first, an Instapoll!

A few days ago, my girlfriend left on a ten-day trip out of town.

You don’t actually have to answer. We all know where that is going.

---

Q: When I was twelve or so, my mother moved my sister, myself, her friend Anita, and my father's sister Reva to a farm in a very rural part of Michigan. It was totally foreign to me. One day my mother and Anita invited some people home for a visit--not sure how they met them, and we never saw them again, for cause. My father (who died when I was very young) was Jewish and his sister Reva was also Jewish. This came up in conversation. Our visitors had never met a real live Jew in person before, and they were inquisitive. "What do you call yourselves? Jew is an insult, so...." Well, what DO we call ourselves? We call ourselves Jews, regardless of the ignorance or bigotry of others. Arabs call themselves Arabs. The problem (usage or otherwise) is not in the name that people use to identify themselves. It is ignorance. It is bigotry. What I say is no knuckling under to either.  – Stephanie 

A: Several years ago, when I was writing this book, I did something I absolutely never do. I showed a subject what I had written before it was published.  I was writing about a man named Edward Lefrak, a thoracic surgeon who had done the first heart transplant in the Washington area on the One Day I was writing about. .  He was a hero of the book, a fine, vastly gifted man, generous of spirit, who had saved many lives.  The chapter about him contained so much technical medical information that I was afraid I had misunderstood something, or expressed it imprecisely, so I sent him the large part of that chapter that was about him.  (I never do this because I feel it puts the writer in jeopardy – if the person asks for a change not because of accuracy, but because of, say, vanity, it almost obliges you to weaken what you have written, to keep a relationship going.)  

Dr.Lefrak read it and, indeed, found a couple of small things to correct, which I fixed.  And then he asked for one more thing, of a personal nature.  

Whuh-oh, I thought. 

I had written this line: “Ed Lefrak was that extreme rarity: A devoutly liberal northeastern Jew, and Yankees fan, who happened to have a taste for country music…” 

“Please don’t say ‘Jew,’ he asked.  It sounded bad to him.   

I didn’t actually know why.  I call myself a Jew.  But the change was harmless, and I made it “Jewish,” and adjusted the syntax, and it sounded better to him.  It’s an oddity, that word.  I think the older you are (he’s a little older than me), the closer it comes to Very Bad Times, when Jew was often a sneered slur.

TIMELY TIP: If you're reading this right now on an email:   Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “Three point one five…” for my full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers, and be able to refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

Q: Commanders is not a great name, but it could have been worse. It's been my experience as a logo designer for 45 years that any decision like that made by committee results in the winner being everyone's third choice. A colleague once tried to outsmart that inevitable outcome by submitting two terrible choices along with the obviously best one. Guess how that turned out.-- Connie Akers 

A: Many years ago I edited a piece by Steve Mendelson, a hugely gifted cartoonist and caricaturist who illustrated books by Art Buchwald.  Steve had a wonderful sense of humor, and was dying of AIDS.  When he was near the end of his life, he told me about Buchwald, a man he admired but who had a manic need to imprint himself on everything.  Whatever illustrations Steve submitted, Buchwald always needed to find one – exactly one – that he didn’t like, to demand a re-draw.  So by book three, Steve had hatched a plan.  If there were, say, 12 chapters, he would submit 12 drawings.  One would be deliberately terrible: “People with eleven fingers, that sort of thing,” Steve said.   Buchwald would peremptorily demand a replacement.  Steve would wait a week, watching TV or whatever, then submit the 12th good one he’d already drawn.  I miss Steve.  

Q: See, that’s your problem.  To you ( and, I suspect, to a noble prize economist who was seemingly staggered to learn that 400 bucks would devastate many a family when needed in an emergency) 50 bucks is small.

A:  This is reacting to our pathetic entreaties that you buy a subscription to The Gene Pool for $50 a year. I confess I do not know how to answer this.  $50 a year is $0.96 a week, or $0.48 an episode, with occasional freebie episodes.  It’s less apiece than the price of a non-fancy small cup of joe in a Styrofoam container .  If that is a financial burden, which it might be, I strongly do not recommend subscribing.  You can still, and will always, be able to read it.  It’s Jake with me. 

Q: What do you think the chances are of Trump winning the 2024 presidential election? Do you think DeSantis would be more disastrous for our country than Trump?

A: The first will be based entirely on the economy. Which at the moment is looking dire. The second, yes. But it’s close.

Q: Do you dream in technicolor, or black and white?

A: Odd answer.  I would have said definitely black and white, but not long ago I had a dream in which differences in color were part of the narrative, and I saw color.  I forget what that dream was, which is part of the problem here.  

Q: I’m concerned that AI might lead to the elimination of my job, as well as those of all Congressional Research Service attorneys and analysts. So I decided to test it out, and geez, I don’t think I can top this. Are we in trouble?

From ChatGPT:

Please write a CRS report analyzing whether the chicken or egg came first.

CRS Report: The Chicken and Egg Conundrum

Introduction

The age-old question of whether the chicken or egg came first has been debated for centuries, with no clear consensus among scientists or philosophers. In this report, we will analyze various perspectives and evidence to determine whether the chicken or egg came first.

Scientific Perspective

From a scientific perspective, the egg came first. According to evolutionary biology, chickens evolved from non-chicken ancestors through a process called speciation. This means that at some point in the past, two non-chicken birds mated, and the resulting offspring had a genetic mutation that led to the first true chicken. This mutation likely occurred in the egg, which means that the first chicken must have hatched from an egg laid by a non-chicken bird.

The egg also precedes the chicken in terms of reproductive biology. The female bird (or any other egg-laying animal) produces eggs containing all the genetic information required to create a new individual. The egg is fertilized by sperm, and then the embryo develops and hatches from the egg. Thus, the egg is the necessary precursor for the chicken's existence.

Philosophical Perspective

From a philosophical perspective, the answer is less clear-cut. The question of whether the chicken or egg came first has been a subject of debate among philosophers for centuries. Some argue that the chicken came first because it is the mature form of the egg, while others argue that the egg came first because it contains the genetic blueprint for the chicken.

One way to approach this question from a philosophical perspective is to consider causation. If we define causation as the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), then we can ask whether the egg or the chicken is the cause of the other. Some philosophers argue that the chicken is the cause because it is the result of a long process of evolution and natural selection. Others argue that the egg is the cause because it contains the genetic information that determines the chicken's characteristics.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the evidence suggests that the egg came first from a scientific perspective. Evolutionary biology and reproductive biology both support the idea that the first true chicken hatched from an egg laid by a non-chicken bird. However, the philosophical question of whether the chicken or egg came first is more complex and open to interpretation. Ultimately, the answer may depend on one's definition of causation and the perspective from which one approaches the question.

A: This is utterly terrifying, because – even as an editor – I can say that is a very good answer.  I have a close friend who had to send an email to a foreign dignitary and used AI, and got a perfect document that he was able to just … send.  

Q: Birthday. Do you only celebrate the exact moment you emerged into the outside world? Or do you take, at least some larger and more random part of the whole day? See. You;re just being...pointless.

A: Birthdays are not a day in celebration of precision and accuracy.

Urgent message. I have had to re-set questions two and three in the first set of polls. If you took it please take it again. Thanks.

Q: Gene, I always thought that the Commanders was a good name because we could shorten it to the Commies. “Go Commies!”  – Former Washingtonian Mandy

A: I think it’s lousy.  It’s authoritarian. And elitist. Classist.  The second dictionary definition is “a member of a higher class in some orders of knighthood.” 

Mostly, though, I think it is typical of committee-think. You always wind up with something bland that no one loves but no one hates.  I have thought for some time that the Washington Nationals – a committee product – should have been “The Washington Greys,” an homage to the Homestead Greys, a long-ago Negro League team from hereabouts.  No one would dare. 

Q: Why do people need to consult the Master Contest List for the premises for Year 1 or is it just me who has them all memorized?

A: Because you are old and decrepit. 

Q: Thanks for your answer to the posters who want a divorce from red states. I'm a progressive living in Houston, who BTW, was raised in Bethesda. First, I like it here and will not be returning to the east coast, despite the current politics of Texas. I would like to remind your readers that more people voted for Biden in Texas than Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware combined and then some. And Texas is largely a nonvoting state. We elected a gay women as mayor three times and currently have a black mayor. We have the number one cancer center in the US, number three ranked children's hospital, we send people to space, and make the jet fuel for your plane flights. And probably the plastic for your EVs. Look, I'm not sh--ting on it Maryland every chance I get--I still love coming back for a visit. What is it with people dissing other states while claiming their state is the only one worth living in? Libs--quit being divisive! How about encouraging us progressives to flip Texas? I wish there was a question or story in this, sorry, just had to get it off my chest.

A: Then why did you folks elect a right-wing maniac for your governor? Why is the state’s policy on abortion so cruel and inhuman?

Q: I'd like to know about the messages you received after your second Pulitzer Prize, awarded for your article on cases of children being left to die in hot cars. Did any relate their own experiences or talk about someone they knew who did that. I ask because if I had ever had children, I think I could easily have become one of them, having often got preoccupied with my thoughts. Sorry this isn't funny, but I am curious.

A: I had several people talk to me with their stories.  All I could do for them was listen. One was a grandmother who had almost killed her grandchile while babysitting; the child survived but she was prosecuted.  Her pain was overwhelming.  She will never be the same person she was before. 

Q: Were you at risk of going into the military during the Vietnam War.? Are you genuinely outraged by the use of spurious deferment strategies to avoid serving in that war? Who is a hero to you from that period: Muhammad Ali or John McCain and is it intellectually honest to say both?

A: I had a pretty high draft number (213, I think) and skated.  I would have fled to Canada if drafted.  I think “both” is intellectually honest.  These were not easy times, and people who chose the absolute extremes are to be commended. 

Q: Now that The Invitational is likely visible to a smaller pool of contestants, is it time to lift the draconian 25-entry limit? My dance card was already full by 3PM on Friday for Week 10 of The Invitational. Now, what do I do?

A: Good Lord.  Twenty-five is huge. Are you aware that toward the end  of the New York Magazine Competition, Mary Ann Madden only allowed ONE entry per person?  The great Chris Doyle, a mainstay of our Invitational, would enter under different names.  He used more than 200 of them.  Then he found us, and was unfettered at last.  Be happy with 25. I don’t know who you are, but I can assure you most of your entries probably suck. 

This is Don. I find it fascinating that you, too, wrote a poem on that joke. I believe I first told you the joke. At least that would be likely; I tell EVERYBODY that joke. I could tell you a story about a Methodist pastor to whom I told it....

Hi, bro. I bolded you. This is not impossible!

Q: I can only answer for myself, but I don't get any sort of notice that the chat is getting ready to start, so I never see it live. 

A: Okay, this is troubling.  I announce when the Gene Pool starts both on Twitter and Facebook. More important, Substack sends an email, with the first giant section of The Gene Pool attached.  Substack tells me there are three possibilities with you. 

1. You are not a subscriber, but just find it online.  If so, subscribe.  You do not have to pay. 

2. Their messages are going to your spam filter.  Check  you should have one today. 

3. Something else weird  

Meanwhile, it will be every Tuesday and Thursday at noon. 

Q: I have read of bone spurs developing in the neck due to constant cell phone use. Do you think the human body will evolve into a stooped (stupid) neck configuration eventually? Considering the evolution of the phone from 1849 to today isn’t there more likely going to be a chip implant that allows you to switch to phone mode and just think your posts? I know this sounds insane, but as Frank Loesser wrote in a song, “someday there’ll be horseless carriages that fly.”

A: I think our neck structure is going to stay.  At the risk of being gross, I will paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks: If spinal evolution was at all efficient, men would be able to [you know, inhale] themselves off. 

Of course, that would be anti-evolutionary in terms of birth rate, if you think about it, so maybe you have some sort of point. 

Q: Question for the ex-journalist. The Post has had excellent stories exposing Fox News personalities texts concerning Trump and Jan 6. These have mostly run in the Style section. Why there rather than in a news section, say the front page? These seem to me to be hard news stories of some importance.

A: Style covers the media.  If the story was deemed not worthy of page one, that’s where it would go. 

Q: Not a question, just an aptonym: Fr. Andrew Small, secretary of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. 

A: Indeed. 

Q: Changing the time leads to questions on changing the time.  Daylight Saving Time.   Good?  Bad?  Until the Internet took over my life, I thought of COURSE everyone loved DST.  As I still do.  But it appears I may be in a minority.

A: I don’t mind spring forward, but hate fall back.  That is because my house has 12 antique clocks, and moving a clock’s hands  backward is a pain in the ass.  As to the big picture, I don’t care.  Others of you disagree. 

Q: I have been reading about colonial era witch trials. Do you know any witches that need to be denounced? 

A: Denounced and humiliated but not executed.  Forced to appear in public with shirts but no pants, like Donald Duck.  There are several in Congress. 

Q: Not a question, but an aptonym: Dr. Jeffrey C. Toothman, DDS

A: Absolutely superior.

---

Q: Many years ago, I learned that the phrase "pulled a boner" meant "made a boneheaded mistake". Nowadays, it sounds like something else. I continue to say it around my wife, who finds it amusing, but I've stopped using it in polite company to avoid unpleasant misunderstandings. There's no other idiom that has quite the same flavor -- "screwed the pooch" is too old-timey, "buggered up" is too British -- and I feel its lack. Are there any phrases you enjoy but no longer employ because they are liable to be misunderstood? - Ev

A: One is “I don’t like Indian curry.” Don’t say it anymore. Also, look up a famous moment in sports, called “Merkle’s Boner.”

Q: It's all okay until you start bringing the chitlins to bed in a roughly girlfriend-shaped mound.

A: Ha. Not there yet but it’s only been four days.

Q: That image is amazingly mathy-looking, but meaningless! Someone wrote a letter on a crystal ball in Sharpie and stood near graph paper. It's like AI describing math.

A: I’m thinking someone painted a pi on the back of the globe. It’s from Getty Images.

Q: Don has not written poetry in 30 years? I don't believe it.

A: Didn’t say he hasn’t written it. He hasn’t published it anywhere big. I’ll ask him right here: Has he written any? We wrote one together when I was in college. It was called The Ballad of Red-Eye Rose. I’ll try to find it.

Q: Ah, well, someone brought up the time change. As a sufferer (albeit self-diagnosed) of S.A.D, I have a strong preference for Daylight Savings time, and would love for it to be made permanent. I am a great deal happier when daylight is prevalent. And yes, fall back is a royal pain in the butt. However, I live in fear that, in eliminating the annual time changes, they will fix, not on permanent Daylight Savings Time, but on permanent Standard Time. That would suck big time. Please tell me you agree.

A: As one with no skin in the game, I fervently agree. And on that rare note of concurrence, I call us down for the day. See you on Thursday for a pioneering, never before attempted Invitational, thanks to one of you. And please, keep questioning and commenting. I’ll deal with some of both on Thursday.

WOW. RACHEL FOUND THE BALLAD OF RED-EYE ROSE. I was 19 and Don was 25. We were serious druggies.

Buy me a drink and I'll tell of a time when men were really men,

And drugs could be had, but drugs were rare, and Harlem was their ken.

And I'll tell of the days of Big Jim Reed and the ramblin' life he chose

And the new kind of drug he was pushin' around, the one called Red-Eye Rose.

Big Jim left town one April day without his wife and child,

And when he got back in early May his eyes were hot and wild.

"I been to New Orleans," he said, "to visit my old pal, Mose,

And he turned me on to the king of 'em all.  They call it Red-Eye Rose."

Now Jim didn't know (or else wouldn't say) whether Rose was an up or a down --

But the word was out that it topped 'em all, and it spread through Harlem town.

Jim wouldn't sell any more than one dose (He swore two would put you on ice) 

So nobody took more than one at a time --  and most didn't do it twice. 

'Twas about this time in '69 Jim went in search of weed,

And his wife took a whole bunch of aspirin pills to ease a crash from speed.

But the aspirin bottle was all that was real (or so the story goes)

The pills that she popped were Big Jim's stash of dynamite Red-Eye Rose.

A knife greeted Jim when he got home -- It pinned a note to the door:

"I've gone out back for some milk," it said, "Little Jim's with Jack at the store."

Now, there's no back door and no back stairs in Big Jim's house, you know --

Big Jim's wife had lost her life on the street, five stories below.

Big Jim stood at the window wide, takin' one long look around,

Saw the aspirin bottle with nothin' inside and followed his wife to the ground.

And Little Jim stayed with his Uncle Jack until some time in his teens

When he rolled a drunk and bought a bike, to head for New Orleans.  

Now it's twenty years Big Jim's been gone, and drugs have been gettin' around

And I've heard no talk 'bout Red-Eye Rose since that day in Harlem town.

But a rumor's been spreadin' among the boys (I heard it today and I froze.)

They say Little Jim's called Big Jim now, and he's pushin' Red-Eye-Rose.

So one more drink and I'll sell you a chunk of the very best hash I've got.

Or a line of coke, or a trey of smack, or these bad-ass reds, or some pot.

But stay away from Big Jim Reed.  He's his father's son and he knows

That there's only one high in this whole damn world, and they call it Red-Eye Rose.

And we’re down.