The Smartest Guy in the Room

It's Sunday, usually the slowest day of the week anyway. But this is the Sunday before July 4, which means that land speed record pizza delivery times are possible, paying extra for two-day shipping on anything ordered today is probably a mistake and taking a little time to heed some advice you are about to give someone else is a good idea.

It isn't so much advice as a request -- nay, plea. And I am not the first to make it. But maybe seconding a motion will create a groundswell that even a Sherman can't brush off.

Here it is: we need to get Samer blogging again, and I am returning from a lazy blogging break to make my case. Samer abruptly stopped sharing his thoughts about his life and the extraordinarily wide variety of subjects about which he is knowledgeable in May of 2005 -- there is one post after that, but it is clearly half-hearted. Officially, the story is that blogging is hard, and time-consuming, which can be true. Unfortunately a lot of people who really shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard and an Internet connection do somehow manage to find the time, filling the Internet with a shrill, self-involved cacophony that, by its sheer volume and, in my view, little else, has media companies quaking in their boots. But that is a subject for another time.

When pressed, Samer will say the despair he still feels from a company restructuring which found me and all of his co-workers without chairs when the music stopped, the event which was the subject of his penultimate blog entry, contributed mightily to his hiatus. He has also said that of all the things he might write about, he could think of nothing that was not already being done better. This is, of course, false modesty and not the Guinness talking.

One of the ironies of my crusade is that I would moan -- and I mean audibly -- at the subject of blogging five or six years ago. I vowed I wouldn't read them and -- heaven forbid -- would never bother trying to create and maintain one as perhaps the least worthy member of the human race to opine. This is still true, and my own extremely humble (i.e., pointless) web site is billed as a blog-free zone with thoughts only from truly wise people.

When Samer, as ever on the cutting edge, would tell me I should be taking this seriously because the world was changing again 17 minutes since the last paradigm shift I would do my Luddite routine (not really a routine, I guess) and he would roll his eyes and gracefully swivel his chair away from me and back to the screen. This is something else Samer does very well that I can actually take credit for, his perfection of that move coming as it did from frequent practice at my expense.

Samer used to work for me, but only in the most literal sense of the word. The truth is that he was the man behind the curtain. I came to be the Salieri to his Mozart -- smart enough, but just, to recognize the raw genius in him that others perhaps did not always see, but not nearly enough to compete with it. Of course, Samer is a much more civilized person than Wolfgang Amadeus and I have no intention of ending up in an asylum for his murder.

No, Samer must live, go forth and multipy. He must help tilt the balance of sanity in what is (sigh) widely referred to as "the blogosphere." He must participate, if only to lend credence to his argument that blogging should be seen as an important force of nature.

Don't get me wrong. Samer is neither shy nor disconnected. I ask him things via IM at strange hours and he a) is there b) knows the answer and c) explains it patiently. He has recently become an active Flicker-ista, revealing yet another of his many talents. But it isn't the same. The world needs the words.

So, this is start of my campaign to get Samer back in print (a phrase that will surely date me):

My Top 10 reasons that Samer should resume blogging:

10. Whenever Samer tells me about beer I am already drunk and remember nothing.
9. Iceland's tourist industry depends on it.
8. I still have unused Samerfest tickets.
7. It turns out that there actually aren't enough Apple blogs -- someone said so on digg.
6. I am this close to understanding climatography
5. If Dan Kim can do it ...
4. If Brian Green can do it ...
3. If I can do it ...
2. I'm sick and tired of having to ask him to explain everything to me.

And the number-one reason Samer should resume blogging:
1. Redheads dig guys who blog -- I'm just sayin'

there's no business like it

i've begun implementing my secret plan to humiliate myself in public (more, i mean) by wheedling my way into the reston community players as a volunteer carpenter. my goal, of course, is not only to achieve serene fulfillment in the creation of the perfect piano stand but rather to be "discovered" and give my family and what few friends i have left more reason to be embarrassed to know me.

but i don't care.

while we've always been aware of the rcp in our nine years in reston it has only been in the last year, sadly, that we have attended performances. this even though we realize community theater is precious and we are lucky to have a troupe in our own little town. a company, mind you, which, at 39 years, is nearly as old as the town itself.

the catalyst to attending for the first time was the daughter of friends, who has been cast in the past three rcp productions, including "beauty and the beast," nominated for 25 (!) washington area theatre community honors, in which she shared "chip" duties with another young thespian. previously she had done a turn in "honk" and most recently in "the crucible", which just ended its run.

there is no chance that even i have the gall to audition for a musical, although my only tread of the boards was as captain von trapp in the 1969 production of "the sound of music"* (*at public school 149 in new york city, when i was in the sixth grade) but the next rcp production that hasn't been cast yet is the british farce "run for your wife."

perfect. i used to work for reuters, and my acting ambitions are farcical. it's a sign.

of course, i may not muster sufficient courage, although that's why god invented alcohol. and there is certainly no reason to believe that i'd be cast for anything, including "potted plant (stage left)." but every single person i've met so far that is associated with the rcp is exactly as i would have expected and hoped, and it is way fun to be involved in community theater -- even if my destiny is merely to perfect the technique of engineering ersatz spinning plates.