So this morning I’m lying in bed with my laptop (which looks disarmingly good in a wig—but never mind), and I think, “Gosh, I don’t feel like thinking. I know! I’ll go see what other people are thinking.” But that threatened to blossom into something no longer about me, which I of course find unacceptable. So I reached the natural compromise, and decided to think about what other people think about me. This is really one of my favorite things to think about.

What I sometimes do when in the mood to think about what others think about me is to visit blogs that I can see (via my blog’s stat page) have linked back to my blog. That means someone’s blogging about me! What an enrichingly good time for them! And what fun for me, to e-eavesdrop on someone discussing me! It’s the ultimate win-win.

It usually is, anyway. And today it started out that way. First, I discovered that Famous Person John Tesh had a blog in which he had linked to mine. The November 13 post on The John Tesh Blog was titled “The Top Qualities of a Good Woman.” The first such quality John listed was: “A good woman freaks you out with her intelligence. Women have the uncanny ability to cut through the fogginess of an issue and come up with a brilliant perspective. The upside for guys is that the more you hang around smart women, like my wife, the more brainy you become.”

As you see, Mr. Tesh saw fit to turn the words “brilliant perspective” into a link to the post on my blog entitled, “Top 10 Qualities to Look for In a Wife.” (The first on my list being, coincidentally enough, “So smart she constantly freaks you out with her humongous Absorb-O-Brain”—which, by way of explication, I followed with: “Upside: Hanging around with a smart person makes you smarter. Up to a point, of course. But still,” followed by, “”Downside: Smart people remember everything. Pretty mixed blessing.” So you see how amazingly alike John Tesh and I think!)

The next link I followed from my stats page was to a blog called Pharyngula, the slogan of which is, “Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal.” Sweet! Would of course myself change that slogan by a disgusting word or two, but none of my business.

I was disappointed if not actually crestfallen to discover that Mr. PZ Meyers, the articulate and good-natured University of Minnesota biologist who writes “Pharyngula” (which, I was happy to learn, “is a term coined by William Ballard to describe a particular stage in the development of the vertebrate embryo”) didn’t himself write about me. Instead, I saw somewhere amidst one of his 10-mile long comment streams the following, written by one “rickrOll”: 

“I know I said good about him before, but this John Shore is becoming a real problem, exhibiting all the classic signs of religous nuttiness. He … is incredibly rude and vindictive off his blog, and what’s more, I’m tired of waiting for him to be a mature adult. I vote we whack him: http://johnshoreland.com/. Normally I wouldn’t consider him a problem, but he needs to be taught a lesson in manners and some intellectual honesty.” A few comments down, Mr. Roll added: “This thread has no particular discussion in mind, though I was trying to rally support for my effort to slap a little sense into John Shore at Suddenly Christian (link above). If any would be so kind, please do.”

Thus far the brainy scientific types who seem to favor Mr. Meyers’ blog have failed to rally to Mr. Roll’s call to “whack” me. But I kind of hope they get on it! It’s been my experience that accomplished scientists are almost always fantastic writers, because they’re rarely bogged down trying to make their writing artsy. Instead, they worry about clarity—and thereby often achieve, I think, the best kind of writing art. So even though it might be at my expense, I’d welcome almost all of Mr. Meyers’ associates to comment on my blog.

Hey, man. Art’s all about sacrifice.

Anyway, there you have it. Looking to read about myself I visited two sites, finding in the first John Tesh sort of offhandedly if not reflexively mentioning me, and in the other someone trying to rally articulate scientists to “whack” me.

And now I’m going back to sleep.

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