8-22-08

Day 742 of 365 Again.

I do so love the Internet. Who would have ever thought that a connected series of tubes could be so fascinating.

So if you’ve been reading Cosmic Hellcats(and if you’re not, shame on you), or you saw yesterday’s shot then you probably know that we decided to start a new feature in the blog for the comic.

Ask Sarah! is our new advice column written by the real life Sarah filling in for her comic self.

Anyway, since neither Sarah nor I want to break character over on the actual Hellcat site, I figured I might as well tell a little story about her first column here.

So Sarah agreed to do the column just a couple days ago. So I added a section for her to the website and announced that we were looking for questions about love, dating, sex or particle physics. But her first column was scheduled for like 24 hours later. We didn’t think we’d have anyone writing in that soon, so we had decided that we’d steal a letter from Dear Abby to have her answer.

Anyway, a friend of mine, Mike, saw the post and decided that it’d be fun to send in a question. Rather than send in one as himself, however, he decided to send one in as a physicist he had read about in New Yorker magazine, named Garrett Lisi. Sarah and I were ecstatic to have a "real" letter for her to answer, even though we knew it was from an impostor. So she happily ignored that we knew it was from Mike and answered it just as she would have answered a real letter, then posted it to the site.

That’s when things got weird. I had considered editing the post and removing the real name of the scientist, because I knew he hadn’t really written it. But then I decided that was silly and who cared. After all, the whole thing is just a big parody of Dear Abby anyway, and it was a funnier parody if there was a real person in the first one. But then tonight Sarah all of a sudden got a comment from none other than Garrett Lisi thanking her for her advice. Initiailly, I assumed it was Mike, again playing into his character. But Mike denied it, and a little bit of clever google stalking on my part seems to confirm that it was in fact, actually the real Garrett. I was tickled pink. A little more digging and it appears that he even actually seems to know another friend of mine in passing.

Talking to Sarah, we can only assume that he’s as big a egomaniac as the two of us are and constantly googles for his own name across the blogosphere just to see if anyone is talking about him. (Ok, I admit it, I have problems, ok!) Which means, one would assume that he’ll see this as well, in whcih case, hi Garrett, thank you so much for playing along and not outing us. As I said on the Hellcat’s thread, get me your address at Burning Man and I’ll make sure you get a Hellcats T-shirt.

So there you go, Cosmic Hellcats is endorsed by professional physicist surfers, so you should be reading it too. And by all means, please go send us some questions for Ask Sarah. She’s going to need something to write about for next week.

In other Mav is famous news, I got asked tonight to do an interview for Zivity, the pin-up site that Sarah and I are members of. This is potentially very cool and makes me feel all important and stuff. They want to talk to me both about my glamour work and the 365 project. I’m going to be famous or die trying, dammit. "There’s nothing worse than being ordinary."

In closing, I chose this as my SP for today because in a manner of speaking I’m talking about particle physics, but given this shot, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Watchmen movie comes out in exactly 196 days. You’ll never have to watch another movie again.

365 days