Standing Here Beside Myself

Perhaps you've wondered about the title of this blog. The phrase comes from a light-weight science fiction comedy called Short Circuit, which is about a death-dealing military robot, Number 5, who comes 'alive' when accidentally zapped by high voltage. A lot of the humor in the movie comes from the dialog between the robot's inventor and his Indian computer scientist side-kick, Ben Jabituya, played by American actor Fisher Stevens. The Jabituya character speaks that wonderful kind of twisted English one often hears in highly trained technical people from India, and his speech is full of malaprops, malaphors and other forms of unexpected and difficult English. The other characters also have plenty of funny things to say. Anyway, my favorite of all these is when Jabituya, in a moment of confusion and uncertainty, says to no-one in particular

I am standing here beside myself.

Certainly I've felt that way a lot.

Blue Mania

Mary and I had a wonderful visit to Chicago this past weekend to visit our oldest son Sam and his wife Shelby. They just moved there in May, and we had not had a chance to see their new home. We took the train down, which is much better than driving, but still not stress-free. Sam and Shelby took us around to a few favorite places of theirs, but the highlight of the weekend was an unexpected treat Sam came up with. On Saturday afternoon we went to see a matinee performance of the Blue Man Group. It's hard to describe them, since mere words fail. Inspired lunacy? Exalted silliness? A mystical clown act? There's these three guys, see, and their heads are painted blue, and they are fantastic drummers, and they never say a word, although the narrator does sometimes, and they are very ... messy, and ... well, you should definitely go see them if you have the chance.

The audience obviously had a lot of Blue Man fans who were familiar with their performances. It reminded me a little of the zaniness that regularly went on when people watched The Rocky Horror Picture. The raucous behavior of a bunch of Girl Scouts I can understand. But the weirdnesses exhibited by middle-aged women were a bit odd to behold. Anyway, after the performance, the three Blue Men were in the lobby of the theatre so you could take pictures with them. They stayed totally in character and never said a word. We took our time leaving, so by the time we got to the lobby there wasn't a waiting line to get a picture. That's when we got this:



You can't make it out very well, but the Blue Man is holding my cane. I handed it to him to see what he would do. He said nothing, but turned around several times just looking at it. Then when we took the picture, he held it up as you can see.

I even got a little Blue Man blue on my shirt from my close encounter. Mary didn't seem to mind. She said that she wasn't going to wash the shirt.