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September 28, 2004

The water cooler

Every so often, I try to work on my social skills. Today, I decided to strike up a conversation with my coworker. She is planning her wedding, so that seemed like a good opener.

ME: How's the wedding planning going?

COWORKER: Pretty good. But everyone has an opinion. Like, we're trying to go with a French Bistro theme, but my in-laws keep saying "Everyone likes cocktail weenies."

ME: Yeah, everyone's got to throw in their two cents. Like when Ted Williams died.

CW: [puzzled silence]

ME: You know how, when he died his family started arguing about whether they were going to cryogenically freeze all of him or...[at this point I realize the conversation has gone way off-track, but it's too late]...just his head, or cremate his entire body. And the Boston Metro ran this man-on-the-street feature, where they asked people "Should they cryogenically preserve or cremate Ted Williams?" And one guy said "I think they should bury him at Fenway Park."

CW: Oh.

ME: It's like, everybody's got an opinion, whether it's appropriate or not....

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Comments

What do you do? At this point I'm guessing you're a Fox News contributor.

Well, talking about Ted Williams would certainly make you my friend for life. Whether this is encouraging or not is debatable...

Scott, I am very much encouraged.

I'm a freelance medical writer/advertising copywriter. I like to say that my blog is indirectly supported by advertising.

Mostly I'm working on my philosophy PhD applications.

You can strike up a conversation around my watercooler anytime -- in my parts, that discussion might prompt us to go find a liquid N2 dewar and a dead cat to do a simulation.

But I can see where it might get you funny looks in other places.

Thank goodness neither of you figured out how to bring the conversation from Ted Williams and cryogenics back to cocktail weenies.

Lesson: People who name their blogs after obscur characters from Hitchhiker's actually do not have much in common with normal people.

Full disclosure: I made up this pseudonym for a college D&D campaign. I think discussing cryogenics is cool.

When Ted Williams died, I was in one of those "perspectives" with pictures and quotes in the "Berkshire Eagle" in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I said "They should cremate him and use the ashes in the making of a bat - a super bat!" The next day they only printed me saying, "They should cremate him," showing some sort of bias... I think...

Hey, I have Asperger's once on a first date I started talking about the death rate in Poland during WWII (about 30%, IIRC),

At what rate do you think people are being cryo-frozen anyway? I mean.. i never read about it.. there was Walt Disney..almost Ted Williams and then?

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