When someone asks you what it all means, you could always tell them this.

Middle is quite the creative thinker. I'll give her that.

This past Saturday, Middle was going to take her SAT test. Note that I said "going to," not "did." Middle was almost as prepared as you can possibly be to take the SAT test. She had done the practice tests. She had done the nightly vocabulary review. She had done the one-a-day emailed SAT questions. She had printed up her entry ticket, gotten her #2 pencils and calculator, and even gotten up early and made a good breakfast.

Here's where the complications came in. We have three cars and only two slots in the garage, so on Saturday morning, I was driving Middle to the test (she didn't know how to get to the location) and then taking Mr F and Mr Bunches to work with me. We maneuvered around the cars so that I had Vuey (our Saturn Vue -- all of our cars have had names, going back to "Zippy," and through "Denty," "Newey," and "Bluey." Then we got a Durango, too. That doesn't have a name. Nobody really likes the Durango except Sweetie) ready to go, and Middle pulled Bluey, the older car she uses, into the garage.

She asked me: "Should I leave my keys here?"

I said: "No, your mom's not going to need to get into Bluey."

So she left her keys there, I dropped her at the test site, and she called me at 7:40 at the office to tell me that she could not get in to take the test, which began at 8 a.m., without her ID.

Her ID that was in Bluey.

My office is at least 30 minutes from home and another 20 from the test site, so I called Sweetie, who was all set to get the ID from Bluey and to run the ID to Middle until she called me back and said:

"Bluey is locked."

Bluey was in the garage.

Which shouldn't surprise me, because I, too, lock my car in the garage, having lived in Milwaukee for a long time and having grown up with the belief (instilled in me by my Mom) that around every corner lurks a burglar/sex fiend waiting to steal your car and/or your manhood. Mom still talks about a guy that lived near her apartment in a small town, a guy she refers to vaguely and disturbingly as "Panty Hose Man." I don't know if Panty Hose Man exists but he does scare me -- scare me enough to lock my car even when it's in the garage.

The locked car put the kibosh on Middle taking the test. I didn't get too upset with her, though, since I once went to a seminar -- in Milwaukee-- on the wrong day. I drove all the way there, parked, went into the location of the seminar, and only then realized I was a day late. (I expect that will come up at my review this year.)

Middle later tried to pin the blame on me -- she said "I asked you if I should leave my keys, and you said no."

I responded: "That's because you didn't ask the right question. If you'd said I'm going to leave my ID in the car and call you later to get it from the locked car, so should I leave the keys, I'd have told you, yes, leave the keys."

She pouted and I couldn't help adding "Or, I might have told you just take the ID."

Comic courtesy of xkcd.com

While I didn't blame her for locking the car or forgetting her ID, here's what really bugged me about that day: On the way to the test, I said it would be an excellent practical joke if they made up a fake test with impossible questions. One impossible question, I said, could be the essay: Explain the meaning of life in 15,000 words or more. You have 10 minutes. Do not use the letter 'e.'

"Or, don't use vowels," Middle said. We laughed.

"What would you put down?" I asked. She shrugged. I said, "I'd write grrblnka."

"No," Middle said. "That has an e in it."

I don't know where Middle gets off thinking that she knows how to spell a word that I made up to explain the meaning of life without using vowels -- but she was very very certain that "grrblnka" has an e in it, and that it would require other vowels, too. And she made me start doubting myself -- after all, she was the one who'd been doing all that vocabulary work.

But in the end, I held firm and used all my moral authority to tell her that, no, she was wrong and that's all there is to it. I may not know a lot about a lot of things, but if there's one thing I do know, it's that the meaning of life = grrblnka.

Science is SO over.

I think scientists ought to just stop, admit that science is done, and go get real jobs.

The more I read about science-- "science," the more I am convinced that there really are no big questions out there anymore that remain to be answered, but scientists don't want to admit that and end up working at Starbucks, so they have just resorted to making things up to keep their jobs.

Exhibit A in my case against science was the very convincing proof that velociraptors never existed until scientists saw "Jurassic Park," realized that the entirely-fictional-velociraptors in that movie were cool, and decided to pretend that there really were such creatures. I guess we're just lucky that those same scientists didn't get around to seeing "Godzilla," since you can arrange those bones any old way you want to and we'll never know the difference.

Exhibit B now comes from the discovery of 73 million new planets in our solar system. Okay, maybe it's not 73 million, but it's a lot. 12. Or maybe 53. Or more. Maybe even the Moon is a planet! Maybe I am a planet.

(No weight jokes here. I've been working out. And doing yoga. It's all winter weight. My sweater just looks bulky. Leave me alone.)

Scientists, bored yesterday, decided to recast what makes a planet a planet. They abandoned the old definition of a 'planet.' A planet was defined (by NASA) as "a heavenly body other than a comet, asteroid, or satellite that travels in orbit around the Sun; also such a body orbiting another star." (Interestingly, a "planet" was defined by "Wikipedia" as "Adam Sandler's butt." All hail the knowledge of the masses!).

That definition -- which was very straightforward, and understandable, lacked a certain something, that something being "continued attention and employment for scientists." So instead, it was scrapped in favor of the new definition, in which a planet is "anything we say it is; we're the people with advanced degrees, so just shut up and go watch Tyra while sending us more research grants."

Under that definition, you can see how the number of planets can grow exponentially depending on how many children a scientist has in college at a given time. Whatever the actual number of planets in our solar system turns out to be, it will almost certainly need more money thrown at the problem.

And under the new definition, scientists have expanded the number of planets already to 12, including Pluto-- which famously became not a planet just last year but is now included because people missed it, and including the asteroid "Ceres," which is included because it's round. And the planets now include Pluto's moon, Charon. But not our moon. Yet. Maybe other moons, someday.

Oh, and the new planets are not quite planets, they are plutons. Keeping up with this? I hope not, because if you understand it the scientists will change it again to justify their existence. So pretend you don't get it and send them money.

But you're looking at that list and saying Wait a minute, hold on a sec, that's not 12 planets. Even adding Pluto back in and those other things I've never heard of, that's only 11. And you're right. There's also a new mysterious 12th planet, and, no, it's not Oprah's ego. It's "a far-out Pluto-sized object known as 2003 UB313."

That probably won't be its formal name. Here is what 2003 UB313 looks like:

And here is an artist's rendering of life as seen from the surface of 2003 UB313:


So you can see that 2003 UB313 is clearly a major planet, and probably friendly to us.

If you wanted further proof that science is just a bunch of screwed-up guys making it up as they go along in order to get publicity, consider this: Although the new definition includes 12 planets, the new award-winning mnemonic device to remember the planets includes only 11 planets. Here's the saying:

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.

Why'd they leave out Charon? Huh? Answer me that. I think they left it out for the same reason the stars never tell you the baby's name on the same day it's born -- because delaying that news gets an extra day of publicity. So J.Lo gives birth and they announce that and we all thrill to it, and then when the publicity dies down, J.Lo says Oh, by the way, the babies' names are Hector and Waverly and we all go nuts again.

That's what scientists are doing. While we'll all spend the day committing that saying to memory and reciting it, and singing along with the upcoming Lisa Loeb song about it...

...that's for real, she's really writing a song about it...

the scientists will sit back and wait until we're done with that and then they'll bump Charon into it and there'll be a whole new round of publicity with scientists and planets on the cover of "US SCIENCE WEEKLY" (Best and Worst Beach Bods and Periods of Orbital Frequency!) and we'll all fall for it again.

Haven't we had enough? Isn't science done? Can't they quit just making things up and messing with our heads? If they're worried about having to find real jobs, hey, I can sympathize -- I spend 98% of my day trying not to do any actual work, and the other 2% figuring out how to translate that into a raise. So I won't insist that they all start working the drive-through at Hardees's, even though that would mean that "fast food" would again be "fast." They could work on something else, instead, like discovering a way to make a snack chip that doesn't turn my fingertips all yellow. (Sweetie says the answer to that is to eat them without putting my fingers in my mouth, but if science has a purpose, it's to find a way to let me eat with putting my fingers in my mouth, right?)

UPDATE: Even if you don't ordinarily read comments, Mark's comment on this entry is awesome and should be read and committed to memory.

And then maybe William Shatner and I won't let The Boy hang out with us!

My time will come, just like William Shatner's did. Just you wait and see.

If you ever want to find out just how cool you appear to other people, try this: Tell them that you once tried out as lead singer of a rock band. Their reaction will tell you everything you need to know about the image you present to the world.

I did that, the other day, when The Boy and I were cleaning up after dinner. I was only helping him because Middle was off at work; ordinarily cleanup is their chore, but The Boy gets testy when he's responsible for all clean up because Middle is at her job, and that's the way we run it: if you're home, you do chores, regardless of when you got home and/or when you left. So when Middle is home all day Saturday, eats dinner, and then goes off to work, she gets out of chores. But if The Boy is gone all day and gets home just after dinner, he's got chores. That's the only way we can run it, because to do anything else is to invite a specter of micromanagement and delving into who used how many bowls or cups and which person was the last to touch the Golden Grahams.

Which, as a side note, is now possible with some cereals. For some reason, "Cinnamon Toast Crunch" is offering cereal with fingerprints on it, as some sort of contest. You can, if I understand correctly, examine the cereal and compare the fingerprints and maybe win a prize. I'm not exactly sure why it's a selling point for cereal that it's been touched, let alone touched by someone who we suspect of a crime. I'm also not sure that it's marketing genius to link your cereal to crime scene investigations, since actual crime scene work is tedious and gross. Wow! Bring all that to your breakfast table! Here's what I was sure of: it sort of grossed me out to realize that someone had, even imaginarily, been touching my cereal and that their hands were so dirty that they left actual fingerprints on it.

Back to the chores, issue: Every now and then, when the argument still gets raised that "it's not fair" that someone has to do chores because they were out of town or whatever, I point out to the person (The Boy) that they don't really want to start running the house on a system of to-each-their-own, that if we really ran the house by assigning chores to the people who used the resources and privileges to those who earned them, the person (The Boy) would always come out on the losing end of that stick, because, technically, he has nothing that we didn't give him and consumes an enormous amount of resources. ("Resources" in that sentence means "hot pockets.")

The Boy always fires back his one shot in that war: He bought his TV himself. And he did, with his own Christmas and birthday money, none of it from Sweetie and me. I'm holding off on pointing out that he can't pay for the electricity to run the TV he owns, let alone the house the TV lives in.

So I temper my justice on chores with the mercy of helping out, but I insist that while I help out we listen to my music because all The Boy listens to is Pink Floyd. And some AC-DC. But nothing made in the past 30 years. It's strange, frankly. Check out my playlists and you'll find -- amidst the greatest collection of music ever assembled -- the latest indie music. Look at The Boy's iPod and you'd imagine it's 1978 all over again.

We were listening to my music when a rare oldie came on: "You Really Got Me" by The Kinks. I was singing along with it a bit and The Boy said I wasn't a great singer, and I said that's what he thinks, and pointed out that "You Really Got Me" was one of two songs I sang when I tried out as lead singer of a band back in college.

And The Boy just stared. Then he smirked. "You were going to be a lead singer?" he said.

"Yep," I told him, smugly.

"You?" he asked.

And, with that, no matter how much I suck in my stomach, no matter how jiggy I get with it, no matter how well I do at singing "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" (and I can even hit the high notes sometimes), I knew: I am not cool in the eyes of the world.

Yet.

I'm not cool yet, because if people saw me as cool, The Boy would not have questioned me as a lead singer. People who are cool could be lead singers in a band. I bet nobody ever looked at Bono and said "You?" when he said he was going to be a lead singer.

But note that I said yet, because I will be cool.

As another side note, let me point this out: while I didn't make it into that band, I did sing lead, twice, for a band: our law school revue band. Two years running, I sang lead on songs including Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime" and some Beck and Better Than Ezra.

There are those who might think that it's the exact opposite of cool to be the lead singer of a band of law students, especially because we changed the lyrics to be more law-student-oriented. To them I say: You'd be right, except that I also danced, which helped out some.

And that brings me to my main point: Yet. I'm not cool yet. But I will be, because of Shatner Motion.

Shatner Motion is my theory that what cool in fact is, is a sort of force that moves and shifts, very slowly-- much like the universe itself, or the jet stream or ocean currents. Under this theory, what is cool generally remains cool over long periods of time: Blue jeans. Elvis. Lime Jell-O. Abe Lincoln. But cool still orbits, still moves, and that's why things become cool and then aren't anymore: Miami Vice. Crystal Pepsi. The Silver Standard. Cool can intersect things, and shift, and things that weren't cool suddenly are: Shatner Motion.

I call it Shatner Motion for two reasons. One, William Shatner is one of my four heroes. And, two, Shatner proves my theory that you can become cool one of two ways: you can seek out cool things -- dress yourself in blue jeans and learn to breakdance -- and you will be cool, for a while-- or you can just do whatever it is you want to do, and wait for cool to catch up with you.

Like William Shatner did. People have made fun of him for as long as I can remember: Star Trek, the spoken-word songs, T.J. Hooker... but look who got the last laugh! If there is a guy who's cool today, it's William Shatner. He does whatever he wants: He records albums, he's on commercials that are awesome, he's on a hit TV show. He's spent his entire career just being himself, and cool slowly rotated around until it caught up to him.

I'm just biding my time, then. You'll see. Laugh all you want, but cool will catch up to me, and then everyone will wish they could be like me.

You could start by writing some law-student-oriented rock songs.

You think it's easy? Try to match Leo note for note. I can.