Roll over, Heifetz.

Camps and vacations over, the boys focus on a new school term, Tertius showing great enthusiasm for fourth grade. He reminds me that he's signed up to learn the violin.

"You know what I like best about the violin?" he asks.

The timbre? The repertoire? The consonance? "What?" I reply.

"It comes in different colors," he says.

The son also rises.

We go to see The Dark Knight Rises, which holds the boys' attention, despite its nearly three-hour length. On the way home, we note where we may have seen the actors in other projects. Secundus has Morgan Freeman in Dolphin Tale,  and they may remember Gary Oldman in the Harry Potter series.

"And you recognized the man who played Alfred the butler, Sir Michael Caine?"

Secundus, on a roll, reluctantly admits defeat.

"'You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!'" I prompt by quoting The Italian Job, in an enviable and flawless Caine impression perfected by merely every other Englishman on the planet.

"Oh, I thought you meant the other Sir Michael Caine," he answers.

Oh, that wacky second amendment.

Crossing the family room without my reading glasses, I stub my foot badly on an unexpected item in the middle of the floor. It's Tertius's discarded nerf rifle, orange plastic camouflaged against the light wood floor. I'm going to lose a quadrant of the nail on my big toe, which is bleeding.

Tertius inspects the damage.

"I hope you didn't get any blood on my gun," he comments scathingly.

Do I hear a meep?

Secundus and Tertius have been playing with the hose and with water balloons in the backyard. After a break indoors -- during which Secundus is suspiciously elusive -- Tertius is persuaded to step outside the backdoor and wait.

A card descends on a length of string from the upstairs bathroom window. On in is written "Look up."

(On the reverse, just in case, it reads "Look on back of card.")

Tertius looks up.

A water balloon drops on his head.

Nice to know that an education based on Chuck Jones cartoons hasn't been wasted.

Sticks are for fetching.

The Divine Leila's favorite thing is to ride shotgun in the minivan.

(What a crock. That's just one of her favorite things. But to list the preferences that would come first would mean identifying every form of small furry mammal on the planet -- squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, etc. -- and that could keep us here for some time. And you have other things to do, right? Note, I didn't say "better" things. Anyway, it also explains why I'm currently wearing a thumb-brace on my left hand, after the chipmunk-leash-off-balance-sidestep-fire-hydrant-flat-on-face incident.)

I may have mentioned this before, but Leila also has the irritating (but, to her, humorous) habit of shifting over to the driver's seat as soon as I leave the car, to the terror of oncoming motorist who don't realize we're parked.

I pointed this out to my friend Loren the other day, who asked if she can drive a stick shift.

Well, duh, of course not. Because she's a dog!

(An automatic is as much as she can manage, and her parallel parking still sucks.)

Modern etiquette dilemmas, #138

Has this ever happened to you?

When I shook hands the other day with the Dad of one of my kid's friends, I found myself with a palm-full of his fingers.

And I had no idea if he was just a bit slow to prepare the open hand, if he was testing me for freemasonry, or if it was a misguided attempt by a white, middle-aged man to start one of those multi-stage finger-grasping exercises that really should be left to the brothers. (It's like trying to get bowing right if you're not Japanese. You can't.)

I just ignored it. Mind you, it reminded me of one of the jokes of my extended adolescence. You'd tuck in your middle finger when you shook hands firmly, lean toward your acquaintance, and whisper confidentially "Excuse the wart."

The best one of these was to keep shaking hands and not let go until it got seriously embarrassing. (A man is programmed not to pull out of a shake unilaterally -- the ending comes about by one of those inexplicable bits of telepathy that the social psychology department at my alma mater should be researching.) Then you'd say, shaking more firmly and a little more rapidly, "Oh, by the way, I'm from the planet Neptune. We have our sex organs in our hands." Well, it amused us for hours back in Hounslow.

Modern etiquette dilemmas, #137

I've never wanted fame, but I do relish those odd moments when I'm one degree of separation from it. Back in the 1970s, as a psychology undergraduate, I remember the weird thrill I got when our social psychology department at Oxford was featured in a Sunday newspaper, under the tired old trope of "look what ludicrous things these academics are spending public funds on."

In this case, it was a video camera that had been set up on an Oxford Street (London) pedestrian crossing to observe how people passed each other in public places. And while it was easy to ridicule, the post-grad researchers actually discovered some interesting stuff about human behavior.

So here's one valuable piece of advice that comes out of that study. You know those situations where you come face to face with someone coming in the opposite direction, and then you do that interminable little dance where you both try to pass on the same side for several iterations. (In the indispensable masterpiece The Meaning of Liff by the late Douglas Adams and the still-on-time John Lloyd, this is defined as a "Droitwich.")

Well, if it starts to happens to you, go to the right and stay there. Nips it in the bud every time.

The British taxpayers' money well spent.

John, Paul, George, and Bonzo

"Na, na, na, na-na, na na
Na-na na na, Hey Jude"

It's Tertius's voice alone, but I'm assuming he's singing along with the Beatles on his iTouch.

It's a busy year to be a Brit, even a half-American expatriate, with the Dickens bicentenary, the Diamond jubilee, and the Olympics. And we're shortly heading into a slew of golden anniversaries for the Fab Four, kicking off -- pleasingly but utterly coincidentally -- on my birthday this year, with the fiftieth anniversary of the first photograph to include Ringo in the line-up.

Regular visitors to these parts will be satiated with my adoration of the Beatles, so let me instead send you to an essay for the BBC by that fine commentator, Adam Gopnik, that says it better than I could. But I note his point -- as Tertius demonstrates -- about the timeless appreciation of the group (the Beatles were never a "band," except when masquerading as Sergeant Pepper and his cronies):  If, like our children, we baby boomers had admired music that was coming to fruition half a century earlier, we'd have been singing songs from before World War I.

Yes, I'm often found in the shower warbling Vesta Victoria's "Look What Percy Picked Up in the Park." And who can forget Harry MacDonough's "When I Was Twenty-one and You Were Sweet Sixteen"? (Certainly not Harry, who got eighteen months without the option. At least John and Paul waited until she was just seventeen.*)

But in the way of things, another hit from 1912 was the American Quartet performing a barbershop arrangement of "Moonlight Bay." And somewhat later, with a somewhat different quartet, who had little use for a barbershop, unless of course it was showing photographs of every head the barber had the pleasure to know . . .

 

*Know what I mean?

What ho, er, me.

I'm doling out the breakfast Frosted Mini-Wheats for Tertius, who then requests more milk than my initial libation. I comply.

"Thank you, Jeeves," he says.

Is there such a thing as too much P.G. Wodehouse?

Naaaaah.

The Daily Insult. (Non-family version.)

The kids are with their mother on a visit to their grandparents. I get the opportunity to see a grown-up movie at the theater, the deeply satisfying The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Simply can't recommend this enough, just in case a cast that includes Judi Dench and Maggie Smith and Bill Nighy isn't its own recommendation.

A well attended show in a smaller theater, average age considerably in advance of my own. Those announcements about not talking during the show duly ignored, as all the best lines are repeated aloud with chortles and then repeated again to companions who couldn't hear them the first time. Also any words on the screen are read aloud. I wish this were just a joke about older audiences, but, alas, it's true.

The insult? Oh, yes. As I buy my ticket, the vendor double checks that I mean a full-price ticket. Yes, I know the movie is about getting older, but I have ten years to go before I qualify for the senior discount, thank you.