Fridays with Evan

We promised you Evan (who writes about science and therefore knows everything) and, not by our own accomplishment but rather by his vast benevolence, he has arrived. He will now answer the herculean questions that Life thrusts upon our stubborn curiosity.

Molly: Why are Human Resources people so perky?

Evan: My dad is/was a Human Resources person. I resent what you are implying.

Claire: How do they decaffeinate coffee? More importantly, WHY do they decaffeinate coffee?

Evan: The first decaffeination process was developed by Ludwig Roselius, who was determined—in an Inigo Montoya fashion—to avenge his father’s death, which he attributed to his coffee consumption habits. Of course, Roselius’s method involved soaking coffee beans in highly toxic and carcinogenic benzene, plus he was a Nazi. So we don’t use the Roselius method anymore.
And to answer the second question, we decaffeinate coffee because we are imperfect people. Some of us are not strong enough to bear the responsibility and power that comes with the ingestion of caffeine.

Molly: Sometimes, I feel a vibration inside my foot and it’s not my cell phone. Any ideas?

Evan: The fact that you would consider a cell phone to be a potential source of a vibration in your foot suggests a deeper question: what kind of footwear are you using that could accommodate such a device? My Roos have space for less than a dollar’s worth of change (each).
My guess is that you are accidentally wearing some kind of novelty slipper in the shape of a baby seal, or somehow have embedded a piece of ferrous metal into your foot, which is now reacting to the Earth’s magnetic fields.

What the F is wrong with Ingrid Newkirk

So PETA’s president/co-founder/dried up old—you know, I shouldn’t finish that thought— has posted her will on the Internet, in all its mentally unhinged, pink background glory. Note the photograph. Ms. Newkirk looks sort of like Ellen Degeneres, sort of like Stuart Smalley and sort of like that mannish woman who is in all those Christopher Guest movies.

Here are some gems from the will:

1. The “meat” of my body, or a portion thereof, be used for a human barbecue, to remind the world that the meat of a corpse is all flesh.

2. That in remembrance of the elephant-foot umbrella stands and tiger rugs I saw, as a child, offered for sale by merchants at Connaught Place in Delhi, my feet be removed and umbrella stands or other ornamentation be made from them