Two "Bangs" for the Buck

Two posts in one day! What’s that about?!

Well, I’ll tell you. But first, I must call attention to something I just did. And, in the process, give a shout-out to my awesome friend Karen.

Over the course of an illuminating happy hour that she and I shared last week, she schooled me on the tantalizing yet sadly marginalized existence of the interrobang. Which, per Wikipedia, is “a nonstandard punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark and exclamation point.”

Conceptualized in 1962 by American advertising agency head Martin K Speckter—a true “Mad Man”—it is a punctuation hybrid that looks something like a capital “P” (a modified question mark) with an open space on its stem (forming an exclamation mark). It’s entirely awesome, and I so wish my computer keyboard included it. But alas, the interrobang never quite caught on. Decades ago it was featured on some keyboards, domestic and foreign. But no longer. Which is a crying shame, if you ask me. Why, I could’ve saved an entire keystroke at the start of this post, had the interrobang been available. Multiply such savings a zillionfold worldwide, and cancer may well have been cured by now, and planet-saving energy sources discovered, in the resulting pool of otherwise-unused time.

Anyway, back to “two posts in one day.” Back on January 6, 2012, I posted a tribute of sorts in this space to theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking on the occasion of his 70th birthday. I saluted his achievements, and cataloged the conjectured medical reasons for his longevity, despite the fact that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis popularly is known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and Lou Gehrig didn’t live to be 40. I began the post by noting, in full disclosure, however, that I’d found the audiobook of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to be so incomprehensibly boring that I nearly fell asleep at the wheel on I-95 about 20 years ago while attempting to be edified by it.

In the intervening years, Hawking, who I believe already had consensually appeared in animated form on The Simpsons by 2012, has continued to display an impish good humor that is stratospherically beyond what I imagine I’d be able to muster as an undoubtedly whining, self-pitying invalid. Last year he was a complicit, I assume, part of the storyline on an episode of the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory. I again was reminded of just how delightful Hawking can be when I was reading an article this morning about The Theory of Everything, a new movie that traces Hawking’s life from age 21—when he was diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live—to age 45. The film itself is getting middling notices for a formulaic approach to its material, but the actor portraying Hawking, Eddie Redmayne, already is attracting Oscar buzz for his ability to wring pathos, dignity, drama and humor out of a character who’s mute and all but immobile for most of his screen time.

The article in today’s paper actually wasn’t so much about the film itself as it was an interview with Redmayne about what it was like to meet and portray the still-living scientist. The 32-year-old British actor came off in the interview as self-effacingly likable. His first quote, in fact, was, “I tried to educate myself on the science, which was complicated for someone who is pretty inept.” But the passage that really endeared me to Redmayne, and made me like Hawking more than ever, was this one:

“Hawking, now 72, uses his cheek muscles to communicate with a sensor on his glasses that prompts a computer screen with an alphabet and a cursor. “It takes a long time for him to communicate, and one’s instinct is to start a conversation,” said Redmayne. “Maybe Stephen said eight or nine sentences. So I spilled forth about Stephen Hawking to Stephen Hawking for 40 minutes.”

He shook his head at the absurdity. Hawking had just published his memoir, “My Brief History,” in which he mentioned being born on Jan. 8, 1942, three centuries to the day after Galileo’s death.

“And I told him my birthday was Jan. 6 so we’re both Capricorns,” Redmayne said, “and as I said that I thought, ‘What am I saying?’

“There was this excruciating pause,” he recalled. Hawking, a man of few words but considerable wit, replied, “I’m an astronomer, not an astrologer.”

In response to which, Redmayne said, “I died a hundred deaths.”

God, how much do I love that anecdote?! And, yes, of course, the interrobang that I again was denied the opportunity to employ just now?

I try not to be too oppressively grim in this blog. I really do. So, granted, Armageddon is nigh. And today’s Veterans Day ceremonies, while properly saluting our soldiers past and present, remind us that war is endless. Still, I must add that life’s pleasures are boundless. (For whatever time we have left!) All one need do is look around. You’ll find joy in the darndest places, ranging from physics labs to barstools.