While I’m watching Laura’s weekly Ultimate Frisbee game, a player on the field makes this exquisite acrobatic catch, eliciting cheers all around. A moment later, the same player releases a wayward throw and the Frisbee hits the grass, thus turning it over to the other team. Another player on the sidelines observes to me that we have just beheld the Law Of Conservation Of Greatness in effect. I find this remark hilarious and clever, but later I discover that conservation of greatness is a widely-known bit of Ultimate Frisbee jargon, a term that dryly bestows a name upon a painfully common scenario of gameplay (and, by extension, of human endeavor in general).

Ultimate Lingo’s concise definition:

Conservation of greatness: The postulation that a player who has just made a great play and as a result has possession of the disc is likely to commit a throwing error turnover due to the rush of adrenaline from the great play.

Urban Dictionary features a somewhat more codified version:

Describes a situation where a person has just done something earth-shatteringly amazing, and then immediately proceeds to attempt another amazing action. The second action has a 1% chance of doubling the glory, and a 99% chance of failure, which includes a 50% chance of making the person look like an absolute fool.

Addendum: After having perused that Ultimate Lingo glossary, I will now attend these weekly Ultimate games holding out hope for witnessing a Sea World.

Our pteropine intruder from the other night has me mulling over assorted bat-texts.

Dickinson:

The bat is dun with wrinkled wings
Like fallow article,
And not a song pervades his lips,
Or none perceptible.

Roethke:

By day, the bat is cousin to the mouse
He likes the attic of an aging house
His fingers make a hat about his head
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead

D.H. Lawrence:

Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Swearengen:

Sometimes I imagine in my declining years
running a small joint in Manchester, England,
catering to specialists exclusive.
And to let ’em know they’re amongst their own,
maybe I’ll operate from the corner,
hanging upside down like a fucking bat.

Thompson:

And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

Handey: Think again, bat man.

A bat gets into our apartment at three in the morning, and, apparently unable to find its own way back out, starts flitting wildly around the kitchen and living room in what I can only assume is a panic. I am still up, so I get to start right in on my very first bat-in-the-house situation. I spend a few teeth-gritting minutes ducking and shooing and opening-and-shutting an umbrella menacingly at it, while calling out to Laura to go back to sleep, it’s all under control, it’s just nothing, nope, no airborne vermin here. (Laura has had previous bat-in-the-house experience while growing up, so my chivalry is probably unnecessary. On the other hand, I am also our household’s resident beetle-bludgeoner and spider-smasher, so my initiative may be in the right place after all.) It is a very tiny bat, and insanely fast, a spastic blur in the air, its wings flapping with a quiet, rapid-fire rustling sound like someone flipping through a paperback. I prop open the front door, and soon enough the bat flies out the door and down the building stairwell, where it becomes Someone Else’s Problem.

I very much doubt we’ve seen the last of this creature, but next time I’ll be a little better prepared. The question now is: Dunlop, Wilson, or Prince?

I meet with a CIBC banking rep to open a U.S. dollar account, and as we’re filling out the paperwork, she asks me where I’m from, whether I’m from Hamilton. I tell her no, I’m from the States, I’m a Permanent Resident here. (Only a few minutes earlier I’d handed her my PR card as one of my required forms of ID; I guess she forgot.) She looks at me in surprise and asks me why I don’t have one of those American accents.

A Three-Great-Lake Weekend: Laura and I have dinner on Saturday at a patio restaurant on the waterfront of a deep blue and spectrum-skied Lake Ontario. On Sunday morning, we drive west across southern Ontario, to Goderich, and eat a high-noon picnic lunch on a lighthouse-crowned hill overlooking a vivid blue-green Lake Huron. We kill a few hours at Pinery Provincial Park, roaming the beaches, soaking up UV rays, climbing dunes, collecting pebbles. Finally, we drive southeast to Port Burwell, where we grab dinner at a fish & chips dive alongside an ethereally grey and nearly horizonless Lake Erie. We’ll hit Superior and Michigan another time.

Two months ago: We successfully repaint the walls, eradicating the previous tenants’ bad burgundy, bilious beige, and loathsome lime green, replacing them with the cool, mellow, stupefying neutrals we prefer. (The kitchen’s Flayed Ernie lives on.)

We paint while listening to opera — several hours’ worth of opera CDs checked out from the library. Carmen. Tosca. The Fiery Angel. Matrimonial Figaro. Pavarotti and The Two Chumps. Pretentious, perhaps, but at some point I seem to have gotten the idea stuck in my head that one must listen to opera while painting walls. It’s possible I saw someone else do this in a movie somewhere.

Our walls’ new colors’ names, according to the Benjamin Moore brand paint-shade nomenclature: Cement Gray, Pike’s Peak Gray, and Old Prairie. The mundane low, the majestic high, and the endless flat line.

Mark Strand, from “The President’s Resignation”:

I have never ceased looking up at the sky and I never shall. The azures and ultramarines of disappointment and joy come only from it. The blessings of weather shall always exceed the office of our calling and turn our words, without warning, into the petals of a huge and inexhaustible rose.

It has not escaped my notice that for the past week or so, whenever I hit up Environment Canada’s website for my current conditions, they show some variation on MOSTLY CLOUDY. Look out the window, though, and the skies always tell a different story. How to explain this glass-half-empty approach to the presence of clouds in otherwise sunny weather? Is this done everywhere? Possibly the airport METAR data droid is depressed. Its runway windsock needs a starching.

Laura buys an iPod Nano, for grooving to on her walk to and from work. I couldn’t be prouder to finally have an iPod in the house. Of course, I never get to listen to it, but somehow this seems immaterial. Anyway, I have no commute.

Mike Doughty: Do I need a Nano? No. But you must understand. It’s VERY SMALL.

From an old physics joke: Assume the horse is a sphere.

The ideas of physics fascinate me, but the math breaks my brain. I’m not proud of this. Ten-and-a-half years ago: University-level honors physics annihilates me and my GPA with such ruthless efficiency that I flee Engineering in disgrace and hotfoot it for the humanities after one tormented semester. For years afterward, I insist on telling people over and over again about this experience of mine even though it isn’t very interesting, nor does it seem particularly unique. It’s just kind of this big joke to me that physics was what turned me definitively to the English department. If it weren’t for my failure in that physics class, I tell myself, today I might be an engineer, a programmer, a researcher, a tech-sci journalist. Instead of … a bookish web designer with a dusty English diploma, a seven-year-old boredom-blog, and a fortress of trade paperbacks. Did I ever dodge that bullet.

“Truly. This is not dexterous wordplay, sleight of hand, or psychological illusion,” writes Greene, fifty pages into Fabric, wrapping up an introductory summary of special relativity. “This is how the universe works.” Glad that’s settled. Now I can get some sleep.

Albert Einstein, describing radio:

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

Mark Twain, describing Vesuvius’s Grotto del Cane:

Every body has written about the Grotto del Cane and its poisonous vapors, from Pliny down to Smith, and every tourist has held a dog over its floor by the legs to test the capabilities of the place. The dog dies in a minute and a half—a chicken instantly … I longed to see this grotto. I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little, and time him; suffocate him some more and then finish him. We reached the grotto at about three in the afternoon, and proceeded at once to make the experiments. But now, an important difficulty presented itself. We had no dog.

Kevin Bacon to Fred Ward in Tremors: Who died and made you Einstein?

Greene has this half-endearing, half-lame penchant for explaining certain concepts in The Fabric of the Cosmos by hauling in geek-pop-culture characters to act out his examples. So far, Chewbacca has helped illustrate special relativity’s implications for our understanding of past, present, and future; several Simpsons characters have helped demonstrate the absolute nature of spacetime; and the X-Files’s Scully and Mulder have helped articulate the scientific debate over quantum entanglement. Obviously, writing a popular-science book requires resorting to this sort of song-and-dance to hold the interest of us poor lay readers, and for the most part it’s successful at lending a sense of humor and a spirit of playfulness to a lot of dry, complex technical abstractions, but still … we know that we need you to talk down to us, Professor Greene, but you don’t have to rub it in.

I’ll grant that the use of Scully and Mulder is appropriate, given that 1) Greene at one point mentions a physicist named Marlan Scully (who is co-credited with suggesting the existence of the quantum eraser), and 2) the book’s author photo makes Greene bear an uncanny resemblance to David Duchovny.