I am, I confess, among the most boring men in my family. In a family lineage that includes war heroes, riverboat gamblers, inventors, crusaders and even a guy named King Arthur, I instead write science humor on the interwebs.
Not much to brag about.
That’s not to say I don’t do stuff – I have travelled all over Europe, parts of the mid-east, and a decent chunk of Asia. I’ve gone up against the Bulgarian mafia, done falconry in England and faced down Turkish police. There just isn’t a lot to explore these days and real-life adventuring is so obscure as to be a little weird to take on as a career: There are no inner reaches of Africa left unmapped and the Amazon has better cell phone reception than I get in Silicon Valley.
Heck, even being an astronaut means you only get to drive a glorified delivery van to a warehouse orbiting the globe.
But I look like I do stuff and a few months ago I was at a conference and a woman came up to me and started babbling about interviewing me after a near-disaster in the Lincoln Sea part of the Arctic Ocean during the ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission last year. I looked at her quizzically and finally she noticed.
“I have the wrong person, don’t I?” she asked. I nodded my head (1). “Well, they described him and said he looked like a younger Harrison Ford so I assumed it was you.”
She meant the Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, of course, and not that knucklehead Han Solo in “Star Wars” who mumbled something unintelligible about making the Kessel Run in “less than twelve parsecs.” No one in my family would ever make that kind of grade-school physics mistake.
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for example? Well, okay, Lauren Fox, but she wasn’t a scientist.
