First, let’s face it, that Cobra is one mad sucker. He’s been cooped up for years in a little cage and fed whatever we thought he would like whenever we thought he would like it. What would you do if you were him? Stay in the building, or get the hell out of Dodge? Look, I’m no rocket scientist, but I know that snake is lying in wait to welcome me to the Big Apple. I believe in associations, and apples and snakes have a history dating back to Adam and Eve. Remember the picture of the snake slitering around the apple? Hello.

Here is the zoo’s statement about said snake’s escape: “Upon leaving its enclosure, the snake would feel vulnerable and seek out a place to hide and feel safe,” zoo director Jim Breheny said in a written statement. ”When the snake gets hungry or thirsty, it will start to move around the building. Once that happens, it will be our best opportunity to recover it.”

The snake is feeling ‘vulnerable?’ Really? Our “best opportunity” to catch him? What does that mean? In ten years we couldn’t find Osama Bin Laden, and he was two feet taller than everyone else in the area and traveling with a hospital attached to him. But we think we are going to find a snake in New York City?

Next they said the best way to catch him is to cool down an area of the reptile building at night (dark is good, apparently), set up a heater somewhere in the room, and said Cobra will slither toward the heat. Voila, they have him. Another thing they are doing is walking around at night with a flash light to see if he’s out. Just who is doing that little patrol? Would it be the last person hired in the reptile department? They always get the worst jobs. Get everyone coffee in the morning and stay late with flashlight in hand and see if you can find our missing deadly Cobra.

Finally, they have issued this suggestion for what to do you if you happen upon him: Avoid coming within a snake’s striking range, which tends to be about half the length of the snake’s body length. The escaped cobra measures approximately twenty inches long, so its strike range would be limited to about ten inches. Do not attempt to provoke the snake by poking at it or stepping on it, as doing so will only endanger you even more and likely will result in a snake bite. Do not attempt to provoke the snake? Who are you people?

The fabulous Sarah (daughter extraordinaire in Boston) was on the phone with me this morning. I told her that she had to pay close attention to her feet walking around Cambridge this week.

“Why?”

“Because a cobra has escaped from the Bronx Zoo, and I’m concerned. Just don’t take chances. Watch where you are walking.”

“Just how do you think it got here?”

“I looked on the map and Amtrak runs right by the zoo. Have you not heard of the Acela?”

“Love you mom.” Click.

After hours of research, I thought you should all know that a Cobra (privately owned in a trailer park in California) escaped in 1979 and he was never found. I’m just saying.

Someone set up a twitter account for the Cobra and has been tweeting things about its whereabouts since its escape. “Went to financial district yesterday. Slimy.” Late night comedians have also been chatting about Mr. C since he escaped. I have a really good sense of humor, and I can make people laugh if I want to. I am really good at being irreverent in difficult situations. But this is no laughing matter. I’m running out of places to be safe. I’m heading from California, where I’m sniffing the air for nuclear waste, to New York, where I will have to look under my hotel bed for a missing Cobra. It’s exhausting having to save myself from the negligence of others.

Listen, if I were Mayor Bloomberg, I would tell them they have 24 hours to find said snake, or the building will be ripped down, brick by brick. And, then the rest of the zoo will be dismantled and all the ‘wild’ animals will be returned to the real wild where they belong in the first place. Zoos, like circuses with animals, churn my stomach. I have always wondered about the things that entertain us. Taking a wild bear and putting a tutu on it and having it dance in front of laughing people has always been grotesque to me.

So, in short, find the F***ing snake. Now.

I’m just saying.

Seriously, the stem cell thing is an enigma to me. So, I took to the Net to do some homework. Here is what I learned.

1. Stem cells are uncommitted cells that have the potential to turn into any cell in the human body. Scientists are able to isolate stem cells and to keep them indefinitely.

Wow. Uncommitted cells. I know about trouble with commitment, but what exactly does that mean? Then I decided it doesn’t matter why they are uncommitted, just that they are and can be anything you want them to be. Talk about the mysteries of life. Wow.

2. We may be able to direct stem cells to become any type of human cell (nerves, heart etc.) that can’t normally be replaced once damaged.

The key word is may. But whether it works or it doesn’t, where is the question? I have never really paid much attention to the debate on stem cell research, but who wouldn’t want to take cells that might save your life, change a friend’s life, or enable someone battling a terrible disease to cure it easily? How is it possible that you wouldn’t want to do that? And if we are going to discuss this in the context of the abortion debate, I can live with the fact that some consider it murder, no problem. But since it’s legal and they are doing it whether you like it or not, it seems ridiculous to me that you would expect them to throw away the stem cell matter just because.

3. Stem cells can be found in: embryos; umbilical cord blood and adults (bone marrow and brain);

So it’s in the umbilical cord, which makes sense. A mother ‘sends’ those cells to nurture the growth of a child. I get that they would be uncommitted until they reach their target destination. I get that. But bone marrow and brain? First, what’s the connection between the two? Brain. Bone Marrow. I want to know the connection between umbilical cords, bone marrow, and brain matter. I need to know. I’m working on it and will get back to you when someone answers that question.

Back to the beginning: Female stem cells are more productive than male stem cells. Might I point out that the more enlightened we become, the better my gender looks in the scheme of things. Turns out we are great at building businesses. Turns out we are great at raising children. And now we’ve discovered our stem cells beat out the competition easily.

I’m just saying.

If a huge house is burning, everyone in the neighborhood becomes a firefighter. They all rush over to the burning building. They help direct traffic, run in if the firefighters haven’t arrived yet to save the children, turn on the hose and point the stream of water onto the flames. They don’t just stand there watching, or head off to their normal jobs driving by the disaster at their sister-home.

“Where is she going with this,” I hear you ask already? Keep your knickers on. I’m getting there.

We leaked oil into the already people-polluted ocean. We have it spreading all over the place. We also have really smart people on the planet. Stephen Hawking comes to mind. All those brain-peeps from NASA. Physicists out the wazoo. Ok, people, it’s all hands on deck. Mars will still be there waiting for you in a year after you fix this burning home sitting right next to you. The black hole can wait another year or so to be explained. Seriously. Everyone needs to try and find a solution. Rome is burning and you’re worrying about black holes? Get a grip people.

We need every smart person to go to the gulf, be indoctrinated into the fine workings of what happens to the ocean when oil spews into it, and then everyone needs to go put their thinking caps on to figure out what to do about it. Fix it. Get it outta there.

You think I’m nuts? There is a famous story about how a large eighteen-wheeler truck got stuck in the Lincoln Tunnel in New York. The driver didn’t read the sign that said the height restriction was shorter than his vehicle. All hands were on deck. Fire department. Police. Transit peeps. You get the picture. There was a car stuck behind the truck with a nine-year-old boy in it. Everyone was out of their cars watching them try and figure out how to get the roof off the truck. The little kid went over to the police officer and said, “Excuse me smart officer. If you let the air out of the tires, I think it will work.” Now, I wasn’t there, and this could be folklore, but either way, shouldn’t everyone be putting on their thinking caps?

I’m a smart person. I have been thinking about this myself. I was thinking about how long it takes olive oil to seep through cheesecloth. It’s a cooking thing. So, make a huge net of cheesecloth, surround one of the moving flotillas of oil and scoop it up and crane it onto a barge. You roll your eyes? Ok, smarty pants, what did you think of as a solution? At least I’m trying.

This is not rocket science. Or maybe it is, but this is the time when if you have brain power, you need to bring it to the sister-ship. Now.

Rule #1 I, Christine, will only watch one movie a month that I have already seen.

Rule #2 I, Christine, will watch only one reality show a season. (Hard choice between Biggest Loser or American Idol.) Good news is that Rule #2 does not                                     begin until the fall season because I’m already ‘in’ more than one of those shows.

Rule #3 I, Christine, will look at the TV Guide on Sunday mornings and plot my television course for the week which must include one interesting show where I                   actually learn something I didn’t know, and one talk show. (I hope I go with Rachel Maddow, not Oprah – I’m getting over Oprah.)

Rule #4 TV goes off by 9:00 pm (I Tivo everything and watch it on tape without commercials). Reading or walking Luke will take over from 9:00. Or writing.

Those are the new rules and I like them already.

This leads me to National Geographic’s Hawking’s Universe, which I watched a few nights ago. You all remember Stephen Hawking and the book he wrote, A Brief History of Time. He also suffers from ALS and has lasted years and years longer than anyone thought possible by his sheer determination to see his theories become truths. I, like the rest of the country, bought the book when it came out, but I never actually read it. Nor, I suspect, did most of the other people who bought it.

So, here is his book’s content on National Geographic where they explained it all in the kind of layman terms that even I could understand. It was fabulous. For the first time I understand what a black hole is and what causes it. I get what gravity really is and how it’s not as strong as we all thought. I sort of understand the string theory of additional dimensions, and just writing these things down makes me feel smarter than you already.

I was at dinner with friends last night, and I was telling them about the show. Victor (you remember my friends Victor and Cathryn. Cathryn is the one who keeps maple syrup in her car for when she stops at IHop.) Well, Victor is very smart, and he actually read the Hawking book cover to cover but pointed out to me that it was very difficult for him, and he needed to really focus when reading it. What he was really saying was that I shouldn’t bother buying it again. I told him I had no interest in reading it.

Here’s the thing. I’m 57 years old and I don’t want to read his book now. It’s not a topic that totally spurs me on to greater knowledge, but I’m so glad I now understand what a black hole is and what causes it. And, all that in one TV show for one hour. Who knew? And, without my ‘rules’ I would never have watched it. If we are totally honest here, I watched it thinking it was more about the man than the theory, but who cares what led me to the Kool Aid, because what matters is that I drank it. And, if I had watched Silence of the Lambs one more time instead, not only would I still not be an FBI agent, but I wouldn’t understand black holes either.

So, the long and the short of this lesson is that rules are very good for you. Set some.

Now today, we attack the moon? Are you kidding me? Send a huge bomb into the moon and catch the debris as it rises off the moon? Have we lost our minds? What the hell has the moon done to us? Once a month, when it’s in full bloom, it provides a view from the heavens that never ceases to take our breath away. And now it has a huge hole in it where we bombed it looking for water. Why don’t we spend that $100,000,000 cleaning the water we’ve ruined instead?

There is something so innately wrong with invading the moon this way. It’s also indicative of our narcissistic, it’s all about us, approach to everything. We want to know what is beneath the moon’s surface. Let’s just send in a big bomb, blow up a huge crater, take pictures of what we want and we are on our way outta there. Damage be damned.

So many moon memories. My first kiss was under a full moon. My daughter’s favorite book each night for months was Goodnight Moon. We landed on the moon singing ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ in my Cougar; it lit the way to many a night’s adventures including stealing a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch with my child and her friend and then going back the next day and paying for it. Now, you want me to add this to the list? Not a chance. After this post, I’m turning off the TV and not watching any coverage of it. Leave my gentle moon alone you idiots.

Speaking of idiots, I just heard someone from NASA say he doesn’t know what they will find when they do this. What if they find that the core is not as stable as ours and this causes some damage? While that may be ridiculous, we don’t do invasive surgery on people when there is another way, why must we do it to the moon? Why didn’t we send those guys from the movie Armageddon, have them drill gently into the surface and take samples? Ok, seriously, we couldn’t do another landing, send some guys and a drill up there and accomplish the same thing?

And, the creme de la crap is that it is costing in the neighborhood of $100,000,000. Do I need to make a list of what could be done with that money? Besides, they are lying. It’s costing a lot more than that and we all know it. And, since we believe so much in coalitions, how come we don’t do those in space where we are supposedly doing things with positive explorative purpose? Seems like the perfect way to reach out, amortize our investment and let the world share in our space exploration.

I love looking at the moon. It happens to be full right now. There is the moon and an American flag up there. Now there is a crater forever that we blew up as well. Thanks so much.