Scientists produced a map of aurorae on Mars, which is apparently a pattern of ultraviolet light that’s created by the planet’s crustal rocks. Science Daily has a cool photo of it. But it, um, looks kind of familiar. Like the dragon tile on a mahjong board:

That’s just a screencap of mahjong and pasted the Science Daily image atop it. Anyone else see it? Turns out Men in Black was right: We really are just small parts in a giant game of marbles.

A couple of guys from work and I went to a screening of The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s fantastic new flick. Everyone met at the screening room, though, and I managed to write the address down incorrectly, so I spent the first half-hour running back and forth in Times Square, finally figuring out my error, and walking into the movie a bit late. Turns out there were only seven people in the room: me, three other Men’s Health guys, two people I didn’t recognize, and John Waters. As in, the “Hairspray” and “Pink Flamingos” guy.

Afterward, a friend from MH, told me that, a few minutes after the screening was supposed to start, the following exchange took place:

MH Friend, to the woman running the screening: “Jason will be here in a few minutes. He got lost.”

Woman: “Oh, no problem. We can wait.”

John Waters: “Let’s start the screening now.”

Woman: “Ok, we’ll start the screening now.”

And that was that. John Waters will not wait for Jason Feifer! Fair enough.

I was making myself a PB sandwich this afternoon, and accidentally dropped the jar on the floor. It hit, and an enormous glob of the stuff rocketed up out of the jar, and landed back up on the counter. Rubberyness: Probably not a quality I should be looking for in food.

But I had the sandwich anyway.

Ok, I’m not buff at all. But I have news: I now work for Men’s Health, and I moved to New York two weeks ago. Hence the non-buffness: I’m totally new to the city and have spent the majority of my time orienting myself to the job, and so I’ve abandoned attempts at nutrition and have had pizza for about 50 percent of my dinners, mostly from a place called Ultimate Pizza. I’m not convinced it’s the ultimate, but I’m lazy and it’s close by.

I’ve spent my free time these last two weeks setting up my apartment (which is still mostly a disaster), and my Internet was just hooked up yesterday. My first week here was air conditioning-free, which made living and sleeping a mostly indecent proposal. So then, with all these life changes, do you forgive me for the very long absence from this blog?

Yes? Is it because, uh, you stopped reading this blog about a year ago, when I stopped updating it regularly, and just don’t think it’s worth putting forth the energy to not forgive me?

That’s what I thought. Thanks!

So here I am, living in Manhattan, running MH’s Malegrams section. My last feature for my former employer, Boston magazine, ran in its September issue: It’s about an outsourced singing telegram service, and it made me reconsider everything I’ve thought about outsourcing.

I’m still mostly unfamiliar with NYC, so if you happen to be reading this blog and hail from our great city, and care to tell me a good place to eat, see, walk or avoid at all costs, please do drop me a line. I’d welcome anything at this point. Just don’t send me back to Ultimate Pizza. I’ve done it.

Otherwise, stay tuned. I’m about to make your abs rock-solid.

But I did submit myself to be a panelist on this week’s “News IQ Quiz,” a news quiz show on NECN that ran at 8 p.m. on Friday — which means I pity anyone who had nothing better to do than watch me. Here’s the first segment:

If you suffered through that and actually want more, well, you’re beyond help. Here are links to Round Two and Round Three. Be sure to listen in for my very forced Bill O’Reilly reference during the final question.

Some friends and I played pub quiz tonight. Our team name: We’re Waving Right Now. Whenever the announcer listed off scores and read our team name, we waved.

Genius! I’m telling you: Interactive, innovative genius. That’s some out-of-the-box shit right there. We won third place, which means we got free Common Ground t-shirts. Because we’re innovative geniuses.

On Friday afternoon, some co-workers and I gathered at a dive bar called TC’s Lounge for after-work drinks. We’d been talking about doing regular Friday drinks for a while, and thought, considering its quietness and proximity to our office, TC’s Lounge would be the perfect regular spot. And it would be, if it weren’t run by an asshole.

We sat in the back, and moved two tables together to accomidate us all. We were there for two and a half hours, from 4 p.m. to 6:30, and ordered four pitchers of beer. We chatted. We laughed. We filled the jukebox. We were, at times, perhaps the only people giving that place business. And when we were done, we got up to leave and ran smack into a 60-something man with his arms crossed, who was short and stocky and bald and very upset.

“What, you’re going to leave the place like that?” he said, clearly pissed and somewhat yelling. “You don’t put things back where they belong?”

We looked behind us. There were the two tables, still next to each other, with some empty glasses and pitchers on them. Pretty standard sight for any bar. I’ve walked away from many such scenes. Tables get moved around in bars. That’s what they’re there for. So, uh: What’s the problem?

We asked: “What?”

“You put things back where you found them,” he ordered.

“Are you kidding?” one of my co-workers said.

“No,” he said. And he wasn’t.

Two of my co-workers went to move the tables apart. “Thank you,” the bald man said in the most condescending way those two words can be spoken, as if he were teaching us a lesson. And then again: “Thank you.”

I was standing next to the bald man at this point, and I thought he needed a lesson of his own. Something about running a smart business. Or not driving away customers. Or not being a dick. I settled on this: ”And you’re welcome for all the money we just spent on beer.”

“Don’t pull that shit on me!” he snapped. “Don’t you pull that shit on me! This is a family business.”

How I weep for his family.

He kept yelling at us, so we all just turned around and left. “We’ll be taking our business elsewhere,” one of my colleagues said as we walked out the door.

And we will. TC’s, don’t pull that shit on me.

I got waxed. I got plucked. I got lots of expensive haircuts. And then I did amazingly silly photo shoot (see above, one of the shots that didn’t make the final cut), all for a story I did about local men’s salons in this month’s Boston mag.

Update: Matty in the Morning brought me in to talk about men’s pampering. The audio is here.

(Spotted by my parents, who were just in Italy.)

This sign spotted at the theater I went to see The Incredible Hulk at tonight. (It beat the purple pants off the last one.)

In her latest On Language column — er, uh, in her The Word column, in which she actually cites William Safire as a source — Globe language scribe Jan Freeman posed an interesting question. I tried responding to her directly, but the e-mail bounced twice, so I’m giving up and just posting it here. First, Jan:

IF, WHETHER, OR NOT? Grammar Girl, the popular usage podcaster, offers “quick and dirty” usage advice, most of it reliably mainstream. But her recent treatment of whether and if has me stumped.

In my experience, the only real problem in the “whether/if” department is that overzealous editors sometimes delete an obligatory “or not.” But Grammar Girl sees another potential problem. She claims these sentences have different meanings:

Squiggly didn’t know whether Aardvark would arrive on Friday or Saturday.

Squiggly didn’t know if Aardvark would arrive on Friday or Saturday.

I don’t see it, but I’d like to know if readers do (without the aid of Grammar Girl); please send explanations (or exclamations!) to freeman@globe.com.

To which I say: I’ve never heard of Grammar Girl, but I’m semi-siding with her on this one.

Squiggly didn’t know whether Aardvark would arrive on Friday or Saturday. This seems to mean that Aardvark will arrive on either Friday or Saturday. The “whether” implies that these are the only two possible outcomes, and that one will come true.

Squiggly didn’t know if Aardvark would arrive on Friday or Saturday. This seems to mean that Aardvark may arrive on Friday or Saturday, or maybe Sunday, or Monday. The “if” suggests that “Friday or Saturday” is one, joint outcome — an arrival on one of these days — but in the context of the sentence, it’s unclear if Aardvark will arrive on one of those days. It’s equal to saying, “Squiggly didn’t know if Aardvark will arrive.”

This is tricky, though, because I don’t think the whether/if split in meaning would be as clear if the sentence included only one potential outcome. For example:

Squiggly didn’t know whether Aardvark would arrive.
Squiggly didn’t know if Aardvark would arrive.

Those two mean the same thing, because there’s only one outcome presented, and the suggestion from both “whether” and “if” is that this one outcome may not be achieved. Which, I suppose, means I don’t know whether or if I’m right at all.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t get enough sleep, or I’m grumpy from the record-breaking heat Boston’s about to endure, but I heard a story on NPR this morning that caused me to fire off an angry letter to the editor. It was this:

Larry Abramson’s story today, “School Devoted to Traditional Teaching, Values,” sounded deluded, and borderline delusional. He visited a public school in the heart of an evangelical community, and found, not to my surprise, that the community there has hijacked public funds and created a public school that functions as a church. In Abramson’s story, we hear a teacher promote abstinence, and we hear about students who drank alcohol—normal teenage behavior—being sent away for spiritual retreats. However, we never heard Abramson raise a question about this, or interview an independent advocate for the separation of church and state.

Abramson’s story was instead so fawning, and so full of praise, that he should be embarrassed for its naiveté. Without irony or examination, he used the phase “traditional values”—a phrase that evangelicals use to falsely portray social conservatives as something foundational—as a casual descriptor of the school. And although he mentioned that most students are from the evangelical community, he did not discuss how that community has clearly shaped the social and religious agenda of this school.

Classical Academy would have made for an interesting NPR story—but not because it’s supposedly churning out upstanding citizens. Abramson should have used it as part of an inquiry into how the constitutional and American walls between church and state crumble when evangelicals gain control of government money. These people have no business running a school; the result, a church disguised as a school, speaks for itself.

But I loved the ones I did get. This kid’s going places.

As I walked by a guy who was talking on his cellphone yesterday, I caught this fragment of conversation:

“What do you mean?”

Pause.

“What do I dislike? Um. Uh. Things I don’t like.”

Until yesterday, I had watched James Frey only once, when he was squirming on Oprah after being exposed as a fraud. But he was doing a reading in Brookline Wednesday, and when a friend (and loyal Frey supporter) asked if I wanted to go with her to see him, I considered it an expedition into a foreign land. Which, in many ways, it was.

The book-reading section of the evening was unremarkable — he read aloud as if he were rambling, without pause or emphasis, the way a fifth grader might — but the Q&A was somewhat fascinating. For one, Frey still has supporters. They came out in force, at least a few hundred of them, applauding and thanking him and encouraging him to be strong. They referred to the scandal in vague terms, like “when it happened” or “back then.” Someone mentioned Oprah, and someone else in the crowd booed. When Frey explained why he doesn’t use much punctuation or paragraph indentation in his writing (he claims they slow the reader down), the audience laughed knowingly, and nodded, as if they’ve all been thinking for years, You know what’s keeping me from enjoying all these things I’m reading? It’s the fucking commas and periods and paragraph breaks, that’s what.

But that was the fun stuff. Frey’s moment of exposure came when someone asked him about his experience writing this new book (a work of fiction), and he said it was energizing and freeing. “This time, I didn’t have to follow anyone’s rules,” he said.

I didn’t have to follow anyone’s rules.

As if all his troubles before were caused by his having to conform to someone’s edicts. I didn’t have to follow anyone’s rules.

Listen, James Frey: When you wrote your first two books, those memoirs that turned out to be pure fiction, there was only one rule you had to follow, and it was your own fucking rule: You said the books were true, and so they had to be true. That was it. That was the one rule — a self-imposed rule. And you didn’t need to impose it. You could have said the books were fiction — just another first-person story about a guy on drugs. But you said they were real, and so, rightly so, people expected them to be real. And when they weren’t, and when that turned out to be a problem for you, suddenly realism is someone’s rule, just some arbitrary ceiling meant to keep you down.

Come on, James Frey. All these years later, and you still don’t get it.

Frey does deserve one compliment, though: He’s very, very grateful for the readers who have stuck by him. He stressed it repeatedly during the Q&A session, and he’s one of the very few speakers I’ve seen who continues to take questions, even when the bookstore dude running the event says it’s time to wrap up.

“One more question,” the bookstore dude would say, for the third time.

“Ok, I’m going to take a few more,” Frey would say.

Afterward, Frey stuck around for more than an hour, talking to fans, signing books and taking photos. In my friend’s book, he wrote, “A beautiful life to a beautiful girl. Thank you for your support. Thank you, thank you, thank you. James.” That’s great and generous. I have a lot of respect for that.

But I don’t have respect for much else.