Evening, reader.

As our world-famous guests arrive –- and Tim Berners-Lee is first -- my sense is that they are kind, good-spirited, they have done things for people. That understanding precedes my trust.

When Jack Kilby died a few years ago, like others I regretted, "Now I will never have the chance to meet him." I had not reckoned on tonight's imaginary encounter with his background (in facts herein) and quotes (in italics).

Jack has two daughters and five granddaughters – ”You could say that the Kilbys specialized in girls,” he observes. He is easy taking a fatherly interest in Lisa and me. Curiously, he asks about Lisa Kudrow’s recurrent “Smelly Cat” song in her role as a mellow, vacuous folk-singer on Friends. He is especially keen about her creation of the Michelle wannabe inventor for High School Reunion.

Rick chimes in about the DVD we rented, Lisa’s satirical series The Comeback. We liked her complex, delusional character and how the media was shown constructing reality.

Lisa is pressured to speak of those two inventors at 3M Corporation who actually did invent Post-Its. She knows that Spence Silver created the adhesive in 1980 without knowing what use to make of it. Colleague Art Fry came up, Lisa reports, with the practical application -- after he kept losing scrap-paper bookmarks in his church choir’s hymnal.

The inventors in our living room imply they are solidly motivated by such practicalities. For as Jack Kilby says, “Hell, it’s incredibly satisfying to face some important problem and find a solution.”

These men are star-struck enough to wonder about Lisa's co-stars on the long-running Friends. For 10 minutes, she shares back-stage stuff, friendly and funny stuff, about the real Monica. Rachel, Ross, Chandler, and Joey. It is clear they were a cohesive ensemble.

We learn that Lisa's university major was Biology. She took it when living-matter departments were flourishing -- before Biology programs in universities became more abstract, molecular, and smaller in student populations. Lisa says she had planned to become a medical researcher like her father, a headache specialist.

But after graduating from Vassar, she gained an intro to a L.A. sketch comedy troupe, Groundlings. A friend of her brother’s opened that door. Much on-stage experimentation, and assorted acting jobs, followed. Questions ensue tonight, our guests asking Lisa how she responds to hecklers, how she uses objects to depict her characters, how Jack Benny's old 'slow burn' would go over today (okay).

Lisa's inspiration comes from “a few different people at a few different moments. A lot of it was myself, at different moments when I’m insincere or afraid or insecure about my sexuality. And then other people [supply elements] for other things: certain teachers, family members.” Lisa doesn’t think of her Phoebe character on Friends or certain other of her parts as particularly ditzy: “They make me laugh really hard. I never think they’re really that stupid. No one is ever just dumb. They’re usually dumb about something, and you just have to figure out what that something is.” For her characters, she loves “coming up with things.”

Lisa Kudrow's good at drawing out others. She muses whether, similar to Art Fry and Spence Silver at 3M in Minnesota, Jack Kilby had a revelatory experience en route to his invention.

Jack recalls that he'd placed all the components on a single slab of germanium (“Not the green-and-red plant kind?” Lisa intervenes), wiring them together by hand. Barely five months later, Robert Noyce, another U.S. inventor working separately from Jack, supervised the design of a smaller, easier-to-mass-produce single circuit on a chip of silicon (“Not the breast kind?” I intervene). Jack nods, “We worked hard together to achieve commercial acceptance for integrated circuits.”

In what may pass as sagacity, I nod. As if I even had a rickety grasp of circuit workings.

Jack is prodded to note that his interest evolved from childhood: “My dad ran a power company that served a wide area in rural Kansas, and he used amateur radio in his work. I found it very interesting. In fact, it was during an ice storm during my teens, when customers throughout his area lost power, that I first saw how radio –- and by extension, electronics –- could really impact people’s lives.” The rest of us precisely understand what Jack's taking about: Radio as Lifeline, a bringer-together of people. Perhaps we’re all radio folk.

Tim Berners-Lee is speaking now of his early years and his love for electronics. His parents were programmers for one of England’s first commercial computers. Berners and Lee encouraged their son to play games with imaginary numbers at their breakfast table. He made ‘pretend’ computers out of cardboard boxes and five-hole paper tape.

That was about the time, Lisa says, colossus of art Picasso was saying “Computers are useless –- they only give you answers.” Hah!

At Oxford in the ‘70s, Tim built his first computer. He used a soldering iron, an old TV set, and –- for all I know -- one of Jack’s integrated circuits. One impetus, Tim admits, was that his hacking led Oxford to ban him from the university’s PCs.

"Ohhh, Oggsford!" Lisa qua Phoebe comically mispronounces Oxford like that character in Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby.

I feel good about Barb and I placing ourselves in the company of these folk. Our tone isn't like a tenth-year high school reunion, but I see outcroppings of conviviality.

Preparation for Jack Kilby’s ‘Eureka’ came in part from university studies. “I graduated in 1947, just one year before Bell Labs announced the invention of the transistor. It meant that my vacuum-tube classes were about to become obsolete.”

Jack recalls that the bulky, fragile, fickle, power-gobbling vacuum tubes could not enhance any significant evolution of computers, but the point-contact transistor “offered great opportunities to put my Physics studies to good use.” The transistor’s developers at Bell Labs earned Nobel Prizes in 1956. Robert Gibney, a Metallurgist/Physical Chemist who helped develop their configurations of crystals, was not a winner.

Turns out, those awards are limited to no more than three persons in one field at any one time. Gibney had been key in the “miracle month” of 1947 that culminated in the transistor's invention. Lisa Kudrow points out that Rosalind Franklin too may have deserved a Nobel in 1962 (like Watson, Crick, and Wilkins) for her work pointing to the structure of DNA.

The exclusions of Gibney and Franklin somehow flabbergast me. I am all for giving them Nobels now, on the spot. Posthumously (which also is disallowed).

Not to put too tangential a point on it, I am also for recognition of those family members who have to put up with absent Laureates during those miracle months of theirs when they are chasing big discoveries. Lisa and I are wired for empathy and so we lift our glasses in support of all those discoverers' overlooked wives and children. We feel sorry too for those men in those crunch times -- they may have their soaring career trajectories, but often they miss out on chances to enjoy and help guide their families.

(Of course, talk about people who miss out! Just yesterday, December 6, we commemorated those 14 very young women shot dead at a Montreal university in 1989. Yesterday was an international day of remembrance and of female solidarity. That weighs on me still.)

I would like to be a post-feminist, encouraging and supportive, avoiding the gender wars and divisive male-bashing of certain Boomers. But am I now being a Trouble-Maker to ask our guests about Scientists ducking out of domestic responsibilities while tracking down professional mysteries? Am I going overboard tonight in championing the left-behind wives of young professional guys who hole-up for 14-hour workdays?

Excited, I am really on a roll for the just society and the sisterhood, I add that women are still outsiders in Science, Technology, Law, Investment, Architecture, Politics, Aerospace, Corporate Boards, and Evolutionary Biology. Men in those fields miss out on chances to...oh, I said that already.

Men around the table rebut: my perceptions are off-base, without empirical support. High proportions of their breed are indeed excellent husbands and fathers, even fathers and husbands of excellent Scientists. My sweeping correlation of hard-working Scientists with absentee fathers/husbands fails to explain Cause.

They blather so. About how it's now an exception for scientists to 'forget' about their families. About Scientists being excellent outside their labs -- at Frisbee, chess, diaper-changing, picking up their infants’ toys, showing-up to watch their kids play baseball, beer-drinking, playing tuba, and so forth.

In fact, except for Lisa, every guy down-table cites a different pastime that dedicated Scientists do marvelously. Talking almost like feminists (Third Wave), the men claim women’s “situatedness” in Science is advancing: that there are "more women in more labs" undercuts my “passé narrative of exclusion.”

Whoa, Nelly! I have just learned never to ask Scientists and Inventors about their boys’ clubs. They gloss over the gendered nature of their organizations.

“Well," I rest my case, "Here's to more husbands accompanying their Prize-winning wives to Nobel ceremonies."

Rick asks me to pass the gravy.

When I first sized-up Tim Berners-Lee at the door tonight, he seemed mellow, low-key. But look at him now, all animated at Jack Kilby's talk of crystals, chips, and putting Physics to good use. Tim too was turned-on as Physics major. Not only was that undergrad subject exhilarating, it was “in fact a good preparation for creating a global system.” Which I understand he did at age 24.

Our two physicists and onetime biologist Lisa Kudrow get into a conversation about whether Quantum Mechanics includes waves, energies, and materials that occupy space, the traditional stuff of Physics. Jack suggests not, that Quantum is really more about relationships among observables, data, and likelihoods. Sadly, I hadn't the foggiest that was an issue.

Okay, so some Scientists slave away on such matters. And yep, often they are apart from their families. Yet in the end, I somehow feel comfortable with those guys. They are so calm about creating global systems.

Among Jack and Tim, dear Rick is odd man out. His major was Folklore. I love him because of that or in spite of that. Not sure which…

Dissatisfactions with the reputability of search engines? Tim Berners-Lee frets over the rubbish on his medium too. He admits there’s no way to appraise the reliability of what’s online.

For ten years, though, he's thought one way to promote trust would be to “put what I call an ‘Oh, yeah?’ button on the browser…You should be able to click on ‘Oh, Yeah?’ and the browser program would tell the server computer to get some authentication – by comparing encrypted digital signatures, for example -- that the document was in fact generated by its claimed author....”

Lisa Kudrow speaks about her main medium, half-hour comedies on TV. Today it’s “in a weird place. You have 19 minutes on network television to do something more eye-catching and funnier than people humiliating themselves on Reality Shows, which is a tough act to follow…it feels like there is a lot of desperation.”

The desperate character that Lisa plays in “The Comeback” show endures much humiliation.

Barb asks if Lisa might ever fall back on her Biology degree. Barb is being playful -- but Lisa is excited about Biology's breakthrough news just last week, that embryonic stem cells have been created from human skin cells. Lisa does take the possibility of working in Biology half-seriously: “No, I don't think so. I think that ship has sailed. I would have to do a lot of school to catch up.”

Our reminiscences sail back to Jack Kilby. After a decade as an electrical engineer in Milwaukee, Jack looked for work in miniaturization. Texas Instruments proved an enthusiastic employer, wanting to avoid hand-soldering thousands of components for thousands of bits of wire. "I worked through the period when about 90 percent of the workforce took what we called ‘mass vacation.’ I was left with my thoughts and imagination…I thought it would be worthwhile to try and make everything from semi-conductors. This was contrary to most other major efforts at the time.”

Hey Jack, one should work well even when no one sees it, and one should take responsibility without being asked, but no vacation?

Jack talks about his experiments with various passive and active devices. He aimed “to lower the cost, simplify the assembly, and make things smaller and more reliable.” Jack recalls how he “realized that since all of the components could be made of a single material, they could also be made in situ inter-connected to form a complete circuit.”

Jack’s engineering jargon, and there’s more of it, short-circuits my understanding.

I so love hearing professionals shop-talk. Guys in technical fields seem so much at peace talking about their work, as compared to the angst you can get from men who aren't technical.

Wonder if I correctly caught what Tim Berners-Lee was saying about sending information through the air as flashes of light? Did I overhear something about computer pros needing to sell their ideas to marketing and business sides of their organizations?

It is not fair that I am out of the room and can not keep-up with the conversation. Back when I was in the kitchen stirring gravy and cutting cumin-infused lamb, I probably missed out on good talk of browsers, infrastructures, protocols, servers, applications, the works.

When I rejoin the group, Jack Kilby is being questioned. Were his breakthroughs greeted well? Or did he get the cruddy sort of ‘blah’ reaction, Lisa Kudrow explores, that a comedian gets when a joke bombs?

At first, Jack recalls, “there was tremendous criticism…[and several of us] provided the technical entertainment at professional meetings for the next five years as we described and debated the merits of various miniaturization systems…The turning point was two highly visible military programs in the ‘60s -- Apollo Moon and Minute-man Missile.” Both programs adopted the integrated-circuit technology.

Jack singles me out for a sympathetic glance, likely as a follow-up to our discussion an hour ago. I had been talking about modern men and women, when suddenly Rick had said that 'wives are silent partners.' He had quoted from J.M. Barrie's play What Every Woman Knows: behind every successful man is a woman who must do two things -- 1) never allow her man to realize that she is helping him big-time, and 2) always allow him to think that it is his own ingenuity and intelligence that are moving him ahead.

Of course it had been sweet of Rick indirectly supporting my call for male scientists to take on more domestic responsibilities. (I think that's what he had meant with that quote.) Basically, however, I had replied that Rick's 'power behind the throne' argument was anti-feminist. Today's narrative focuses on a two-career couple, rather than the fix-it woman who stands quietly in her husband's shadow. Rick had agreed with my point affably.

That had sunk in with Jack too. He says 'humankind' now like it includes womankind:
“Humankind eventually would have solved the (circuit) matter, but I had the fortunate experience of being the first person with the right idea and the right resources available at the right time in history.”

For his part in history, Tim credits government backing for allowing him to do much of his highest-tech engineering, combining HyperText and Internet for “the Web address which you find in shortened form painted on trucks and vegetables and all kinds of things now.” Tim waxes about W3C developing open technical specifications through a democratic process. Any member can suggest that --

"What's W3C?" bursts Rick. Over to Jack who says to be it stands for the World Wide Web Consortium that Tim oversees in Boston. W3C strives for inter-operability, and thus keep the Web from splintering into factions –- academic, commercial, free. "W3C works for me," Lisa Kudrow says.

She builds on that show of support to launch a far more ambitious question: “What would you say was the Web’s overall achievement?”

For Tim, that's easy. “It allows people to exist in an information space which doesn’t know geographic boundaries. My hope is that it’ll be very positive in bringing people together around the planet, because it’ll make communication between different countries more possible.”

Jack is on the same globe: “I believe the best is yet to come.”

Well now, who wouldn’t believe them?...

Tonight, Barb’s been clattering back and forth to/from our kitchen, puttering around fixing different courses, parsley here, fresh raspberries there.

(Agreed, I should help more than simply making soup for these shindigs. I ought to be like our gallant son-in-law, cooking meals some nights. Maybe all nights.)

Barb now is positioning herself as the evening's promoter of Tim Berners-Lee’s work. Clearly she’s googled-up on his achievements. Before him, the Internet had millions of documents secreted away on servers round the world, accessible only through user-unfriendly lingo.

Seems Barb's eager to know about inventors’ minds, how they tick. “Tim, did you deliberately set out to create simple systems with simple rules that could be democratically decentralized and acceptable to all? For you, was it ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’? Or was it more exploratory, like ‘Ready, Fire, and then Aim’?” (Barb's curiosity is but one her gifts.)

But then, before Tim can answer, Barb's querying again. (Meantime, nostalgia jolts me. Somehow, Barb's question-per-minute style tonight is reminding me of Dr. I.Q., on old-time radio.)

Barb: “Tim, did you really enable the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Hypertext Mark-up Language, a client interface for your World Wide Web, and" -- here Barb blinks -- "the very first server to store Web pages and dish them out on users' demand?"

"I have a related question," Lisa Kudrow piles on the much-questioned chap. "In the computer world, Tim, it's difficult to tell who really is the pioneer and who is the developer. Various people may contribute to the important idea’s development -- but the prizes, patents, and profits go to just a handful. Is that how it is?"

Tim wears a grimace that might mean “C'mon now, ladies, no one subscribes anymore to the lone-gunman theory of technological inspiration.”

Jack Kiley jumps in to emphasize that the women's grasp of who-does-what is “good enough.” Many women don’t realize, he adds, that sometimes in some spheres these days, “good enough” is all that’s required.

For Tim, however, Jack’s endorsement is not good enough. He starts to list a crowd whose work he’s drawn upon – Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Paul Barran for coming up with packet-switching, Paul Mockapetris (sp?) for Domain Name Service, Dave Somebody at MIT, and Van/Vann Somebody Else also at MIT.

I bring up the developer of the e-Bay auction. Tim buys online but, as far as I can tell, Tim doesn't see himself standing conceptually on that chap's shoulders. Jack refers to the creators of Facebook, Napster, and the Electronic Readers coming on the market this month. "Software is still a hotbed for young conceptual innovators."

As you can see, our dinner-party conversations sprawl. They’re anything but systematic or systemic.

Tim must be satisfied, I remark, to have invented e-mail. And then I trot out how I first went online, in the mid- ‘90s. I share that story because, well, because Barb's food is fantastic, and consequently we all feel warm, cozy, relaxed, and open to swapping autobiographies.

Actually, it was not until the ultra-late '90s that I first e-mailed. Tonight's group, though, is so tech-savvy that a confession of late adoption would be humiliating.

Here's the scoop. Years ago, during the business meeting of an international conference with 70 of my peers in Folklore, a friend (Ed) stood up to comment on an agenda item. He said our organization couldn't start an electronic newsletter -- because “a couple people, like Townsend” (me) "do not e-mail."

Tonight Jack guffaws as I tell our guests about what happened next at that international conference: I said, “Come on, fellow-Folklorists, surely the number is larger than just a ‘couple.’ Let's have a show of hands of all who are not into e-mail?” Confidently I raised my hand, the brave truth-sayer fearlessly contesting widely accepted falsehoods.

No other hand shot up, not one.

Next day, I sent my first-mail. In due course too, the Folklorists started an electronic newsletter.

Settling again in our LR, Rick unfurls his old humiliating story about how he was 'motivated' into going online. How many times have I heard that story?

All the same, as I say while pouring liqueur, many people can date their involvement with the Net to a particular episode. I tell how my sister Mary Lou, for example, realized she 'had' to learn about the information highway one day in 1995. She was walking down a hall and happened to see two colleagues looking at a map. It was a hard copy, printed from online only a minute earlier, of the expected path for a Caribbean hurricane. "Do you think this will affect my trip to Mexico?", one colleague was worrying. Mary Lou says that moment was her trigger towards computer literacy.

After Rick declares that Tim invented e-mail, we hear that particular inventor really was Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tomlinson had the idea in 1971 that it would be as easy to send messages on a computer network as it already was to send files. Apparently, 30 to 40 seconds later, Tomlinson came up with the @ sign to identify users’ and senders’ names.

E-mail’s provenance gives me a charge, since Rick and I -- together with our first-born son –- during 1971 lived only 3 miles away from that Cambridge. We rented a third-floor walk-up @ Newtonville. To tonight's guests, however, I do not brag about that 'bond.'

Ray Tomlinson should be a household name, don't you think? Do computer people have awards like Oscars and Nobels?

(Tonight is the chattiest Rick and I have ever been with masters of computerland. Once, though, we sat behind Bill Gates flying economy on Northwestern. We had seen an article indicating he flew economy class on that airline. We're fairly certain it was Microsoft Man -- we caught a frontal look too. We saw what we wanted to believe.

(Before take-off, a stewardess kept trying to prompt that red-haired, bespectacled guy to turn off his electronic device. He was as stubborn as a CEO, shutting his laptop only at the last minute.

(So Rick wrote a note asking the Man to give our first-born a job interview. A thousand air miles later, we crossed out the word ‘interview.’

(Pity, neither of us had the nerve to give him that note. When we landed, Rick handed him his coat from the overhead compartment, helping him on with it.)

Lisa Kudrow interrupts my above flashback. She says she takes pleasure in the Web’s universality. She is glad no one institution controls it with proprietary claims.

Further she praises Tim for the notion that any piece of information anywhere on the Web should have an identifier, a URL or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that would allow users to capture hold of it?

Lisa remarks, upbeatly, that Tim Berners-Lee and Jack Kilby stand as exemplars of her proposition that it is “not just how smart you are –- but how creative you are with your smarts”.

I am about to say something about there being a whole lot of kinds of ‘smarts’ to be creative about, like hymn-singing smarts, enthusiasm smarts, happy smarts, basketball smarts like our guest last month Michael Jordan, etc. But I have already bent our subjects of tonight's conversations enough. I know that listening confers respect, and I am determined to listen...

Tim Berners-Lee says his “Aha” moment came to him while working after Oxford at CERN, a Swiss nuclear physics institute. ”I needed something to organize myself. I needed to be able to keep track of things and nothing out there – none of the computer programs that you could get, the spreadsheets and the databases, would really let you make this random association between absolutely anything and absolutely anything.”

Out of that need, and from CERN’s corporate wish to maintain coherent documentation among teams of visiting high-energy physicists, Tim began cobbling together a free, global database of information. He devised underlying protocols that ordinary folk could key into. Now, almost 20 years later, Tim's dismayed to see the Web corrupted by porn websites, spam, cyber-bullies, potentially dangerous chat rooms, and hackers who steal fortunes or top secrets.

Because I checked out a porno site, once it was -- with my Folklorist’s curiosity and academic interest in the Dionysian -- I let out a smirk. Does Barb notice?

I notice, Rick, I notice.

We’ll talk about this later.

Jack Kilby looks interested, but nobody does anything with my remark about CERN serving as the sinister, science-lab setting in Dan Brown’s conspiratorial novel Angels and Demons. My quasi-literary comment just plops there. Alas, as host, I lack leverage.

Barb, who has been mum for a spell, brings up an old chestnut (not an edible chestnut). Her question is about Al Gore’s remark that during his service in Congress, he took the initiative in inventing the Internet.

Somebody, maybe it was Lisa Kudrow, quasi-groans and says the media -- as part of its innuendo of Gore as a serial liar -- arrogantly insisted Gore had made that hyper claim in 2000, but Bill Clinton’s Vice-President didn’t actually say that. Rather, Gore did indicate that he had sponsored legislation committing government resources to the web technology. “So, there we have it," Barb infers probably a little too grandly, "he is a co-pioneer along with Tim.”

Tim Berners-Lee shrugs, mustering an amiable stare and “The Web is not done,” i.e., all sorts of creativities and smarts, including Gore-like legislative ones, are still to be tapped. “It will be many decades before we will be able to say we have really implemented the Web idea in full, if ever we can. But once you start with the basic Web idea, so much stuff becomes possible.”

When I asked my ironic little question about Al Gore, I heard no groan. I know that the Silicon Valley values Gore's raw brainpower -- he's a consultant there -- but I wanted to learn if computerland begrudges his imprecise claim?

Our guests balked at characterizing Gore. I guess that first-time visitors at dinner parties shy away from discussing politicians. Just like first-time Presidential candidates shy away from "innovation agendas" to push new-economy jobs. (The exception so far is Obama, but the campaign is still on.)

It unfolds that Tim Berners-Lee’s office at M.I.T. is sparse, anything but world-wide or world-class in size. Still, think of the thrill of young undergrads there, passing by the office door with Tim’s name on it!

We learn that the popular image of Tim as the Web’s inventor is quite “separate from private life, because celebrity damages private life.” I recall that his website indicates that he is active in the Unitarian church. Tim confirms that affiliation, finding a parallel between the Web and Unitarians –- they are both decentralized entities with a higher purpose.

Lisa Kudrow says that she can relate to Sir Tim’s problem with celebrity-hood. Except for L.A., “People kiss you and touch you, and I’m not very touchy, actually.” Lisa appreciates that her sister, who looks a lot like Lisa, responds to audiences’ demands for Lisa’s autographs. That sister “doesn’t want to give them a phony autograph, but some people won’t take ‘No’ for an answer. So what are you going to do? She [the sister] signs more, I think, than I do, because she’s nicer.”

(Lisa’s tale sets me thinking. Maybe we could buy a book for autographs and ask our guests to sign in please. We would never sell those signatures -- but when we are old, those autographs would remind us of visitors who earned our respect.)

Jack Kilby has not been as concerned about maintaining his privacy as Lisa and Tim. Yet he has resisted the “standard corporate baloney” that would make him famous and catered-to. He has declined, for instance, having a high school named after him in his home town –- ”The whole thing would be a lot of trouble. I’m not worth the fuss.”

Everyone gets a chuckle out of his ‘fuss’ line.

As hostess, I want to bring out the good in guests and to justify tonight's mix. "Lisa has to count as an inventor too," I say. "Besides a special brand of incandescence, it takes imagination and ingenuity to be an effective actress.”

Lisa's giggle has a trace of her giggle on Friends.

“For TV and movies,” I continue, “Lisa has invented comic as well as serious characters that let you know their vulnerabilities.” Fact is, much as Jack has over 60 patents to his name, Lisa has created very well over 60 different roles…

Earlier tonight when Lisa had said she improvises by elaborating on quirks of people she knows, the remark had passed without comment. Now returning to that theme, Lisa acknowledges that she creates a “composite.” Inspiration arises from “a few different people at a few different moments. A lot of it was myself, at different moments when I’m insincere or afraid or insecure about my sexuality. And then other people [supply elements] for other things: certain teachers, family members.” [broken link]

btw, Lisa doesn’t think of her Phoebe character on Friends or certain other of her parts as particularly ditzy: “They make me laugh really hard. I never think they’re really that stupid. No one is ever just dumb. They’re usually dumb about something, and you just have to figure out what that something is.” [broken link] For her characters, she loves “coming up with things.”

We chaps haven't exactly thought of ourselves as creating ”composites,” but we all admit we're “in the composite business.” Tim Berners-Lee mentions (actually, re-mentions) the important theoretical work by Vannevar Bush, a predecessor of his at M.I.T. on storing information based on associations.

That's a killer first name, Van-ne-var. A kick to roll off the tongue. What if we'd named a son Vannevar? Would he have gone to M.I.T., and now roll around Technology all day?

Jack Kiley backs the idea of science as a composite, though his words are sort of boilerplate flat: “I’m grateful to the innovative thinkers who came before me, and I admire the innovators who have followed.”

Our guests’ easy consensus is that innovative thinking is a composite with something extra that turns out to be useful. Everyone goes along, sort of, with that definition, the better to get along with each other across the rest of the evening. We're not seminar-exact.

As our little supper party winds down, Lisa Kudrow vouches that everyone appreciates Barb’s work making our meal and post-prandial snack. "Her time in the kitchen has meant she’s had to miss some of tonight’s conviviality, yes? I get the impression Barb want to be more in the midst of dining-room things?"

Oh-Oh.

“Sure do,” my wife jumps at Lisa's lead, weary of having to ask us to speak louder when she's in the kitchen. Like her father the doctor, this Lisa woman is interested in curing long-term headaches.

Back at our dining table, once we transport dishes to the kitchen, our guests seem to relish devising reductions of Barb’s problem. Barb welcomes all ideas: “Like I’ve been telling Rick, the layout is awful.”

Sadly, no one is an adherent to the proposition, beloved in my Folklore circles, that every time a kitchen/dining room is emptied of people, the appliances, sinks, tables, and chairs vaporize, reappearing when people return.

I’m relieved that Barb doesn’t bring up our other 'aspirational goals' for our kitchen. Fixing the floor with several trip points. Changing the sink that has to be cleaned with Clorox. De-sagging our sagging cabinets.

"The world can only be changed one Piece at a time." Tim Berners-Lee then rises above the corniness of that observation: “The art, ah the Art, is picking the Piece.”

As they scope the kitchen, our guests are surprised that ingredients of tonight's hyper-cuisine had been put into plastic bags and vacuum-packed, then cooked in low temperatures for very long periods. So they assume we’ll need additional room for our Cryovac’s new technology for cooking.

We admit the cooking-under-vacuum mechanism is on loan, just for tonight. Barb explains that the smell of her home-baked dinner rolls was intended to compensate for the lack of cooking pungencies in the air and for the blandnesses emanating from odorless Cryovaced goodies.

Remembering that invention these days is often a team effort, our guests use their paper napkins to take turns sketching better layouts.

After some jousting, a solution emerges.

It’s getting late, I worry about renovation costs but, what the hell, i lack the energy to disagreeeeee.

tipsy-smitsy from bottle of apricot liqueurrr from party last month. I agree-he-he-he to everything.

_________
* UPDATE - About those paper napkins, which our neighbor Celia Wellborne says are a no-no for company. Unfortunately I hadn't gotten around to machine-washing -- and Barb hadn't gotten around to ironing -- our cloth napkins from last month's party. A breakdown in our household's division of labor, that.

It will take some shifting to follow-through on Lisa Kudrow's exit question and the redesigns that she proposed along with Tim Berners-Lee and Jack Kilby. For starters, we will have to re-build a counter, knock-out a non-load bearing wall, and re-locate a china cabinet, five chairs, and three paintings.

Of course we will sink more into debt. We expect an income-tax return to cover most expenses.

We will carve out a new window, since the north light is best for painting pictures. Which is what I do in the dining room when guests are not at hand.

While we are at it, we will repair the kitchen floor and I will gain a new sink. At last!

For the art, ah, for the Art in picking those Pieces, one Piece at a time, thanks you three…