Plant TV

So there I was, waiting for a client call, when I again picked up the latest New Yorker to breeze through "The Talk of the Town."

Oh, I thought, here's Adam Gopnik in a piece called "Bright Ideas/Plant TV."

It begins like this:

"Jonathon Keats—a San Francisco-based experimental philosopher who has, over the years, sold real estate in the extra dimensions of space-time proposed by string theory (he sold a hundred and seventy-two extra-dimensional lots in the Bay Area in a single day); made an attempt to genetically engineer God (God turns out to be related to the cyanobacterium); and copyrighted his own mind (in order to get a seventy-year post-life extension) came to New York a couple of weeks ago to exhibit his latest thought experiment: television for plants."

Television for plants, as we readers who read on discover, is "an extension of an earlier project to make pornography for plants."

I could continue; I will not. I will say only this: Here I sit with a history and sociology of science degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and I have not a single clue what Mr. Keats and Mr. Gopnik are speaking of.

I want my father's money back.