It is an indication of just how uncool I am that last year I was in Los Angeles the night of the Academy Awards, but I spent most of the evening at the airport because the town car that was supposed to take me from the airport to my hotel was stolen. Maybe "stolen" is too strong a word. But that is the term the car company used when I called them. Perhaps "commandeered" is better.

Moreover, the car was commandeered by a guy who was indeed headed to the Kodak Theatre because he had been nominated for an award -- though, according to the car company, it was one of the science and technical prizes that no one cares about and are awarded ahead of time over lunch in a pizza parlor with computer-generated drapes and a stage hiding the pizza ovens. No doubt, it was the award for Best Use of Digital Shading and Anti-Aliasing on Moire Interference.

Actually, that wasn't it. I made that one up. Besides, the folks at the car company thought it was a sound award. A technical sound award.

It doesn't matter. My point? He didn't have to be at the Kodak Theatre last year on the big night.

Of course, I didn't either. I was just heading to my hotel to watch the awards on television. Instead, when I realized that my car had been commandeered by some audio geek with a doctorate in wave science, I spent an hour in a cab line the length of Rhode Island. Apparently, cabs are in serious demand in L.A. the night of the Academy Awards.

So, however, are town cars. Which is why mine was stolen.

Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I always have town cars waiting for me, or that I travel in rajah-like opulence. I don't. Usually I'm that guy with his knees in his chin in a center seat at the very back of the airplane.

Here, essentially, is what happened last year.

I had spoken at a writers conference in Washington State on Saturday, and I was speaking in Los Angeles on Monday. And so on Sunday afternoon, I flew from Seattle to Los Angeles, and arrived as the Academy Awards telecast was beginning. My hosts for the Monday appearance had asked the hotel to send a car to the airport for me.

When there was no kind gentleman with a sign with my name misspelled at the baggage carousel, I phoned the car company. And they told me I had canceled the vehicle that morning. I told them I had done no such thing. And so they checked their notes and discovered that it wasn't I who had called. It was someone at the hotel where I was staying who was claiming to be the concierge. Either way, it didn't matter: That car had been assigned to a person who had been nominated for some sort of technical achievement in sound.

"Those awards were given out days ago," I said.

"Well," the dispatcher said, "he has the car, and we won't have another until an hour after the Oscars."

Apparently, this happens all the time. Hollywood is a tough crowd. The concierge insisted the next day that he had most certainly not canceled my car, and explained the scam to me. Someone at the hotel had given away my car because I am even less cool -- even lower on the Hollywood food chain -- than the people who get their Academy Awards over lunch at pizza parlors far from the primetime television cameras. The hotel employee had probably been tipped well for the information.

I hope I don't sound like a person who dislikes sound engineers: A soundist. I'm not a soundist. I think sound engineers are amazing, especially when they give us the sound of things blowing up.

Nevertheless, I am very glad that this year I will be watching the Oscars from my home in Vermont -- instead of standing in line at an airport, the least cool person in California.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on February 25, 2007.)

The other day I was asked what my favorite time of the year is in Vermont, and I surprised myself by answering, "March." It was a reflexive and completely sincere response.

Now, I probably wouldn't have come up with March if I were a daffodil, crocus, or tulip. I look at the crocuses scattered throughout our front yard, and I swear they all have a death wish. No sooner do they emerge from the earth and bloom, than they are flattened by a blanket of heavy, wet snow.

And I understand that some folks aren't exactly wild about mud season. They have seen their cars sucked into the slop one too many times. Certainly that's happened to me, too. Years ago, when I hadn't yet figured which cars can successfully navigate which dirt roads, I was driving my powerful Dodge Colt hatchback on the northern tip of Quaker Street in South Starksboro. The road is largely dirt, and that section is a steep hill that descends toward Vermont 17 the Appalachian Gap. The mud there in March becomes a car-slurping quagmire: A slow-motion waterfall in which vehicles disappear into the slough like bread in a toaster. One morning my Colt, despite all that squirrel power under the hood, hit a mud rut on the hill, and the next thing I knew I was in so deep that I couldn't open the front door. I actually had to climb out the window to extricate myself from the vehicle.

But the thing is, I was only stuck there for about 15 minutes. A neighbor with a truck and chains soon came along, and I was on my way. Sure, my car looked like one of those relics unearthed from the Titanic after a century underwater, but that Colt actually had endured far worse including one icy winter morning, when it did the lambada with an oncoming school bus and lived to tell.

March, however, is about far more than mud season. It is also the start of the sugar season, since maple and mud are meteorological cousins. And no sane person can help but love the sugar season. There are few better sensations than the chance to stand in a sugarhouse turned into a sauna, with the steam the aroma of maple syrup.

And just as the sap starts running once more in March, even here in the Land of the Polar Tomato there are the universal signs of spring and rebirth: That first green haze along the tips of the trees as the buds start to emerge. The sound of the frogs in the early evening. The return of the bluebirds which are also, I should note, a source of unending interest to my cats. Even the Girl Scout cookies arrive in the month of March.

Best of all, perhaps, is the length of the days. We are approaching the vernal equinox, that pivotal moment when the days once more are longer than the nights. From March until June, we are in that wondrous period when the future increasingly warmer and brighter days is unfurling before us like ribbon. We have, for the next three months, both the pleasures of spring and the promise of summer.

Moreover, there are those days when the temperature will creep into the 50s, and not simply because humankind has wracked such havoc on the environment. A person can sit outside at noon on those days and eat lunch.

Sure, there will be more snow here in the faux tundra of northern New England. And there will be ice. Here in Lincoln, I have seen snow on Mother's Day and flurries on Memorial Day Weekend.

Nonetheless, I savor those moments when I smell the steam from my neighbor's sugarhouse or I hear the peepers or I realize as I am sitting down to dinner that it is still light out. March bears a reputation for ornery weather. But it also offers just enough hints of the wonders before us that I don't mind a little mud in the mud room.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on March 4, 2007.)

Somewhere in Senegal, there is a chimpanzee hunting with a stick. There might be another one there sharpening a twig into a small spear. This is alarming news if, like me, the original "Planet of the Apes" movie from 1968 gave you serious nightmares when you were a child.

In all fairness, "Planet of the Apes" didn't scare me the way "The Birds" did. After I saw "The Birds," all my older brother had to do was sneak up behind me and yell, "caw-caw" like a crow and I would be in the fetal position under the kitchen table. Remember Otis Redding's lovely ballad, "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay?" It ends with the sound of seagulls, and I was always the little kid with the transistor radio spinning the dial frantically to talk radio the moment the song began.

Still, "Planet of the Apes" cost me some sleep, too, which is probably why I find the discovery that chimps might soon be shopping for camo clothes at Dick's Sporting Goods a wee bit unnerving.

I first heard about the chimps with sticks the other day on the news. It seems that researchers Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani saw chimps designing wooden spears 22 separate times that the animals would then jab at smaller primates hiding in and around the trees. This is news because it is the first time that people have witnessed chimps hunting with tools.

Now, there is a chasm between a chimp sharpening a stick with his teeth and an ape putting Charlton Heston in a loin cloth in a cage.

But this might be only a small part of a much larger trend in the world involving a lot of animals. For instance, we now know that only the dumbest of lobsters get caught in lobster pots. The smarter ones? They stroll in, take the bait and wander back out. The result is that we are breeding a more savvy lobster as only the dimmer ones become dinner.

Other examples? Magpies seem to sing for their own pleasure. Elephants have been observed joining trunks to tails and moving single file so they can navigate safely in the dark.

Meanwhile, humans are -- for lack of a better term -- devolving. Britney Spears melted down completely and shaved her head. Here I spend an embarrassing preponderance of my waking hours wondering how to keep what little hair I have left, and Spears just lopped all that she had right off.

Likewise, it is very hard to respect a species that asks to be abused by Simon Cowell on national television, or will switch families for a reality TV show, or will eat all manner of insect on desert islands while the cameras are rolling.

It's only a matter of time before the chimps and humans cross rungs on the evolutionary ladder, one group heading up and the other heading down.

Now, I could try and take the high road here and mention that I have never been on a reality TV show and thus might be spared the wrath of the soon-to-be-dominant chimps. But as readers have reminded me, I have never been shy about chronicling in this very space the more ridiculous and embarrassing moments in my life. To wit: Right now there isn't a chimp in Senegal that couldn't do a better job than me when it comes to using a stick to unclog a sink.

And so instead I am taking comfort in the reality that while there might come a time when my descendants are wearing loin clothes and trying to convince Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter in ape masks to cut them some slack, for the moment the biggest threats to humankind are global climate change and Paris Hilton behind the wheel of an SUV.

And while I can't do much about Hilton, I think I'll go turn down the thermostat right now.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on March 11, 2007.)

I spent a sizable part of the last month traveling on a book tour, which meant that most days I was eating pretty much like an 8-year-old. Actually, that's not fair to most 8-year-olds. Let me rephrase that: I was eating pretty much like an 8-year-old would if his parents lost their minds and told him to live for a month inside a 7-Eleven.

And you know what? Even that's not completely accurate. Most 8-year-olds trapped for a month inside a 7-Eleven would not have wound up mainlining sugar free Red Bull.

I should also note that a lot of the garbage I ate came from airport kiosks and gas station quick marts. I can't blame everything on 7-Eleven. I'm quite sure if I were a more discriminating consumer or had devoted more time to my quest for food, I could have found lots of healthy choices inside the convenience store. Slurpees, for example. Why didn't I drink more Slurpees?

In addition, I ate a lot of airplane pretzels and potato chips the very same color as that Red Bull can. At one point I was on a runway for an extremely long time -- though I was not, I should note, a part of that infamous 10-hour nightmare -- and I had airplane pretzels for breakfast and lunch. There was another period when everything I ate for three days I consumed standing up or inside an automobile. It was a pretty glamorous time in my life.

Now, I would not want to eat like this year-round. I would be super-sized. And, soon, dead. Moreover, it is no easy task to be a vegetarian in a fast-food world of fried chicken fingers and quadruple patty burgers. Fortunately, I am a cheese-a-tarian, and so I was able to get my sodium from cheese and my sugar from Little Debbie. The great thing about Little Debbie products is that they are both cheap and highly caloric.

One day when I was in Boston, my media escort surprised me with a bunch of bananas she purchased while I was inside a radio station, and it was the only thing I ate in a 36-hour stretch that didn't come with a warning label or fall from inside a vending machine.

Someday I am going to dedicate a book to junk food -- or, perhaps, to junk food and Red Bull. Notice, I am making a distinction between junk food and Red Bull. The difference (and here I may be splitting hairs), is that an author can stand at a podium and look slightly hip if he is holding a slender can of Red Bull. If I were to stand at a podium with a pack of Little Debbie snack cakes, I'd just look insane -- or, perhaps, like a guest on the Jerry Springer Show.

Also, Red Bull has caffeine, and Little Debbie has fat. Last month, I needed the former poison a lot more than the latter. Besides, I am hoping to postpone that day when, like so many of my father's friends, I am scheduling angioplasties like haircuts.

Just for the record, some readers have suggested that if I really want all that caffeine, I should drink Monster or Rock Star instead of Red Bull. Two points:

-- Most of the people who have offered this advice have been 10.

-- I think Monster tastes like liquefied PEZ.

In any case, somehow I did survive my junk food orgy. I became an expert on the many different flavors of Doritos, and I can tell you which ones leave the most residue on your fingers, your clothes, and (if you are not careful) your breath. Dorito breath is very bad if you are touring. So are Oreo teeth. I battled both.

But it was also extremely satisfying to return home to fruits. And vegetables. And the civilized pleasure of drinking my Red Bull from a glass instead of a can.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on March 18, 2007.)

So, I am sitting on a stationary bike at Bristol Health and Fitness, pedaling lazily. I am far more focused on the book I am reading than I am on the reality that I am supposed to be getting something that resembles a cardiovascular workout. It is a weekday afternoon earlier this month, and there are about 15 of us in the gym on the various bicycles and Stairmasters, or lifting weights on the other side of the facility.

On the bicycle beside me is Emily Kaster, a 27-year fitness trainer at the health club. Emily is -- and let's avoid hyperbole here -- the most physically fit person on the planet. She is seriously buffed. Biceps that ripple like the thick ropes of a pirate frigate. Six-pack abs that might -- if such a thing is possible -- become an eight-pack if she keeps at it. Or, perhaps, a 24-pack. Not just a six-pack of muscles, a whole case of them.

She is also seriously tattooed. Emily is not merely into body art, she is also into face art. We're not talking a small rose on her ankle or a discreet little zodiac sign on her hip. We're talking the flesh as a canvas, with tattoos of lines and circles along her nose and her temples, large symmetrical designs on her back and her hips, a necklace tattooed along her neck, and rings around her elbows. Remember Harvey Keitel's tattoos in the movie, "The Piano?" They were understated and tame compared with Emily's.

"My mom hates my tattoos, but she has also told me that even as a little girl I used to draw lines and pictures on my face," the trainer says. "And the good thing about having all these tattoos now? It means I can never get a normal job."

In any case, Emily is biking beside me that afternoon, when suddenly she yells loud enough to be heard in Kuwait, "Let's go people, 60 seconds! Finish strong! Go, go, go!" I should note that Emily is not teaching a spinning class. The spinning room is two doors and a long corridor away. At the moment, she is actually not teaching anything. She would, if she weren't the most physically fit person on the planet, simply be sitting right now at the front desk. Instead, however, she is on the bike. And now she is pedaling as if she were on the last leg of the Tour de France, her knees pumping like pistons, her upper body hunched over the handlebars to minimize wind resistance -- though, of course, wind resistance isn't exactly an issue on a stationary bike inside a gym.

What did the rest of us on the bicycles and Stairmasters do? Suddenly we were all pedaling or climbing like lunatics. Without exception, we were dropping our books and magazines onto the floor and actually doing on the machines what we were supposed to be doing: Working out. Getting sweaty.

This wasn't the first time that I have seen Emily energize the whole gym. Some people are natural born cheerleaders: They are capable of making even the most jaded among us get excited once again about life. Emily is like that.

She is also, my wife has observed, one of the most nonjudgmental people on the planet. If you're willing to play nice at the gym -- and, perhaps, go 60 seconds beyond death on the stationary bike or find it within you to shred one more set of muscles on a Nautilus machine -- she will forgive all manner of otherwise antisocial behavior.

"I just try to remain genuinely positive about people. I like to see people leaving the gym feeling better about themselves than when they came in," she says.

There is only one thing that drives her crazy: "When people begin a sentence around me with, 'You'd be so pretty if ...,' I know instantly where that sentence is going. They think they're being complimentary, but they're not."

Still, it is a testimony to Bristol that when we want to get buffed, we turn often to the tattooed lady.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on March 25, 2007.)