Kris's KoRner; Identical Twins Stranded on a Deserted Island with a Dumb Nanny

Did you know that in sixteen hundred and something-or-other, King James of Scotland sent a set of newborn twins to a deserted island with a dumb nanny? And left them there for five years, without any human contact other than one another and their dumb nanny? And that when they were picked up on their fifth birthday, the twins were fluent in ancient Hebrew?

It's true. You can read it in any history book.

We did shows in Edinburgh and Huddersfield, but I will type about them later when I am on my own computer and not the one belonging to the lovely Chris Svensson. For now, you will have to make do with the first installment of 'Kris's Korner,' a column that will appear very irregularly on this site, wherein our dear friend (and sometimes lover) Chris Cain of the We Are Scientists weighs in on the most pressing topics of the day.

Without further ado, here's...


People come to me with questions a lot -- I chalk it up to my mustache, simultaneously avuncular and oracular. And while mind-reading is not among my skill sets, I can, with a 95% confidence interval, predict what someone is about to say when they approach me tentatively, finger raised, eyes narrowed. Inevitably it will go something like this:

"Hey, you know Ben Lee, right?"

or

"But so what about this Ben Lee character? You're part of his gang, right?"

or

"I want to now steer the discussion toward a topic I know most of our audience is... shall we say... VERY eager to hear about: Ben Lee Handler." Calamitous applause.

and

"Let me bounce a name off you: Be--"
"Ben Lee," I interject impatiently. "I know."

Fair enough. I do, famously, associate with Ben Lee. I am, notoriously, a vice-sergeant in his gang, The Ferris Wheels. I can, on a whim, call him up and leave him an encrypted voicemail that sounds, if you listen to it and you are the Uninitiated, very serious, very grave, but is in fact a request for him to pick up a bottle on his way to the party.

That's right, I party with Ben Lee. What's he like at a party? He's like a kangaroo in a pit paved with thumb tacks, and the pit is just a couple feet too deep for him to jump out of. He's flipping nuts. He's like an 80 year-old woman who's been doing adrenaline/PCP shooters.

I structured that last example as a simile, but there's more literal truth to it than you'd guess: I can take you to a certain very underground sex club in Prague where they actually serve a shot that's half adrenaline, half PCP. It costs the equivalent of 60 bucks American. "I'll have a Ben Lee," is all you have to say, and throw down your 1300 Koruny.

The club is called "Ben Lee".