Modern Nerd

You can tell a lot about a person from their ears. If the eyes are windows to the soul, the ears are periscopes to the stomach.

The rule is even stronger with dogs. When the golden labrador pictured here arrived in our household, it took my mother, brother, sister, and me 10 minutes to choose ‘Yoda’ as a name for him.

The puppy in front of us, with his puddled skin and pricked-up ears, had all the hallmarks of an 800-year-old Jedi Master. ‘Yoda’ was a name you grew into. It seemed fitting not because it made fun of his physical attributes, but because we expected great things of our first family pet.

My father vetoed the suggestion less than an hour later, so today our dog’s called Toby. I was fine with this. Yoda’s a ridiculous moniker for any animal and, besides, I knew that dogs respond not to the name itself, but to the number of syllables in that name.

Shout, ‘Here, Benjamin!’ to a dog named Toby and it will think you quite mad. But anything with two syllables of equal phonetic prominence works fine. Dogs are forgiving creatures; they know full well when you’ve forgotten their name, but they’ll let you off if you get it close enough.

Toby has arthritis now. Somehow it makes his original name — the one he had for 45 minutes — all the more fitting. When I visit my folks and no-one’s within earshot, I throw his ball and call to him:

‘Yoda! Come here, you must!’

Toby’s always smiling when he hobbles back. Secretly, I think he likes his real name better too.

A blind man turns to his friend. ‘You know, I’ve always wondered. As a sighted person, what does browsing the Web feel like?’

‘That’s a tough one,’ says his friend. He shrugs. ‘It doesn’t really feel like anything. What does eating an apple feel like, for example?’

The blind man thinks. He brings an empty hand to his face, opens his mouth, and takes an imaginary bite. He chews. He swallows.

‘It feels like falling through ice,’ he begins. ‘It feels like cutting your tongue and swallowing sunlight. Eating an apple feels like running through Eden. Eating an apple feels like tearing chunks out of heaven,’ he says. ‘Your turn.’

The friend pauses. He breathes in, raises his arms, and starts to type in the air. One hand moves to guide an imaginary mouse, an index finger tapping out the beat of the Web.

‘Browsing the Web feels like being lost in a hotel,’ he says. ‘It feels like waiting for someone to greet you, to hit the lights and offer directions. But no-one comes. So you start to wander. You start to open doors. You hope to find meaning; a reason you’re there. Browsing the Web feels a lot like life. Browsing the Web feels like slowly growing old.’

The blind man smiles. ‘That’s funny,’ he says. ‘It feels exactly the same for me.’