It’s a worthy thing to give enough to a museum that they want to put your name on the wall.  Even better a hospital or a homeless shelter.  But in the end, these are still just buildings, and buildings eventually all fall down.  Or even worse, your name gets subdivided, like the erstwhile Rice Stadium at the University of Utah, which received a face lift prior to the Olympics, diluting the Rices’ impact and giving rise to the current Rice-Eccles Stadium.  Those poor Rices– all that money they threw in, expecting their names to stand as a monument to their largesse, only to have to share the stage with another bunch of Crimson Club patricians.  (And all this for naming rights to the home of a second-rate football team.)  Then there is the anonymous alphabet soup of building names spread across the university campuses of the world.  BYU buildings like the MARB and the Crabtree building are presumably named after someone, but the glories and achievements of these people are utterly lost to the drowsy students that walk their halls each day, as ancient and irrelevant as Ozymandias.   Buildings are okay monuments, but you can do better.

And after you’ve paid all that money, they still go and print ‘Utah’ on the field.  Instead of ‘This football game made possible by a generous donation from the Rice and Eccles Families’

Think of Heimlich. He had to invest a little more than some Founders Club donation, but with a little work and deep knowledge of the human diaphragm, he was able to attach himself to an innovative maneuver and secure his place in history.  Everyone knows Heimlich, and everyone loves his maneuver.  I’d love to have my name attached to a maneuver.  (The only guy that ever came close to that kind of success with a gambit was Ivan, of Crazy Ivan fame).

Like with so many other things, the Greeks were the best at memorializing themselves by attaching their names to things.  No theorem is as famous as the one made up by Pythagoras, nor is any theoremist as well-remembered.  And can you imagine having sole naming rights to all of geometry?  Euclid’s coup is exceptionally brazen.  You can’t own geometry.  And yet, in a sense, he does.  We should be talking about Euclidean Chutzpah.  Socrates has a method, Hippocrates his oath, and then there’s Plato, with his ideal, his solids, his Republic, and his love.  That guy was so good.

The best of them all.

Since the fall of Greece, people have had a harder time taking indelible ownership over abstract concepts.  The most seminal breakthrough of the renaissance came from Isaac Newton, who found a way to attach his name to all of physics—a discipline that had existed for centuries before him (and an obvious missed opportunity for Aristotle).  By the time Newton stuck his flag in all of physics, there was very little space left for others.  Even Einstein could find nothing on which to make his name stick (‘Einsteinian Relativity‘ just never popped).

Probably my second favorite naming rights achievement belongs to Jefferson, who is now inextricably attached to the most successful form of government in history.  Can you imagine having democracy named after you?  It’s just a phenomenal success in name-sticking.  I wish I could pay someone to buy those naming rights.

But after long contemplation, I think there’s one guy at the top of the heap- the one who found the very coolest thing to stick his name to.  I would loooove to have an argument-settling conceptual razor attached to my memory.  Occam wins.

My firm shares our building with a very large healthcare services corporation.  I suppose it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they traffic in certain medical commodities.  But this is the first intimation I’ve ever had that they actually ship spare parts around.  This realization was both disconcerting and comforting– disconcerting to know that the shipping is done in what looks like the U.S. Mail, rather than in some high-tech refrigerated truck as you’d expect; comforting to know that at least the parts go well-labeled.  If you need to ship breasts, it is infinitely safer and more cost-effective to ship them in a box specially made for the purpose.  Yes, this looks like a normal, everyday rectangular brown cardboard box, but don’t be fooled.  This box is a BREAST MAILER BOX.  Certified for safety and freshness by the Governing Board of the United Breast Shippers Association (I think).  It contains every bell and whistle you could ever need to provide the absolute most comfortable possible environment for these valuables, as well as great support.  Or maybe it is just a standard cardboard box, but still, it is clearly marked, which is enough to tell people to handle delicately.

I imagine there’s a stack of these up in the floors above mine, each one sitting there flattened, waiting for some employee to pick up a tape gun, fold the box together, and fill it with its precious cargo, for mailing.  Questions arise, however.  What’s the capacity of one of these boxes?  How heavy would it be when filled?  And isn’t it fascinating to imagine the person opening the box at the end of the line?  I wonder, is he or she excited?  A little afraid?  Or perhaps it’s a surprise?  No matter.  Whoever the BREAST MAILER BOX recipient is, she can’t be more excited to receive her shipment than the man waiting for his brand new NEWBORN HAL.  Man, I’d love to get one of those.

Besides, the odds don’t matter in my case. That’s because this is a problem for me. ‘This’ being getting really painful things in my eye. It’s one of the Dumb Things I don’t not do, I guess. About six months ago, I was in the office of one my colleagues at work. He has a cactus there, and that’s obviously the thing a person is going to start playing with when he’s trapped in that office during long conference calls. People who just sit in a chair and listen during conference calls may not know this, but when you poke a cactus with a straightened paper clip, it bleeds this thick milky white sticky stuff, pretty profusely. After seeing that a few times, it’s honestly pretty hard to resist poking the cactus, just to watch it bleed.

Turns out one of those times I got the cactus blood on one of my fingers. A few minutes after that, back in my office, I rubbed my eye with that finger, and then I had to check to see if my finger had lemon-juice razors on it. Because my eye was screeeeeeaming in the most awful pain I had ever experienced. I rushed to the bathroom to flush water into it. In the nexst 20 minutes I returned to the bathroom two more times. But cactus blood is non-water soluble, and is made out of wasabe and bee stingers. My eye had turned into a fountain of pus and tears, and I was honestly wondering if the pain would ever stop, and what I’d look like with a glass eye. When I saw Macy an hour later, the pain was just barely subsiding. She looked at me sympathetically and asked me why I had been crying. I told her it’s because I had been attacked by poisonous cactus milk, and then she stopped being so sympathetic, which just added to the pain. It was a very, very unpleasant episode.

But it didn’t end there. A few months after that we were sitting around my mom’s dining room table after a funeral, chatting. I was playing with a bouquet someone had sent over, which was cool because it had a few little clusters of real peppers in it. I broke open a few to smell them, and instantly began to feel a burning sensation around my nostrils, though it wasn’t horrible. The sensation reminded me of my run-in with the cactus juice, so I began to tell the family about that experience. As I touched my eye to demonstrate where I had put the cactus juice, a burning streak of pain shot throughout my whole eye, spreading pepper juice all over that poor beleaguered eyeball.

So there I was, in the middle of my story about how awful the cactus juice had felt, only to find myself in perfect position to demonstrate in real time exactly what I had gone through. I think the audience was very appreciative of that level of commitment to story telling. But it stung like the dickens. Davis and Christian kept telling me to put milk in it for some reason. That sounded awful to me, mostly because the last milk I had put in my eye had been from a cactus, but also because the only milk in my mom’s house is powdered. (People who have learned to be wary of what substances they put in their eye just have a natural aversion to putting powdered milk in their eye. I don’t know, just sort of a sixth sense maybe.) Left without any good options, I just sat down again, to wait out the pain, again.

So this morning’s toothpaste event was only my third chemically-induced-ocular-agony accident in the last six months. Tomorrow I will re-set the little ‘_X_ consecutive days without a chemically-induced-ocular-agony accident’ sign in my bathroom. This time, though, I’m really going to get it to 100.

I’ve had that sign for a little while now. Since July 24, 2007, to be precise. That’s the date when this video was taken.

Ryan mentos explosion from Eliza Thompson on Vimeo.

(That was black cherry Shasta you just saw being propelled into my eye with the force of ten giga-mentos. And it was carbonated. I still see the world through the taste of black cherry Shasta. EVERY DAY.)

Never forget.