The Iceman Cometh.

Remember that movie from 1984 where Timothy Hutton discovers the Neanderthal frozen in the arctic and then brings him back to life? Basically he thaws the smelly bugger out, hides him from some dissection-happy fellow scientists and then teaches him to sing Heart of Gold by Neil Young. While I think Neil Young is a God, I probably would have started with Bill Russell's A Little Bit of Soap.

As you may know it's been an unusually warm winter here in Boston so far, with this past week bordering on humid. And I thought I saw an Iceman on the way to work this morning. As he approached me, I tried to identify the sort of animal hide he was wearing, checked his hands for wooly mammoth flesh scraping tools and wondered if I'd be able to get him back to my laboratory for some guitar lessons without a net and a tranquilizer dart.

Then he asked me for a quarter. Previously driven inside by the bitter cold, Boston's homeless have returned to the streets in force. My great contributions to science and guitar-driven rock will have to wait a bit longer.