Muito Mais Que Nada

If Richard Feynman were still among us, he would be 104 years old.  In the unlikely event that he were still well ambulatory (the legs go first), he would be tuning his bongos for tomorrow's Fat Tuesday Carnival march in Rio.  He did not rise above his Carnival street band at Mardi Gras; he permitted himself to get lost, embedded in it.

He also was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics, helped to invent the atomic bomb, figured out the mystery of the cause of the Challenger disaster in real time, on TV, and cracked a number of supposedly impenetrable safes.

Excused from wartime service because he was thought to be mentally unbalanced, he was in another sense the most balanced of men, nurtured not by happenstance on American "soil," the streets of Queens, New York City.