I’m back in KC for the week, getting in touch with my past and a few interesting new bits of my present. (The ConductMom has a new feller, and I got to meet him!) Anyway, I got to be on KCUR’s legendary Walt Bodine show yesterday. Here’s the podcast.

… is online here.

… they got crazy little women there, cause that’s where this one is from.

On a plane to the old home town today, folks, where I’ll be for the next week. I’m hoping to get a chance while I’m gone to write about a whole bunch of things that have been on my mind, as well as catching up with about a six-inch stack of back issues of the New Yorker. My camera’s on the fritz at the moment, so no travel pix until I get back.

I’ll be chatting from noon-1pm EST here. Join us! It’s my birthday!

… is online here.

Yesterday I went to my health club for a massage, and I got there a bit early to shower and take a sauna. In the steam room, I started up a conversation with a woman who, it turned out, was a career counselor with whom I shared a lot of the same interests, professional and intellectual. We agreed to get together in a more formal and less humid venue sometime. I told her my name and “Miss Conduct” and how to reach me through the Globe, and as I always do after finishing up a friendly and interesting schmooze, automatically stuck out my hand and shook hers.

Now, I am not going to go into the lurid details of my past, but I am a twice-married woman, and suffice to say I have done many things with naked people, but I do not think I have ever shaken the hand of one. It was surprisingly discombobulating.

Although, it occurs to me now, if it struck the other woman as strange at all, it probably seemed much more strange to her. Your first naked handshake with a stranger is one thing; your first naked handshake with a stranger who is an etiquette columnist is probably another thing entirely.

If you’re not into the Neanderthal look, but still like to imagine yourself in an earlier time, the “Mad Men” website has some new features on their “Mad Men Yourself” site. In honor of the new haircut, here’s my latest:

Oh, goodness, you’re worried about me. That’s so sweet. But I’m fine, really. I’ve just been in an awfully summertime kind of mood and wanting to be irresponsible and not do anything grown-up or difficult at all. And you know, the thing with having as many jobs as I do is that it’s hard to take time off from all of them at once.

Anyway.

I was at a party last weekend and someone pulled out an awfully cool party trick on his iPhone — it’s an app from the Smithsonian, with which you can take your picture, and then see it transformed into an earlier species of human. Then you can have it e-mailed to yourself. This is what the e-mail told me about me-as-homo-floriensis:

Thanks for using MEanderthal from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Your image is attached.

It’s the new, very very old you, Homo floresiensis! You’ve been extinct for 17,000 years.

Your modern relatives didn’t know you existed until 2003, when they found your small skull and skeleton on the island of Flores in Indonesia.

You stood up and walked. You made tools and hunted. You were small, so scientists call you a Hobbit.

Get to know me and all the other early humans on the Smithsonian website

Download the Smithsonian MEanderthal app for iPhone and morph yourself, your friends, or even Fluffy and Rover into early humans.

Here’s what I look like as an early human:

Pretty hot for back in the day, I must say. I would have been quite the rockin’ cavechick. At any rate, if you party with geeks — and I know you do — this is a fun little app to have.

… is online here.

I’ll be chatting from noon-1 Eastern time today here. Come by and join us (it’s like talk radio, with typos!) or read the transcript later.

“Give a woman a compliment, feed her for a day. Teach a woman to fish for compliments, feed her for life.”

– Sassy Curmudgeon

… because of the holiday. So I put up my Miss Conduct Monday question a day early, instead.

Happy Independence Day, everyone. I hope you have a great one. Last year I was in the Ozarks with my cousins. I shot a gun for the first time in my life, ate barbecue, drank lemonade surreptitiously spiked with Jack Daniels, and listened when they all pulled out their guitars and harmonized on country and gospel music. This Fourth I’ll be going to a party in Brookline, schmoozing rabbis and editors to get more speaking and writing gigs in synagogues and Jewish publications, nibbling from a gourmet kosher deli platter, and listening to the Boston Pops.

I love the diversity of this country. I love the diversity of my life.

Go USA!

So much for my dreams of stylish glory! When I took Milo for his walk this morning, a woman in the park asked me, “Are you an MIT scientist?” When I demurred, she replied, “Well, you dress like one.”

Burn!

I guess that’s what I get for going out in my cargo Dockers and Project Steve t-shirt! Don’t tell Peacebang on me, okay?

(Incidentally, this woman was sitting on the ground, next to her cat in a carrier. Did she take it out so it could enjoy the nice weather? Cat people, is this something you do?)