My kids just got back from camp, and while they were gone, I enjoyed myself. (See, all last week, you didn’t even realize, because I hid it so well.)

I watched a whole bunch of Netflix! Including episodes of Star Trek and The Dick Van Dyke Show and Get Smart and Roswell.

On the evening after the Curiosity landing, I celebrated with the X-Files episode “Space,” in which an alien possesses a NASA director in order to sabotage US space exploration (thus explaining certain NASA disasters and embarrassments). In my opinion, those early episodes of The X-Files are truly creepy, suspenseful in a way that I wish I could reproduce (and maybe I will learn to someday). I followed that up with Mythbusters “NASA Moon Landing” myths, all of which are silly but entertaining. More fascinating to me as a character author are the reasons why anyone would be that skeptical that man has stepped foot on the moon. I mean, I’m a sorta skeptical sort myself, but the “moon landing is a hoax” position represents an extreme that I see no logical reason to adopt.

Last week, I got the strangest email, and I still can’t quite figure out what to make of it.

N, from the Natural Sciences department at Bentley University, found a sealed NetFlix DVD on a cart in one of the buildings there. She also noticed the corresponding torn-off part of the envelope, the part with the subscriber’s address, in a nearby wastepaper basket. And the address (she said) was mine. So she looked me up on Google and emailed me, asking if I wanted her to drop the DVD in a mailbox.

But I don’t go to Bentley, have not been to Bentley; and that certainly isn’t my DVD.