Crop Circles

There were two things Bill Mumy hated about life:

1. That things were sold by weight, not volume
2. That his name was Bill Mumy

While the fact that "some settling may occur" might help explain the inherent unfairness of #1, nothing would alleviate the personal hell that was #2.

Whenever Bill made a little mistake at work, for example, there would always be some wiseguy who would say,

"That's okay, that's a *good* thing you did!", or

"Oh no!! Does this mean you're going to send us to the corn field?"

It got tiresome. It's not like his name was something like "Ronny Howard", or "Kurt Cameron"; no, the pop references evoked by his name were much more obscure than that, and thus the *real* trivia geeks came out of the woodwork whenever they saw or heard his name.

"Danger, danger Will Robinson!"

Ha, ha. Bill simply *never* heard that one, and would *always* find that one *ever* so funny and original...

None of this compared, however, with those who could call forth even more obscure references to his in-name-only doppelganger:

"Do you still have a crush on Bridget Bardot? HAHAHA!", or

"I *loved* you on that episode of "Bewitched". Or was that "I Dream Of Jeanie"?"

(As the *really* Trivia-focused folks will tell you, it was both).

These people, who apparently had the entire contents of the popular culture of Northern America during the last fifty years hard-wired in their brains, were just so *proud* of themselves for noticing that he shared his name with a semi-famous child actor from The Sixties. They thought they were unique, that they were the only ones that won a few beers now and then at their local bar for knowing what the stardate was for the "For The Earth Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky" episode of Star Trek. They thought that they were the only ones to have played Trivial Pursuit (tm) in
college competitively for money.

Sadly, that wasn't the case. The world was full of such people... folks whose eyes lit up when he'd introduce himself to them. You could almost see their synapses working... the axons and dendrites firing along neural pathways that have for some reason physically embedded themselves in their brain, allowing them to remember that one "Billy Mumy" was once lost in space in glorious black and white. They couldn't *wait* to share this information with him, never realizing that being Bill Mumy all of his life he'd heard it all.

Yet he'd smile anyway at their little jokes, often firing back with a wink and the old "gun shoot." You know, pointing at them with his index finger, his hand pretending to be a gun, "cocking" said hand gun with his thumb while making that "tick-tick" sound out the side of his mouth. Yeah, Bill had gotten quite good at firing the imaginary gun at all the would-be comedians he met day in and day out. If only the imaginary bullets were more effective.

Still, no one as of yet had asked him to sing "Fish Heads," and for that he was grateful.

As to crop circles, Bill Mumy didn't think much of them.