Here’s by far the most interesting thing that happened to me on vacation:

My wife and I were walking near Union Square in San Francisco, fresh off the trolley, trying to get our directional bearings and looking, I imagine, very much like the tourists we were.

From behind us, we heard stomping — someone very large running in our direction. It happened too quickly for us to orient ourselves to the noise, and before I could turn around, a hand grabbed my right buttcheek and gave it a strong squeeze.

I spun to face my assailant. A very large woman, maybe six-feet tall and 180 pounds, either homeless or at least dressed in all the regalia typically associated with homelessness, stood staring at us with a menacing scowl.

“Got that ass!” she yelled.

Initially, I felt a bit disappointed that my wife made no effort whatsoever to defend my honor, even if she stood no chance in a fight against this terrifying woman.

I learned later that my wife had no idea the woman grabbed my rear-end. She assumed the ass in question was hers, and that yelling “Got that ass!” was the woman’s way of complimenting me for, well, acquiring it — not that a man walking along the street with a woman maintains any dominion over any part of her body, but, well, maybe this lady doesn’t share our worldview and whatever.

Still shocked, I muttered something to my wife about getting the hell out of there to avoid further confrontation, and we scurried away without incident.

In the immediate wake of the goosing I felt a bit violated, but later mostly flattered. There were so many asses to choose from on that street, and this woman ran some distance to grab mine.

That means something, and I appreciate it. I don’t condone such behavior and I ask that if you happen to see me in public you avoid the temptation to give me the same treatment, but in the case of this one isolated incident, I am grateful for the ego boost. And maybe I shouldn’t put too much stock in the judgment of people who do crazy things in public, but then maybe this is just a crazy world and there’s one sane lady roaming the streets of San Francisco.

i see when there are posts that are negative to your views you just delete them. where is objective journalism? who cares about your opinions about anything other than the mets? for example, i saw a pvt screening of “MoneyBall” last night. Since when are you a movie critic? i can go on and on-you are a no talent.

– Jason, via email.

Usually I don’t indulge folks like Jason here with responses via blog posts, but since he did not furnish me a working email address with which to reply privately, I figured I’d have a go at it here. This is all extremely petty:

First of all, I have no idea what he’s talking about. As you may know, I was on vacation last week. I spent part of Saturday cuing up a few posts to roll out while I was gone, then set off to California on Sunday. I did not touch this site while I was gone. A few others have administrative access, but since they (obviously) have less invested in the site than I do, I imagine it would take a particularly hateful or profane comment to capture their attention.

Also, best I can tell from the site’s CMS, no comments have been deleted, flagged or unapproved in the last 30 days. If you were around the comments section while I was gone you might know something I don’t, but best I can tell, whatever Jason’s referring to did not happen.

This is not a democracy — the site is called TedQuarters, and I maintain the right to delete any comment I want for any reason. But it so happens I rarely do. We’ve been through this: The people who regularly comment here are awesome enough that the comments section does a pretty good job of policing itself, and I can rely on a very vague commenting policy of “everybody just be cool” and count on it happening. The only comments that will reliably get deleted are bigoted ones and personal attacks on other commenters that cross the line — provided I catch them.

Also, Jason, I’m not sure why you came here looking for objective journalism. I don’t believe any such thing exists, for one thing. For another, this is a blog, not a news source. All the content here is driven by my opinions. Again: The site is called TedQuarters.

I don’t know why anyone would care about my opinions about anything besides the Mets. But I don’t know why anyone would care about my opinions about the Mets, either. Who the hell am I? I’m not a former player or scout. I’ve never been employed by any Major League front office. I stumbled my way into a job at a team-affiliated television network because I have a decent sense of the English language and a strong sense of how hard one has to work to find and maintain a job in sports. I got my first full-time job in journalism in part because — no joke — another guy got hit by a car and died soon after I started a part-time job in journalism. Random chance.

And that’s not me trying to sound humble; I’m anything but. I think I’m good at the blogging part of this job and the other parts too. But I recognize that there are hundreds of unemployed Mets fans that could do an equally fine job who just haven’t been as lucky as I have.

Jason, why you managed to get so upset over the post I made about Moneyball is beyond me. If someone deleted some inflammatory comment you made about that post that did not deserve to be deleted, I apologize. And we are all very impressed that you found your way into a private screening of that film. But if you are not interested in my opinions — which is undoubtedly your right — there is a very, very simple solution: Do not read TedQuarters.

And then you won’t have to even bother sending me nasty emails about my lack of talent and objectivity.

“I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.“

Still other scientists are intrigued by the opossum’s casually relentless adaptability, the way a basically tropical mammal has managed to steadily expand its range into wintry New England, the Midwest and beyond. “Sixty or seventy years ago, there weren’t any around here,” said Todd K. Fuller of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. But in a recent four-year study of opossum demographics around Amherst, Dr. Fuller’s graduate student, Leann Kanda, found an impressive marsupial density, 25 to 50 adults per square mile.

One key to the opossum’s success is that it’s low-key — a nocturnal forager that shies away from other animals, is nonterritorial and avoids fights. If cornered, an opossum may resort to its legendary talent for playing possum, an autonomic response, like fainting, in which the animal falls to its side with its mouth adrool, excretes droppings and a foul odor, and remains in a deathlike state of curled catatonia for minutes to hours, until finally it revives beginning with a twitch of the ears….

No matter what they eat, opossums are poor at storing body fat, and as the Fuller team discovered, they survive harsh winters only by taking advantage of the happenstance scraps and warm shelter that humans supply.

– Natalie Angier, N.Y. Times.

Click through and read the whole thing. I struggled to pick parts to excerpt. I promise this will be the most fascinating thing you read about opossums all day.

As for the excerpt: The article doesn’t connect the dots, but I take this to mean that opossums didn’t spread this far north until humans started producing enough waste in the winter to sustain opossum life. That’s kind of awesome, and pretty damn enterprising on the part of the opossums.

The article says opossums have remained relatively unchanged for about 60 million years, and yet sometime in the last century, some cunning opossum noticed a big heap of delicious garbage left out for pickup on Tuesday night and was all, “hey, other opossums! There’s good eatin’ up here in Massachusetts. And these suckers are even building sheds for us.”

Probably it didn’t go down exactly like that, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

Also I left the description of opossums doing their main thing in the excerpt because it’s awesome. Who among us, when faced with an unpleasant situation, hasn’t wanted to excrete foul odors and resort to “a deathlike state of curled catatonia for minutes to hours”?

The Toadies, because now the song’s in my head: