David Smith is a father of two, husband of one, and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His influences include W. S. Gilbert, Ogden Nash, Tom Lehrer (also at UCSC, and the victim of an embarrassing scene the one time he met the author), and of course Alison Renshaw's Wintertime Low-Frequency Weather Variability in the North Pacific American Sector 1949–93.