So, there I was, watching the “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central.

Just kidding. The “Colbert Report,” a farcical news program hosted by Stephen Colbert — a journalistic attack dog with Alzheimer’s disease … on steroids — comes on at 11:30 p.m. I have as much chance of staying up until 11:30 p.m. as I have of flapping my arms fast enough to hover.

I was actually watching the show on the Internet because my son Corky had called to tell me that Jeff Gore was one of the guests the previous night.

Jeff is a Corvallis boy, and one of the best and brightest we have produced.

It was obvious early on that Jeff was a very special student.

While in middle school he attended Crescent Valley High School for advanced math classes. While at Crescent Valley, he attended Oregon State University for math, chemistry and Western civilization classes, even as he became one of the best tennis players on a very good team.

Between the OSU classes and various Advanced Placement classes, Jeff had completed almost a full year of college courses when he graduated from high school as valedictorian.

Jeff and Corky have been the best of friends since first or second grade. They could not have been more dissimilar.

Cork was tall, laid back and happy-go-lucky. Jeff was diminutive, dedicated and serious. They were constantly at one another’s homes. We kept a toothbrush at our place for Jeff because when the day ended they were just as likely to spend the night at one place as the other.

As they grew older, both boys got taller, but everything else stayed pretty much the same.

Jeff’s academic accomplishments were a regular source of discussion in our home, though our attempts to use them for motivational purposes were ineffective.

One day Corky came in laughing, saying he’d signed up for two AP classes, just like Jeff. Delighted and amazed, I asked which ones.

“AP foods and AP weight training,” he said.

I should have known better.

Jeff went on to MIT, where in four years, he received degrees in physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, economics and a minor in chemistry. I still haven’t figured out how such a thing is possible.

After a two-year walkabout, which included tours on a crab fishing boat in the Bering Sea and as a hunting guide in Mexico, Corky received a degree from OSU in … well, I think it might have been baseball.

Jeff went on to get his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. While studying there, he obviously had too much extra time on his hands.

Jeff became disenchanted with the penny and formed the Citizens for Retiring the Penny (www.retirethepenny.org).

He argued that pennies are a waste of time; each adult spends 2.4 hours each year either searching for our own pennies or waiting in line while someone else does.

When you consider the 240 million adults in this country, the loss of time is significant. Shortly afterward, he was interviewed about the subject by Peter Jennings for “ABC World News Tonight.”

Jeff’s notoriety got a serious bump when the United States Mint admitted it now costs 1.4 cents to make each penny.

Suddenly the penny was news, and Jeff was the expert-in-residence.

In the past year, he has written a piece for New York Times Upfront, been interviewed by Morley Safer on “60 Minutes” and, of course, appeared on the “Colbert Report,” where Jeff more than held his own. (It is an extremely funny segment available at www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?episodeId164899.)

For the time being at least, Jeff doesn’t anticipate more time in the spotlight.

He says he is kept busy as a Pappalardo postdoctoral fellow in the MIT Physics Department, where he is studying “the evolution of cooperation using yeast sucrose metabolism as a model experimental system.”

You can check out his Web site at http://www.jgore.org.

Whenever Jeff and Cork are in town at the same time we try to invite Jeff to join us for dinner, so he can bring us up to speed on his latest endeavors.

He explains things like “DNA twist mechanics” and the “mechanochemical cycle of DNA gyrase.”

I nod my head knowingly and say things like, “I see,” and “right.” My wife does her best Aunt Bee imitation with “Isn’t that nice?”

It doesn’t take us all that long to explore gyrasing DNAs; then we go on to the really interesting stuff … like baseball.

Pat Wray is a freelance writer and longtime local resident. His general-interest columns can be found in this section on alternate Fridays. He can be reached at patwray@comcast.net.