Honey writes great blog entries and organizes them into wonderful essays. I am not that organized. That’s why I leave my shoes all over the house. So, herewith, some Wednesday thoughts:

Tomorrow I interview for my job. It’s the job I have now. I have to convince people that I should keep it. There’s another guy interviewing on Friday. I decided I couldn’t be on campus while he was also on campus. I didn’t want to try to avoid him.

So Honey and I are going to San Francisco for the weekend. We’re taking our bikes, staying at a high thread count sheet hotel, and going to Citizen Cupcake.

I had a weak moment when I found out his name and googled him and looked up his dissertation. He’s published more than I have. I know nothing else about him. I also took a small comfort in the fact that my name is pretty common, making googling me hard. In fact, you can’t find me in the first ten pages of google hits on my name unless you include my middle initial, middle name, or some other pertinent detail. He could, however, look up my dissertation if he chose to.

I share my name with a famous madam (now deceased). When Heidi Fleiss was arrested in the early 90s, I got A LOT of phone calls for the madam. I lived in L.A. (so did the madam) and they all wanted to talk to her about Ms. Fleiss. My favorite calls were the ones where the reporter found the mix-up funny. My least favorite calls were the East Coast doofuses who called at 6am. Madam wouldn’t have liked to be called then either.

Her death, my relocation to a particularly unglamorous part of the San Fernando Valley, and the current lack of notorious madams have conspired to keep those phone calls from me. Someone organized that particular conspiracy, I’m pretty sure.

Speaking of conspiracies…what cloud came over the Cardinals last night? They lost 20-6 to the White Sox. My National League-only fantasy team was not helped by the Cards’ starting pitcher and “star” for my team. His stats from last night (look away from the horror):
2.3 IP
9 ER
4.268 WHIP
34.71 ERA

Yikes. Fortunately, Matt Morris did better beating the Angels. Is it wrong to root against my favorite team because one of my fantasy team is pitching against them? Interleague play is nice in that I can root unconditionally for the National League boys.

I’m going to tea to celebrate a friend’s new adopted baby this afternoon. The baby is darling; the friend a lovely woman. Tea tastes good, but I’m so awkward that tea makes me feel like a giant freak. It’s like I’m Biscuit in the tea room. I’ll try not to break anything. No promises, though.

Honey watched Biscuit celebrating the “go out” suggestion last night and noted that Biscuit is anything but feminine. Honey claims that all dogs are boys at heart. Watching Biscuit flop around doesn’t make me question that observation.

I wasn’t going to quote Shakespeare about my upcoming ordeal, but the Macbeth quote calls out to me…

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

Here are some good things that will happen tomorrow:

Eric Milton will face off against Pedro Martinez. Here’s hoping for a 1-0 game, a no hitter by Pedro, an unearned run given up by a Reds’ reliever in the ninth. Milton and Pedro are both on my fantasy team.

Meryl Streep, Cyndi Lauper, and Andreas Kloden* will have really happy birthdays

It’s National Onion Ring Day

The American Library Association will begin their annual conference in New Orleans

The NBA and NHL seasons will still be over

Francisco Franco will still be dead

And I won’t have to worry about my interview any more!

*What? You don’t know who Andreas Kloden is? He finished second in the 2004 Tour de France. He rides (a bicycle) for T-Mobile.

It’s raining hard today. I have a meeting with the furren language people in a few minutes. Normally I’d ride my bike of the week down to the other end of campus. Each week I bring in one of my two bikes to ride around campus. That bike is the bike of the week. This week it’s my mountain bike, because Honey told me about the rainy weather forecast. My road bike won’t melt or anything, but its skinny little tires and weak brakes don’t mix well with wet and big me. So, the mountain bike is the bike of the week for the second week in a row. No applause please.

Bike of the week:

Not bike of the week:

I want to ride it down to the other end of campus despite the hard rain. I just don’t want to arrive at the other end of campus looking like a wet rat. Choices. I could walk, I have an umbrella. I don’t want to walk. I like getting my heart rate up and my lungs working. I don’t mind getting wet. It’s drying off that I don’t like.

I’m back. I walked and got pretty wet. What would have been wet is my head and back. What was/is wet is my legs and arms. The meeting was annoying. Lots of eye rolling, none of it mine. Don’t be shocked. I can keep my eyes still. Sometimes.

And then when I came back, was it raining? No. So I should have ridden down there.

Today seems to be the day of theoretical problems to which there are no solutions. The management team here in my office started agitating for everyone in the office to get reclassified. The furren language people bemoaned the lack of training in furren languages in the state.

Nobody on my fantasy team hit well yesterday. I’m not in last place because Jake “$3.60″ Peavy pitched well for the Padres.

The Bruins lost the bball game to Florida. Florida. Somebody just saw the whole penisula off. Really. North America could stop at Valdosta.

As long as Bailey White knew the shearing of below Valdosta (BV) was coming, it would be ok.

Ok, ok. Florida has some things going for it. Right now I can’t think of any.

I bought an interview outfit via the internet and it arrived yesterday. I tried it on for my honey. She asked, “what interview?”

“The one for my job.”

“You have to interview? Yeah, I guess you do, huh?”

She liked the outfit fine, pointing out that it would also work as a conference presentation outfit or for a funeral. Not that we have a funeral to go to but you never know, as Honey’s mother says. (Though usually she says that about stopping at skanky garage sales of the type that Sandra Tsing Loh describes as “Foxy Lady t-shirt flapping above a scabrous lawn” or something similar.)

Speaking of funerals, I just bought the new book about obituaries from Amazon. My dissertation director once lamented to me that he wouldn’t automatically get an obituary by virtue of his professorship at the IHE where I did my Ph.D. I had a hard time feeling sorry for him. He probably will get an obit. If not, it’s the price he pays for staying in the big city. If he lived in some little college town, his obit would get lots of column inches.

My mother taught me to be fond of obituaries. She lives in a smaller city than I do and therefore has more access to the little obituarites. She calls me a lot to ask if “such and such who died went to high school with you.” Makes me feel old. Still, I read the so-called “news obits” every day in the LA Times.

I’m reading this novel called A Brief History of the Dead which supposes that when you die you go this city which is a holding zone until everyone on earth who knew you dies too. I don’t really like the idea. I’ve taught too many big lecture classes.

Still, remembering the dead and the past has a sweetness to it that I like. My mother’s uncle Bert married but probably never “did it” as my grandmother said once. He taught piano in a little town in the southeast. Recently my mother was having her picture taken for some article she’s going to be in (I zoned out on the publication. Mother gets a lot of pub and I try to ignore it). The photographer was from the same little town that Uncle Bert lived in. Mother said something about the photographer being too young to know him. To which the man replied, “I’m 46 years old and Dr. F taught me piano for 5 years.”

Another mother and death story: she was in Canada giving a speech and she noticed that someone in the audience had collapsed. She stopped speaking and went over to see if she could help. The woman had no pulse and a doctor in the audience was giving CPR. When they got on the phone to 911, the doctor said “she appears to be in her mid-80s.” As soon as he said that the woman’s heart started again and she sat up and said, “I’m in my mid-60s.”

My family and I have a presidential death bet. I’ve lost. My mother and brother are neck and neck having gotten Nixon and Reagan in the right order. When I suggested we should have included the first ladies after Jackie Kennedy died, my mother allowed as how that wouldn’t have been funny. Whatever. I’ll be sad when Jimmy Carter dies. Still, I have a bet on his death order relative to the other guys.

Some friends and I were discussing the relative aliveness of the cast of What’s Happening. I knew that Shirley Hemphill had died and everyone agreed. No one but me thought Fred Berry (Rerun) was dead. For the record, he died in 2003.

My father’s mother would greet everyone she knew with “so who are your people?” She was also dedicated to the obituaries. She owned this book called Looking Backward Through My Knott Heritage. She was related to the Knotts of Knott’s Berry Farm thought she didn’t think much of them. Southerners who move to California are suspect. Fine with me, says Suspect Number 1.

So I’m in a meeting today with one of my favorite colleagues, a woman from the Theatre Department with lots of white hair and this fantastically loud voice that has a nice tone to it and never grates. Which I think is pretty impressive.

Anyway, she has the 16 year old son who is an underachiever. He had this big report to work on and instead of going out to buy a folder yesterday, he was going to try to buy one at school this morning. Theatre woman’s (TW) husband decided his lack of planning was sufficient to prevent said kid from getting his learners permit. TW wanted parenting advice. I tried to demur, as I am not a parent. Finally, I said that they shouldn’t prevent him from getting his permit. People often make bad mistakes while driving when they’re young. But when the get older and more sensible, they simply become really bad drivers. Honey calls it adult onset driving and she’s right.

TW then asked if she could make her son talk to her. I said no. And that I wouldn’t have talked to my mother at all as a sixteen year old, but because my mother is a force of nature, I couldn’t get away with not talking to her.

“He’s in trouble,” TW said.

“No more than anyone else. Besides, his not getting the folder just proves he’s part of the laziest generation. And besides, we’re all in trouble,” I said.

TW worried about my comment. She puts too much stock in what I say, I think. But I do think we’re in trouble, not because she and her late baby boomer cohort have raised a different kind of kid. Generations differ from one another. It’s a thing. In case you’re wondering…

Following the outline in William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations, the current “living” generations are:

The Lost Generation (born 1883-1900)
The G.I. Generation (born 1901-1924)
The Silent Generation (born 1925-1942)
The Baby Boomer Generation (born 1943-1960)
The 13th Generation (usually called X) (born 1961-1981)
The Millennial Generation (usually called Y) (born 1982-2000)

There’s a lot more to Strauss and Howe’s argument, about periods of awakening and crisis and about what generations fit which molds. Whether or not you agree with them (I see some merit in their arguments, but it’s too Anglo-focused for modern America), there is a difference between and among TW’s late Baby Boomer sensibility, my X-ie rejection of her idealism, and her son’s Y-esque deep connection to technology and the ennui it produces.

I am not the least bit confident that my generation is capable of leading or that the generation that follows is either. Boomers have a mixed record. Clinton was ok, W is beyond horrible. I was listening to AirAmerica this morning and Elaine Boozer, who was filling in for Stephanie Miller, kept calling W “the fishhead” which seemed so right. He’s so rotten in all the ways that he can be. She also mentioned that the President of Venezuela calls him “Mr. Danger.” Which is right too.

So, here on the third anniversary of a war that is wrong and has been wrong all along, I’ll quote (how lesbian cliched of me) Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls:

And they want to tell you
It’s a merciful sword.
But with all the blood
Newly dried in the desert
Can we not fertilize the land with something else?
There is no nation
By God exempted
Lay down your weapons
And love your neighbor as yourself.

I’m not crazy about the biblical reference in the last line, but she’s right on otherwise. And she’s another gay X-er from Atlanta, so go Emily!

My mother likes to remind me that my birthday coincides with the beginning of spring. She went in to the hospital in winter, she says, and came out in spring. The dogwoods were blooming. I’m very pro-dogwood, though the story gets a little old. Still, it has a nice nostalgia to it, I guess.

Since 2003, I associate spring and my birthday (which is Thursday, for those of you who want to send cards and letters), with the beginning of the current war.

It’s funny, really, that I allow that TW woman’s son should be allowed to make driving mistakes. Young men and women not much older than he are in harm’s way right now and I can’t stop it. And little mistakes cost them their lives every day. If spring is indeed the promise of the good to come, why is it that I think we’re in so much trouble today?

The dogwoods still bloom and I can still go home to my decent semi-suburban house. I make plenty of money and drive a car I like. I have a nice honey who loves me and who I love. The future looks good on a micro level. It’s the macro I’m worried about.

Happy spring anyway.

Once while sitting in the Tri-Cities airport in northeastern Tennessee, a guy walked by me and handed me a book.

If you’re wondering, the Tri-Cities are Johnson City, Kingsport, and Bristol (which is half in Virginia and half in Tennessee). This area is the center of what is sometimes called “The Lost State of Franklin.” The State of Franklin lasted for four years in the 1780s, but was never recognized by the Congress. North Carolina, which claimed sovereignty over the counties involved at the time, won the war of rhetoric over the controversy. Obviously, since there is a North Carolina and there isn’t a Franklin.

The Tri-Cities airport claims “You can get anywhere from here” and then lists the cities to which you can fly from it. Apropos of my worry about “forever” the other day, “anywhere” includes: Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Detroit, Memphis, and Orlando. So now you know.

The Tri-Cities themselves won the “All-America City” award in 1999. Also up that year, Fresno. I know where the hookers hang out in Fresno, so that you can go check with them about how proud they were to be a finalist.

2005 winners include:
1. Canoga Park, CA (which is not a city, it’s part of Los Angeles, but then come to think of it, Tri-Cities isn’t exactly a city either. Still, I live in L.A. and I’ve been to Canoga Park. Eh.)
2. Seward, Alaska (I’ve been there, liked it a lot. There was bingo on Thursday nights at the VFW).
3. Georgetown County, SC (I’ve been there too, it’s pretty and very historical. You’ll get grits with your meal, but don’t take the boat to what Honey and I call “Biting Fly Island.” If your experience is like ours on BFI, you’ll be trapped for four hours and your underwear will get wet).

2005 finalists (but losers) include:
Athens, GA (indy music/UGA=weak)
Park City, UT (film/skiing=weak)
Golden, CO (beer=weak actually this one is true, Coors beer is weak)

It does seem you have to put in your AAC dues, many finalists become winner the following year. And then once they win, the can use the logo which in turn “reinvigorates a community’s sense of civic pride.”

Has this entry gotten away from me? Oh, right. Small things.

Anyway, it was one of those “small stuff” kind of books, though this was pre-Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. It was one of those books, though. The guy who gave it to me said I looked smart (nice) and that I should read this (don’t tell me what to do) and then walked away (nice ass–actually I don’t remember how his ass was, but I do remember he was a bouncy walker).

It was an odd encounter and I threw the book away later. Still, I sometimes wonder what small things I would appreciate now that I don’t because I didn’t read the book.

Here are some small things that I do like now (no implied order):

* How raising my bike seat today made me ride better and harder and more efficiently. Smooth.

* Speaking of the bike, my cool Pearl Izumi pittard carbon gloves.

* The squishy fresco lizard my mother brought my niece from Spain. My niece didn’t like it and now it sits on my desk.

* The lizard’s friends, the teeny devil ducks. My Honey and I split the six-pack of teeny devil ducks. I have orange, blue and green, which means she must have red, yellow and purple. Is that right? I also like that she and I each have half of them. And I like when people notice them.

* That my office has a view.

* How soft Biscuit’s muzzle is.

* The amount of white on Halo (set off really nicely by the orange and black). It’s just right to me aesthetically.

* Hugging my honey in the morning. This morning she put my glasses on top of my head so I could get closer.

* Chipotle (the flavor and the restaurant)

* The way shops at the beach smell. Like rafts, I think.

* Cool days.

That’s enough for now. I’m off to the lost state of Franklin. Actually, I have to write a letter to all incoming students in my program for approval by the Integrated Communication Committee. They may live in the lost state of Franklin. Or not. But they may live in Canoga Park!

One of my academic interests is festivals. It’s an odd thing really, as the great festivals are very Catholic and I am not. I’ve been to Carnivale in Venice and behaved badly. I was drunk and young, but it was not my shining moment. I also went to Mardi Gras in New Orleans pre-Katrina and have felt very wistful about New Orleans as I read and watch the coverage of this year’s event. This despite the fact that my Mardi Gras experience was very lonely in the way that festivals can be incredibly isolating for an outsider. It probably didn’t help that I experienced MG without any mind-alteration. But I wasn’t as young or as stupid then.

My experience with “real” festival has been very corporal, really. I remember the dizzy drunk sensation of Venice, the pounding headache of New Orleans, getting my period in the middle of the Palio, surrounded by 100,000 people with no way out.

As I said, it’s an odd thing, I think, that I’m so interested in festival from a scholarly point of view. I’m not one to let go and my indulgences (to some degree) are a thing of the past. Certainly my alcohol indulgences. I like the tropes of festival and the structure of it fascinates me. The experience of it requires more self-release than I’m willing to give over to as I wallow around in the back end of my 30s.

Carnivale and Mardi Gras are two versions of the same festival, of course. The pre-Lenten celebration before the repentance of Lent. Easter is late this year, so Mardi Gras is late. It should come in the coldness of February in my mind, not the bright promise of March. As a kid in a Protestant household, I didn’t spend much time thinking about what I needed to “give up.” I knew that the liturgical season had changed, because my mom wore a different stole over her robe (she’s a minister).

In case you’re wondering; most Sundays Presbyterians wear green stoles–Lent is purple, Easter is white, Advent is purple, Christmas is white, Pentecost is Red. There are other days that are white, and a couple where red is an option (from the worship FAQ on the PCUSA web site). As a kid, I liked it when the colors changed. Now, of course, as an adult (and a folklorist), I recognize the power of color in theological symbolism. Red days are loaded in ways that green days can never be. And purple now makes me think of change while white makes me think of promise.

I don’t go to church much, but I think a lot about the nature of religion in my life and in others’ lives. I often (and this will probably upset some folks, so be ready ok?) find myself in the company of friends who eschew faith and bash it heartily. I understand why, especially given our current political leaders’ screwed up positions on the nature of belief in the public arena and the scary way in which most people in my adopted state manifest their beliefs… Still, I listen to their harsh words and worry about my silence and the way it implies approval of their attitudes. That’s too mild a description really, but I’ll let it go at that.

I was in a meeting last week and a colleague of mine (a guy I don’t like a lot but have some respect for) said to me “if we are judged in the hereafter I want to have done the right thing here.” I was startled. Liberal academic don’t say things like that in public meetings. And yet I found myself (in a meeting about strategic planning of all things) wondering about what it means to be a good person. My honey believes (and she is as moral a person as I know) that what we do in the here and now is all there is. I’m not sure that’s true. She’s very forgiving of my doubts. This weekend we talked some about my criticism of people who have trouble reconciling faith and their sexual identity. She was more right than I was, as is so often the case.

So, here on Ash Wednesday, what do I have to say?

One, that I am glad to have not overindulged yesterday, though I liked looking at the festival pictures (as usual).

Two, that I’m glad I didn’t have to have a filet-o-fish with my Catholic co-workers.

Three, that I forgive myself for excesses in Carnivale in 1988.

Four, that I may no longer NOT say anything when faith gets bashed. Fair warning #2

Five, that I still don’t KNOW what will happen in the hereafter, but I’m hoping that there will be one.

Six, that I hope the hereafter feels and looks like it should (which is nothing like what festival has felt like in my life, at least).

Seven, that promise of better things (whether they take the form of Easter or not) be with all those I love and with those who need it–which is pretty much everybody, I guess.

I just ordered some “sticky flags” from OfficeMax. I was reminded when I said I wanted sticky flags (OM understood what I meant, to her credit) of a postal clerk who asked me if I wanted “sticky flags” or “sticky loves” when I asked for some stamps. I’ve always liked that.

Other random language things I like:

1. “Walking around eggs”–my description of cage-free eggs when I couldn’t think of the term cage free

2. Internal plurals such as passersby, attorneys general, mothers-in-law.

3. But if there’s no noun, you have to do the second word plural… also rans.

4. The word vituperate

5. When my honey and I were playing a game where we guess celebrities and I said, “The guy that should have been in the boodle doodle doo movies but wasn’t” and she said “Steve McQueen” which was the right answer. The boodle doodle doo movies are the Sergio Leone trilogy. I still don’t know how she got it.

6. Also one time I wanted to eat at Red Robin and I said I wanted to eat at and then bobbed up and down some and she knew that I was talking about Red Robin (from the red red robin goes bob bob bobbin along).

7. That I always could get a laugh in class if I mentioned a culture group that lived near Lake Titicaca. And that I thought it was funny too.

8. The chorus of Schoolhouse Rock’s Interjection song:

Interjections
Show excitement,
Or emotion.
They’re generally set apart from a sentence
By an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling’s not as strong.

Cool, don’t you think?

9. I don’t like that they never did a Schoolhouse Rock for prepositions (it was the one part of speech they left out) but then they did do one for the release of the CD in 1993. It’s a terrible song called “Busy P’s.” Here’s a wee sample:

Busy Prepositions.
Busy, busy, busy.
On the top is where you are.
On the top.

10. The word “wee” for small or as a happy go fast sound, but not as a stand-in for urine or urinating. I should have said “wee” when I rode my bike today. Some would contend that should be “whee” to which I say whatever.

A non language thing I don’t like, but can’t look away from…

Neve and Gliz lifesize. Avert your eyes! Walk around with the chickens!

So I have to work today. Some of you may be SHOCKED at this (as my students often were) because I work for one of these fine United States. (Or as my Honey’s school play had it, the “fifty nifty United States.” Not to steal her story or anything (she says while actually doing it), but when the time came for her to shout out “New Jersey” and hold up the map of same, she did neither because she left the map somewhere. So for that moment there were only forty nine nifty United States. New Jersey might not be at the top of everyone’s “if we’re getting rid of a state which one should it be?” list. But I’m guessing it’s in an awful lot of people’s top five. I’m voting to keep it because it went Dem in the last election. (53% to 46% for Kerry). Make your own list. I’m going with Texas (if we can keep Austin), Florida, Utah, Arizona, and Alabama as my top five to let go.

Anyway, my university observes the minor holidays during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It allows the staff to have a week off and the University to shut down without affecting instruction. Students don’t like it. Faculty don’t like it. People like not having to go to school. It’s a thing.

Just so you all know, Prez Day will be observed by all who work here at XXXX on December 27, 2006. I can hardly wait.

One other holiday observation note: our esteemed Governor pushed through a law that mandates that Veterans’ Day be observed on, well, Veterans’ Day. So this year we’re going to have to open the University back up for Friday December 29th. We”l be closed from 12/23/06 until 1/1/07 except for 12/29/06. Smart. Very smart.

In a deeply passive-aggressive show of yuck, I arrived this morning to discover that no one from the front office team had shown up for work. OM had the day off because her daughter’s daycare is closed (ok), Front Desk woman (FDW) isn’t here because her visa expired (right to work, not credit card) and she had to resign (ok). But then the third member of the “team” called in sick. Now, she knew she would be the only one in today. OM has poisoned the waters with her and me and AD in the new “accountability regime.” So she called in sick. Um Hmm. So did the student assistant. Third team member (TTM) better be really sick. I better see evidence of it when she next shows up. I’m talking snotty tissues, vomit in ziplocks, whatever. The advisors are covering the front and the office has been really slow. The office is slow, of course, because TTM and OM screwed up and we have no student appointments because they had no back-up of the schedule. OM swore up and down that we were “booked” this week and last. You could shoot a cannonball through the office and not hit anybody. We weren’t “booked.”

OM is doing what my mother calls “shining her fanny.” Last week she threw away an application from someone who wanted to replace FDW because it didn’t go to Human Resources. She then announced that she had done so. I told her to get it out of the trash and call or e-mail the person to help them get the application to the right place. Then a faculty member from our advisory board wanted information on from whom we had ordered lanyards and how much they cost. She sent half the info that was asked for. Lanyard ordering information is not a secret. There’s no CIA “need to know” standard. I told her to send the faculty member all the information she had. High gloss fanny.

While I’m ranting, Ice Dancing is really annoying to me. The costumes, the smiles. Oh the humanity.

So what does all of this have to do with Washington and/or Lincoln? Not much, I guess. I have the right to rant (thanks GW and TJ and JM) and some of the states I listed for expulsion wouldn’t have been part of the picture were it not for AL.

In honor of those guys, I guess I’ll turn rant mode off. We are at a crossroads, it seems to me. We have to choose whether the notions that the country was founded upon are still worth believing in. In a world of sound-bites and spin, Lincoln’s words are worth reading one more time:

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Freedom and proof of illness. Those are my themes for President’s Day this year. Anyone else?

First, big props to scout for digging into the whole Olympic mascot dealio and discovering many many disturbing things. Here’s one little tidbit:

Go read her blog at your own risk–the link’s on the right. (I’m such an html wuss that I can’t get the link to show up and blogger does it for you. Lame. Weak. Whatever.)

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, slangred sent me a link to a blog I hate this morning because, well, she wanted to ruin my day. No, actually, she just wanted to confirm my hatred. Said bloggist is NOT worth linking to here, and I say that having including a picture of Gliz herein already. The blog is bad in a bad way not in a funny way. Like Neve.

Anyway, said bloggist was doing the meta-blog latest which is taking a survey about yourself. I like the survey. (To those who know which blog I’m talking about, his spacing on the survey was even annoying. That’s sort of impressive, to be annoying in the abstract and in the details). Thusly:

Four Jobs I’ve had:
a) Taco maker at Del Taco
b) Library shelver
c) S.A.T. tutor
d) Interim Director, XX Program, XX University, X

Four movies I could watch over and over:
a) Clue
b) Top Gun
c) The Thin Man
d) Libeled Lady

Four places I’ve lived:
a) Decatur, Georgia
b) Roma (see how NBC I am?)
c) Chevy Chase, Maryland
d) Beverly Hills, Studio City and most importantly Van Nuys, California (SoCal being one big blob that only counts as one place, right? BeHi and Van Nuys are EXACTLY the same, trust me).

Four television shows I love:
a) Battlestar Galactica (but y’all knew that, didn’t ya?)
b) Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (I know it’s off the air, don’t talk to me)
c) Dragnet (see above)
d) West Wing (going off the air–more dvds, less tifaux)

Four places I’ve vacationed:
a) Sequoia National Park
b) The Grand Strand, South Carolina
c) Lake Rabun, Georgia
d) Cody, Wyoming

Four favorite dishes:
a) Brunswick stew
b) Bagels with spicy cream cheese
c) Pulled pork
d) Steak, corn, and bean burrito–Chiptole

Four sites I visit daily:
a) Salon
b) Woot
c) Slate
d) Craigslist

Four places I’d rather be:
a) With my honey
b) On my bike
c) Somewhere calm
d) North Georgia

Four books I love:
a) Housekeeping
b) The Corrections
c) Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
d) Fever Pitch

Four video games I play:
a) Luxor
b) The Sims (when I have A LOT of time)
c) Bubble Trouble
d) The games on my Sega Saturn

Four bloggers I’m tagging:

See the links to scout and bryduck on the right. I also like dooce and rabbitblog. Urls=the obvious ones.

So there. One last meta-blog thing. Somebody comment, please. I feel so lonely with no comments.

Last night I was driving home from puppy school with Biscuit. She’s finished her six sessions and now has a certificate of completion. The certificate is not an acknowledgement of skills, it’s an acknowledgement of showing up. We did show up. Honey and I started calling her “completer” last night.

I was listening to “Says You” on NPR on the way home from puppy school and they were doing lists of “what does it have in common?” “Pea, Walnut, Golf ball, Grapefruit, Softball” was one of the lists. The answer, in case you care, is that the are U.S. Weather Service sizes of hail. I found myself trying to make sure I remembered them correctly. I then had to look up hail sizes on the web. According to the NOAA.GOV web site (that would be the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the uber-agency to the National Weather Service), there are the following hail sizes. Are you ready? You sure?

0.25 inch Pea Size
0.50 inch Mothball Size
0.75 inch (Severe Criteria) Penny Size
0.88 inch Nickel Size
1.00 inch Quarter Size
1.25 inch Half Dollar Size
1.50 inch Walnut or Ping Pong Ball Size
1.75 inch Golf Ball Size
2.00 inch Hen Egg Size
2.50 inch Tennis Ball Size
2.75 inch Baseball Size
3.00 inch Teacup Size
4.00 inch Grapefruit Size
4.50 inch Softball Size

I was relieved to see this chart and its specificity, because I had been worrying about the relative lack of difference between the size of a softball and a grapefruit and the relatively large size difference between a pea and a walnut. It helps me to know that there is a complete list and standards to go along with it.

Of course, then I worry about people being killed by grapefruit sized hail. Sure enough, someone was killed in 2000 by a grapefruit sized piece of hail in Forth Worth, TX. Probably a Republican, but still.

I worry about these kinds of things too much. Give me a topic, prompt an interest and I’ll find out everything I can about it. I file the little factoids away, trot them out at random times, and admire them like pretty little nuggets or hen egg sized pieces of hail.

My mother says that there are two kinds of people in the world: those that tell you everything they know, and those that know way more than they will ever tell you. She is definitely in the former category and my dad in the latter. I like to think I am more like my dad in this way, but suspect the opposite is true.

Lately, I’m trying not to be the busybody know-it-all that I have a tendency to be. Because I’m not teaching now, I don’t have a captive audience for random fact of the day. Therefore, I want to spout them out when I can.

Murphy Brown had a great scene about this whole thing. One of the characters is telling the bartender something (it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, ok? Don’t expect really great scene recreation). The bartender replies, “If I remember that, I’m going to have to let go of Truman’s hat size.” Please don’t remember the hail sizes unless you have room.

I know that facts don’t do you much good unless you have the analytical tools to connect them. I was at a meeting yesterday where a faculty member went on a rant about the chancellor of our system. I know facts about him (the chancellor) and I’ve heard opinions. I was impressed by the provost’s response. He talked for a while and then said, “if the problems we have were really the result of one person, the solution would be fairly simple.” It was as clever and thoughtful a bit of reasoning as I’ve heard in a while. And he’s right, of course.

I’ll probably hold on to the hail sizes for a while. But I’m going to try to figure out how to think about them (and all the other random things) in a more complex way.

I don’t, by the way, know Truman’s hat size and I’m not going to look it up.

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