untwittered

2007 was the year that I started thinking to myself “I ought to twitter that” instead of “I ought to blog that”. On this trip to St. Louis, I would have noted several things, except we had no internet, so these are the untwittered things that I couldn’t send you.

This whole thing is inauthentic, because I didn’t note these things at the time – Twitter is nothing if not direct and automatic, so it feels fake to remember what happened on the trip and crack wise about it now. I haven’t cheated by pretending I knew the answers to the questions that came to me, but I’ll add notes at the end to let you know what I found.

Thursday, December 27th

• You are going to love the new highway font. Iowa has it. It’s like butter.
• The 40s on XM 4 played a song I’m sure Frank Black has covered (but I didn’t know). “The Big Hurt”.
• Wait, was Mark Twain born in Hannibal, MO? Because they should put up a sign about that. (Sorry, there are a zillion signs that say that.)
• My first Country Kitchen experience since childhood is… disappointing.

Friday, December 28th

• If this becomes the vacation of GarageBand and watching TV in iTunes, I’m fine with that.
• Questions I’d like answered at the St. Louis Arch museum: why a giant arch? How big is it? And can we touch it?
• Getting the metal detector treatment at the arch seems a little extreme. Are terrorists really thinking along these lines?
• I touched the arch, but we’re not going up there. Still no satisfactory answer to “why”.
• A revival-esque, harmonizing fudge vendor wouldn’t do well in Minnesota. Or maybe it would.
• We live two miles from Houlihan’s in Richfield, so going out for appetizers at a Houlihan’s in St. Louis is not very adventurous. Landry’s seafood looked too fancy for preschoolers, though.

Saturday, December 29th

• Christie’s family thinks I’m fall-down hilarious. I don’t need new matierial, I just need audiences that haven’t heard the old stuff yet.
• Watching the NE/NYG game with a Titans fan who wants everyone on every other team to die. Being twelve never really changes.
• The third-floor bedroom we’ve moved to has a few new wifi options – a “linksys” that sometimes works, and a “screwyoutheif” [sic] that never does.
• There won’t be any The Office on this trip – the one episode I brought with me is one Christie’s seen.
• Getting through two Flight of the Conchords and three Californications makes this an awesome vacation.

Sunday, December 30th

• I recommend the chili dog at Crown Candy. The chocolate malt back home at Uncle Franky’s remains the best ever, though.
• No, we don’t go into convenience stores in this part of St. Louis. We ask for a Diet Coke through the bullet-proof window.
• Not able to tell from the national coverage how the Vikings looked. They lost and were eliminated from the playoffs, but did they appear to care?
• Convenient, really, that the Titans game is on national TV, since everyone I’m staying with is from Nashville.

Monday, December 31st

• At the St. Louis Science Center, I’m starting to kind of understand DNA.
• All of this directions-transcribing is making me want not a GPS system, but an iPhone. (I wouldn’t have to beg for wifi anymore, either.)
• Who said “if god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”? I want to say a French philosopher, but it’s certainly not Ben Franklin (as CB’s dad says).
• We’re doing nothing for New Year’s. There are fireworks outside, though.

Tuesday, January 1st

• People – in this neighborhood – are FIRING FUCKING GUNS for the new year.
• In the hour before we leave, the usually weak wifi is strong. Wait, it’s broken again.
• Turns out that most stores and places we’d want to eat are open on 1/1. Good.
• When she says “two pies” and you think you heard “two fries”, it’s customary to both exchange the item and REFUND THE DIFFERENCE IN PRICE. Jeez.
• Twenty-five cent lotto in Iowa? Yes, please.
• Thermometer has dropped to 2 from 16 where we left.
• Your ancestors expand exponentially (2 in generation n-1, 4 in n-2, 8 in n-3)… but there weren’t that many people that many years ago. What’s the scientific answer to this?

Notes

• The Big Hurt was in fact covered by Frank Black and the Catholics. It drove me kind of crazy for the six days that I couldn’t further research that.
• Still not sure about the Vikings – I think we’ll know more this week about who’s hired and fired and targeted for free agency. I’ll repeat – this was never a playoff team.
• Christie’s dad was quoting Voltaire, not Benjamin Franklin.
• You have 8 ancestors 3 generations back, 32 5 generations back, and 1024 10 generations back. Christie and I discussed it on the way home, and you have 2^n only if the same one guy (or gal) isn’t represented twice somewhere. If that’s the case, then somebody had a kid with their cousin, and there’s probably no point getting worried about it now. That reduces the large math by a little – it’s probably not 2^10 (over 1 million) ten generations ago, but something like 700,000 or 800,000. Still, that’s too much to hold up if you go further – 10 more generations, and you’re at some percentage less than a billion people, and then 10 more (only 1000 years total) to a trillion, which there never were on the planet and there never could be. Does the overlap effect explain away all this?