Thessaly's Tooth

I’m back from my week in Nebraska. I had a good time visiting with family and friends. Activities included watching the 1981 BBC television adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with my friend Jen, which was quite fun. On Wednesday morning I met another friend at the new Panera Bread in town, both of us having agreed to bring a book in case the other was late. Oddly enough, we both independently decided to bring The Night Country by Loren Eiseley. What are the odds? It’s a really good book, I recommend it.

The flood of spam comments continues, but we refuse to be intimidated.
I am heading home to Nebraska tomorrow for a week, while Andy holds down the fort here. Looking forward to seeing the family and friends, and also looking forward to getting back here to celebrate our second Christmas as married people. Weirdly, the predicted weather in Nebraska is a lot like the weather in California: sunny and in the 50s.
It’s nice being at home all day again, though school work is coming along somewhat slowly. I’m taking my Hebrew stuff (not very nice of me to make some poor airport employees hoist my Biblica Hebraica Stutgartensia (what a ridiculous name), lexicon, and the dreaded Lambdin textbook around, but then I trucked them back and forth from campus often enough, so I know it can be done) and my pottery forms to memorize, and now that I’ve told everyone this, maybe I’ll feel shamed into doing something with it.

Comments will be shut down for a while due to spam. All of your brilliant remarks will reappear here before long, I hope.

Funny article title of the day: “(Un)masking gender–Gold foil (Dis)embodiments in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.”
(For)tunately I (don’t) think I’ll need to read (this) one.

Don’t you think that would be a good advertising campaign for Pepsi? Kind of sacrilegious though. Unless it didn’t refer to Christmas, but a new holiday centered around Pepsi. I see a very ambitious campaign coming out of this idea.
I’ve been having all kinds of good PR ideas lately. For example, as we were walking through the Grand Rapids airport on Monday, I thought of a new tourism campaign for Grand Rapids: “It’s Time for Grand Rapids.” The campaign would involve lots of clocks all over the city, decorated to represent various local things of interest. (“Things” of interest, now you understand why I don’t work in tourism). It would be like those cows in Chicago and Kansas City, or the famous Bicycles of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Anyway, all of these valuable ruminations were sparked by my purchase of a Holiday Spice Pepsi today. It was like eating a cinnamon candy and drinking a Pepsi at the same time, something I never would have thought of doing, but I guess the Pepsi people did. It was okay, but I’m ready to take an offical stand against this proliferation of soda flavors. Sure, cherry and vanilla colas are tasty, but Pitch Black Mountain Dew? Just not a good idea at all. They should have come to me: so you want a successor to Mountain Dew? How about Prairie Thunderstorm? or Steppic Seasonal Precipitation? I have all sorts of great meteorological soda concepts.

We put up the Christmas tree today. There was snow on the ground this morning. The all-Christmas-music stations have been going full swing for quite some time now. And the mall has been decorated with fake evergreens and ornaments since shortly before Halloween. So, I guess it’s that time again.
If I ever write a Christmas song, its title will be “So, I guess it’s that time again.”