The Markives

"If you took a picture of it, magnified it a million times, and projected that image onto the edge of a razor blade, it would still look like a BB on a 4-lane highway."  Such is my level of interest in the following items currently blowing up the I'net:  1.   The Cracker Barrel logo. 2.   The Tay-Kel (which I really would like to see gain traction as the portmanteau name for that couple) engagement.  I recognize that a lot of people are very invested in the second of those things, but I got more breaking news emails on that than on any death since Queen Elizabeth II.  We need the occasional distraction from the more serious things that are going on these days, but it seems like there should be something better out there. M--> 

  Celebrity Deathwatch (It's been a busy week): Malcolm-Jamal Warner: 14 emails. Ozzy Osbourne: 14. Hulk Hogan: 11.  Chuck Mangione: 2. Arnold Palacios, governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands: 2.  (The second one was updating the first one; they were from the same source.)   Tom Lehrer , whose impact on my life exceeded all of the others combined by several orders of magnitude: 0.  What I find very interesting about Tom's online obituaries is that the comment sections are virtually unanimous in mourning his loss.  The first three folks above have some commenters who, while not exactly taking glee from their deaths, seem at least a little pleased in a "got what he deserved" kind of way.  (In the case of M-JW, it seems to be linked to his sort-of defense of Bill Cosby a while back.) That's not the case with Lehrer.   The I'net seems to be experiencing universal bereavement, as he described in "We Will All Go Together When ...

 ...where the motto ought to be "Park In Utah, Play In Nevada", given the location of the Nevada/Utah state line running between the parking lots and casinos of the Montego Bay and Wendover Nugget.  The vacation part of this adventure ended yesterday when I put Laurie on a shuttle to the San Francisco airport and pointed my car toward Reno.  Today involved driving on I-80 from Reno to West Wendover, through landscape that is far too unpopulated to even qualify as "rural". One odd quirk on I-80 in northern Nevada is that freeway exits are often keyed to the towns they surround, thus we have "West Elko" and "East Elko" exits even though neither of those is a city in its own right. That said, there is no analogous "West West Wendover" exit.  One must make do with the Ola exit to the west, whose sign has a footnote-like sign alerting the traveler to WW's looming presence.  This occurs just before one drive around a curve and sees the en...

 I have a few things to say that will wait for another post, but I wanted to get this locked in tonight: I'm pretty sure that Tre Donaldson rocked the Pride Stance (and rightly so) after his game-winning end-to-end layup. I was in a sports book in downtown Las Vegas watching the game, with the usual cheers and groans from people who had money on the game.  (I was not one of those people.) M-->

"And he called for a cab, and he said "JFK"--Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Old City Bar. All right, I didn't travel to (or from, for that matter) Kennedy Airport by cab this week.  There's something about JFK that doesn't apply to LaGuardia or Newark airports--to wit: it's easier to get from there to midtown Manhattan on public transportation. One relatively simple transfer between trains, and we were good to go.  Moreover, the signage directing one among transit options was impressive. When I was a kid, I had a voice-controlled Kennedy Airport playset , and so I've been aware of that airport for rather a long time.  This week was the first time in fifty-some-odd years since then that I've crossed their doorstep (I've previously flown into and out of both LaGuardia and Newark), so some sort of odd circle has been closed. And I'm not sure I knew it was even open. M--> *--In the interests of full disclosure: Technically, this was written on ...

So I've been in Las Vegas for a week, and the last 5 days have basically been "Hotel.  Library.  Food.  Hotel."  Repeat as needed. Which is, of course, SOP for tourists arriving in LV--once the plane touches down, it's "Woo hoo!  Vegas!  Let's hit the library!". Maybe not.  Of course, I arrived by car on this trip, so some standards may not apply. I understand that there are other things that people enjoy doing in this town, and since the archive where I'm doing most of my research is closed on weekends, I'm going to seek some of those out today. M-->