A belated comment from Andrew reminded me of my last trip to St. Louis. One of the highlights of a trip along I-70 is the absolutely fabulous radio stations that pop up. Flipping through the stations around the Illinois-Indiana border on our last trip, we were startled by a creepy, Gollum-like voice describing how he used his hind legs to perform various feats with a ball of dung. We listened for a few more minutes and eventually figured out that this strange creature was supposed to be a dung beetle, apparently explaining his species' behavior to an old man. The question then, of course, was why? In God's name, why? I thought I'd missed the premise for some sort of sick joke. But then there was this:

Old Man: So when do you teach your children how to do all these things?

Gollum the Dung Beetle: We don't have to. They already know.

Old Man: You mean it's programmed into their tiny computer brains?

Gollum the Dung Beetle: Yes. By the Lord Jesus Christ!

And that was the end, and they cued up the choir doing "How Great Thou Art." It was beautiful. Maybe you had to be there, but it really was. And the really great thing is you find similar quality programming any time you're traveling through. In fact, it's the only kind of programming you find at all.

- posted by Darcey @ 1:23 PM

 
We have that pass from Blockbuster where you can keep 2 movies out all the time and trade them in whenever for $20 a month. It's a good deal. There's a lot of really bad, really weird movies out there. And those are pretty much the most exciting thing in my life at the moment. And I've decided I like Celebrity Poker. But not I Love the 90's, because that's just silly - trying to be nostalgic about things that are mostly still here. That's all.

- posted by Darcey @ 1:17 PM

 
On the Fourth of July I went to Symphony on the Prairie, where the symphony plays outside, and they play the 1812 Overture and shoot off cannons, and then they shoot off fireworks while playing more music. Only there's lots of people there, so you can't really see the symphony, so you don't really know for sure that you're listening to real live people and not a recording (and a recording being played by not so great a sound system at that). I went with my mother and two members of the Kelley family, our former next door neighbors. We played cards during the non-firework, still light outside part. And then the cannons and the fireworks came, and those were cool. And then we tried to leave, and that's where really made a mistake. We were in the back parking lot (where, when we arrived, we were directed by nice people in orange vests, posted approximately every two feet). When we tried to leave, in the dark, with everyone leaving at the same time, there were no orange vests. There were not even roads on the grass parking lot to prevent people from taking off in twenty different directions at once. And so we sat for over an hour in the back parking lot, not moving an inch, waiting for all other parking lots to empty before any of us were able to move. And we played more cards.

Monday my grandparents visited, and my aunt came over too, and then we tried to go with my aunt to see The Terminal, which I hadn't really heard anything about, but apparently I'm just clueless, because it was sold out at the movie theater we go to specifically because it is less crowded. So instead we went to my aunt's house and rented a pay per view movie, the deep and thought-provoking Chasing Liberty.

And now I am work at again, where for the past week I have been comparing hundreds of pages of numbers to another set of hundreds of pages of numbers. But I am finished now, and there is no one around to give me hundreds more pages, so here I sit.
- posted by Darcey @ 9:34 AM