dispatch from salt lake city

(photo of the Cheney protest at BYU -- note the sign that says "Enter to learn, go forth to TORTURE")

So, thanks to Brayden's invitation to give a talk at BYU, I can now cross Utah off my list of states from which I've blogged.* I'm staying overnight tonight at the airport Hilton in Salt Lake City, and the temptation to go rent a car and drive to the Wyoming border is almost overwhelming.

Turns out my talk was the same day as apparently the biggest protest in recent years at BYU, against the forthcoming appearance of Dick Cheney as BYU's commencement speaker. About a half hour before my talk, Brayden and I went downstairs to check out the protest. I left my bag inside the open conference room where the talk would be. Brayden hesitated for a moment before leaving my bag there, but then decided it was okay. Me, I thought, "Come on, what's there to worry about? This may be Crazy Civil Disobedience Day, relatively speaking, but this is still BYU."

Anyway, I got back to the conference room and discovered my laptop was gone. So then I was simultaneously panicked about my impending presentation and thinking that this would make a pretty good cocktail party anecdote. As it happened, I was just confused and had left my laptop in Brayden's office, even though I had no reason to have hauled my bag down to the conference room in the first place except it contained my computer.

The talk went okay, especially considering how little sleep I've gotten the last few days. Perhaps I could have used some caffeine beforehand. The person who gave me a ride from the airport graciously asked if I had any caffeine needs to be taken care of before entering BYU's campus (which is a caffeine free zone), but I passed with the idea that if BYU was nice enough to bring me in to speak, I could caffeine-fast for the day. That lasted all the way until the off-campus lunch.

* Updated list:

Alabama	Alaska	Arizona	Arkansas	California	Colorado
Connecticut	Delaware	Florida	Georgia	Hawaii	Idaho
Illinois	Indiana	Iowa	Kansas	Kentucky	Louisiana
Maine	Maryland	Massachusetts	Michigan	Minnesota	Mississippi
Missouri	Montana	Nebraska	Nevada	New Hampshire	New Jersey
New Mexico	New York	North Carolina	North Dakota	Ohio	Oklahoma
Oregon	Pennsylvania	Rhode Island	South Carolina	South Dakota	Tennessee
Texas	Utah	Vermont	Virginia	Washington	Washington, D.C.
West Virginia	Wisconsin	Wyoming