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

dispatch from the grassy knoll

(the view of the book depository from what turned out to be the wrong grassy knoll--the real knoll is across the street. you can see the cardboard boxes in the window where they have set up in the museum an replica of what how the boxes were actual corner where Oswald sat)

Yes, that grassy knoll. I am in Dallas for a conference and am sitting here waiting for Sal and Megan, who are still working their way through the museum in the book depository.

I wonder if, in addition to blogging from all the states and from all the planets, if I should start a thing where I blog from the sites of all four presidential assassinations. Perhaps then Sarah Vowell will finally take my repeated marriage proposals seriously.

The states list, updated to include Texas:

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

Sal and I both have colds, his worse than mine, so the planned Tulsa trip is off, so Oklahoma will remain unblogged.

kentucky flied chucken

I am on my way to a conference at Penn State University. Given that I
have already blogged from all states between Massachusetts and
Pennsylvania and all states bordering those states, this trip would
not allow me to add to my list of states from which I've blogged. Air
contraire, as the cheapest non-twostop flight has me now sitting in
the Cincinnati airport, which is not in Ohio but northern Kentucky.
This is my 25th state (not counting DC), so the impossible dream is
halfway dreamt.

I still need to finish the paper (not to mention slides) for my
discussant turn. However, I learned on the flight that even if my
brain feels occupational urgency, my stomach will still not tolerate
me working on my laptop when there is turbulence.

dispatch from kittery, me

(me, posting from my car in Maine)

So, after driving with me to and fro Montreal, my friend Kathryn stayed an extra day with me in Cambridge today. Tonight we went and saw the road-trip movie Little Miss Sunshine (thumbs up, although not uppity-up). After it was done, I asked Kathryn what we should do next. Her answer: "Drive to Maine and post to your blog!" And, lo, here we are, in a hotel parking lot maybe two miles over the state line.

Despite all her previous good sportitude, Kathryn is now telling me to "hurry the [expletive deleted] up" so she can get a decent night's sleep before her early-morning flight back to Chapel Hill, where she will be going directly from the airport to serve as witness for a friend's small-claims suit against his wedding caterer. I was trying to tell Kathryn earlier that the idea of someone trying to prevent a witness from testifying provides the animating premise for Snakes on a Plane (only three days away!), but she thinks it more likely the caterer would try to poison her by serving up substandard grits in coach class.

dispatch from burlington

(me, trying to find a wireless connection in a parking lot in burlington, vermont)

This post is being dictated to Kathryn as we drive around Burlington, Vermont, looking for wireless (and maybe the coat factory). More later (and maybe from Maine).

Update: Not from Maine, as it turns out. We didn't make good enough time on the drive through Vermont to justify the detour, especially when I realized it would take us more out of the way than what it looked like from our poorly-printed Mapquest map.

Updated States From Which I've Blogged, included for personal reference even though the list has been recently cited elsewhere as a blogger self-indulgently providing Information No One Else Cares About:

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

dispatch from lebanon

(me, on the grounds of phillips academy, andover)


(me, writing this post)

So here I am in Lebanon, NH with Kathryn on our way to the ASA meetings in Montreal. The main reason for this post is allowing me to cross New Hampshire off the list of states from which I've blogged.

Within five minutes of meeting me in Harvard Square today--a meeting at which, it goes without saying, I was wearing shorts--Kathryn announced that "most people believe adults should not wear shorts except on vacation, running, or mowing the lawn." I said I would canvass my blog for opinions on the subject. Opinions on the subject?

On our way here, Kathryn and I stopped by Phillips Academy Andover, where Kathryn went to high school, as did George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy Jr, and the Kerry daughters. We toured the campus and it was much different than the placebo school that desiccated my mind for four years in rural Iowa. Kathryn says, if she could choose to be any age again, she would choose to be fifteen, just so she could go to Andover again. By coincidence, I would also choose to be fifteen again, if I could to Andover, or at least to any high school where increasing the diversity of extracurricular activities did not mean just adding another sport.

Kathryn just asked me how many sports they offered at my high school. "Not as many as at Andover," I replied. "You could say that about pretty much anything," she said, "except for maybe meth addicts." "Did Andover have a Future Farmers of America chapter?" "No. But John Deere sent his son there."

o-hi-o

Baby, if you've ever wondered
Wondered, whatever became of me
I'm sitting in an airport in Cincinnati
Cincinnati--er, um, actually Cleveland

Being a Midwesterner, I have no excuse for such confusion. Then again, it's not like being in a city's airport is really like being in a city, except that it counts for my tally of States From Which I've Blogged (22!). I've actually been through Ohio before--Cincinnati or Cleveland, I can't remember--and did not post from there, so this post is like casting a Buckeye monkeye off my back.

Regarding WKRP in Cincinnati, an interesting phenomenon that has occurred every single time I have been in a nostalgic conversation with other straight men involving WKRP, sooner or later someone will offer--as if they were about to voice a heterodox opinion--that they always found the woman who played Bailey Quarters more appealing than Loni Anderson, and no one will disagree. Seriously, every single time, as lawlike as the tendency of an apple going to down rather than up when you drop it. Now, an obvious first hypothesis for explaining this would be that I am continually the one who voices this opinion, but, in fact, I am confident I have never been the one to introduce this angle to the conversation. (Talking about one's comparative assessment of the sex appeal of different television characters is really not my thing, unless it's the perennial debate about Daphne vs. Thelma on Scooby Doo.) How you have someone on a television series defined as the "sex symbol" when really seemingly every man (except for, at least during that period, Burt Reynolds) prefers another woman in the show would seem an interesting sociological question, and so perhaps something I can ask Dr. Ruth if she takes questions from the floor during her upcoming appearance at the upcoming American Sociological Association meetings.

Update, after midnight: A commenter posted a link to a site celebrating Bailey Quarters, where a guy takes the idea of her being a heterodox preference and celebrates it to the point of being--and yes! I know I overuse the word--creeptastically creepy. The guy is just so earnest in his affection.

Meanwhile, the updated list of states:

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

(wilmington, de) crossing the delaware

I am on a train headed for Washington DC. My rule for States From Which I've Blogged is that it counts if I am physically in the state, even if that is just from a train station or airport. So this post is sufficient for me to cross Delaware off my list. I should note that it was relatively late that I figured out that the Boston-to-DC train goes through Delaware. I had, before this, succeeded in cajoling a friend of mine (Aileen!) to take a road trip from DC to Delaware to dispatch a post from a random coffeeshop somewhere.

I believe, incidentally, that Delaware features the hometowns of Madison-blogger-pals Ann, Tom, and Careyoke, although I will have to admit that only now that I am in Delaware do I truly believe that it exists. Prior to this, I was pretty sure it did, but part of me held out to the possibility that the state was a conspiracy devised by
credit card companies.

I realize that I have forgotten the little doohickey again required to make my cel phone charger work. This happened last time I was in Madison, and I had someone FedEx my backup charger from Cambridge to Madison. That charger, unfortunately, I left in a hotel room in Connecticut (I think), so I don't have a backup charger this time, and I doubt I'm going to be able to find a backup for my obscure phone easily in DC. Sometimes, I have tried to estimate the "Jeremy Freese tax", that is, the cost in terms of time and money imposed by the ways in which my life is made more complicated by my absent-mindedness.

(new and presumbly wildly infrequent recurring feature!) stars and stripes blogever

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

Who knows if I'll even ever get to all 50 states in my lifetime? Who knows how much longer I'll even be doing this blog? No matter: last week's train-station cel-phone posts have inspired me to start keeping track of the states from which I've done blog posts. (I've decided the rule is that it counts so long as I write the post there, even if technical issues lead me to hit "publish" from elsewhere.) The links are to the first known post from each state.

dispatch from providence train station

(Once again, this post is being written and sent from my phone, solely for the purpose of my being able to cross Rhode Island off my list of states from which I've done blog posts. Not that I don't think I'll be back to Rhode Island or Connecticut, mind you, but might as well get them crossed off sooner rather than later.)

dispatch from the bridgeport train station

(Wonderphone lets me access my e-mail account, and you can write posts to Blogger via e-mail. Put the two together, and I can post from the train station, which is what I'm doing now. But why post? To be entertaining? Because I've got something to say? No. I just want to cross Connecticut off the list of states from which I've done blog posts. There, done.)