Happy 30th, J & K

The Shoe

P.S. "Live Rattlesnakes Released in Snakes on a Plane Theater." Aa-ah!!

Attention

To the person in the big-ass truck behind me on Barton Skyway when we were coming to the crest of the hill, and I slowed down to 20 because I didn't have room to pass the bikers who were two abreast on our right, who felt the need flash his headlights at me and to LEAN on his HORN, in case he didn't get the message by my slowing to a halt, waving my arms around and giving him the finger:

CHECK YOURSELF.

Damn, just because you're in an F150 and I'm in a Corolla. I do NOT have all my Texas manners back yet.

JUMP-AH NYC Chicago Autsin

On the plane ride home I was reading the SkyMall catalogue that sells personal oxygen masks and robotic whisker trimmers and things like that, and I came across a map of the world that comes with little pushpin flags so you can flag the places you've visited. (The sample map had 100 little flags popping out of the United States and Europe, and the rest of the world looked very empty and forlorn. If they're only selling the map to people who go to Europe, why not just sell a map of the U.S. and Europe?)

Anyway, it made me realize that I want a map of the world with a pushpin for each of my friends, kind of like Mrs. Weasley's clock that tells where each of her family members is at any given moment. A magic map!

There is probably already a program online that will do this for you, right? Here's one where you can enter your own travels. Witness my extremely regionally-bounded explorations. I had a layover in O'Hare yesterday but that doesn't count, right?




Create your own visited states map

I'm reading a book by Arjun Appadurai that a friend loaned me. He (my friend) is studying IR and I'm studying media and Appadurai is one of the places our syllabi overlap--there would be more if I were tackling media as a sphere of globablization instead of, you know, Veronica Mars and teaching Tupac in the classroom and things like that.

The first chapter made me think of this video for some reason. So here it is for you: